NPR outflanked by Tucker Carlson

When it comes to UFO forums, public radio remains jammed in the 20th century

Nothing worse than obsolete approaches to new ideas — and National Public Radio needs a reboot to keep up with what might well be the biggest story in human history.

NPR owes its listeners an apology, especially to those for whom exposure to the UFO controversy depends exclusively on public radio. Last week, its 1A segment performed a major disservice to the radio equivalent of the New York Times.

Like many legacy media institutions, National Public Radio has begun a slow drift into the increasingly competitive field of UFO news. There was a time, before the 12/17 NYT scoop that ripped the quilts off the military’s hush-hush interest in UAP, when practically any coverage of The Great Taboo, however ill-conceived, rated applause on general principle. It didn’t even have to be substantive. But those days are over. And if NPR has any hopes of staying relevant in this rapidly expanding content market, management needs to get a lot smarter. And quickly.

On August 4, 1A host Jenn White attempted a discussion on what the Pentagon’s newest acronym, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), might reveal about the phenomenon. No mention of the deep and unresolved divisions within the military intelligence community preceding this shotgun marriage between an intransigent bureaucracy and increasingly restive lawmakers. And that’s OK, maybe, for now. It’s complicated. But NPR listeners are way behind the curve.

What they got was Shane Harris, national security beat reporter for the Washington Post – a not illogical guest – who sketched the continuing fallout from 12/17, plus a lot of stuff that anyone who’s been paying attention already knows. What they also got were some pretty shaky pronouncements from University of Pennsylvania science historian Kate Dorsch.

Big news — Bigelow cofounded TTSA

Questioned about the seminal role of Tom DeLonge and his To The Stars Academy on the military’s reluctant and fitful relationship with transparency, Dorsch stumbled from the get-go. She said TTSA, established in 2017, was “co-founded by Tom DeLonge, and (Robert) Bigelow, the aerospace guy and entrepreneur, a buddy of Harry Reid, and some others …” Bigelow, of course, had nothing to do with TTSA. Dorsch went on to compare DeLonge’s operation to NICAP, the nonprofit civilian research group that compiled massive UFO databases for nearly 30 years in the mid-20th century. TTSA, to the contrary, doesn’t conduct field research at all and concentrates on showbiz.

“I don’t think To The Stars has had any impact or influence in the United States military coming forward,” she added, ignoring the fact that two of TTSA’s charter members – former Pentagon insiders Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon — worked their sources in the Defense Department and Capitol Hill to help lay the groundwork, in May, for the first formal UFO hearings in 54 years.

Still, the most unforgivable editorial decision on the 1A piece was to seek counsel from Seth Shostak, the nervously chuckling SETI Institute astronomer. Any hopes that his puzzling inclusion on Harvard’s Galileo Project advisory board by considerably more enlightened fellow astronomer Avi Loeb might have a mitigating effect on Shostak’s thought patterns were blown to smithereens last week on 1A.

Why this guy continues to have a place in any discussion of UFOs is stupefying. His famous refusal to study the evidence, coupled by his annoying Why do you think they’re aliens? fallback line whenever someone who never said they were aliens wants his take on UFOs, exudes the intellectual dexterity of a tire iron. And in 2018, the guy even admitted he couldn’t fake it anymore.

During an interview with Black Vault researcher John Greenewald, Shostak flipped off a question about how, given decades of zero evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the radio spectrum, astronomers might consider tweaking the game plan by revisiting the UFO mystery.

It’s the media’s fault again

“Well,” he replied, “if somebody wants to spend the money to do it, I don’t know that the SETI Institute will ever be doing it anytime soon – if ever – because there’s not the expertise. The kind of expertise you need for this sort of thing is not the sort of thing that an astronomer would have, for example.”

Yet, like Christmas in December, there he was again last week, on NPR, over his head, flailing away, sanguine and unabashed. Totally bewildered by events forcing the military to respond to congressional pressure on the UFO “obsession” (“My guess is, it’s probably due to the media more than anything else”), Shostak kept saying shit that made no sense whatsoever. On the Pentagon’s grudgingly asserted interest in UAP:

“It seems to be a periodic activity of the military, because of course, the military is always interested to know what might be up there. I mean, y’know, they’re not gonna send their fighter jets up into the sky if there’s something up there they don’t know about, right? There’s 100,000 commercial flights every day, and you wouldn’t wanna be in one of them if there’s something that didn’t file a flight plan.”

Dude, what?

On it went. Shostak’s best guess for why hypothesized space aliens visit Earth might not have splattered so thoroughly if 1A producers could’ve at least overlayed some lafftrax: “That’s a long ride in the middle seat eating pretzels, so they have to have some motivation to do that. So what could possibly entice them to Earth, other than, I don’t know, reality television?”

Jesus. If only he’d stopped there. Shostak went on to regale 1A listeners with intentional falsehoods regarding the three famous Navy F-18 videos, released in 2017-18, that remain officially unexplained. But, despite his avowed lack of credentials to Greenewald, Shostak implied the fighter pilots who captured that footage should’ve consulted astronomers like him: “One is clearly just a balloon, all right, that’s become the bad boy of all these sightings, balloons, weather balloons, used as decoys very frequently. But one of them was a balloon. The other two, to my mind, they’re just aircraft at a great distance.”

White didn’t challenge Shostak at all, and let him get away with it.

The spoils of ‘anomalous’ knowledge

Now, it’s probably safe to assume that NPR prides itself on having an audience it regards as several evolutionary orders above, say, the seething MAGAheads who mainline their dopamine from Fox News. But what does it mean when the prime-time king of Fox News – Tucker Carlson – leaves his podcast viewers far more intellectually engaged about UFOs than last week’s 1A Jell-O?

Two days before the Shostak disaster, Carlson, the bomb-flinger who champions the Orbanization of American democracy, pulled off an astonishing hour-long interview with a research scientist who might well be a star witness if/when congressional UFO hearings resume.

Developer of revolutionary CyTOF blood-cell analysis technology, his CV swollen with more than 300 published articles, and with a couple of his startup companies trading on the NASDAQ, Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan addressed a range of personal and professional interests in the UFO conundrum. Most riveting, however, was what he told Carlson about his work with the CIA.

Approached 11 years ago by The Agency to review brain-damage maps of people who had been exposed to “anomalous objects,” Nolan took a look at some 100 cases and drew blood samples for additional details. The evidentiary threads led Nolan and his team to the caudate putamen, a portion of the brain that governs intuition. In most instances, said Nolan, the caudate putamen in the injury cases “was overdeveloped . . . a lot of these individuals were – we call them high functioning.”

More specifically, he added, “A side benefit of studying this allowed us to find a – come up with a medical understanding of where cognition is happening in the brain. And we’re following up with that in a mainstream science way with a neurophysiology group at Harvard.

“Because we paid attention to anomalous data, we found an anomaly that really had nothing to do with the injury in the first place. But it told us something about what makes people intuitive and smart.”

Hello — this is what’s called a news peg. And this is the type of story that NPR can and should pursue. But as the world evolves, so too do ideas about what does and doesn’t constitute news. Public radio needs to reevaluate its conceits – and prevent tenuously coherent self-professed non-experts like Seth Shostak from embarrassing themselves on the national stage. It makes NPR look like a) it has an agenda, or b) it’s grown complacent about the public interest.