BREAKING: Terrible reporting about UFOs continues

I'll give you a moment to collect yourself after that shocker

As many have exhaustively reported, the entire pop-culture UFO rage that has enraptured even a few congresspeople is the creation of a few individuals who have been at this for decades. My recent 3-minute inFact video summarizes, if you need a refresher:

Nevertheless, either through laziness or simply the desire to write a more sensational article, the majority of news writers parrot the narrative as provided by these UFOlogists. A great example is this recent piece by USA Today reporter Eric Lagatta. The line the UFOlogists always give is some variation of “I was a skeptic until I discovered this massive UFO coverup,” always happening to omit the fact that they’ve been the very ones writing the UFO mythology for decades.

Lagatta open his article by interviewing alien abduction author Ralph Blumenthal, who was one of the architects of the famous 2017 release of UFO videos. Blumenthal also seems to have given Lagatta that same line, acting like this was all news to him, a shocking revelation he must report:

That changed in 2017 when Blumenthal, by that time a retired contributor for the Times, connected with investigative journalist Leslie Kean, who had come across an extraordinary tip.

Kean, who has long reported on UFOs, was able to attend a confidential meeting that October where she learned of a top-secret Pentagon program that had for years operated in the shadows. Its mission? To investigate reported sighting of mysterious objects in the skies.

The discovery was monumental, not least because it directly undermined the government's public position of more than 50 years that unidentified flying objects were not worth studying.

(Leslie Kean is a career UFO author, she has never been an “investigative journalist.” And she didn’t “learn” of the Pentagon program; she and her colleagues collectively made it all up.)

Lagatta allowed Chris Mellon, who has been promoting and financing alien visitation advocacy since the 1970s, to feed him this line:

It’ll get increasingly difficult to deny that there are intelligent vehicles doing things that we ourselves cannot do in the atmosphere. I think these kind of changes always take time, and I'm talking about a sea change in our worldview, of our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

This one pissed me off to the point that I felt I needed to dissect it line by line.

It’ll get increasingly difficult to deny…

No, it won’t, because there has never been any evidence that this stuff has ever happened. More and more anecdotes and badly misinterpreted videos do not aggregate into good evidence. I’d counter that if anything, it will get increasingly difficult to claim “proof of alien visitation” when all the UFOlogists have done is cry “Wolf” for 75 years.

there are intelligent vehicles doing things that we ourselves cannot do in the atmosphere

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and we’ve never had a shred of it. Oh sure, many of the “big names” in UFOlogy have verbally asserted that such evidence exists, locked away in government warehouses Raider of the Lost Ark style, but a verbal assertion does not constitute evidence. That’s why they ask to see your lottery ticket before handing you the jackpot.

I think these kind of changes always take time, and I'm talking about a sea change in our worldview,

Hardly. The evidence is that a huge number of people will accept new claims without evidence in a heartbeat. Since the UFOlogists’ successful 2017 release and PR blitz of the three Navy UFO videos, today 40% of Americans believe that aliens actively visit the Earth. Look at how many people flipped on vaccine science during the COVID epidemic.

For Chris Mellon personally, of course, this is no change at all. He’s been all-in this for his entire career.

of our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

This is just a silly straw man. We have a pretty decent understanding of the universe (I was just reading up on Lambda-CDM today, and concluded to merely trust in astrophysicists) and our place in it, and that includes the widely-accepted high probability of alien life out there somewhere, sometime.

Little Green Men in flying saucers whizzing around the Earth, however, is another matter. Nothing in our understanding of the universe precludes the possibility of two technological civilizations happening to be very close together and at exactly the same time, though it’s highly improbable (as I discuss in my new film).

So, yeah. Reporters, do better. Exercise even the smallest modicum of skepticism of your sources. Don’t let lifelong promoters of this nonsense like Blumenthal and Mellon feed you these kind of lines.

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