We all want to protect our planet: our land, water, air—all life itself. Environmentalists bring passion and dedication to that cause, to enormous positive effect. But there is another aspect. As David Mountain writes in our cover article, “Environmentalism has been shaped by a range of fringe beliefs that have nurtured a tradition of unscientific thinking about the natural world.” He writes from a clearly sympathetic viewpoint about the causes while also urging environmentalism to renounce “its long dalliance with the fringe.”

In a related article, “Ten Years of Fukushima Disinformation,” Amardeo Sarma and Anna Veronika Wendland report on the many misperceptions about the events ten years ago when the fourth largest earthquake in recorded history struck the coast of Japan. The resulting tsunami wreaked the havoc we all watched with horror on television. That in turn triggered the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Most of the deaths and destruction were due to the earthquake and tsunami, but anti-nuclear activists have been successful in painting it all as a “nuclear disaster.” That has caused grave consequences: to mention just one, Germany announced days later it would shut down its entire nuclear power program. The authors examine a variety of myths about the three-part disaster and contrast them with the facts.

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Are we returning to normalcy? The worst of the pandemic (at least in the West) seems over. We are being vaccinated at high rates. The political chaos in the United States has ebbed. So now we can all get back to our normal concerns, right? Mainstream media can concentrate on other serious issues they’ve been neglecting. Like what? UFOs, of course. Yes, UFOs are back in the news, now relabeled UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). The New Yorker—our favorite quality magazine of the establishment—carried a fifteen-page (!) article in its May 10 issue titled “The U.F.O. Papers.” It was—how should we say it?—highly imperfect. Some of our scientist colleagues called it “awful.” The article was clearly stimulated by a 2017 New York Times article; it covered the same ground and interviewed the same sources. Both were short on skepticism and naive about the human dynamics of UFO beliefs. The New Yorker article in turn stimulated widespread media coverage in mid-May, including a CBS 60 Minutes report that was better than most (because it didn’t trot out the usual UFO-promoter people). The three Navy-pilot videos in these stories may still pose some legitimate questions, but the answers aren’t likely to involve ETs.

Science-minded skeptics hardly need be reminded of the notorious history of these enthusiasms. Here are a few points I wish the media would remember: One, stop conflating sightings of something in the sky with extraterrestrials. A UFO (or UAP) does not mean “aliens.” That’s a leap of illogic of galactic proportions. Two, there are always going to be some unresolved sightings. Three, there are always going to be people among the sprawling defense agencies who have to take them seriously … and others there and in politics who tend to be UFO “believers.” In the meantime, by sometime in June we are promised an official new government report on the topic. I’m sure that will totally resolve the issue once and for all. And if you believe that …