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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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Seth Shostak took to his FaceBook page to do a one man stand-up show, performing his shtick last Thursday (1-18-18) and taking questions in the aftermath. For those who presumed that the revelation of a 5 year secret UFO investigation perpetrated by the

By Frank Warren The UFO Chronicles 1-21-18

Department of Defense, along with Navy pilots coming forward who engaged a UFO, supported by radar and FLIR video, would give Shostak pause re Ufology—it ain’t happenin’!

Shostak, in my view seemed only to have taken a cursory look at the reports surrounding the disclosure of the formerly secret UFO program. At one point he couldn’t recall what the acronym, AATIP (Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program) meant—the very subject of what he was addressing! If a university student gave such a presentation, he would have been given a failing grade.

Ironically, Shostak spoke a bit about arguments from ignorance ….
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A few years ago, analysts with the National Bureau of Economic Research decided to try to quantify the headlock that “elite scientists” exert on their chosen disciplines. They wanted to know if Nobel laureate Max Planck’s lamentation on ego could be statistically proven: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

By Billy Cox De Void 4-2-16

Targeting the life sciences, NBER formed a database of 12,935 scientists whose publication performance, patents, funding levels and peer pedigrees – i.e., membership in the National Academies of Science or the Institute of Medicine – satisfied baseline criteria. From there, NBER whittled the field down to 452 names. All were considered the rock stars of their generation, circa 1975-2003. More significantly, every one died before they retired.

The results of the study – published in December under the headline “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” – showed how subsequent publication activity by the deceased stars’ colleagues tapered off precipitously, by 40 percent, following the deaths of the luminaries. Into that vacuum surged the work of non-collaborators. It went up 8 percent within a year. Within five years, papers by the non-collaborators “fully offset the productivity decline of collaborators.”

NBER summed up what had been happening this way: “The idiosyncratic stances of individual scientists can do much to alter, or at least delay, the course of scientific advance.” Conclusion: “While co-authors suffer after the passing of a superstar, it is not simply the case that star scientists in a competing lab assume leadership mantle. Rather, the boost comes largely from outsiders who appear to tackle the mainstream questions within the field but by leveraging newer ideas that arise in other domains.”

Uh-oh. Outsiders.

Which brings us to the latest paint-by-numbers whimsy from astronomer Seth Shostak, 72.

Champion of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence via the exclusive mode of radiotelescopes, author of four books, plus 60-some peer-reviewed research papers, not to mention 300 or so popular articles ranging from astronomy to technology, Shostak is so inside-the-box he even co-authored a college-level textbook on astrobiology. Plus he’s made a multitude of appearances on documentaries and TV series. Smart guy, clearly. Elite. He was rewarded for those efforts in December when he received the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. And as a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he never misses a chance to remind Americans that UFOs are a waste of time. Thus:

Sensing a potential affront to mainstream groupthink with Hillary Clinton’s recent advocacy for transparent federal UFO documents, Shostak felt the need to translate her avowed interest into language Huffington Post readers could understand. From his opening sentence – “If you’re worried about little gray guys with no hair and amygdaloid eyes, Hillary Clinton wants to help” – it’s eminently clear that the senior astronomer with the SETI Institute has disqualified himself from any meaningful discussion on The Great Taboo.

Shostak does what he always does. He falls back on the veracity of the USAF’s dreadfully bollixed Project Blue Book, and he characterizes “those whose psyches are invested in the alien visitation story” as delusional thinkers. No allowance, of course, for people who make no such claims, people who think radar tracks of weird *&! in the sky are interesting, and for people who wish that authority figures like Shostak would quit proselytizing and actually investigate events occurring in the 21st century. Or, failing that, at least quit misrepresenting things, like the British Ministry of Defence’s position on UFOs.

“The MOD said that after more than a half-century of taking hotline tips, they had learned nothing of either military or scientific value,” writes Shostak, who doesn’t even have to Google UFOs anymore because he’s riding Yuri Milner’s $100M SETI gravy train. “They also released tens of thousands of related government documents.”

Well, no, sorry man, you’re totally wrong on that first point. According to an MOD study declassified in 2006, referred to as Project Condign, the Brits are definitely interested in pursuing what it prefers to call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. That’s the same term Clinton used last week in her Jimmy Kimmel interview. Struggling to make sense of the evidence they considered from 1997-2000, UK analysts agreed to describe UAP as “buoyant plasma formations.” Under the MoD’s definition, UAP is a meteorological phenomenon so bizarre, so intense, that it can subject observers to radiation exposure, hallucinations, “lost time” episodes, and even cause pilots to make evasive maneuvers.

“The relevance of plasma and magnetic fields to UAP was an unexpected feature of the study. It is recommended,” declared the authors, “that further investigation should be (undertaken) into the applicability of various characteristics in various novel military applications.”

Whoa, hey, crazy “weather,” huh? With defense implications to boot. Mmmm . . . smells like $$$. Still, 10 years after the declassification of Condign, and no followup to speak of. That could mean one of two things: 1) Classified research is ongoing or, more likely, 2) a more informed generation of scientists is waiting for speed bumps like Shostak to get out of the way so a less doctrinaire era of inquiry can begin.
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NEW YORK (FOX5NY) - Practically since humankind could look up at the sky, the question has been asked: Do we have company up there, in the cosmos? "I'm quite sure we're not the only intelligent species in the universe," said Dr. Seth Shostak.

ARTHUR CHI'EN www.fox5ny.com 2-22-16

For the last 25 years, Shostak and his team at the SETI Institute have been eavesdropping on space with their massive antennas in California. They are listening for signs that intelligent life exists or has existed.

"I find it hard to believe it hasn't, doesn't or won't," said Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer.

Dr. Oppenheimer, Chairwoman of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and her team have been looking at images of planets for the same. Both Oppenheimer and Shostak agree, life must exist beyond Earth. In its simplest form, it could be as close as Mars or Europa, Jupiter's icy moon. [...]
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