Explaining the current UFO craze through government nepotism, ineptness, and human desire to believe
As I cited in my post about watching Contact again a few weeks ago, the Carl Sagan quote still rings true to me, but this is a much more believable breakdown about what has led to the uptick in UFOs and the recent congressional hearing.
The post is from June, so it's not new new, but I think it all makes sense to me.
In an age of sclerotic institutions, when the arteries of education and media and government are all thickening in front of our eyes, their decline so often captured in hyper-virality on social media, it is inevitable that conspiracy theories thrive.
And you know what? I'm not even sure that's a bad thing, everything considered—I personally think people can make up their own minds on any number of subjects. But one downside of the conspiratorial turn in public discourse is that actually fake conspiracy theories are now promoted by journalists for clicks. We appear to be in a dearth of skeptics, and those same sclerotic institutions put forth ambiguous but hyping headlines, like this one in The Guardian, published on Tuesday, about how the United States might possess "intact alien vehicles."
The real story behind the ongoing UFO craze is completely different from what dominates on Twitter and in major media outlets.
Just to start, let's look at the claim about "alien wreckage" that's been blowing up Twitter for the last few days—which already has House Oversight Committee hearings being scheduled about it. The media ran with it, discussing it almost everywhere, from The Daily Beast to Fox News. Business Insider even called on people to invest in aerospace tech:
The world is on the precipice of changing forever. The truth is out there. Investors, act accordingly.
It turns out the story was passed over by places like The New York Times and The Washington Post until a website called The Debrief was willing to run it. Probably because the guy claiming it, David Grusch, also allegedly said that, beyond wreckage of multiple different craft, the government has in its possession the bodies of the "dead pilots." And that there's been a flying saucer spaceship hidden away since 1933, which was found in Italy and kept secret by Mussolini until the US government retrieved it. And Grusch said, in an interview, that he'd be briefed on "malevolent events" that have occurred wherein live aliens have killed or injured humans. If all this sounds fantastical, keep in mind the idea of Grusch's "disclosure" appears to have come together at a Star Trek convention with people who make their living promoting stories about UFOs, like Jeremy Corbell (who just yesterday was amplifying a story about a Las Vegas couple who reported saw nine-foot tall aliens on their lawn).
The post talks more about the people involved, and also it takes on the fact that UFO stories drive clicks which - in ad driven content sites - directly equals money. Furthering the desire for news sites to carry these stories despite real substance. Before lastly delving into the fact that UFO conspiracy theorists are now in the government and thus only fueling it further.
On December 16, 2017, the New York Times released a bombshell story about a Pentagon "UFO program" called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
The Times reported that Nevada Senator Harry Reid spearheaded the creation of AATIP, which was funded with $22 million to study strange unidentified objects flying over America's skies. . .
Two days after it was published, Lue Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who the Times claimed was the director of AATIP, went on CNN to talk about the otherworldly UFOs that AATIP had allegedly studied.
Except that this program was, according to the Post, basically just a grant given to the owner of Skinwalker Ranch:
As exclusively reported by the Post, the Pentagon didn't actually have an official UFO program called AATIP and Elizondo was not its director.
In 2019, the Pentagon released a statement saying Elizondo had "no responsibilities" with AATIP, a program which they also said wasn't created to investigate UFOs.
This official statement contradicted the claims of The New York Times and Elizondo, but hardly any outlets bothered to report it.
Here's what I think is the best account of what really happened:
The story starts in 2007, when a scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), James Lacatski, says he read a book about Skinwalker Ranch—a supposed paranormal hotspot in Utah that some claim is home to UFOs, ghosts, werewolves and all kinds of monsters. . .
Lacatski then went to the home of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a longtime friend of Bigelow's and a believer in UFOs.
Lacatski told Reid about his Skinwalker "experience" and shared his theory that UFOs, ghosts and monsters were possibly all part of the same "phenomena."
According to Reid's interview with New York Magazine, Lacatski said, "Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it." Reid agreed.
Incredibly, it appears this effort to connect ghosts, monsters (like werewolfs), and UFOs, somehow received Pentagon funding on a contract basis. Probably because the term UFO is allegedly not mentioned on the proposal. The grant awarded instead looks like an incredibly dry technical grant shorn of details about studying "new aerospace technologies" with no mention of UFOs or anything paranormal. It helped that there was only one bidder: Bigelow's company.
As I said at the start - I have to believe we aren't alone in the universe. But I also can't bring myself to believe the idea of mass coverups like this. So, I take the skeptical view on it all.
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TIL how the Meter was originally defined
From the Wikipedia entry:
The metre was originally defined in 1791 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's circumference is approximately 40000 km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar. The actual bar used was changed in 1889. In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86.
I had no idea it was defined based off the size of the planet. Love it.
Dirty Harry (1971) - 3 out of 5 .44 Magnum rounds
Watching this, it is very apparent that the movie is over fifty years old. It feels like it from the start and throughout it. Things are said and done which would never fly today. And yet, it was still a good movie.
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