Weekly Roundup: More Gunung Padang Claims and Chris Mellon's Confession

​After two months of miserable Ancient Aliens episodes on all but one Friday, I felt more than a little relief to receive a bit of time off from the grind. But that doesn’t mean that the outer edges of pseudoscience fell silent. After John Wiley & Sons retracted the infamous Gunung Padang paper claiming the Indonesian site was an Ice Age mega-pyramid, the author of the paper, Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, published on Graham Hancock’s website what he says is the full text of his team’s communications with the team at Wiley over the retraction. Natawidjaja seems to think that doing so vindicates his claim that nefarious forces of Western orthodoxy ae suppressing his superior science, but reading through the correspondence makes plain that Natawdjaja and his team have no real evidence to support their claims, failed to consider alternative explanations, and relied almost entirely on drawing conclusions from a visual inspection of rocks—basically, “looks like, therefore is.” Natawidjaja seeks to reverse the burden of proof, demanding that critics prove that the natural-seeming formations he identifies as prehistoric constructions are not human-built, rather than offering any positive evidence of their artificiality. 

​Meanwhile, in a Gizmodo piece about UFOs this week, Chris Mellon offered one of his bluntest revisionist narratives of how he created the media firestorm in 2017 that put UFOs on the media and Congressional agenda. In the interview, Mellon admits to sneaking UFO videos out of the Pentagon against the rules and claims to have delivered the 2017 New York Times story that started it all to Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal as a complete package, saying they did virtually no work. He even admits to stage-managing a propaganda campaign to legitimize UFO speculations that AARO later concluded, after millions of dollars in wasted spending, were—surprise!—the fantasies of Mellon and his group:

Mellon says that after learning of the extent of UFO sightings by U.S. pilots, he wanted to spread the word about the issue. “I came up with a simple plan to do that, which involved going to the press and going to Congress,” said Mellon. He then relays to me a familiar tale that has made its way into numerous news reports, which is the origin story of how a famous UFO video—the 2004 Nimitz episode—was leaked. According to Mellon, a person met him in the parking lot of the Pentagon and handed him an envelope containing a USB drive. Inside the USB drive were three videos taken by F-18 pilots that showed “real UAP,” as Mellon puts it. Mellon says he then decided to share the videos with the press.
 
The way Mellon explains it, the pivotal New York Times story that is largely credited with helping legitimize UFOs within the broader culture never would have happened without his direct involvement. “This was not investigative journalism,” Mellon tells me. “I handed them the evidence, introduced them to Lue Elizondo, gave them a stack of documents, arranged for them to meet and interview Harry Reid, and made a deal with them. They ran the story, which appeared on December 16 of 2017 on the front page.”
 
Mellon says this was part of a broader plan on his part to spread the word about UFOs and to get Congress to take some sort of action on the matter.

Perhaps telling is that the Gizmodo interview ends with this Mellon analysis about government secrecy: “If you get deep in that world, you do see things differently afterward […] And, if you get really deep into it—and you learn how certain things work—you read the newspapers differently...You realize how different actors are pulling different strings.” That sounds great until you realize that it’s a close paraphrase of a story that Henry Kissinger (I think) used to tell to new diplomats about the impact of access to classified information and its effect on officials’ judgment.* Nothing in UFO world is what it seems.

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*  I tried my damnedest to find the book that reported the anecdote to link here, but, never thinking I would use that story again, I hadn’t committed its location to memory when I read it last year. It’s possible that the anecdote belongs to someone else.