FOIA Documents Reveal Lex Fridman Sought to Join Pentagon UFO Office

​John Greenewald of The Black Vault posted a cache of documents recently released through FOIA, and in the collection of emails and memoranda we learned the podcasted Lex Fridman secretly tried to involve himself in developing a UFO office for the Pentagon all while covering UFOs on his podcast.

In 2021, Fridman wrote to the Pentagon to request an interview with then-undersecretary Ronald Moultrie. He added:

Research & public-facing communication for AOIMSG: I'd like to ask if I can help in the early stages of forming the AOIMSG in my official role as research scientist at MIT. My work is in Al, robotics, machine learning, and computer vision, so perhaps I can assist on that side of the effort. I can write up an official proposal from MIT if needed. I'm not interested in finances, just to help out on an exciting effort, either in research or in communication. DARPA & DoD has funded many efforts of my research group.

​I guess I am just too old-fashioned in my sense of ethics and propriety, but it is shocking to find that a media personality, even if only a podcaster, would be actively covering the government while not just accepting funding from them but also actively seeking work from them. This is an almost textbook definition of conflict of interest. Had he been working for a news organization (at least before the Trump era and the Fox/White House union), this would have been a firing offense. But being a podcaster apparently exempts a media personality from traditional norms.

Fridman has repeatedly failed to maintain even basic journalistic norms on his podcast, as when he was criticized for his close relationships with members of the Trump family, with whom he spent holidays and whom he interviewed and let spread falsehoods on his podcast.
 
This reminds me a bit of when Travis Taylor admitted to secretly working for the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force while hiding that employment from his day job on The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and from his viewers. That conflict of interest put Taylor in the position of lying about his UFO conclusions on TV in order to protect his secret government work, and Lex Fridman’s efforts to involve himself in the government’s UFO investigation similarly would have created a massive conflict of interest that ultimately betrays the audience.
 
And, on a personal level, this kind of corruption angers me because I’ve been frozen out of reporting gigs many times under the specious claim that my research work compromised my ability to be fair, while these clowns get to take money and jobs from the people they cover and are celebrated for it. The double standard when you’re famous is astonishing.