Over the last three years, the New York Times has published a series of embarrassingly credulous accounts of a U.S. government program investigating U.F.O. activity. The fact that such a program exists within the Defense Department is beyond dispute—it has received Congressionally-appropriated funds with a six-month reporting requirement—and the Times cannot be faulted for thinking this fact odd enough in itself to merit a write-up. But when the reporters start to describe what their sources have told them about the program's alleged findings, and to present these assertions as credible—that is where the eyebrows rise.
One of the more recent entries in the Times series, for instance—published over the summer—asserts that "[n]umerous associates of th[is] Pentagon program" believe not only that the military has encountered unexplained aerial phenomena that appear to perform feats that far exceed the current technological capacity of human societies: but even that the U.S. government has retrieved material from mysterious downed aircraft (at least some of it extraterrestrial in origin). Further, they claim that these materials contain technology and metallic alloys our scientists are not currently able to explain.
Even the most entrenched skeptic is sure at this point to feel a frisson of sci-fi excitement. Are we about to discover that all our childhood fantasies of secret government X-files and crashes at Roswell have been true this whole time? It is, to be sure, a thrilling idea—at first. It is also not one that obviously comes from a biased or untrustworthy source. As someone trained since birth to regard the distinct font and contrasting black-and-white text of the New York Times home page as veritable holy writ, I know that I found it much harder than I normally would to dismiss these accounts out of hand. We are dealing here with a paper known for reporting the facts and doing its homework. So what they say must be true, right?
But this trust, at last, is precisely what makes this reporting so dangerous and irresponsible. The paper's accumulated stock of credibility is a treasure that should be guarded more carefully, since there are those who would like very much to take it away. The Times, like other legacy media players, is currently engaged with a life-or-death struggle with forces that want to portray all fact-based reporting as so much scurrilous rumor-mongering, in order to bury evidence of their own malfeasance; who would like to substitute conspiracy theories for real information; who would like to submerge political truths in a welter of relativism and moral equivalence, so that their own crimes go unnoticed.
If the Times and similar papers are going to successfully beat back this tide of disinformation from the likes of Trump and his apologists, QAnon believers, Putin, and all the rest, they need to be able to show that they have a steady grasp on the facts—that they are following only the stories they can independently verify and not engaging in speculative overreach or putting too much uncritical faith in questionable sources. And of course, in various in-house apologia, the reporters involved in breaking this story have told us that they are in fact doing exactly what they should as journalists: following the facts wherever they lead.
And indeed, it's not like the Times is making things up. They are relying on sources who have worked in government. But is this enough in itself to establish credibility? Who are some of these sources, and what do we know about their involvement in these programs? Is their integrity so above reproach that we should believe them—or at least, report the claims as serious—when they tell us they possess parts of alien spacecraft with such extraordinary technology that current human science is totally unable to explain it?
When we try to picture who the Times' unnamed military and government sources might be, we all have in mind, perhaps, some Platonic ideal of the expert witness. We imagine that there ought to be someone capable of rendering a scientific verdict on the subject of U.F.O.s who simply assesses the evidence from a dispassionate standpoint, and that the Times has found such an individual. Are there strange lights in the sky? Unexplained blips on an aircraft carrier's radar? Surely they found someone who hasn't already made up their mind as to what these things might be, and who is perfectly ready to settle for the banal explanation. Someone who does not have a dog in this fight.
One would think... and yet, peel away the surface of any U.F.O. media story that appears to have credible independent sources, and you will reach the hard core of true believers at the center of it all. The New York Times reporting is, alas, no exception.
Leslie Kean, one of the reporters on the Times stories, is known chiefly for writing one previous book on UFOs (along with a number of articles on Huffington Post also investigating unexplained aerial phenomena), as well as another book on near-death experiences. She thus appears to have staked out a niche as a reporter covering New Age phenomena—which is fair enough, but which perhaps has predisposed her to take seriously a claim many reputable journalists would much rather leave to the tabloids.
In responding to readers' feedback in the Comments section, meanwhile, Ralph Blumenthal—the other Times reporter—while presenting himself and his fellow journalists as people with no priors who are simply following the data wherever they lead, evinces a surprising level of devotion to cult figures in ufology. In at least one thread, he describes éminence grise of ufology circles Jacques Vallée, along with D.W. Pasulka, the author of a recent religious studies book on the U.F.O. cultural phenomenon, American Cosmic, as "intrepid researchers and deep thinkers."
Here perhaps is our first hint that what was presented to the public as a fact-based investigation on the part of disinterested journalists is actually the product of a closed circuit of information, first promulgated and then confirmed by the same rotating cast of characters moving between military intelligence and private defense contractors—all of whom have spent decades proselytizing for a variety of interlocking New Age pseudosciences.
Who is Jacques Vallée, for instance? In addition to being a famous U.F.O. investigator, he is also a key figure in the history of the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International), a longstanding hub for technologists with an interest in the occult. Previously, SRI has been involved in researching various alleged paranormal phenomena—ESP, telekinesis, and the like—and won for itself in the process a disturbing amount of influence in the defense sector. According to Wikipedia, Vallée, for instance, is a member of the advisory board of defense contractor Bigelow Aerospace.
And here is where the plot thickens. Bigelow Aerospace is precisely the same contractor that was given millions in taxpayer funds to investigate U.F.O. phenomena, through the program described by the Times. As Wired has reported, the company was also founded by someone with a decades-long passion for U.F.O.s. Many of its team members who worked on the Pentagon project are now affiliated with the "To the Stars... Academy"—a for-profit venture founded by Tom DeLonge, a former Blink-182 frontman, that sells media and entertainment products related to UFOs, while simultaneously marketing itself as a serious investigatory project in the public interest.
Are the anonymous "[n]umerous associates of the Pentagon program" in the Times piece chiefly employees of this one private contractor known for its longstanding obsession with U.F.O.s and space aliens? Are they mostly individuals affiliated with "To the Stars"—an enterprise specifically designed to profit off the public's obsession with alien-related government conspiracies? Are they therefore slightly less disinterested than the Times reporting makes them sound? The few named sources we do have in the Times stories do not provide much reassurance on this score.
Let us take the case of Luis Elizondo, the man who claims to have headed the Pentagon U.F.O. program the Times reports are talking about, and who brought the videos to the Times that first set these stories in motion. Evidently, he portrayed himself to Times reporters as a man operating under conditions of secrecy and even personal risk to disclose evidence of aerial phenomena that the government would have preferred to keep under wraps. As other critics of the Times coverage have pointed out, however, at the time he contacted journalists at the legendary newspaper, he was already on the payroll of Tom DeLonge's "To the Stars" venture.
Meanwhile, as the Intercept has reported, no one has so far produced any evidence that Elizondo ever actually worked for the Pentagon U.F.O. program in question, much less ran the whole operation.
The picture that begins to emerge is of a small overlapping cohort of individuals operating on the fringes of the defense sector with a pronounced interest in the occult, a tendency to misrepresent themselves, and a direct financial stake in promoting belief in extraterrestrial and U.F.O. phenomena among the general public. Keeping this picture in mind makes the rest of the Times's eerie reporting much less remarkable and far easier to believe.
In the July 2020 Times story linked at the outset, for example, the reporters feature a single "unclassified slide" that they claim is part of a series that has been shown in briefings to members of Congress, the intelligence community, and private contractors. While it includes no physical or visual evidence of any extraterrestrial phenomena, it nonetheless makes some pretty striking claims: it refers, for instance, to the "off-world" origin of some of the alleged aviation technology recovered from crash sites: technology so advanced, it is insinuated, that it exceeds anything earthly societies have yet been able to devise, and could not possibly have come from foreign governments.
I do not for an instant doubt the veracity of the Times's bare statement of the facts here. I am sure that such slides exist and have been shown in briefings, just as the reporters describe—and that this proves the Pentagon program "took this claim seriously enough to" show these outlandish assertions to some powerful and influential people. But here is where we should begin to remember what we have known for a long time: the mere fact that some claims came from people adjacent to the military does not render them credible. Why? Because people in and around the military are just as capable of being batty as the rest of us.
As Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats) and others have reported extensively, military intelligence has for decades seriously explored such topics as telepathy, mind control, and other alleged psychic phenomena—influenced in doing so by precisely the same Silicon Valley New Age types (SRI for example) who are now pushing U.F.O. conspiracy theories at the highest levels. That doesn't mean any of these things are real or true—just that members of Congress, the defense industry, and military hierarchy may be more easily gulled than we would like to believe. It means that these individuals are not perfectly immune to the lure of fantasy, paranoia, and sci-fi excitement—no more than the rest of us are.
Certainly papers as serious as the Times ought to take claims about these paranormal phenomena with a grain of salt. The mere fact the assertions are coming from people who previously received taxpayer funds to study U.F.O.s does not ipso facto make them credible.
I have held up Elizondo for scrutiny in part because the Times reporting seems to have relied so heavily on his accounts, but he is really just one of a type that seems to reappear in every modern-day U.F.O. story: the "reluctant government source," the daring "whistleblower," who actually—on closer examination—turns out to be a miniature celebrity within the U.F.O. subculture... the "disinterested" military intelligence or scientific investigator who turns out to have a personal stake in the promotion of extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.
This brings us to D.W. Pasulka, the other name that proves something of a give-away in the Times reporter's comment. While her book, American Cosmic, is presented as a scholarly monograph examining U.F.O. culture in the United States as a quasi-religious phenomena, the author is willing to make startling would-be factual assertions alongside her ethnography: she speaks of government U.F.O. conspiracies, mysterious alien technologies impossible to engineer on Earth, and extraterrestrial crash sites hidden from public view. Moreover, Pasulka not only fails to substantiate any of these extreme claims, she also seems to feel no need to do so.
Of course, Pasulka does offer an attribution for these views—just as our Times journalists do—to anonymous military figures and scientists. She states time and again that such individuals are reluctant to speak on the record about their U.F.O. investigations, however, not because they have no real evidence to share, but because they fear reprisal if they were to reveal it: implying both that they dread public mockery and that they are bound by protocols of secrecy related to confidential government programs. While often referring to such people as a large group—indeed, a whole research community—she only discusses two of her alleged sources in much detail.
While Pasulka never names these two individuals—keeping up the pretense that they are somehow not at liberty to discuss their super-secret work on U.F.O.s—both men proved to be extremely easy for online sleuths to identify based on the information she provides in her book. And lo and behold—far from being anonymous "g-men" who have to keep their U.F.O. claims off the record—they are both publicly and openly involved in the U.F.O. subculture.
One of them, Garry Nolan, is a Stanford biologist who has appeared as an expert witness in a U.F.O. documentary. More tellingly still, he has served on the advisory board of (you guessed it!) Tom DeLonge's "To the Stars.... Academy." Though Nolan appears to have resigned from the advisory board in 2018, according to SEC filings, he is plainly not someone who has striven to keep his interest in the U.F.O. subject matter under wraps!
The other source is equally up-front about his identity as a U.F.O. researcher. Not only is he known to the U.F.O. community, he has even published an autobiography detailing many of the stories he later told Pasulka, which diligent Googlers can find and purchase if they are so inclined.
And what stories are these, pray tell? Many of them involve U.F.Os, of course. But those that do not are scarcely more credible. While Pasulka appears to accept everything he says at face value, the reader cannot help but feel a troublesome nettle of doubt, when we read his long-winded accounts. It is not merely that this man has a fund of astonishing personal stories, which might after all be true. It is that he seemingly has a story for every occasion. No matter the situation or the topic Pasulka introduces, it turns out he knows all about it—has lived it himself, in the most dramatic and spectacular fashion.
The Challenger disaster? It turns out he was close friends with its most famous casualty, and that her death led him into an emotional crisis that forced him to leave NASA in the late 1980s. A visit to the TSA line at the airport? This individual is of course allowed to pass ahead of everyone else because of his super-secret government clearance. UFO technology? Turns out this man has been receiving psychic signals from above that helped him play a pivotal role in the development of all the important information technology of the last few decades. A trip to the Vatican with Pasulka? This individual promptly breaks into tears, has a religious experience, and converts on the spot.
In every possible instance, in short, he hits just the right histrionic cue that Pasulka needs, in order to write him up as the star of the book.
What we are dealing with here is not a credible informant; this man plainly has some kind of compulsive disorder: a pathological need to lie and to appear interesting—a pronounced tendency toward grandiosity, if he is not in fact delusional outright. Is this a precipitous judgement? Am I perhaps being over-hasty and unfair to him? As Doctor Sloper defends himself from a similar charge in Henry James' Washington Square: "in order to be able to form that judgement in a single evening, I have had to spend a lifetime in study. [... H]is type is written on his whole person."
The type in question here is the type that, as I have mentioned, seems to crop up in all the U.F.O. stories: the former government agent or military contractor with Svengali-like powers of persuasion who is actually operating under false pretenses—who, like all cons, seeks his mark in people who have much to gain from believing him; people who are primed already to believe; people who—like Agent Mulder—"want to believe"—and who will therefore all-too-happily certify evidence that matches their priors—even if that evidence turns out to be shaky, or to have a questionable provenance.
As the Harvard Classicist Christopher Jones wrote in an article on the lamentable "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" controversy, in which another Harvard professor was tricked into validating a forged papyrus that purported to be an ancient undiscovered Gospel: "For forgeries to succeed there must be an atmosphere receptive to them: a forger will usually not manage to impose on others unless his product, by accident or design, comes into a setting ready to give it a favourable reception."
It appears that this is what our band of "To the Stars"-affiliated U.F.O. believers found when they set their sights on Blumenthal and Kean in the Times, and Pasulka at the University of North Carolina. All three appear to have already been people with an interest in "the phenomenon." They were ready to believe; they just needed someone they could accurately refer to as a "government source" who was willing to vouch for their priors.
Of course, none of this is to examine the alleged U.F.O. videos themselves, which I am not equipped to do with any degree of expertise. Before one looks at the documentary evidence, however, one needs to ask where it came from, whether it might have been doctored, and what motives might have activated the people who first brought it to one's attention.
I fear that the provenance of these videos points all too clearly to the suggestion that at least a few journalists and scholars have become the unwitting marks of a collection of charlatans and grifters (some of whom may indeed have come to believe their own hype). And they had no excuse for being so easily taken in; for, sadly, the con-man is a type that has become all too familiar to us in Trump's America.
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