On April 30, the normally serious New Yorker dropped online a very misleading article titled “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.” (UFO author Leslie Kean said that work on this story “has been underway for months,” which is quite surprising!) The article appeared in the May 10 printed edition of the New Yorker under the title “The U.F.O. Papers.”
This article, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, boldly begins, “On May 9, 2001, Steven M. Greer took to the lectern at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., in pursuit of the truth about unidentified flying objects.” In pursuit of the truth, no less! Because Lewis-Kraus had only a few months to research this article, he apparently had no opportunity to learn that serious UFOlogists, both skeptic and otherwise, consider Greer a yarn-spinning money grubber whose credibility is zilch. Greer once even claimed to have an “alien familiar” named Bijoux.
After recounting the exploits of the mighty Dr. Greer, still in pursuit of the truth, we learn, “Among the other speakers was Clifford Stone, a retired Army sergeant, who purported to have visited crash sites and seen aliens, both dead and alive. Stone said that he had catalogued fifty-seven species, many of them humanoid.” Again, in his apparent rush to prepare the article, Lewis-Kraus didn’t have time to discover that the wild tales of Clifford Stone are soundly rejected by most serious UFO researchers.
The principal hagiography in this piece is that of Leslie Kean. Lewis-Kraus portrays Kean as “stand[ing] apart from the ufological mainstream,” which is pure bollocks. Kean is down in the UFOlogical mud, wrestling with the rest of us. She has a best-selling book from 2010, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, whose credibility—like that of most UFO books—is pretty bad. He tells us that Kean’s apartment is “a tranquil space decorated with a Burmese Buddha and bowls of pearlescent seashells.”
Lewis-Kraus mentions only in passing that Kean’s “latest project examines the controversial scholarship on the possibility of consciousness after death.” Actually, it’s much worse than that: Kean has gone full woo-woo on the subject of ghosts and spirit manifestations. She insists that she has “absolutely no doubt, not one iota,” that a spirit manifested and touched her while she was attending a seance:
In May, 2019, I experienced a full form materialization in a seance with Stewart [Alexander]. His communicator Dr. Barnett, who normally speaks in independent voice, walked out of the cabinet, stood in front of me and touched my hair. He then placed both his large hands on top of my head, bouncing them up and down for about a minute and a half. (That’s a long time). These were solid “living” hands. He spoke in his recognizable voice. “I just wanted to let you know that I am a solid human being,” he said. He then returned to the cabinet and disappeared.
We read how Kean’s intense interest in UFOs began in 1999 when she was sent a copy of a ninety-page French report referred to as COMETA. Because the report was prepared by “a dozen retired French generals, scientists, and space experts,” Kean “was certain … that anyone given access to the French report’s data and conclusions would understand why she had dropped everything else.” (They didn’t.) Others, more experienced in the crazy world of UFOlogy, reached other conclusions. John Alexander, who was involved in Pentagon ESP experiments and is surely no skeptic, described the COMETA report as “an embarrassment … unsubstantiated data from questionable sources” in his book UFOs Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (218–20). No such doubts occurred to Kean, who seems quite certain that the government is hiding something really big from us concerning UFOs, although she professes (a bit disingenuously) to be agnostic on the question of whether they are extraterrestrial.
In this very long article, Lewis-Kraus tries to give us a summary of UFOlogy’s Greatest Hits, its Golden Oldies, such as the airship sightings of 1896–1897; Kenneth Arnold; the Washington, D.C., incidents of 1952; the Robertson Panel; J. Allen Hynek; the Condon Report; and so on. I guess the purpose of all this is to show that UFO sightings and UFO controversies have been around for a long time.
Having given us a crash course in UFO history, author Lewis-Kraus returns to his hagiography of Kean:
Once it was clear that U.F.O.s were going to be her life’s work, Kean resolved to ally herself with the research tradition that Hynek had pioneered. Ufologists liked to dwell on certain historic encounters, like Roswell, where any solid evidence that might once have existed had become hopelessly entangled with mythology. Kean chose to focus on “the really good cases” that had been reported since the close of Blue Book, including those that involved professional observers, such as pilots, and ideally multiple witnesses; those that had been substantiated with photos or radar tracks; and especially those in which experts had eliminated other interpretations.
The first such “really good” case mentioned is the famous Rendlesham case in Suffolk, United Kingdom, in December 1980 (which the late James Moseley always referred to as “Rendle-sham”).
The details of the incident as it is described in Kean’s book are sensational, to say the least. Another witness, Sergeant James Penniston, said that he got close enough to a silent triangular craft to feel its electric charge and to note the hieroglyphic-like designs etched into its surface.
The claims associated with Rendle-sham may well be “sensational,” but the facts are decidedly less so. I have already described some of the many absurdities claimed about this case. As for Penniston, he claims that he touched the landed UFO and received a message from it in the form of a “binary code,” which he subsequently wrote down. However, he did not tell anyone about it for thirty years. (Highly publicized UFO cases, like fine wines, often improve with age.) Penniston now says that the binary data from the Rendle-sham UFO was sent by time travelers. Remember: this is a “really good case,” unlike all those other flakey ones.
Later on, Lewis-Kraus tells us,
One dogged British researcher has convincingly shown that the Rendlesham case, or Britain’s Roswell, probably consisted of a concatenation of a meteor, a lighthouse perceived through woods and fog, and the uncanny sounds made by a muntjac deer. Eyewitness reports are subject to considerable embroidery over time, and strings of improbable coincidences can easily be rendered into an occult pattern by a human mind prone to misapprehension and eager for meaning. The researcher had exhaustively demystified the case, and I was perturbed to learn that Kean seemed unfazed by his verdict. When I asked her about it, she did little more than shrug, as though to suggest that such fluky accounts violated Occam’s razor.
He doesn’t want to tell us the British researcher’s name; it is Ian Ridpath. Nor does he give us the URL that “exhaustively demystified the case”; it is at http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham.html. Mustn’t give skepticism too much of a boost. Or upset Kean! So much for “journalistic objectivity”! Obviously wavering in The Faith, at least a little, he asked Kean about it:
Even if Rendlesham was “complex,” she said, it was still “one of the top ten U.F.O. encounters of all time.” And, besides, there were always other cases. Hynek, in “The UFO Experience,” had contended that U.F.O. sightings represented a phenomenon that had to be taken in aggregate—hundreds upon hundreds of incredible stories told by credible people.
So even if the Rendle-sham case has a logical explanation, it is nonetheless a “top ten” UFO case, a Golden Oldie, so that counts for something, I guess. And here she repeats Hynek’s “bundle of sticks” analogy, which I heard him make many times: any one stick might be broken, but taken together they are too strong to break. To which the obvious reply is: If each case is a zero, the sum of any number of zeroes is zero.
For another “really good” case,
Kean selected an incident that occurred in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a rural hamlet southeast of Pittsburgh, on December 9, 1965, in which an object the size of a Volkswagen Beetle allegedly hurtled from the sky. According to multiple witnesses, the acorn-shaped bulk had been removed from the woods on a flatbed truck as service members guarded the area with guns.
Allegedly. The problem is, we know exactly what people saw in the sky near Kecksburg—and indeed across the entire region. It was the Great Lakes Fireball of December 9, 1965, well documented in Sky and Telescope magazine (February 1966) and other astronomical publications. This has been pointed out repeatedly by skeptics for decades, but somehow the word doesn’t seem to have reached Kean. She lives in a bubble of overwhelmingly pro-UFO information and apparently thinks that there is nothing of value outside it. As for the claims about soldiers in the woods recovering a crashed UFO, as I said about Rendle-sham, highly-publicized UFO cases, like fine wines, often improve with age.
Lewis-Kraus Continues,
Kean’s book, which was praised by the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku as “the gold standard for U.F.O. research,” and to which John Podesta had contributed a foreword, enhanced and expanded her influence. In June of 2011, Podesta invited Kean to make a confidential presentation at a think tank he founded, the Center for American Progress. … In August, 2014, Kean visited the West Wing to meet again with Podesta, who was by then an adviser to President Obama. She had scaled down her request, proposing that a single individual in the Office of Science and Technology Policy be assigned to handle the issue. Nothing came of it.
What we are not told is that Michio Kaku is a UFO believer who has warned about possible alien invasions and such. His book Physics of the Impossible, deals with the supposed physics of “phasers, force fields, teleportation, and time travel.” The great majority of Kaku’s colleagues in physics would dismiss this as nonsense.
Now we come to … The Fly! Lewis-Kraus somewhat apologetically writes that Kean
had a cordial relationship with the Chilean government’s Comité de Estudios de Fenómenos Aéreos Anómalos (cefaa). She had begun breaking stories from its case files with an atypical recklessness. Kean’s work from this period, mostly published on the Huffington Post, shows signs of agitation and evangelism. In March of 2012, she wrote an article called “UFO Caught on Tape Over Santiago Air Base,” which referred to a video provided by cefaa. Kean described the video as showing “a dome-shaped, flat-bottomed object with no visible means of propulsion … flying at velocities too high to be man-made.” She asked, “Is this the case UFO skeptics have been dreading?”
However, the CEFAA video was widely panned—and not just by skeptics—as simply showing a fly buzzing around. (Note that the Huffington Post article, coauthored by Ralph Blumenthal, Kean’s coauthor of her New York Times articles about AATIP and Pentagon UFOs, was updated in 2017—undoubtedly to make it less embarrassing. I was not able to find the original article in the internet archive or anywhere else.) Lewis-Kraus does mention my debunking of the Chilean fly UFO video, again without giving anyone the URL to enable them to check it themselves.
When Kean wrote about the CEFAA video, debunkers leaped at the chance to point out that the object in the case they had been dreading was in all probability a housefly or a beetle buzzing around the camera lens. Robert Sheaffer, the proprietor of a blog called Bad UFOs, wrote in his column in the Skeptical Inquirer, “Indeed, the very fact that a video of a fly doing loops is being cited by some of the world’s top UFOlogists as among the best UFO images of all time reveals how utterly lightweight even the best UFO photos and videos are.” Kean consulted with four entomologists, who mostly declined to issue a categorical judgment on the matter, and urged patience with CEFAA’s ongoing investigation.
Kean still has not admitted that she was fooled by a fly buzzing around. She posted some completely irrelevant pictures of beetles, then tried to pass the buck to certain “entomologists,” as if even they could identify the exact species of an insect buzzing around and flying rapid loops in front of the camera, and nothing less renders it “unknown.”
One of Leslie Kean’s last “really good” cases is the UFO reported over gate C-17 at Chicago’s O’Hare field on November 7, 2006. Several employees of United Airlines reported seeing a “strange object hovering just under a cloud bank … the metallic-looking disc was about the size of a quarter or half dollar held at arm’s length.” Unfortunately, no photographs exist of this supposed “metallic-looking disc” hovering over one of the world’s busiest airports in daytime, and nothing showed up on radar. Reportedly, “the suspended disc suddenly shot up at an incredible speed and was gone in less than a second, leaving a crisp, cookie-cutter-like hole in the dense clouds. The opening was approximately the same size as the object, and those directly underneath it could see blue sky visible on the other side.” From the article:
The object hovered for several minutes before accelerating at a severe incline and leaving “an almost perfect circle in the cloud layer where the craft had been,” as one anonymous witness subsequently put it. … The F.A.A. claimed that it must have been a “hole-punch cloud”—a cirrocumulus or altocumulus cloud crisply perforated with a circular gap, which occasionally appears in below-freezing temperatures. According to meteorologists whom Kean interviewed, it was much too warm that day for hole-punch clouds to occur.
Kean’s source for this information is a report by NARCAP, a pro-UFO investigative team, showing that temperatures were too high for a hole-punch cloud to form at the reported 1,900-foot elevation of the ceiling, which is probably correct. (Kean has no difficulty referencing investigations by other researchers, so long as their conclusion agrees with hers.) But the low ceiling could easily have been partially obscuring a much higher cloud layer, where a hole-punch cloud could exist because of much lower temperatures. Hole-punch clouds occur in cirrocumulous or altocumulous clouds, approximately 8,000 to 39,000 ft. elevation—not in low clouds at 1,900 feet! Thus, there is no reason to reject the FAA’s explanation.
The strangest part of the entire article is what it says about UFO skeptics.
“An informed skeptic is a very different thing from a debunker on a mission,” she wrote to me. “There are many out there who are on a mission to debunk UFOs at all costs. They’re not rational and they’re not informed.” Kean thought that they were blinded by zealotry.
How dare rational people argue against her extraordinary claims? Here Kean’s mean streak is on full display, which unfortunately is quite common among UFO zealots. They simply cannot believe that there could possibly be any rational objection to their claims. We read,
Many U.F.O. debunkers are overtly hostile, but Mick West has a mild, disarming manner, one that only occasionally recalls the performative deference with which an orderly might cajole a patient back into his straitjacket.
Because I have been an active UFO skeptic for over fifty years, a longtime associate of the late King of the Debunkers, Philip J. Klass, and indeed the owner of the website debunker.com, I suppose that the “overtly hostile” people author Gideon Lewis-Kraus is talking about includes me. I don’t think of myself as “overtly hostile,” and I’m wondering what, exactly, he means by that. For years I’ve been attending major UFO conferences and have met most of the well-known UFOlogists who attend such things. In fact, I get along quite well with many of them. I haven’t gotten into any fistfights and hardly any big arguments. And I wouldn’t describe any of the UFO skeptics I know as “overtly hostile,” but I suppose that’s just my opinion. I am happy to report that most attendees of UFO conferences are able to handle skeptical commentary without melting down—very few of them are as rigid in their UFO evangelism as Leslie Kean. I would say that Kean is clearly one of those UFOologists who is “overtly hostile” to anyone disagreeing with her beliefs, a trait she apparently picked up from her mentor, the late UFO abductionist Budd Hopkins. Hopkins’s ex-wife, Carol Rainey, wrote that “In our house, the words ‘debunkers’ and ‘skeptics’ were used very much in the way that devout Christians use the words ‘unbelievers’ and ‘the unsaved.’”
I have met Mick West, and I agree that he is a soft-spoken individual. But notice the subtle put-down, comparing his mannerisms to a hospital orderly trying to calm down a crazy person. Lewis-Kraus continues,
Everything [West] told me was perfectly persuasive, but even an hour on the phone with him left me feeling vaguely demoralized. Morgellons sufferers and chemtrail hysterics, he supposed, would be grateful to be relieved of their baseless fears, just as he had been disburdened of the psychic hazard posed by farmhouse aliens—and he didn’t see why U.F.O. advocates should be any different. He seemed unable to envisage that someone might find solace in the decentering prospect that we are not alone in a universe we ultimately know very little about.
So Lewis-Kraus feels “demoralized” talking to West, because people find “solace” in entertaining unsupported beliefs? Here we have an outright admission by the author that he is seeking not facts about UFO claims but comforting beliefs. And he commits the logical fallacy of concluding that if there is no valid evidence of ET visitation to earth, we are therefore alone in the universe. What an absurd fallacy! Lewis-Kraus continues,
During one of my phone calls with Kean—greatly pleasurable distractions that tended to absorb entire afternoons—I mentioned to her that I had been in touch with Mick West. It was the only time I had known her to grow peevish. “If Mick were really interested in this stuff, he wouldn’t debunk every single video,” she said, almost pityingly. “He would admit that at least some of them are genuinely weird.”
Yes indeed. How pleasant and engrossing it is to talk to the exalted Ms. Kean! Lewis-Kraus shows no inclination to challenge anything she says or to consult other sources that contradict her. If he had, he would have encountered Kean’s “peevishness” many more times. Here we have a clear admission that the author has tossed journalistic objectivity out the window … and also note that Kean seems to be advocating a sort of “social promotion” for at least a few UFO claims. Mick should give at least a few UFO videos a passing grade, even if they don’t deserve it. Just because!
In any case, the important thing to keep in mind when the subject of “Pentagon UFOs” comes up (as it now does so frequently): The Pentagon’s AATIP program came into existence not because “the Pentagon” or “the Navy” was concerned about UFOs (or “UAPs”, as they prefer). It happened because of Robert Bigelow and Senator Harry Reid (D-NV, who was then the Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate). Reid arranged a sweetheart $22 million government contract for his major campaign contributor Robert Bigelow. Leslie Kean found out about it and coauthored several articles about Pentagon UFOs in the New York Times. The rest, as they say, is history.
Drunk history, actually.