Misinformation Abounds in a Busy Week for Government UFO Fantasies

​This week in Washington, Lue Elizondo moderated a panel of ufologists, including Chris Mellon and Avi Loeb, sponsored by the UFO Disclosure Fund. The panel discussion, billed as a briefing, took place in Congressional offices, but it was not and official Congressional hearing. During the panel discussion, Eric Davis told Rep. Eric Burlinson that there are four different species of alien visiting Earth regularly: insectoid, reptilian, Grey, and Nordic. These are not serious men. Elizondo then appeared on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation program to discuss UFOs, and by the end of the day yesterday, his “new” evidence for flying saucers had already been debunked. At the panel discussion, Elizondo presented a blurry 2021 photograph of a light-colored and a dark-colored circle on flat land he claimed to be a 60-100 foot craft flying near the Four Corners. Internet users quickly identified the photo as an image of two irrigation circles on farmland in Colorado. The water-filled circle next to the cleared land created the illusion of a shadow. [Update: Elizondo apologized on Saturday for presenting this photograph to Congress without appropriate vetting.]

Lue Elizondo's "UFO" photo.

The same area in a Google Maps photo.

​Similarly, the new UFO “whistleblower,” Matthew Brown claimed to have seen secret UFO documents labeled “2018 Schriever Wargame,” the same wargame David Grusch claimed to have consulted on in the C.V. he provided to Congress. However, the Schriever Wargame is a long-running annual military exercise, established in 1998, that is publicly promoted and discussed by the Space Force each year. It is “designed to explore critical space issues to include investigating the military utility of new space systems, identifying solutions to common challenges, and advancing space support,” according to Space Force.
 
It appears that UFO fanboys in the military mistook fictitious wargame documents for secret UFO revelations. Both this and Elizondo’s irrigation circles reinforce a conclusion I’ve drawn many times before, that ufology is nothing more than believers interpreting their own ignorance of the mundane through a lens of midcentury science fiction mythology. They see what they want to believe.

​And just for giggles: Hal Puthoff, the godfather of this whole mess, told Joe Rogan in a new Joe Rogan Experience interview that “one of our remote viewers [from Project Stargate] found a UFO base, Mount Zeil in Australia.” A popular hiking location, no one has ever found evidence of a UFO base in Mount Zeil, nor did the U.S. government ever go in search of one there. But Puthoff’s claims show us that ufologists not only rely on fantastical “psychic” claims but that their quality of evidence hasn’t changed from the 1970s, no matter how many times New Age nonsense fails to produce any tangible results.
 
They see what they want to believe.

Throughout the multi-hour interview, Puthoff displays a shocking lack of critical thinking, devoting most of the interview to defending psychic powers before endorsing nearly every traditional UFO chestnut, from the Roswell crash to underground UFO bases to the magnesium-bismuth slag from Art's Parts (which he cannot imagine could be industrial waste and not intentionally manufactured) to Bob Lazar and element 115. It is rather shocking how steeped he is in UFO culture and how heavily it shapes his thinking, even more than one might imagine. Worst of all, he claims that “compartmentalization” in government means that most people working on crashed UFOs do not realize they are involved with alien ships, but he never stops to think that the same “compartmentalization” may well mean that he and his colleagues are imagining alien spaceships from fragments of research in other fields that they do not fully understand.
 
So why is all of this happening this week? Oh, right: Congress needs to plan for next fiscal year’s budget, and Avi Loeb wants $1 billion to hunt UFOs.