Confronting high strangeness can fill us with child-like awe. It can also make us act petulant, spoiled and childish/CREDIT: Billy Cox
Justifiably forgotten on the day 60 Minutes normalized the UFO issue for the masses on May 16 was a massively gratuitous waste of time that aired 10 hours earlier on CBS Sunday Morning. It was a Freshman 101-level grab for issue relevance from correspondent David Pogue, whose Rip Van Winkle reporting might have been news to, say, the Toromona people of Bolivia’s upper Madidi River region. Oddly, for a companion network property, it also failed to promote Bill Whitaker’s far more competent treatment of the UFO controversy.
Like so many newbies trying to play catch-up to this impossibly complex topic, Pogue clearly had no idea his lead interview, SETI cheerleader Seth Shostak, admitted more than two years ago he had insufficient standing to offer any insights. Shostak has long perpetuated the establishment conceit that looking for ET via anything other than a telescopic lens was de classe. Yet, when pressed in a 2018 podcast by Black Vault founder John Greenewald about SETI’s capacity to address the UFO mystery, Shostak was surprisingly candid.
“Well, if somebody wants to spend the money to do it,” he said, “I don’t know that the SETI Institute will 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, Pogue’s decision to work the 77-year-old astronomer into the top of a conversation he knows so little about was, until recently, right out the mainstream media’s playbook for UFO coverage. They called it “balance” – find someone, anyone, who can trash ongoing research, employ that voice to push back against transparency advocates, both sides get their say, and it all passes for due diligence. Fortunately, thanks to radar data, official videos, and testimony from intelligence insiders and military pilots, journos are growing sharper and less inhibited. And that’s driving so-called Skeptics, and their dogmatic certitude, up the wall.
In a sulking rant published last month in New Republic, “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers,” Jason Colavito skipped entirely all the evidence now driving the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of the story. Lamenting the fact that UFOs have jumped the ghetto walls and landed in “the creamy pages of high-end magazines and the marble columns of the Capitol,” the author is waking up to the realization that the train is leaving the station – and he’s not on it.
In Colavito’s gospel, Congress and the “media elite” are “being played” by a “small” group of people with enough defense industry connections and money to “supplant material science with a pseudoscientific mysticism straight from the History Channel’s ‘Ancient Aliens.’” And this cabal, which he calls Team Space Poltergeist, “poses a danger to America more real than a flying saucer” by advancing “the kind of magical thinking that leads to lunacy and disaster.”
The guy says Trump’s paranoid anti-science conspiracy theories primed the pump for our collective “credulity,” and that the Svengali manipulating the rubes at The New Yorker, CNN, The NY Times, etc., is none other than billionaire hotelier Robert Bigelow, the only bidder for the Pentagon’s secretive $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification contract in 2007. The Times broke the story a decade later because reporter Ralph Blumenthal “convinced the paper to run the story – and it was a good story – that a billionaire had scored himself a personal military UFO research program.
“But Blumenthal and (fellow reporter Leslie) Kean framed the story as one of military interest in UFOs, not Bigelow’s,” Colavito writes, “thus shaping the media and congressional perceptions of the program.”
In other words, everybody missed the real story. Journalists, pols, first-person veteran eyewitnesses – they all went for the obvious and took the advanced-technology-flying-circles-around-our-warplanes bait. Everybody … but Jason Colavito.
So that shrill noise you hear is the sound of a world view buckling under extreme pressure, and it will get more obstreperous with each release of new data. In the tussle for hearts and minds, the goalposts will retreat toward the ledge inch by semantic inch. Remember the good old days, when UFOs were seen only by psychotics? Then drunkards? Then hillbillies and other untermenschen? Here’s what celebrity Skeptic/scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson said this week on “The View”:
“These Navy videos, you have to ask, if they are aliens visiting, why are they only visiting Navy pilots? How about the rest of the Earth’s surface?”
Good one, Neil.
As we slide deeper into the mystery, news consumers will be shopping around for considerably more than cold rehash, glib quips, convoluted conspiracy theories, and bloviations from scientists whose egos are vested in the status quo. Journalism platforms that can’t hack this new reality should do the rest of us a favor, get out of the way, and avoid UFOs altogether.
Well, I heard the Senate Intelligence Committee received their briefing on UAP. How long will it take for additional info to leak out?
"Imagine the sheer audacity it took to selfishly cling to UFO secrecy. This meant that multiple generations believed that it was their right to keep the American people ignorant of this mysterious presence. Consider the mentality required to conclude that the best way to deal with UFOs would be to ensure most elected officials are ignorant of this reality and that the American people, hundreds of millions of us, should intentionally be led to believe the entire subject is nonsense" - https://medium.com/on-the-trail-of-the-saucers/ufo-truth-85cc0057a7b8