The Men Who Walk Through Walls
If you're wondering why "the government" is spending so much energy on UFOs, it's a throwback to when they spent that energy on psychics — in a kind of creepy example of history repeating itself.
I, for one, would be delighted if the US Government would focus even more of its time and energy on UFOs. Why? Because it’s much less harmful to the country than most of everything else they do. Give them something to distract them.
It’s been a weird, weird road that led us here. Up until 2017, very few thoughtful people put their time and energy into running around panicked that alien flying saucers are marauding us, because as you can probably tell, that’s not a thing that’s happening. It all changed in December 2017 when UFOlogist Leslie Kean, with the backing of a few powerful people, successfully persuaded New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal to add his name to a UFO “expose” she was writing to promote the beliefs of some of her long-time UFO friends. Together they convinced Helene Cooper, a mainstream national security reporter, to add her name as well; and before you knew it, they had front page headline news. UFOs were now a national security issue.
Kean and her friends behind the scenes couldn’t have been more delighted. The world was taking UFOs seriously.
Who were those friends behind the scenes who greased this? Lifelong paranormalists all, they included billionaire Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace and Skinwalker Ranch; centimillionaire Chris Mellon, heir to the Mellon banking family and a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (which is no doubt what got Cooper on board); and — tellingly — parapsychologist and former electrical engineer Hal Puthoff, who had been the lab manager at a place called SRI in California bay area in the 1970s and 80s when it was contracted by a little organization called the CIA to conduct research on psychics. Yes, psychics.
Now, nearly a decade after that New York Times article, the government’s UFO caucus is a little bit bigger, but not much. Most notably, it includes the Congresspeople you know best for running this embarrassing series of UFO “hearings” which are really just PR megaphones for a long line of “whistleblowers” — other UFOlogists who happen to have backgrounds in the military or intelligence, and who they can list among their cheerleaders: Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Eric Burlison (R-MO), and a handful of others.
It’s really not accurate to say “the government” is obsessed with UFOs. It’s really just this small group, but they sure make enough noise for a whole crowd.
If you’ve read Jon Ronson’s 2004 nonfiction book The Men Who Stare at Goats, this is a pattern you probably recognize. The same thing was happening 50 years ago when the CIA was investing good money — tens of millions in various programs — to see if psychics really could bend spoons and read letters inside sealed envelopes (spoiler alert, they can, because these are trivial magic tricks that the “psychics” were good at).
Just as is the case with the UFO proponents in our government today, 50 years ago there was a core group within military intelligence who firmly believed in just about everything supernatural, and had the power to spend your money trying to make it real. And some colorful individuals they were, too.
