Read My "New Republic" Piece

5/21/2021

How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers
Jason Colavito / The New Republic / May 21, 2021

On April 30, the online UFO community lit up with excitement. The New Yorker, the most luxe of news magazines, published a major UFO article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus alleging there was good reason for the U.S. government to get back into the business of hunting flying saucers. On May 16, CBS’s Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes broadcast stories about UFOs, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio sternly intoning about the importance of treating them as a potential national security concern. All month, major media have jumped on the bandwagon. Magazines published think pieces. Ezra Klein gushed about the “spaciousness of mystery” in The New York Times. Morning Joe invited Lewis-Kraus on to chat about UFOs, and Gadi Schwartz did multiple spots across NBC’s broadcast, cable, and streaming platforms breathlessly hyping new videos from the Navy showing fuzzy shapes in the sky.

For UFO believers, this was the moment they had been waiting for. ...

Read the full article here.

13 Comments

Brian

5/21/2021 10:26:41 am

An extremely good, clear, precisely laid out explanation of the history of what is at base a scam to fleece the government, and us taxpayers, with the collateral benefit of destroying science and logic, thereby making future scams even easier. The Times, CBS, and the other outlets should be ashamed of themselves and held to account.

But I sure don't envy what you're going to be subjected to by the fleecers in the next little while. Stay strong.

Prospero45

5/21/2021 01:20:21 pm

It's amazing how the quality of photographic equipment has regressed since the second world war, despite the introduction of digital technology. Compare the UFO videos with this clip, taken in 1941 on celluloid film, from the cockpit of a wooden biplane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTZ-R4QM1E

kent

5/22/2021 01:28:46 pm

Always nice to hear from Anthony Warren.

It should be born in mind that these "UFOs" were not seen by eyeballs looking out a window, they are electronic artifacts appearing on a TV screen connected to an IR system undergoing a shakedown cruise. No one actually SAW them.

5/21/2021 07:26:01 pm

I too have always wondered why, with the amazing photographic and video sources available to everyone, especially the military, how nobody has ever taken a clearly defined, no-doubt-about-it visual record of a UFO. Everything is blurry or makes you think you are watching a remake of the Blair Witch Project. Excellent article Jason. The haters will no doubt show up soon. Too bad they never have any real factual basis for their rants.

Allen B. Ing

5/21/2021 08:03:40 pm

However wacky Robert Bigelow's beliefs or conduct might be, the U.S. military now acknowledges that its pilots regularly encounter “unidentified aerial phenomena” whose behavior the brass and its scientists can't explain. Doesn't it feel at least a bit anachronistic to still be doggedly pursuing conspiracy theories about UFO believers' influence in D.C.?

Your piece actually mirrored the tone of the believers' solemn accounts of UFO "coverups" at the highest levels of government, just 180º opposite.

I've had a $10/1-year subscription offer from TNR sitting around for months. Your piece finally convinced me to just recycle it. TNR has been an irrelevant, comically woke, joke for years. But landing on the Squaresville side of free inquiry into unexplained phenomena really seals no deal. It reminds me of when some self-important young TNR twerp confidently dismissed an emerging TV personality, Stephen Colbert, as completely unfunny and doomed.

Not realizing that the piece was freelanced, I honed in on your condemnation of J. Allen Hynek's (my fellow Allen's) questioning of "materialism." "Aha," I thought, "the UFO folks have offended some TNR kiddie, by contradicting some Cliff Notes version of Marxism he learned in his Structuralist Hermeneutics class."

The truth is out there. I don't know what it is, but neither do you. I do know that, retrospectively, ridiculing free inquiry doesn't have a great heritage.

As the Skeptics™ themselves would probably be the first to remind us.

Harry Henderson

5/22/2021 03:38:43 pm

Now, if we can only get the Pentagon to release a report on all the military Bigfoot encounters.

3 HOURS of TRUE **MILITARY VETS & BIGFOOT ENCOUNTERS!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHBhwCL31WE

Joe Enright link

5/23/2021 01:16:15 pm

As always the truth often proves to be a bit more complicated than both debunkers and true believers would have us believe. I agree with the comments of the esteemed Mr. B Ing above. The article is very knowledgeable but much too dogmatic and aggrieved. I prefer this Brooklynite's gentler take on the issue:
http://www.star-revue.com/major-tom-to-ground-control-have-the-hubrids-taken-over-red-hook-yet/

Larry storch

5/22/2021 03:14:36 am

When someone uses the word “luxe” in the opening paragraph of a piece, does that mean that he’s trying to be luxe himself?

Anyway, I think you needed to make the article more concise for general readers, although I acknowledge the likelihood that, given the New Republic’s recent travails, its readership has been reduced to such a small group of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that you’ve found the perfect forum for your sprawling, aimless, unfocused style of prose. Good luck with it!

Doc Rock

5/22/2021 06:34:11 am

I watched some of the episode of Tucker Carlson where he trotted out the whole crew of nutjobs while in the process of demanding that the government get to the bottom of this whole UFO thingy. Since they tout the fair and balanced deal he might have had at least one person offer a differing perspective on what that long distanced blurred shaky footage really is showing.

Congrats on the article. Nice to see that the aliens teat continues to nourish.

Jim

5/23/2021 05:46:12 pm

Let's just put a cherry on this.

"Newly leaked video shows a UFO disappear into the water"

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/05/19/ufo-navy-video-jeremy-corbell-orig-jm.cnn

Can I get a "HELL YA" from everyone wanting the Pentagon to do up a report on Atlantis !

Alton M.

5/25/2021 10:37:24 am

Some more commentary about your piece over on Metafilter:
https://www.metafilter.com/191571/How-Washington-Got-Hooked-on-Flying-Saucers

AAA

5/25/2021 11:23:21 am

These “sceptics” are so boring. Dudes, read for example Dolores Cannon and Neale Donald Walsch. Case closed on UFO-s long time ago.

Redactor

5/28/2021 08:55:10 am

This is a really good summary of how we got here over the last 50 years, but you must have tried hard to not mention the sudden uptick in Chinese drone activity recently. There are a lot of strange lights out there that are real and not hocus-pocus, and keeping your mouth shut about what's really going on is the best way to feed into flying saucer paranoia. An irrational desire to deny that America has any legitimate national security interests is really not very skeptical at all.

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