Oh for god's sake!

Pentagon rolls media on UFOs (again)

I was deep into my weekend torpor, one of more than 5 million Americans turning into the top-rated “CBS Sunday Morning,” when I started looking around for my baseball bat. Then I remembered it was in the bedroom by the nightstand, and getting up to fetch it would’ve required effort. And I would’ve had to clean up all that plastic, glass and metal. Plus I would’ve been out $500 or whatever for a new TV set. Plus, well . . . bashing the flatscreen to smithereens is childish.

Still, I’m not used to being insulted by “Sunday Morning.” The show has been a weekend staple since forever because it offers a respite from the tiresome dross of most network fare by making room for surprises.

In 2021 (seems so long ago now) an episode of CBS/“60 Minutes” blazed a trail in big media’s erratic coverage of the UAP/UFO issue. That’s when veteran correspondent Bill Whitaker scored an on-camera exclusive with Alex Dietrich, the first female Navy pilot to go on record with her pursuit of a UFO – in this case, the so-called Tic Tac – in 2004. The story was too hot for a one-off; surely, CBS had the resources and material for plenty of followups. Back in 2021, David Pogue filed a perfectly insipid UFO piece on “Sunday Morning.” The man deserved a chance to redeem himself someday.

Instead . . .

During a transitional segment between a story and a commercial break, producers dropped a mention of the Pentagon’s “Historical Record of the Government’s Involvement With Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Vol. I,” released last week. Uncritically regurgitating the Defense Department’s rote 63-page conclusion that “there is no evidence that extraterrestrial intelligence has visited Earth,” the “Sunday Milepost” added:

Et tu, Brute? Hey CBS — you suck!

So. CBS bought it, too. Not merely the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s distortions of America’s history with the phenomena, but also the flawed logic of its zero-sum language about “extraterrestrial intelligence.” Jesus Christ – they all bought it. After six-plus years (actually, decades) of mounting evidence that America is in fact not in control of its own airspace, restricted or otherwise, and has no idea what to do about it, the DoD analysis got the treatment it wanted from the majors:

“Pentagon finds ‘no evidence’ of UFO technology in new UFO report” – NPR; “Pentagon study finds no evidence of alien life in reported UFO sightings going back decades” – Associated Press; “Pentagon report says most UFO sightings ‘ordinary objects’ and phenomena” – Reuters; “Pentagon says no evidence of UFO cover-up by U.S.” – NBC; “Alien, UFO mothership is not being hidden from you: Pentagon report” – USA Today; “Pentagon finds no evidence of alien visits, hidden spacecraft” – Washington Post; “Pentagon review finds no evidence of alien coverup” – New York Times.

Banging out history-related stories on deadline isn’t always easy, especially if they’re outside your beat. But if, say, the National Archives unveils documents suggesting that someone else, not John Wilkes Booth, shot President Lincoln, it’s a no-brainer – you contact Lincoln scholars. It’s called balance. That’s what reporters Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper were up against in 2017 while working their groundbreaking UFO investigation into the NY Times. Editors demanded dissenting opinions. Therefore, skeptical M.I.T. astrophysicist Sara Seager and ex-NASA engineer/debunker extraordinaire Jim Oberg were included in the article, even though neither one knew anything about the topic, i.e., the Pentagon’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

But that standard collapsed altogether last week, not only at the Times, but at the Washington Post, the twin pillars of American legacy journalism. Neither NYT’s Julian Barnes nor Shane Harris at The Post even tried to fake a familiarity with the long view. In fact, they were among the half-dozen scribes hand-picked by the Pentagon to get a sneak preview from acting AARO boss Tim Phillips. In January, Phillips succeeded the agency’s contentious inaugural director Sean Kirkpatrick, widely believed to have written this “Historical Record” . . . thing. Conspicuously uninvited to that powwow were troublemakers Kean and Blumenthal, as well as investigative reporter Ross Coulthart.

Sorry — club members only

Writing for The Debrief last June, Kean and Blumenthal broke the news about Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch. The just-retired intelligence officer had quietly informed the Intelligence Community Inspector General, as well as Congress, about classified and possibly illegal government research involving the recovery of nonhuman craft, technology and “biologics.” Days later, Coulthart followed up with an hour-long on-camera interview with Grusch.

That one-two punch triggered, one month later, televised hearings by the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs. Grusch joined two Navy pilots with sworn testimony. And that, coupled with closed-door meetings involving key lawmakers, led Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in a bipartisan push to craft a bill that – had it not been scotched by a couple of powerful GOP House committee chairs in December – stood to blow the lid off America’s deepest Cold War secret.

A lot of other little jewels emerged from that Capitol Hill hearing last summer, too, things the NYT, WaPo, CBS or any other half-assed media outlet might’ve followed up on. Here’s one:

In opening remarks to the witnesses, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz volunteered that he, and fellow GOP lawmakers Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, had traveled to Eglin AFB to investigate an incident sparked over the Gulf of Mexico “several months ago” during military exercises. The encounter involved a diamond shaped formation of objects, including some sort of orb, that temporarily fritzed the plane’s radar and infrared camera as it approached the perplexity.

After initially being stonewalled at the front gate, Gaetz said he and his colleagues were allowed to interview a crew member who photographed the UFO. “The image,” Gaetz stated, “was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States, or any of our adversaries.”

That incident might’ve remained stuck in the hearsay drawer were it not for a software engineer named Abbas Michael Dharamsey. As Black Vault researcher John Greenewald announced last week, Dharamsey managed to nail down not only the basic facts but the exact date of the encounter, 1/26/23. Although Dharamsey’s FOIA for video and stills was rebuffed and the case documents were thoroughly redacted, the USAF Office of Special Investigations confirmed the essence of Gaetz’s recollection in a brief declassified summary:

Just don’t expect AARO to comment

On that date, the plane’s radar tracked four formation-flying UFO/UAP, but only one showed itself to the pilot, who was able to get a “screen capture.” The visible object was operating at 16,000 feet, and the rest were generating radar pingbacks some two to three thousand feet higher. The visible object resembled “an ‘Apollo spacecraft’ in size and shape, with an ‘orange-reddish’ illuminated rounded bottom and the top section ‘a three-dimensional cone shape’ comprising ‘gunmetal gray segmented panels.’” The summary included an eyewitness sketch of the target.

Time out. What the hell, man? Are these things actually mocking our Apollo program? Making fun of what the early astronauts used to call “spam in a can”? Well, at least we know it was real, thanks to one (1) curious mind making info requests and performing citizen journalism.

Since this event occurred in the first quarter of 2023, one assumes the report made it into the AARO database. But we don’t know for sure, because AARO doesn’t discuss details of individual cases involving unknowns. In fact, as longtime FOIA sleuth Robert Powell just discovered, the only way you’re going to pry those records from AARO’s clutches is to make an end run through the Federal Aviation Administration.

Noting AARO’s contention last October that it had received more than a hundred reports from the FAA, Powell asked the FAA to produce them. After initially balking, the FAA released 69 cases; fortunately, the summaries were uncensored, and at least four were especially noteworthy because they involved America’s frontline warplanes.

In February 2023, with all eyes fixed on the shootdowns of balloons and/or unknowns over the northern frontier with Canada, at least four Lockheed Martin F-35s were gathering data elsewhere during a three-week span. There were encounters over El Paso and Vermont. Taking off from Luke AFB a week or so apart, two of the fighter pilots logged separate UFO incidents over Arizona. Better yet, the $82 million stealth interceptors are all theoretically tricked out with state-of-the-art sensor technology.

‘It was so . . . stupid’

Powell is one of those guys the press might’ve contacted for comment on the Pentagon’s “Historical Record” scam. A founding member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and co-author of the comprehensive, 580-page UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry in 2010, Powell would’ve given the media an earful. Within 48 hours of posting a blistering critique on X, his analysis had drawn 275,000 views, more than 200 comments and more than 1,200 likes. But even today, a week later, the magnitude of “Vol. 1’s” errors, omissions and fabrications still leaves him aghast.

“My first thought was, this is the most stupid report I can imagine – I mean, it was so . . . stupid,” Powell says. “I guess they were just going for headlines, but I think in the long run it’s going to bite them in the ass.”

In fact, “Vol. 1” – yes, there’s a “Vol. II” still to come – was so decisive in its trivialization of unknowns, one could argue the unnamed author(s) intentionally sabotaged AARO’s credibility as a template for future generations to contemplate about the price of absolute secrecy. But not now. The current big-media environment, Powell says, appears to reward only those who swallow the blue pill.

“They totally failed to verify what was in there,” he says. “I mean, all they had to do was click on some of the references. I stopped at the 10^th reference because I’d already found something like six broken links. They had more than a hundred footnotes referenced, and I don’t have time to waste going through them all.”

Never mind the sloppy little things, like getting late Sen. Harry Reid’s home state wrong, or attributing the wrong first name to former Blue Book director Robert Friend, or screwing up a few dates. In ignoring entirely the voluminous history of nuclear incidents, and going blind to data-rich cases like Stephenville 2008, Aguadilla 2013, and even the massively popularized 2004 Tic Tac incident, then fixating instead on debunking allegations of top-secret “reverse engineering” programs, “Vol. I” signaled that Grusch’s testimony – without mentioning Grusch by name – had indeed struck a nerve. Without revealing which companies or agencies they contacted, without naming interviewees, the time or the place of these contacts, the author(s) concluded the allegations “most likely are the result of a range of cultural, political and technological factors.”

Yes, size does matter

But even the most basic questions went unanswered, says Mark Rodeghier, heir to J. Allen Hynek’s massive Center for UFO Studies archives.

“In their briefing to the press, there was a question about how many people AARO employed. They refused to answer that. I mean, how can that be classified? That’s insane,” says Rodeghier. “The Russians and the Chinese, they don’t care how many people are employed by AARO, in a security framework. I think they’re worried because we’ll think their staff is too small. They talk about transparency, but if we find out they have four employees, that’s a big difference from 40.”

The real value of “Vol. I,” he says, is its stamp of official evasiveness which, if ignored by Congress now, would be beyond negligent —it’d be complicity.

“When the government puts out a report, that’s a big deal. They’re saying, this is what we believe to be true about these matters of national security. So why can’t they tell us more?” Rodeghier wonders. “At least (USAF Project) Blue Book (1952-69) published their cases – but AARO can’t? Why can’t they redact the technical information they need to protect and give us more than two sentences? What’s going on?”

Last fall, a small band of lawmakers formed the House UAP Caucus; on Tuesday, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) sent a letter to House leadership requesting the convening of a select committee to impose transparency on the Pentagon.

But researcher skepticism cuts both ways, and Jan Aldrich, co-founder of the online Project 1947, harbors serious doubts about the recovered-tech coverup claims of Grusch and former AATIP director Luis Elizondo. Eight months and counting since the House hearing, and corroborative evidence from hands-on insiders has yet to materialize. Will it ever?

“I’m not saying it’s not possible that they have bodies or samples of UFO material, but I have yet to see anything that indicates that,” says the 78-year-old Army veteran who’s been chasing government paper since he was a teenager. “They’ve been saying that forever. But when you get right down to it, there’s nothing tangible to follow up on.”

AARO might’ve ameliorated even more critics by providing just one detailed analysis of what it considers a true unknown. But with a supplicant press, it didn’t really need to. AARO gave ‘em “Weekend at Bernie’s” and the media lapped it up like it was Ken Burns.

So here’s money in the bank: AARO has an opening for a Science and Technology Officer that pays anywhere from 163,964 to $191,900 a year. Abbas Michael Dharamsey will not be getting that job.