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British cinephile Robbie Graham, who took a look at Hollywood-government collusion in shaping perceptions of The Great Taboo several years ago in a book called Silver Screen Saucers, tried another angle in 2017. He asked an eclectic cast of UFO culture vultures to steer the controversy away from the usual futile debate over origins. The goal was to consider the impact of the phenomenon on society, the mind, religion, politics, etc., and the result was an anthology of essays, UFOS: Reframing the Debate.

By Billy Cox De Void 2-26-18

The foundation for this discussion appeared not on a UFO site, but in the journal Political Theory, back in 2008. That’s when Alexander Wendt at Ohio State and Raymond Duvall at the University of Minnesota collaborated on a breakthrough academic piece called “Sovereignty and the UFO.” Wendt and Duvall argued a superpower is incapable of handling a serious debate because it might well be forced to confront the absurd notion that something other than homo sapiens occupies the top slot in the food chain, so to speak.

“Taking UFOs seriously would certainly embody the spirit of self-criticism that infuses liberal governmentality and academia in particular, and it would, thereby, foster critical theory,” they wrote. “And indeed, if academics’ first responsibility is to tell the truth, then the truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs, human beings still have no idea what they are, and are not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of rule that requires and sustains it.”

In Graham’s compendium, critic M.J. Banias dives even deeper with a challenging assertion titled “UFOs and Modern Capitalism: Dissent, Disenfranchisement, and The Fringe.” Without a moneyed or proprietary constituency, the UFO phenomenon, says Banias, poses an unprecedented dilemma for an array of institutions — military, corporate, scientific, you name it — because its existence is truly egalitarian. He says merely staging a formal conversation about The Great Taboo is an implicit form of dissent, because the issue is democratized by its lack of “hierarchy, domination, or subordination.”

“It is a discourse with no locus of control, no elites, and no ivory tower that establishes ideological truth. There is no established power in the discourse, therefore power moves openly between constant shifts in ideas.” Because the “consumable aspects created by UFO discourse are economically inconsequential,” Banias adds, “modern capital is unable fully to negotiate that threat into something it can fundamentally control as it has before.”

Banias’ bottom line: “Mainstream capitalist culture has no choice but to resist UFO discourse,” although “Ufology must continue to push towards democratization, towards a shared body of knowledge and ideas that cut against the grain of mainstream official culture.”

And that’s why, at least superficially, the emergence of the To The Stars Academy last October, and its stated goal of harnessing and exploiting technologies associated with UFOs, plus transparent public access to boot, might test Banias’ argument. It’s hard to know for sure – TTSA’s business model has its share of critics, and the company isn’t exactly loosey goosey with making its sources available. Moreover, the kind of hyper-technology being discussed comes with inherent and very sobering national security overtones. Is it reasonable to think that a capitalist venture, TTSA or anyone else, would ignore its own for-profit self-interests and not hoard any acquired self-financed knowledge and expertise?

Maybe the capitalist model on its current path is unsustainable. The widening and potentially cataclysmic gulf between the super-rich and everyone else – not just in the U.S., but globally – shows little evidence of deceleration. The institutions that support it here are beginning to look like pigs or castrati. Congress, with its approval ratings in the teens, subsidizes the plunder of the Treasury with even more lavish rewards for its corporate sponsors. As “legacy” media platforms dissolve by the week and #fakenews rushes in, info-junkies cluster at digital information niches dispensing coveted dollops of dopamine-strength anger and fear. The Defense Department spends $586 billion a year, but it can’t protect taxpayer hearts and minds from an epidemic of gasoline-slinging Russian bots wreaking havoc across a sizzling spectrum of American insecurities.

And oh, by the way, that UFO stuff going on upstairs? No money can stop it from happening. At least they’re not Klingons (yet).

As reason and independent inquiry asphyxiate beneath unending gushers of special-interest cash, and fringe thought infects the mainstream, maybe a Reframing the Debate
essay from a contributor whose pseudonym is Red Pill Junkie is more relevant now than it was even a year ago. RPJ’s take on where UFOs fit into this transitional period – “Anarchy in the UFO” – doesn’t sound all that that far-fetched. And by anarchy, he apparently subscribes to the “V For Vendetta” definition, in which anarchy means without leaders, not without order.

“… As we observe the events unfolding in the second decade of the 21st Century, the eventual disappearance of the Nation/State, as we currently know it,” writes RPJ, “seems a more likely scenario than for those entities to recognize an anomaly over which they have no control whatsoever; an anomaly that refuses to conform to our ‘sensible’ expectations and seems hell bent on throwing into question everything we take for granted – even the nature of reality itself.”

Not much else from RPJ about what, exactly, might replace that disappearing nation-state, only the certitude of a receptive market for an end to things as they are: “That which is a nuisance to the governing authority becomes appealing to those with a distaste for orders and regulation,” RPJ writes, “and the unruliness of UFOs seems to stir something in the core of the most marginalized layers of society.”

Shudder … Well, it’s been two months now since Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Hill’s Jordan Fabian, who asked about the December NY Times piece on the Pentagon’s $22M UFO research program, she’d “check into that and be happy to circle back.” Sanders hasn’t circled back and, judging from all that smug White House press corps giggling around him, Fabian has decided to leave well enough alone.

So it’s up to De Void again, and here goes:

Mr. President — If you truly want to do something no POTUS has ever had the guts to do before, start tweeting about UFOs, now, before it’s too late. It’ll be a worthy diversion, you’ll go down in history and it’ll be totally amazing, that I can tell you. That I can tell you.
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Remember that riveting opening sequence in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” when air traffic controllers stared at their boards as airline pilots barely avoided colliding with something nobody wanted to talk about afterwards? A drama that unfolded over America’s northwest corridor in the early evening of Oct. 24, 2017, wasn’t quite that Hollywood. But whatever it was, the thing was flying. It had no transponder but got caught on radar. Then it erased itself and vanished from ATC screens. Immediately after that, at least three airline pilots reported seeing it. Jet fighters scrambled; by time they

By Billy Cox De Void 2-16-18

got airborne, whatever it was vanished for good, and the whole sequence probably left a few people who had to deal with it wondering if it was worth the effort.

We know all this thanks to some masterful work from Tyler Rogoway, a military aviation reporter at a non-UFO website called The War Zone. Armed with voluminous details harvested from a Freedom of Information Act request, Rogoway broke the story last November. And the updated results are so cool, De Void anticipates a Congressional suspension of FOIA laws any day now.

On Thursday, Rogoway posted audiotaped real-time chatter from eyewitnesses and official sources. It begins with the detection of an unknown flying object by Oakland Center air traffic control. It popped onto its screens at 37,000 feet, and for more than an hour, the speeding bogey drew swivels from both the Federal Aviation Administration and North American Aerospace Defense Command. It streaked for several hundred miles over northern California and Oregon, northbound. It ended when F-15s from the 142nd Fighter Wing out of Portland were dispatched on a fool’s errand to identify what at least one civilian pilot described as a big white unmarked aircraft, with few additional details.

Three months later, Rogoway has augmented his early reporting with a fascinating narrative presented in four separate videos, some syncing radar maps with recorded participant dialogue. The confusion among FAA operators is unambiguous: “You know that target south of the boundary there, that 0027 code moving very fast at 37,000?” “Yeah, look at that thing.” “Yeah, that’s, uh, crazy.” “Hmm, um, and you don’t have anything on him, huh?” “I got nothing.” “Well, we’ll look.”

Oblivious to requests for identification, the UFO merges into existing air traffic lanes and no longer expresses itself in radar pingbacks. But northbound airline pilots report seeing a distant white somethingorother that paces and maybe passes them, even as it resembles thin air to radar beacons. Although this potentially dangerous behavior fails to trip the planes’ Traffic Collision Avoidance Systems, it does alert a picket fence of other acronyms – DEN (the Domestic Events Network) and WADS (the Western Air Defense Sector, also nicknamed Bigfoot). Somewhere along the way, a command goes out to put F-15s in the sky to get some military eyes on the intruder. When an Alaska 439 pilot requests new info on the bogey, an ATC operator says it may have gone into “stealth mode or something.”

The F-15s hunted for the UFO “with the most capable air-to-air radar set in the world (AN/APG-63VC) and Sniper advanced targeting pods for long-range visual identification,” Rogoway states in his November report. “Their pilots are some of the best in the world and are highly trained in the homeland air defense mission. The fact that they ‘didn’t find anything’ is surprising to say the least. Maybe this was due to the nature of the aircraft being searched for, or the possibility that they launched long after it was first sighted, or that we simply aren’t being told the whole story.”

Rogoway’s FOIAs also produced an after-action audio gem. In this segment, an unnamed Seattle Center ATC Manager In Charge of Operations reaches out to airline pilots and FAA officials to figure out what just happened. All spoken names, phone numbers and emails are literally beeped out; but then, curious stretches of silence punctuate some of those interviews.

We also get a peek into procedural tensions during an exchange between Seattle and the FAA Air Traffic Security Coordinator. Among other things, FAA wants to know who asked for jet-fighter support. Seattle says Oakland sounded the first alert and, as the UFO entered another coverage zone, Oakland told Seattle to call WADS. Seattle said he notified WADS, but he didn’t ask for air support. FAA reminds Seattle that a “request for military assistance has to come through FAA headquarters.” Again, Seattle tells FAA he never made such a request.

FAA: “I explicitly said over the line that headquarters was not in conference with requesting military assistance at that time because I was on the DEN … I had no radar, had no target, I had nothing –” Seattle: “Yeah, we had nothing, either.” FAA: “—from anybody. So I would not send the fighters to go up and, y’know, toodle around and –” Seattle: “Right, flying around. ‘Cause we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

Afterwards, sounding slightly chastened, Seattle calls Oakland to compare notes. Oakland has Seattle’s back: “But there was definitely something out there.” Seattle: “There was definitely something there, there’s no question, because United 612, it was … off his 3 o’clock, and about 5 to 10 miles for about a hundred miles … so what we’re trying is to reach those pilots of all those aircraft to see if they can write us a little a report about what they saw …”

Oakland: “Our radar did pick up an intruder target coming in at a high speed right toward the southwest …” Seattle: “Southbound? Not northbound?” Oakland: “Southbound. And then it did an abrupt maneuver and just took off northbound. And we’re like, what? He was southbound, now he’s northbound. Weird …”

A new weapon system going out for a test spin? Hey, what if it was North Korean? They do sneaky secret stuff, right? Unfortunately, the FOIA material doesn’t get us anywhere close to an answer. The last audio clip finds Seattle talking with an official with the FAA’s Safety and Quality Assurance Group. She calls the incident “potentially significant,” says it’s “a weird enough thing that there is not a set procedure,” and “It’s not often we hear about an unknown guy up at that altitude.”

Maybe, as Skeptic James McGaha would reassure us, the mystery would solved by now if only the pilots and radar monitors had been astronomers. Anyhow, great reporting. Well done. Stay on it.
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Nearly two months after The New York Times dropped the bomb about the Pentagon’s UFO research program, the Skeptics have had a chance to catch their breath and regroup. To be sure, the Times piece caught everybody off guard, and clearly there’s a ton of reporting left to do. Unfortunately, the media clamor that followed the Times’ coup has tapered off, and the only thing we’ve learned about the Defense Department’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program since then comes courtesy of KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp.

By Billy Cox De Void 2-8-18

The Times’ primary source, the recently retired Army intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, stated in December the AATIP was operational from 2007-2012, but he added it was still being maintained in an unofficial capacity with an assist from the Navy and the CIA. Last week, in a little nugget that would appear to bear him out, Elizondo told Knapp the so-called “gimbal video” — the one that showed gun-cam footage of a Navy F-18 pursuing a UFO – was recorded in the skies above Florida in 2015. The original, carefully worded NYT story, which was accompanied by that video, mentioned an event off San Diego in 2004. Many readers, including yours truly, inferred the gimbal footage referenced that 14-year-old incident.

Is this a true unknown or the infrared profile of conventional airplane exhaust? Skeptics are making a case for the latter and challenging the credibility of the Navy pilots who chased this thing/CREDIT: U.S. Department of Defense

Without additional information from the To The Stars Academy, the investigative team that’s ostensibly calling the shots here, detractors are beginning to command the conversation. And you can always detect a Skeptical agenda by how quickly its advocates employ buzzwords that many serious researchers tend to avoid. Goddard informs us that “Rotating infrared signatures are not necessarily evidence of extraterrestrial technology,” and few would argue that. The E word is implicitly pejorative, since there’s no observational way to prove the origin of a UFO without “Gliese 581c” or “Trappist-1″ stamped on the fuselage.

Last week, on the SETI Institute’s “Skeptic Check” podcast, astronomer Seth Shostak and sidekick Molly Bentley empaneled the usual suspects to weigh in on the mystery. Shostak dusted off the familiar old trope – “The single video released does not provide conclusive proof of alien visitation” – and gave the mic to folks like astronomer and Center for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) consultant James McGaha.

McGaha, a pilot and retired USAF officer, attacked the credibility of the Navy pilots who shared their eyewitness accounts with the Times in December. McGaha asserted that only astronomers like, like, well, McGaha, are qualified to interpret weird images in the sky.

“Pilots are not trained observers, and police officers are not trained observers,” he told the podcast, “and they see things in the sky all the time that they don’t understand what they are, because they don’t know astronomy, atmospheric physics, and various other things that could possibly cause lights in the sky.”

Given the inherent inferiority of being a pilot without a degree in astronomy, it’s a little disingenuous for McGaha to take the word of a single helicopter pilot to discredit the dramatic 2008 Stephenville UFO incident, the subject of a 77-page report that supported multiple eyewitness testimonies with government radar records. Without revealing the helicopter pilot’s name (the pilot obviously had a degree in astronomy), McGaha said the only unusual thing happening in the sky over the Texas cowtown that night was an F-16 flare-drop exercise. Nothing to see here, folks.

Also joining Shostak’s crew was Benjamin Radford, a CSI research fellow who suggested the AATIP was a “pork project” cooked up by former Sen. Harry Reid as a sop to hotelier/aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow. According to the Times, the AATIP’s $22 million in expenditures included modifying some of Bigelow’s facilities in Las Vegas to accommodate “the storage of metal alloys and other materials … recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” Exactly why a billionaire would do this for a lousy $22M with government strings attached is a mystery, but at least part of Radford’s concerns about funneling taxpayer money to a wealthy constituent are worth consideration. Especially if we’re dealing with hyperexotic material.


When Oberg joined “Skeptic Check,” however, he raised a point that should concern us all when it comes to the clout of private-sector special interests, like Robert Bigelow.

“There’s a feeling that if the UFOs are real, and he does the study,” Oberg said, “that his company would be able to make use of any discoveries, any patents, any technologies that are found.”

In that event, we’d be talking serious national security implications, which makes this a conversation we need to have. This is the age of Martin Shkreli, not Jonas Salk. As for the Times reporting — guys, give us something, anything, radar records, more video, just one (1) of the alleged three dozen AATIP reports floating around somewhere out there. Let’s get this show on the road again. Soon.
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Maybe the only tangible payoff for Dom Armentano as a result of last month’s revelations about the Pentagon’s UFO research project is that his golfing buddies don’t think he’s crazy anymore. That may not sound like a big deal, but consider: Armentano grew up in the 1950s, when the radical new communications technology of television began to find an audience. Sixty years ago this month, he tuned in to the Armstrong Circle Theatre, a live, scripted variety show

By Billy Cox De Void 1-30-18

produced by CBS that often dramatized current events. On that particular evening, retired USMC Maj. Donald Keyhoe was on deck. He’d written a number of articles and books on what were then called flying saucers, and he charged the Air Force with concealing information from the public.

The moment Keyhoe tried go off-script, the director cut his audio feed, with millions watching, a move that begat one of the original and enduring American conspiracy genres. The ensuing public clamor prompted CBS to issue an acknowledgement that “This program had been carefully cleared for security reasons,” with the paternalistic assertion that “public interest was served by the action taken by CBS.”

Two months later, in damage-control mode, CBS scheduled Keyhoe for an unrehearsed interview with a young Mike Wallace. Keyhoe showed Wallace a copy of his earlier prepared statement, the one military censors redacted prior to the Circle Theatre appearance. Keyhoe had wanted to challenge the USAF’s contention that just 1.9 percent of all UFO cases were unknown; in fact, the Air Force had hidden the real figures inside something called Blue Book Special Report 14, which indicated 19 percent were unknown. Wallace, ever the provocateur, confronted Keyhoe with a critique from a popular columnist who wrote that “flying saucers are products of, for the most part, quote, pranksters, half-wits, cranks, publicity hounds, fanatics in general, and screwballs.”

This was Armentano’s introduction to The Great Taboo. His career track – advocate for libertarian policies, economics professor at the University of Hartford, adjunct professor with the Cato Institute – guided him safely away from those labels, but he kept a close eye on news from the fringe. So when The Times delivered its 12/16/17 scoop about how the Defense Department maintained a UFO research program, Armentano felt absolved enough to crow about it to the Indian River Press Journal near his home in Vero Beach.

“The deep intelligence state has known for at least 70 years that some UFOs were real,” he argued in an op-ed on January 17. The “decades-long public policy of secrecy and denial,” Armentano went on, “is foolish and dangerous in the extreme and puts our entire democratic process at risk.” He reminded Press Journal readers what happened to him in 2008, immediately after the paper published his call for federal transparency on UFO. That’s when Cato terminated its relationship with him, even though Armentano’s article never mentioned or hinted at his affiliation with the libertarian think tank. A Press Journal editor had attached a Cato blurb to his byline.

“I won’t deny that this latest op-ed played a role in our decision,” Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz informed Armentano, even as the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program was quietly conducting its business, from 2007-12, at a cost of $22M. “Some day we may look back and wish we’d listened to you. But for now this strikes us as not an issue that we want to have as part of Cato’s research agenda.”

Armentano never asked Cato to add UFOs to its agenda, but no matter, Boaz couldn’t handle it, and it didn’t end there. Armentano got another reality check the following year, this time when he approached the Christian Science Monitor about writing an editorial on UFOs. It wasn’t as if Armentano was some unknown Goober. In May 2009, CSM published one of his opinions about President Obama’s new antitrust regulations. But this time around, just four months later, the Monitor said sorry, no thanks.

“UFOs,” explained CSM editor Josh Burek in an email to De Void, “are simply not on the public policy radar screen, not at a time when we’re debating health care reform, cap and trade, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea, the recession, etc.” Furthermore, “Dom’s essay, like so many others, simply didn’t rise to a sufficient level of public salience and/or newsworthiness.”

That last part was a little peculiar, because Armentano hadn’t even submitted his essay for review, only as a topic proposal. Anyhow, Burek’s judiciousness apparently served him well. Today, he’s the director of Global Communications and Strategy for Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs.

Last week, career intelligence officer and former CIA director John Brennan told the Herald-Tribune he was well aware of official government inquiries into the UFO dilemma, and he voiced support for sustained research. But Armentano’s Press Journal piece, which called for “open Congressional hearings and full disclosure,” merely echoed the position Brennan’s distant predecessor, Vice Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, took in 1960.

In a UPI article carried by the Times, Hillenkoetter, the nation’s first CIA director (1947-50), voiced his dismay over the military’s hoarding of UFO data. “Behind the scenes,” Hillenkoetter declared, “high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” He accused the USAF of imposing a gag order on its personnel.

So it’s been a long journey for Armentano. A decade ago, “most of my professional colleagues in law and economics thought I’d lost my mind” following the Cato fiasco, he declared in the Press Journal this time around. Now that the former director of the Pentagon program has gone public, the Conspiracy Nut moniker doesn’t fit anymore, and Armentano’s golfing partners aren’t giving him much crap lately. Are they bringing new eyes to the subject now?

“No, not really,” Armentano tells De Void. “I don’t think they’re all that interested.”

Psst — NY Times. Time for the followup.
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Shortly before taking the stage Monday morning at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota to discuss his career as a Central Intelligence Agency officer, John Brennan paused backstage for a few questions from the press. Thirty-seven years in intel, his last four as President Obama’s CIA chief, 2013-17, Brennan had the ear of the president in 1994-95. That’s when he delivered Bill Clinton’s President’s Daily Brief. And this was the so-called Rockefeller Initiative era, when billionaire Laurance Rockefeller persistently lobbied Clinton’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to release all government documents on the UFO issue.

By Billy Cox De Void 1-22-18

Clinton left office without finding those documents, but former First Lady/former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to make UFO transparency an issue during her 2016 presidential run. Last month, The New York Times broke the story about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program, complete with F-18 pursuit videos and interviews with pilots and the project director, Luis Elizondo. The $22 million study was officially conducted between 2007 and 2012, but Elizondo said research is ongoing. The AATI program is said to have generated three dozen separate reports, none of which have been released.

Five years ago, same venue, Ringling College Library Association Town Hall Lecture Series, Sarasota, Van Wezel, backstage, De Void grabbed a sound bite from one of Brennan’s predecessors, then-recently retired CIA director/Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Months earlier, the CIA’s ex-Hollywood image-spinner, a guy named Chase Brandon, had gone on record about finding a box in the CIA Historical Intelligence Collection crammed with official documentation of the alleged 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, N.M. Said he found it during the mid-1990s. Gates, a friend and colleague of Chase Brandon, declined to challenge Brandon’s story.

“As director of the CIA and Secretary of Defense,” Gates told De Void in 2013, “I think I have had every security clearance that there is available in the United States government. I first joined the government 46 years ago and I have never seen one shred of evidence or one report of any kind of UFO or remains or cadavers or anything.”

That said, here’s Brennan, the man who worked Gates’ old job until 2017, on the record today, when queried about the Pentagon AATI initiative. America’s spymaster was cordial and unblinking:

“I think over the past several decades there have been a number of phenomena that have been observed by pilots, both commercial pilots, both military pilots, that are basically unexplained. Maybe it’s the result of some type of atmospheric conditions or something else. And so I think the Pentagon rightly is trying to understand whether or not any of these phenomena have implications as far as national security is concerned. Some people refer to it as UFO, an unidentified flying object, it’s something that is observed but there is no determination about what its origin or provenance is.

“During the course of my career, both in the CIA as well as the White House, I was aware that there were endeavors to try to discern what some of these phenomena are.” Me: What did you learn? “That most of them remain unexplained. But that shouldn’t mean that we don’t continue to pursue it. And try to apply the latest technologies and the latest science to understand what may be going on.

“We know that a number of our adversaries continue to try to look for gaps and vulnerabilities in our national defense so anything that might take place in the air, in the atmosphere, is something that I think is rightly an area for pursuit on the part of our intelligence community and Defense Department.”

The schedule was tight. Onto the next question.

My kingdom for another five minutes …

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While waiting for the next New York Times UFO bomb to drop: Ahh, to be a fly-sized drone on the wall of the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C ring or wherever it is they’re trying to figure out how to manage whatever comes next. Like, who, exactly, specifically, should own this month-old mess? Is the old guard hoping Trump’s tweetstreams can keep the media preoccupied with meaningless noise? After all, last month’s cookie-cutter headlines — The Guardian (“Pentagon admits running secret UFO program for five years”), USA Today (“Defense Department Confirms They Funded UFO Program”),

By Billy Cox De Void 1-16-18

and the New York Daily News (“Department of Defense admits to running UFO program”), etc. – raised more questions than answers.

After resigning in October as a career intelligence officer, inside man Luis Elizondo told the Times in December what he knew about the DoD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program to study UFOs. Although a laconic military flack confirmed the existence of the five-year, $22M initiative that ended in 2012, not a single serious federal acronym or bigwig currently in its employ has since been held to account for the myriad questions this revelation raises. Few investigators are feeling more hamstrung by federal obstinance than Robert Powell.

Founder of a research team called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, Powell is the investigative point man on two relatively recent and provocative UFO incidents. One left radar tracks and confused military pilots over Stephenville, Texas, before creeping to the very edge of restricted airspace over President Bush’s Crawford ranch in 2008. The other was an ocean-dipping airborne bogey videotaped by U.S. border patrol agents over coastal Puerto Rico in 2013. The latter was documented with the same infrared technology F-18 Navy jets used to acquire the riveting UFO sequences at the center of the Times reporting in December.

Powell, who also co-authored an indispensable history about what happened when honest scientists studying UFOs confronted military roadblocks after World War II, did a very smart thing in July. That’s when he resigned as the Mutual UFO Network’s research director, for reasons too pathetic to waste time with here. Suffice it to say, there aren’t a lot of grant dollars going to an outfit whose leadership includes a prophetess renowned for channeling ancient wisdom and insight from a 35,000-year-old Lemurian warrior named Ramtha. Hello, MUFON? This is the MacArthur Genius Foundation’s board of directors calling, and we’re trying to book Ramtha for a TED talk?

Anyhow, before all that, in 2016, Powell started pounding the military bureaucracy with FOIAs in hopes of authenticating the 2004 F-18 incident, which had slipped quietly into the public domain at an independent naval aviation blog in 2007. At the Open Minds online forum in October, Powell detailed his largely unsuccessful efforts to render an accurate accounting of what happened off the coast of San Diego nearly 18 years ago, and it’s worth a read.

On 11/14/04, the UFO in question obliged military cameras during training exercises. Five naval components were involved, including the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and the USS Princeton, a guided missile destroyer. Powell dispatched FOIAs for details about the encounter to the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Marine Corps, the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the Naval Air Warfare Center, the Naval Air Facilities Engineering Command, Naval Sea Systems Command, and Naval History and Heritage Command. All he got were goose eggs. Powell was incredulous. “So you’re telling me we have five assets and you don’t have any documents on any of those assets from that day, no deck logs or anything?” he says. “That’s unbelievable.”

Following Powell’s appeal last April, which also copied members of Congress, the Navy managed to produce contemporary anecdotal emails from service members who stated they’d heard about or seen the F-18 video. All told, Powell wound up with nine names of USMC or Navy officers with knowledge, peripheral or otherwise, about the event. He continues to explore those leads. Thanks to the NY Times’ blurb about how the Pentagon’s UFO program was initiated by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Powell is now pumping the DIA for info on F-18 incident, too.

The most important witnesses to step forward are retired Navy pilots David Fravor and Jim Straight, who went on to talk about pursuing a bogey that was painted by surface radar, was invisible to in-flight radar, and pulled maneuvers that appeared to crumple the laws of physics. Unless and until official provenance of that footage is established, says Powell, the pilot testimony is much more convincing than stand-alone video.

“We need more documentation. We need to show a FOIA paper trail that establishes a chain of command,” Powell says. “So much of what I’m hearing doesn’t make sense. The Navy can’t find anything, so how can the DIA or the Defense Department have information the Navy doesn’t?”

The defense bureaucracy is clearly at odds with itself. Again, it’d be great to eavesdrop on the contortions playing out within those privileged circles, because a credible, cogent government narrative ratchets this thing up to a very serious level. Maybe, one day sooner than we think, those of us who’ve long advocated for more transparency will get a sharper understanding of what it means to be careful what you wish for. But if the Times keeps doing decent journalism, turning back is not an option, not anymore. Even if — or especially if — it undercuts our conceits about having the fastest, stealthiest, baddest bells and whistles in the sky.
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Just how much momentum The New York Times’ reporting on UFOs will carry into 2018 depends largely on, ahem, The New York Times. Steady followup coverage of its 12/16/17 scoop on the Pentagon’s $22M Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification (AATI) program reminds us of what we already know, that nothing gets traditional media off its ass better than The Grey Lady. Reader traffic has been massive, expectations are high and, as critics point out, The Times has a ton of loose ends to address. Incentives aplenty. But just how far into the uncharted waters of this species of journalism is management willing to swim?

By Billy Cox De Void 1-1-18

Among the many questions raised in the stampede of copycat reporting: How, exactly, does the Defense Department justify, on national security grounds, investing millions of $$$ in pursuit of The Great Taboo? Well, for starters, retired former Senate majority leader Harry Reid points to veterans’ first-person accounts of UFOs’ apparent fascination with America’s nuclear stockpiles. An amazing story — but will the media take the bait? A leading authority on the mysterious incursions into U.S. missile fields has learned that 40 years of research haven’t accomplished what The Times managed to do in December: create a UFO buzz that lasts at least two consecutive weeks.


In short, these guys delivered the sort of testimony that would, were the elusive offenders linked to a foreign country, spark a debate over quality-control protocols safeguarding our extinction-capacity weapons. Media coverage of the press conference, however, was grudging. “It was a short-lived bump,” says Hastings from his home in Colorado. “And a week later, we were back to business as usual. It was as if it never happened.”

A few places, like Stars and Stripes, played it down the middle. Others took their cues from the likes of Washington Post columnist John Kelly, who gave it the brushoff by informing readers he attended the event for the free cookies. Popular Science distanced itself by hiding behind the sci-fi headline “Paging Fox Mulder.” Alluding to reports of UFOs taking U.S. nuclear warheads off-line in North Dakota, a Wired account chimed in, “Earth is being monitored by intergalactic hippies.” And this from a Forbes reporter: “I don’t take this stuff at face value (to say the least), but I do love a grand yarn.”

Hastings has more than 160 veterans’ “grand yarns” on file, but he’s not optimistic about The Times or any other news gatherer taking the UFO story to the next level. For one thing, the next level includes an entrenched, and disjointed, military bureaucracy suffering from sclerotic thinking in the glasnost department. He regards Luis Elizondo, the former Defense Department analyst who spilled the beans on AATI, as a lonely outlier. Though KLAS-TV’s coverage from Las Vegas cites anonymous sources claiming AATI-related projects produced 36 separate and so-far-unreleased reports, Hastings doubts that spigot has much water left.

“Mr. Elizondo said the reason he left the Pentagon was because of resistence from unnamed persons and organizations who don’t want this sort of information out there,” he said. “It’s the same sort of resistance (USAF Project Blue Book director) Captain (Edward) Ruppelt went up against in the 1950s – he was under a lot of pressure to keep this as quiet as possible.”

More ominously, however, Hastings says a discussion that dives deeper than gun-cam video and accounting ledgers would constitute the “beginning of a slippery slope” and lead to an inevitable confrontation with the UFO abduction thing. That’s a path most advocates of government transparency fear to tread. Yet, says Hastings, some veterans from the Strategic Air Command era – not many, but a handful – have reported classic missing-time scenarios that conform neatly to a very creepy and easily ridiculed subculture of “high strangeness.” Newshounds sniffing his website for leads on the WMD controversy will find a little abduction stuff in the mix as well.

“It’s one thing to accept video and radar data,” he says. “But when you drift into the topic of abduction, it’s a much harder sell. It’s like a bridge too far for most people. But surveillance isn’t the only thing going on here, and there’s been a lot of compartmentalization to get around it. And I’m at a point in my life where it would be dishonest for me not to discuss this publicly.”

Abduction tales are largely absent from this blog, however, because it’s been hard enough trying to goad media colleagues into taking a good hard look at simple radar records. That’s been a 10-year project. Plus, I have at least one thing in common with the SETI astronomers: If we’re talking space aliens, I prefer to appreciate them at a safe distance. Even more specifically, I don’t want to think about these whatevers in my bedroom injecting microscopic tracking devices up my whatever. It’d be like running a marathon when I barely trust my ability to walk.

Anyway, here we are, closing the books on 2017, with the press engaged as never before, but on a toehold, tenuous at best. The same rules remain in play: Without the media, there is no way forward. Sustaining that interest – which could evaporate at any time – poses a unique challenge, at least in this country. Aside from The Times flat-out dropping the ball, what might it take to disperse the new-found media crowd? Apathy, or something worse? The possibilities are endless. Most likely, we’ll find out sooner than later. So bring it on.
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