John Oliver Abandons Evidence to Promote the UFO "Mystery"

(UPDATED 4/23/24) ​John Oliver devoted the main story on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight to UFOs, with more than twenty minutes of commentary that reportedly took more than a year to produce. The result was a disappointing attempt to play both sides, deriding skeptics as “killjoys” and believers as lunatics and positing, with neither evidence nor argument, that the truth must be somewhere in between.

​Oliver laid out the history of government efforts to investigate UFOs, which he correctly identified as riven with falsifications designed to protect secret military and intelligence projects, including aircraft and balloons. But from this, he asserted that because some Air Force explanations were incorrect there is therefore a quasi-supernatural mystery the government is obfuscating. Worse, with such a short segment, he lacked the time to explain what he found inexplicable about UFO videos that he admitted usually had prosaic explanations. He took it on faith that all right-thinking Americans understand that paranormal transports sail and assail our skies.
 
He even cited almost uncritically claims from ancient astronaut lore about ancient and medieval accounts of shields and ships observed in the sky, pausing only to suggest that one sighting, in Germany in 1561, was due to peasants “tripping balls” from starvation. For those of you keeping track at home, he was referencing, without citation, a sixteenth-century broadsheet story about the 1561 sighting over Nuremburg, which was likely a secondhand telling of a particularly spectacular sundog. Starvation was not a factor. Oliver was making shit up.

Most egregiously, Oliver took out of context a 1969 quotation from Edward Condon, who led an Air Force-funded investigation in 1968 that found no scientific value to UFO studies, and misapplied it to UFO writers. In a speech about science, Condon had said publishers and teachers who promote any of the pseudosciences to kids should be horsewhipped. Oliver falsely claimed Condon had declared, before his UFO study that UFO writers should be horsewhipped. It was a telling falsification to make skeptics look dogmatic and evil. (The false version Oliver used appears in many pro-UFO books that attacked Condon as an enemy of the faith. One of these seems to be his uncritically copied source.)

Condon's actual words as reported in contemporary news accounts.

That was both surprising and telling considering that Last Week Tonight has won Emmys for its meticulous research and the mountains of evidence used in a typical story. This episode, however, was largely fact-free and seemed particularly confused and disjointed. Scattered disapproving references to Skinwalker Ranch and the History Channel suggest what we saw was cut down from something longer, and the result was much more pro-UFO than you’d expect from Oliver.
 
The story never quite settled on whether it was about UFOs, government coverups, the presumed need for scientific research, or UFO culture. As a result, it degenerated into complaints about political polarization between skeptics and believers, with Oliver repeatedly claiming that skeptics are ruining the fun of UFOs with facts. At one point, after playing a clip of military investigators systematically evaluating a claimed anomalous sighting and using math to solve it, he declared such efforts “boring as fuck”—a bizarre complaint from a man who in recent weeks has referred to his own program as one that uses numbers to make you feel sad.
 
Similarly, while Oliver touched on the New York Times’s role in popularizing UFO claims in 2017 and the credibility problems facing Luis Elizondo (whose claim to have run an official UFO program isn’t supported by documentation) and Robert Bigelow (who is into hunting the afterlife now), he never mentioned how Elizondo and friends planted the story in the Times or drove the very government interest Oliver now praises by targeting Congress with media-drive propaganda, something Chris Mellon openly admits to doing. Most astoundingly, in seeking to seem sensible, Oliver dismisses most alien claims and completely overlooked the congressional UFO hearing last year where David Grusch alleged the recovery of ships and “biologics.” It’s a disservice to viewers to selectively edit evidence to create a falsely serious-sounding UFO argument when the reality is a clown show of kooks, grifters, frauds, and freaks imposing a science fiction mythology on a few ambiguous facts.
 
But, hey, skeptics are just “killjoys,” right?
 
For reasons I can only guess at, Oliver seems to want to believe in some mystical reality to UFOs. One thing Oliver got right is comparing UFO investigations to religion, but he claimed skeptics were the dogmatists. From the moment Arnold saw his saucers, ufology has been entangled with faith. Christian demon-hunters, theosophists, and New Agers were the first ufologists. Within days of Kenneth Arnold's sighting, people proposed, in addition to aliens and foreign tech, interdimensional beings, ancient astronauts, and a government psy-op—all with no evidence. That's where we still are 77 years later. But for Oliver, “objectivity” is all-important, and one should never draw a conclusion about UFOs, no matter how much evidence one has. He complained that Edward Condon wasn’t “objective” because he had concluded there was nothing to flying saucers. This, then, becomes the UFO bind: The “mystery” is real because we don’t know the “truth,” but conclusions based on evidence (or the lack thereof) are illegitimate unless they support the ongoing mystery—without ever saying “aliens.”

In several places, Oliver conflated skeptics, who reach negative conclusions after evaluating evidence, with people who knee-jerk dismiss UFOs without evidence. Skeptics have nearly eighty years of research that turned up no aliens.
 
Oliver falls into the same category error as other UFO researchers, that belief in a sci-fi explanation (invented by sci-fi magazine editor Ray Palmer in the summer of 1947) is the same as there being a sci-fi reality. Every UFO case solved has been non-alien, which suggests perception error, not aliens. But that ruins the “mystery,” so we cannot admit the legitimacy of conclusions that don’t support the faith. “Objectivity” becomes a disguise for feigned neutrality, and the assertion that truth must always lie between opposing views, so “something” paranormal must be going on—a bizarre position for John Oliver to take. Sometimes, one side is just wrong.
 
And this is the real point: What is it about UFOs that causes even normally rational people to spark some vestigial religious impulse to imagine that random lights in the sky are a profound connection to infinity? Objectively, nothing in the evidence warrants any such belief.
 
All told, it was a disappointing episode of Last Week Tonight that demonstrated the difficulties that come when non-experts try to master a subject whose history they barely understand through the lens of advocates with unconventional agendas.