Stumbling into the brave new world

“In a functioning democracy, we must constantly balance the competing priorities of government secrecy and transparency. I believe that there is information uncovered by the government’s covert investigations into UAPs that can be disclosed to the public without harming our national security” — Sen. Harry Reid, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon

It would’ve been nice if, for just one day, America’s news media could’ve bumped the coronavirus and the Jan. 6 insurrection fallout from the leadoff slots and made room for the most hopeful story to spin out of the holidays, maybe the entire year. And nope, “we” aren’t talking about President Biden’s signature on the defense spending bill that created an historic and theoretically accountable UFO/UAP office – the integrity of that setup must be earned, and the verdict is likely years away.

We’re talking, of course, about the Christmas launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, covered live on NASA TV but not so much by the networks. In fact, the flight of this virtual time machine rated mostly down-page coverage, a blown opportunity to showcase our most aspirational bonds as a species. By last Sunday, day 2 of the mission, the story had pretty much cycled out of the newsfeed loop.

No one could’ve predicted the million-mile voyage would embark on a day synonymous with peace on Earth/good will to men, but the media had years to prepare for the brain feast so few of us witnessed Christmas morning. Under the auspices of NASA, the European Space Agency, and Canada, 14 countries joined hands to build a $10 billion behemoth designed to track starlight to the very edge of creation. Mission control at Goddard Space Flight Center looked more like the United Nations than the cloned rows of white male American engineers who guided Apollo 8 into a transformational rendezvous with an image that would spark the global ecology movement 53 Christmases ago. Diversity manned the digital screens this time around, a few Santa Claus caps added more color, and a senior flight operations manager, Aracely Quispe, was a Peruvian woman who grew up in an impoverished village without electricity.

Christmas Day is tough to corral live interviews, but with just a smidgen of foresight, that wouldn’t have been necessary. The networks could have stockpiled enough programming to hold a crowd long after the Ariane 5 cleared the treetops of French Guiana. Like, for starters, maybe telling us who the hell James Webb was, and why the legacy of a former Undersecretary of State and non-rocket scientist rated the name of history’s most powerful telescope.

They could have expanded the audience by inviting, say, historians, sci-fi writers, archaeologists and sociologists to weigh in on what it means when a civilization is determined to follow its curiosity into a place that will guarantee its own diminution. The “Earthrise” photo taken by the Apollo 8 crew at the tail-end of 1968, after all, was captioned not by an explainer on the triumph of Newtonian physics, but by the astronauts’ reading from the book of Genesis. Moments after the JWST launch, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson drew cringes from the atheist crowd by invoking Psalm 19. But he signed off by dispensing with Lee Greenwood nationalism and addressing a larger audience: “God bless planet Earth.”

NASA drew a little blowback for a second time last week when a four-year-old story about the space agency’s brief dalliance with theology resurfaced in the British press. In 2017, former Sen. Jeff Flake lambasted the agency for delivering a grant to Princeton’s Center for Theological Inquiry, which canvassed two dozen clerics and religion scholars for insights on how the discovery of ET life might impact humanity. Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller rated it the second worst misuse of taxpayer dollars for 2017 (behind the National Science Foundation’s $1.5 million grant to create a better tasting tomato). But hey, if the $1.1 million NASA allotted to the CTI project truly qualifies as among the most egregious boondoggles in the fed’s $4 trillion budget, I’d call that an effin’ miracle.

It’s easy to see how consideration of religious perspectives by science gives the willies to a lot of thoughtful people. Physicist Paul Davies, who has made a career of skirting that thin line between atheism and reason and now sits on the Science Advisory Board of Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard, articulated his reservations in his 1995 book Are We Alone? “What I am more concerned with,” he wrote, “is the extent to which the modern search for aliens is, at rock-bottom, part of an ancient religious quest.”

But so what if it is? Trying to present the tensions between science and religion as a zero-sum game seems hopelessly myopic, at least in this country, and that’s something the late Sen. Harry Reid figured out a long time ago. Among the most powerful rainmakers in Washington, the Nevada Democrat joined the Church of Latter-Day Saints in college and was a lay leader of the flock throughout his life.

An obituary in the LDS-owned Deseret News provided an extensive review of Reid’s formidable political legacy. It also included a glimpse into his faith, expressed most notably in 2015 when Reid presided over the conversion of former South Dakota Republican senator Larry Pressler to Mormonism. And yet, like practically every other mainstream media platform, the tribute omitted any mention whatsoever of what will, in time, be considered Reid’s greatest contribution to science – carving out $22 million to study UFOs, under the opaque moniker of Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program.

Reid’s gambit, secretly supported by late Senate lions Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens, provoked a cascading sequence of events and revelations that was rewarded by Congress just days before he died. The revolution Reid started, however, may not even hit its stride until after the lot of us are long gone. And as the lights begin to dim on America’s 245-year-old experiment, state by state, tweet by tweet, lie by lie, how we handle the great expectations ahead in 2022 could also create a trajectory that whatever power structure succeeds this ossified mess we’ve inherited may find impossible to manage. And to that end, the press must get smarter.

Between now and when JWST begins transmitting images next summer, the media will have plenty of chances to make up for a lackluster Christmas Day and provide meaningful context for an anthropocentric cosmology on the brink of transition. Who knows, that sort of innovative storytelling might even serve as a tune-up for processing whatever military intelligence is now being forced to share with the rest of us about UAP/UFOs.

And maybe, someday, the Fourth Estate will even revisit its own eulogies to inform readers that the last act on the public stage by a retired Senate Majority Leader might also prove to be his finest.

Happy New Year. God willing …