'The Pentagon’s Newly Revealed UFO Research Program' – What a Week!

The other day I watched astronomer/Hayden Planetarium director/Carl Sagan “Cosmos” legacy heir Neil deGrasse Tyson lose it on CNN. The topic was the Pentagon’s newly revealed UFO research program. And the flummoxed “rock star of science explanation,” as Tyson was introduced, was so worked up he was practically incoherent. “The evidence is so paltry for aliens to visit earth, I have no further interest,” he said. “Let other people who care, go ahead. And when you finally find some aliens, bring them into Times Square. No, no,” he

By Billy Cox De Void 12-22-17

corrected himself with coercive chuckling, “there are too many weird people.” Obliging laughter from Tyson’s hosts. “And try not to come back during Comic-Con where the aliens would just blend in,” he continued. “Go to the county fair or something where there’s a uniformity of who’s there.”

Oh yeah. The county fair. Monster trucks and funnel cakes. Blue-ribbon livestock. Those people. Look, the truth is, Tyson is actually cool with space aliens. So long as they know their place, confine themselves to distant shores on the far side of the cosmic ocean, and work the keyboards with SETI radioastronomers. But yo, wait up – he’s still talking:

“—and everybody’s got a high definition video camera on them now. We have video footage of rare things that, you know, happened but no one saw it happen, like buses tumbling in tornadoes. In the day, you didn’t say oh, a bus is about to tumble, let me go back and get my video camera to film this. No, you got your tail outta there. Everybody’s got a video camera. I’m just waiting for images of people visiting … having tea with aliens on the spacecraft.”

Say what?

“Fine, we don’t know what it is, keep checking it out. Call me when you have a dinner invite from an alien.”

Say no more, got it. When it comes to investigating for possibilities in our own back yard, let somebody else do the work.

Nope, this isn’t the sort of sputtering discourse we’ve come to expect from the normally unruffled and eloquent personality scientist. But neither he nor we have ever seen a time like this. The revelation of a $22 million Pentagon study of UFOs. State of the art gun-cam thermal footage with embedded metadata. Captured by F-18 jet fighters and professionally analyzed. An officer with an elite military unit – an eyewitness, to boot – telling global audiences “I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying, that has the performance, the acceleration — keep in mind, this thing has no wings.” Plus a lineup of blue-chip advocates for more extensive study, officials who most definitely are not labeling what’s going on as the handiwork of space aliens. People with titles such as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, like Chris Mellon, who recently left the Pentagon.

“Um, you know, that’s speculation,” Mellon responded when asked by a CNN reporter if he was talking extraterrestrials. “I think what we need to do is get serious about finding answers. Speculation is cheap and easy, what we need is more hard data.” Judging from his multiple appearances, this is a guy who isn’t going to shrink from the lights, who understands the media’s role in making people listen or read. “Until the public engages,” he said, “we’re really not gonna make progress and headway. It’s a democracy, people have to be invested and care about it for something like this to be really understood.”

Mellon’s assertion about democracy may need an update, but never mind. America’s traditional stable of talking heads has never been challenged this way before. And that makes it easier to understand why folks like Tyson look off their game. Especially when the former director of that Pentagon Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo, refuses to draw conclusions about the evidence. “We’d rather let the data drive the conclusions,” he told HLN, “(rather than let) our opinions and our conclusions drive the data.” That sounds like, well, jeez, your gig, Dr. Tyson. Science.

When it comes to UFOs, Seth Shostak, like Tyson, is where newsies typically go whenever they want The Reliable Rational Angle. Senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, Shostak has welded his career to the theory that ET will be discovered at a manageable arm’s length, but most certainly not in our own atmosphere. For many in the SETI clique, searching for ET is a zero-sum game, where considering evidence for one is incompatible with weighing evidence for the other. So they tend to avoid the other and resort to the sort of speculation that too often characterizes UFO “believers.”

Their argument usually opens with perfunctory equivocation about how, yes, there are many things we see in the sky that we don’t understand, yes, yes – but that doesn’t mean they’re space aliens. Then they trot out anthropocentric behavioral analogies they use to buttress their degreed perspectives. Like the old saw Shostak regurgitated for Business Insider this week.


“They’re the best house guests ever,” Shostak said of whatever’s going on upstairs. “Because if they’re here, they’re not doing anything … They send a huge fleet of spacecraft, preferably shaped like dinner plates, just to fly around and get people agitated but otherwise not do a thing. It’s a little odd that aliens would come hundreds and hundreds of light-years to do nothing.” Y’know, he’s right? They sure aren’t behaving like the Spanish did when they reached the gates of Tenochtitlan. Go on, Seth: “They don’t try and take any of their land, they don’t bring any disease, they don’t do anything; they just sort of walk around at the fringes of their settlements, leading to puzzling sightings, but that’s it.”

I wonder what this week has been like for these tunnel-visionaries. Did they voluntarily process The New York Times coup? Or will they ingest it only after being drugged, bound, and held hostage to the Ninth Symphony like Alex in “A Clockwork Orange”? This can’t be pleasant.

But this is definitely terra incognita. For the first time in more than a year, I’ve woken up every morning actually looking forward to browsing the news feed to see what kind of legs this thing has. For now, the story is everywhere, NPR, Forbes, NBC, ABC, CBS, Axios, Esquire, Space.com, Fox, Popular Mechanics and everything else I’ve missed. An emboldened reporter from The Hill asks White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders if Trump believes in UFOs, and if her boss intends to restore research funding, which supposedly went lights-out in 2012.

“I feel like I already want to pass on this question,” Sanders replies as the giggles subside, “given that you’ve got aliens sitting among you.” No one knew she was this witty before. “Somehow or another that question hasn’t come up in our back and forth over the last couple of days but I will check into that and be happy to circle back.” She said happy.

Ralph Blumenthal, co-author of the Times story, even took the opportunity to explain his approach. “So how does a story on U.F.O.s get into The New York Times?” he begins. “Not easily, and only after a great deal of vetting, I assure you.” Front-end journalism from other media presses forward. Veteran KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp in Las Vegas scores a sit-down interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid, who instigated the program in 2007.

Knapp also contacts other sources, who tell him “the effort resulted in three dozen thick reports, some of them several hundred pages in length, as well as another three dozen or so technical reports which projected how this kind of exotic technology might usher in a new era of aviation, and what that might mean.” In summary, reports Knapp, “Reid said the study produced voluminous reports, but was canceled because of fears within the intelligence community, fear not only that the story would leak out, but fear based on religious beliefs of those who felt UFOs might be Satanic.”

So even Satan’s doing the war on science thing now. Great.

Reid also referenced the research of UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, who has more than 150 veterans on record discussing the phenomenon’s spooky activity over nuclear weapons facilities. Imagine the White House press corps if the phenomenon’s tampering with our WMD gets any traction: “Sarah, can you tell us if President Trump is trying to sign a deal with UFOs to get them to disable North Korea’s nuclear arsenal?”

Reid even tells Knapp his phone’s been ringing off the hook since the Times story broke, that he’s been fielding calls from members of Congress and business leaders alike. In fact, earlier this week, defense techno-giant Raytheon touted its own critical role in the UFO story by reminding readers that its very own Advanced Targeting Forward Look Infrared sensor — aka AN/ASQ-228 in Navy parlance, installed on carrier-based F-18s — was responsible for acquiring the footage. Stated the chief engineer for Surveillance and Target Systems at Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems, “We might be the system that caught the first evidence of E.T. out there.”

So there’s that.

On the other hand, if precedence holds sway, the attention-challenged press will get bored soon enough, revert to form, and start sniffing around for more accessible VIP bedroom scandals. That’s where I’d put my $$$. But if nothing else, at least De Void will look back someday, fondly, at this moment, this week. The week the media broke from covering the same old repetitive dispiriting Beltway fatcat horror show. The week the media swerved off the rez, nodded politely at the same old celebrity authorities, and at least feigned interest in chasing the biggest story of all time.

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See Also:

On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program

UFO-Pentagon Story Reflects Fundamental Problems

Pentagon UFO Study Examined UFO Activity at Nuclear Missile Sites Says Former U.S. Senator Harry Reid

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