News Roundup: Coulthart's JFK Conspiracies and SOL's UFO Campaign Plans

UFO journalist Ross Coulthart expanded his conspiracy theory repertoire in a new direction this weekend when he produced a special for NewsNation about JFK assassination conspiracy theories. As is inevitable, association with one conspiracy theory leads down the primrose path toward the broader conspiracy culture. It's also a savvy move for the ambitious Coulthart, who saw his stock rise in the U.S. after a series of controversies had damaged his reputation in his native Australia. Parlaying success in one conspiracy theory into a more general role as a conspiracy journalist for a second-tier cable news network allows him to keep building an audience, even during downturns in the UFO story.

Meanwhile, the man who made Coulthart a NewsNation celebrity, so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch, gave a presentation to close Garry Nolan's SOL Foundation UFO conference this weekend in which Grusch announced a new, spiritual dimension to his ufology. Grusch told the audience of UFO luminaries and other interested parties that UFOs have the potential to unite humanity and overcome divisions as human beings move toward a kumbaya moment of earthly harmony under the grace of knowing our true place in the cosmos, beneath our alien overlords. He said that we are in "a new era of spiritual awakening" thanks to flying saucers, and humanity now holds the power to seize the UFO-driven "paradigm shift" and create a paradise on Earth--again, as apparent inferiors to the superior space monsters. 

Look, it doesn't take a genius to see that UFO advocates like Grusch and Nolan are looking for cosmic connections and a secular replacement for religion. But do we really have to pretend that this religious quest has anything to do with national security, science, or even actual space aliens. We rightly don't let the government give Millennialist Christians cash to become "rapture ready," and we shouldn't be basing national security policy on religious believers hoping the rapture comes at the end of an alien tractor beam.

Nor, for that matter, should we ignore the fact that instead of "evidence," Nolan et al. are planning a propaganda campaign and laying out a multi-step process to circumvent the need for scientific evidence and instead socially engineer belief in space aliens, as laid out in a SOL Foundation chart this weekend:

As should be obvious, the chart is rather flawed because its Phase 1, "Demonstrate Existence," has failed to overcome the most obvious problem: Demonstrating that people see things in the sky isn't the same as demonstrating that such things are alien spacecraft. Nor are sightings sufficient to show a connection between them. Imagine, for example, that you have 1,000 sightings. Of them, 950 are easily identified as natural or human-made. Of the remainder, pretend that, unbeknownst to our observers, each has a different cause and the only similarity is that they appear as a light in the sky. Does that prove the existence of a "UFO phenomenon" in the air, or only in the minds of observers who mythologize one from their own lack of information? SOL makes good use of ignorance to create the appearance of a phenomenon without any way to demonstrate its existence independent of the observer.