Like a blast from the past

Legacy media sits out the year's biggest UFO story, again

In 1985’s “Day of the Dead,” the final and least watchable of George Romero’s zombie trilogy, the undead outnumber the living by 400,000 to 1, and the odds grow worse every day. But at an underground lab in Florida, a mad scientist has made a small discovery. The zombies get no nourishment whatsoever from human meat and, in fact, lack the ability to even digest it. What propels them, perhaps, is an echo of their previous lives as insatiable consumers.

Lording over his chained subjects moaning in the basement, the bemused Dr. Logan is convinced he knows how to manage the hordes, so numerous now that there’s just not enough ammo left to kill them all. As the skull-less brain stem of former commandant Major Hooper twitches and throbs on a blood-drenched gurney – “He’s been a lot more help to us now than he was before” – Logan says the rotting ambulatory carnivores can be trained to behave so long as that behavior is rewarded. Yeah, OK, granted (we learn later), a diet of human entrails is the reward. But, cautions Logan, keep your eye on the ball: The goal is to reward mindless repetition. Repetition = predictability = control.

Three weeks after the big bang from former Intelligence Community official David Grusch, reverb from his single-sourced allegations that the U.S. government has recovered, unlawfully concealed, and potentially exploited multiple nonhuman vehicles continue to shake plaster off the walls. They even knocked the dust off dormant images from “Day of the Dead” and I’m not really sure why. There are many things I don’t understand lately, but some mysteries are more confounding than others.

Published by The Debrief on June 5 and immediately fleshed out in Aussie journo Ross Coulthart’s lengthy on-camera interview airing on NewsNation, Grusch’s charges of covert research on nonhuman intelligence demand the nation’s full attention. If the allegations live up to his credentials, Grusch could make Alexander Butterfield, the White House insider who told the Senate Watergate Committee about Nixon’s secret tapes, look like a piker.

AARO, NASA, ODNI, SecDef and any other government entity with skin in the game should advocate for putting this millennial whistleblower under oath now. Otherwise, raise your hand if you want to be caught behind the curve of this jarring turn of events and looking negligent. Like House Oversight Committee chair James Comer almost did when cornered by NewsNation.

I got my best folks on it . . .

“There will be oversight of that. I’ve heard about it, I don’t know anything about it,” the Kentucky Republican began, before flinging the hot potato over to colleagues. “But Representative Burchett and Representative Luna on the Oversight Committee are very interested in this issue, and they’re the lead on this issue . . . We plan on having a hearing.”

Tim Burchett (R-TN) has been openly critical of federal UFO obfuscation for years, and Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) — “The status quo by the U.S. government has been to leave the American public in the dark regarding information about UAPs” — is a newcomer. But lawmakers are getting grilled by the press like never before, and they better have something to offer their increasingly inquisitive constituents. When Wired magazine approached a bunch of these folks for record, it became pretty clear that most are still trying to find their sea legs on a simmering scandal. And if the pols in Congress can’t figure this out, the legislative branch becomes as worthless as your tailbone, or wisdom teeth.

Missouri Sen. “Runnin’ Josh” Hawley: “It sounds pretty close to what they kind of grudgingly admitted to us in the briefing . . . It’s not good. None of it’s good. I think we want to get to the bottom of this. I think it’s disturbing.”  

Texas Rep. Mike McCall: “We just want to know if we’ve been seeing UAPs that are not manmade. (If that’s) what the article said, but I don’t know.”

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz: “It could be a game changer, or it could be a crank, I just don’t know.”

California Rep. Pete Aguilar: “This is not a question I had on my bingo card.”

BLAH-blah BLAH-blah BLAH!

Well, Pete, you and the rest of the gang better get smart real quick because it looks like y’all could get rolled pretty easily by gavel-wielders like House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) who are still trying to yawn it off. “Every decade there's been individuals who've said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space,” Turner told Fox News. “There's no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level.”

And don’t forget powerful old-guard visionaries like reliable old Sen. Lindsey Graham. “If we’d really found this stuff,” he told The Hill, “there’s no way you could keep it from coming out.”

Actually, it sounds like it is coming out, Senator. Are you even reading this shit?

David Grusch’s whistleblowing has been a bonanza for newsies, particularly startup media like NewsNation. Formerly known as Superstation WGN out of Chicago, the Nexstar Media Group property is barely two years into its formal launch, and is beating the bejesus out of the other networks for UFO exclusives. Contrast that with the funereal scene over at CNN.

Last summer, know-it-all CEO Chris Licht terminated its award-winning documentary film division. Remember that? Nice call, Chris. The tossed package included “UFOs: Investigating the Unknown,” a solid, four part-doc that NatGeo picked up and dropped in February, just as U.S. jet fighters were shooting down three (3) technically categorized UFOs (and, by the way, those gun-cam vids are still being censored). Faced with plummeting staff morale and ratings, Licht himself got canned earlier this month. Still no wiser, CNN’s leadership has so far shown little appetite for competing with NewsNation or anyone else for scoops on the political ramifications of the growing UFO controversy.

And that brings us to the mysterious vacuum of those two legacy media titans – the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Dynamic duo MIA

Two years ago, I held out hope that these giant print rivals might actually turn the corner and chase each other for pace-setting UFO leads. And why not?

In their “Weaponized” podcast last week, George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell touted a letter from a member of Canada’s Parliament to Defence Minister Anita Anand, referencing “in-camera (UAP) hearings” in Washington, D.C. “I am concerned,” wrote Larry Maguire, “that expected upcoming public announcements will be coordinated between AUKUS, which could damage Canada’s credibility with our allies and the Canadian public on the global stage.”

On Saturday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence posted its version of the 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act bill, which demands “a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic unidentified anomalous phenomena material,” including deadlines for providing that inventory to AARO. Just yesterday, Sen. Marco Rubio told NewsNation that people with “high positions in our government” are emerging to discuss the coverup, some “fearful for their jobs.”

Yet, America’s legendary print newsrooms have produced no original reporting about potential criminality lurking behind the alleged UFO Special Access Programs. The conspicuous absence of the Times and the Post even provoked an unsatisfying analysis from Vanity Fair. Maybe that’s what reanimated old memories of Romero’s cult classics.

WaPo is a total no-show this month on the UFO issue, despite having worked with independent reporters Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal to get the Grusch story into the mainstream. While the Post’s editors dithered for six weeks over fact-checking, competition for the story forced LK and RB to work another platform. Fortunately, The Debrief, an ambitious, four-year-old website pursuing frontier science and defense tech, knows a no-brainer when it sees one, and pulled the trigger.

‘We Blew It’

The bigger question: What is the NYT afraid of? The Times singlehandedly altered public perception in December 2017 when it broke the news about the Pentagon’s secret $22 million UFO research program, with Kean and Blumenthal contributing two of the story’s three bylines. This time around, despite the efforts of two reporters it apparently trusted five years ago, and with bipartisan interest in the controversy surging, the NYT shrugged it off altogether.

The Times’ belated and tepid efforts to engage — i.e., Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Kean, and columnist Ross Douthat’s equivocating ruminations (“maybe . . . a cynical effort to use unexplained phenomena as an excuse to goose military funding”) — could’ve been summarized under a single headline: “We Blew It.”

But why? Surely it’s not this simple — is it?

Julian Barnes has been working defense and national security sources for 17 years, and has covered spooks for the NYT out of Washington since 2018. Developing trusted contacts takes time, and that trust gets rewarded with great leads, from Putin’s plot to assassinate a rival in Miami to the hunt for saboteurs behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosion.

Trust is a two-way street built on predictable behaviors, such as coloring inside the lines or, in Barnes’ case, never missing a chance to file a UFO report parroting the Pentagon’s assertion that data ambiguities “are a result of inadequate sensor collection, not evidence of advanced technology or any sort of government cover-up.” Rewards also include getting invited to hand-picked Pentagon round-table discussions on UFOs last December, where folks like Defense Department PIO Susan Gough, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, and AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick are only too happy to let Barnes shoot harmless Nerf Balls that can easily be batted away. Like this classic setup: “Is there any evidence, that you have, affirmative evidence, that you have collected, that shows any one of these anomalies is a space alien?” Cue the canned laughter.

Well, it beats eating human flesh, maybe. And with Barnes in its pocket, at least the Defense Department doesn’t have to worry about another rude NYT surprise like the one that started all this trouble back in 12/17.