Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Hal Puthoff Raise Eyebrows with Cable News Alien Claims

​This week, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson released a new book about extraterrestrials, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter, which was greeted with fairly negative reviews for its superficial combination of science trivia and movie references. Somehow, Tyson wrote a glib book about how fictional aliens connect to scientific concepts without ever mentioning written science fiction. But his book launch occasioned the need to drum up publicity about space aliens, so Tyson has been on a media tour and earning backlash for his comments on flying saucers and the government’s interest in them.

​Speaking Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Tyson appeared to give more credence to military testimony and files after having dismissed them for years as unreliable or inaccurate:
 
“Given the testimonies that we’ve heard given, that we’ve heard delivered in front of Congress in 2023, 2024, 2025, from whistleblowers and insiders and military officials, ex-military, ex-intelligence officers, it’s no longer just the farmers in the back forty—right?—commenting on what hovered over their crops, or the revelers coming out of the bars at 2 AM. So, these are people of high rank, and all sincere, and so, not only have they sort of said that they’ve got alien body parts and reverse-engineered technologies, that’s sort of consistent with the files that were released. So, I’m fine—fine!—if that’s where we are. All I’m going to ask is, ‘Where’s the alien?’ Is it too much to ask that if you’ve got them in the back shed, just bring out the alien. Then we would all transition from just asking one another ‘Do you believe in aliens?’ to ‘Well of course, yeah, the alien’s there.’”
 
His comments, made extemporaneously and somewhat hesitantly, were not the “180 degree flip” UFO podcast Jesse Michels called it, but they raised eyebrows because it seemed to suggest that Tyson was open to the idea that the U.S. government is storing space alien bodies.
 
It’s not exactly what he said—he apparently still doubts the presence of ETs on Earth—but the comments seemed to reflect both his need to promote his book about alien contact and the enormous public and government interest in UFOs that has somehow legitimized a fringe subject. But it’s also worth noting that Tyson retained the glib, surface-level view of ufology he has had for decades, referring to alien encounters as primarily involving ignorant hicks and wrongly claiming that the files posted this month confirmed claims of UFO believers who have alleged captured aliens. The files, most decades old, offer no such confirmation.
 
However, Tyson’s comments on Sunday came only one day before Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters ran a segment on captured space aliens pegged to news about how many people viewed the government’s UFO files in the weeks since they were posted to a Defense Department website. The Defense Department claimed that in the first week after posting UFOs files on their website, the site received one billion views, a remarkable show of public interest. Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell posted a graphic on May 18 stating that the files had had one billion “views” but wrongly stated in his posting that this meant “one billion users” had accessed the files. Obviously, hits on the site do not equate to unique users, much less one in eight humans on the planet, which would be the largest audience for any media on earth—and nearly every English-speaking adult on the planet.
 
Building off that enthusiasm, Watters repeated Parnell’s incorrect characterization of the viewing numbers and featured clips from a recent episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast featuring filmmaker Dan Farah of Age of Disclosure and paranormal enthusiast Hal Puthoff. During the segment, Farah said, “Elements of our government have recovered those crashes, and they've gotten out of that technology of non-human origin, and in some cases, non-human bodies that were on these craft.”
 
This is nothing that other media hadn’t promoted in their own coverage of the documentary when it premiered months ago, but Watters added the podcast clip of Puthoff alleges that four separate species of alien are currently operating on Earth. This is a claim Puthoff’s friend and colleague Eric Davis has been promoting for a while now, and it exposed more cable news viewers to some of the weirdest beliefs of ufologists.
 
Those four species, by the way, are the traditional Grey, Nordic, Reptilian, and Insectoid aliens, and it’s no coincidence that they are also the four most common descriptions of aliens in the UFO literature. That strongly implies that the “insiders” feeding this information to Puthoff and Davis are extracting the claims from late twentieth century UFO literature rather than from real space aliens.
 
Sure, it’s possible that UFO stories just happen to report four types of “real” aliens, but the early alien reports are much more diverse than the four types they eventually condensed down into as UFO mythology converged on standardized narratives. The four “main” types of aliens have been fairly standard in UFO literature for at least twenty years, particularly in alien abduction literature. Greys, Reptilians, and Nordics are consistently listed since the 1980s, but the identity of the fourth varies more, with “giants” sometimes substituting for Insectoids, especially in earlier accounts.
 
Remember not that long ago when the dominant narrative was that we didn’t know what UFOs were, which is why we needed to give researchers like Puthoff to study them? Apparently, we “know” what they are, but no one asks why ufologists have been lying about what they “know” until they change their story each time they need more money.
 
It’s important to note that none of this is the result of any convincing new information but rather because Donald Trump released UFO files to distract from his many crises—and even posted an A.I.-generated image of himself walking with a handcuffed Grey alien—and a bunch of people have media products to promote.