Midweek UFO Update: Revenge of the Skinwalker Ranch Ghostbusters

​A great deal of UFO news, none particularly good, bubbled up this week. Lue Elizondo announced his departure from the UFO podcast circuit but then promptly returned, scheduling new podcast appearances just six days into his leave of absence. MUFON confirmed that “top ranking officials in Government” have been in contact with the UFO organization over the past three months. MUFON said it stood by to help the government in any way possible. “With over 10k reports a year, MUFON has a 92% rate of being able to explain the sightings. We hope that Congress and the DoD continue to be transparent w/the American people. MUFON stands ready to assist the government in any capacity,” executive director David MacDonald said.

​Jeremy Corbell claimed that the military leaked to him a video of fighter jets attempting to shoot down a UFO. The video was supposedly shot last week, but Corbell conveniently declined to share the video, instead claiming that the unseen footage proves Pentagon officials are committing crimes to cover up UFOs. Someone didn’t get the message from MUFON that ufologists are supposed to love the government now and think they’re swell.
 
Meanwhile Politico and the Morning Consult conducted a sloppily worded poll that found 3 out of 5 Americans think aliens are real and 4 out of 5 of those believers think the Pentagon is hiding the truth about UFOs. The poll conflated aliens existing somewhere in the universe with aliens visiting Earth and conflated UFOs with alien spacecraft. Nevertheless, the thrust was clear: Nearly half of Americans believe in an alien conspiracy even as they long for the lying government to “confirm” their faith in space monsters and flying saucers.
 
Admiral Thomas Wilson, the former head of the DIA who loudly denies ever claiming that the U.S. is reverse engineering UFOs, said that Senate staffers have contacted him for input on proposed congressional action to compel Defense Department officials to testify about so-called black programs, which ufologists quickly linked to “UFO amnesty,” the effort to compel testimony on UFOs from reluctant officials by granting immunity for imagined crimes and negating their non-disclosure agreements. Stanford scientist and ufologist Garry Nolan announced that “people” are “working” on a UFO immunity program, apparently in reference to the congressional action.
 
George Knapp interviewed Travis Taylor from Ancient Aliens and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and Knapp and Taylor tried very hard to beg Rep. André Carson or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand to call Taylor to testify about UFOs before Congress on the strength of the “science” he does on Skinwalker Ranch. Taylor is currently on tour with Galileo Project consultant Nick Pope, Giorgio Tsoukalos, David Childress, and William Henry as part of the Ancient Aliens Live show, in which they speculate about space aliens having sex with prehistoric humans for a live paying audience.
 
Taylor isn’t just a kook from cable TV who loves paranormal nonsense. He’s also an employee of defense contractor Radiance Technologies, which provides analysis services to the intelligence community. Knapp broke the news that Jay Stratton, the former head of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, has resigned from the Pentagon and is joining Radiance Technologies to work on UFO issues. Stratton is almost certainly the “Axelrod” from Knapp’s Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, an official, radicalized by Bigelow and by Knapp’s first Skinwalker Ranch book, who claimed to be haunted by poltergeists and werewolves after visiting the ranch. “Axelrod” claims credit for keeping the UFO topic going after the end of AAWSAP and is responsible for bringing a “dapper” Lue Elizondo into the UFO fold. He is also very likely the unnamed Pentagon official who fed Politico’s Bryan Bender approving quotes about Elizondo and Chris Mellon for the past four years to give their wild claims official-sounding cover.
 
So, in sum, a very small group of people, most radicalized by Skinwalker Ranch nonsense—claims so stupid that after four TV seasons, Taylor has yet to produce a single piece of convincing evidence and twenty years of research has produced no verifiable, peer-reviewed evidence—created the entire UFO flap, are continuing to push our government in the direction of fantasy, and no one can stop them because, as with so much in America, there are no gatekeepers and nothing other than inertia to stand against a radical minority.