UFOs Come Out of the Shadows. Again. Perhaps.

Mick West

From: Volume 44, No. 6
November / December 2020

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“BAM!” was the one-word message a friend sent me, accompanying a link to the July 23, 2020, New York Times article titled “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” (Blumenthal and Kean 2020).

The implication from my friend (a life-long UFO fan) was that this was a significant step on the road to “Disclosure”—the much-hoped-for event where the government will finally admit that they have evidence of alien visitors and indeed that they have had it for many years, perhaps going back to Roswell.

But the New York Times article in fact reveals nothing at all; it’s essentially a recap of UFO-related news, some a few weeks old and some much older. The most recent event being reported is that there should be a public report on some findings from an “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force.” This actually dates from a month earlier, June 17, 2020, in a Senate report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2021, where Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) added a section titled “Advanced Aerial Threats,” saying that UFOs have not got the attention they deserve and concluding:

Therefore, the Committee directs the DNI, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense and the heads of such other agencies as the Director and Secretary jointly consider relevant, to submit a report within 180 days of the date of enactment of the Act, to the congressional intelligence and armed services committees on unidentified aerial phenomena (also known as “anomalous aerial vehicles”), including observed airborne objects that have not been identified. (Rubio 2020)

The language in this section was supplied by Christopher K. Mellon, a former government official who now works with Tom DeLonge (former Blink-182 singer and guitarist) at DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy (TTSA). It was actually written way back in 2019, as TTSA noted on Twitter when they celebrated their victory last month:

In May 2019 TTSA posted proposed draft language by @ChristopherKMe4 for Congress to take action & just last week the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence incorporated his long-standing suggestion to require the IC to do a full written UNCLASSIFIED assessment of the UAP issue. (To the Stars Academy 2020)

TTSA is primarily an entertainment company. They claim to also be a science and technology company, but to date, their most significant output has been a two-season show on the History Channel titled Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation. This History Channel show, and TTSA in general, were helped by other New York Times UFO stories by the same two reporters.

The other media-friendly aspect of the New York Times story is the reporters’ remarkably convoluted, hedged, qualified, and corrected account of how someone may or may not have bits of a flying saucer or at least bits of something … maybe.

The first version of the article that appeared in print was quite dramatic:

Mr. [Harry] Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.

Incredible news! The leader of the U.S. Senate confirms the U.S. government is having bits of alien spaceships analyzed! Unfortunately, less than twenty-four hours later, that paragraph was changed to:

Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.

And, even after this change was made, Senator Harry Reid forcefully issued a denial of any such thing on Twitter.

I have no knowledge—and I have never suggested—the federal government or any entity has unidentified flying objects or debris from other worlds. I have consistently said we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men. (Reid 2020)

How the New York Times could, as they said in their correction note, have “inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid” so incredibly badly is difficult to comprehend. The idea that Reid believed in specifics about “crashes of vehicles from other worlds” is obviously extraordinary and likely to stir up significant media interest. It should have been fact-checked. Reid’s forceful repudiation makes it very clear this was not done and brings into question the authority of the entire article.

Which brings me to Eric W. Davis. Longtime readers of Skeptical Inquirer might recognize him as the recipient of a Pigasus Award for his studies into psychic teleportation in 2004. In that study, he credulously describes the spoon-bending, teleporting, and remote-viewing skills of magician Uri Geller as actual psychic powers (Davis 2004). Davis is presented as an authority in the New York Times article to back up the assertion that the government has alien material in its possession. With the most repeated quote coming in this paragraph:

Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

There are multiple problems with this. First, Davis is not a credible source. But that aside, he’s supposedly telling the New York Times about classified information. If it’s actually true, then he’s committing a federal crime with significant criminal penalties. If his claim is true, and he actually briefed people about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth,” then how on earth is Harry Reid unaware of this? Why does Reid so forcefully deny any knowledge of any such thing? Why would Eric Davis know something that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would not, and also be able to talk about it?

The New York Times article also renders the remarks of Luis Elizondo, a former government worker who was involved in investigations of reports of unidentified objects. He now works at TTSA and is essentially the host of the History Channel show Unidentified. He seems to be very open to the E.T. hypothesis of UFOs. His position on the mysterious material is described in the article as:

Mr. Elizondo is among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study.

That’s hardly a strong endorsement. They don’t quote him on the topic, and they add the disclaimer “without presenting physical proof”—which seems to me like it was added as a hedge by an editor concerned about the overly credulous tone of the article. Such hedging is scattered through the article, popping up somewhat incongruously, like this blanket qualifier:

In some cases, earthly explanations have been found for previously unexplained incidents. Even lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make an extraterrestrial one the most likely, astrophysicists say.

Or later, they seem to almost throw out the entire idea of retrieved materials:

No crash artifacts have been publicly produced for independent verification. Some retrieved objects, such as unusual metallic fragments, were later identified from laboratory studies as man-made.

So what do we have here with this article? Not a lot, and nothing really new. But in any event, it’s a bit of a mess. UFO writer Christoper Bales described it as “a total debacle,” and I don’t think that’s entirely inaccurate. The Harry Reid error in particular is inexcusable.

Why does the New York Times do this? Has “the newspaper of record” really sunk to attempting a high-brow approach to tabloid topics? I think perhaps they have tasted the forbidden fruit, with incredibly high audience numbers for these UFO stories, combined with vast amounts of secondary media attention. This must have been helpful in these times of changing media preferences.

But I think that the scattered disclaimers and qualifications through the article show that the editors realized that there were problems. I’ve heard that as much as 1,000 words were removed from the article. Even more speculative topics were dropped during the editorial process, leaving us with this crippled, odd collection of things we already knew. It will still fan the media flames—the media loves a good UFO story—but I hope the Gray Lady will think carefully before going down this road again.

 

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Mick West

Mick West is a writer, investigator, and debunker who enjoys looking into the evidence behind conspiracy theories and strange phenomena and then explaining what is actually going on. He runs the Metabunk forum, tweets @mickwest, and is the author of the book “Escaping the Rabbit Hole”.