phlawless

​This weekend, Politico ran a credulous magazine piece on UFOs keyed to the meeting of Avi Loeb’s dubiously legal UAP Scientific Advisory Council, which has not filed the required federal paperwork for a group officially advising the federal government. In the piece, Politico reporter Ilan Greenberg makes the rather ahistorical claim that “there is a growing stream of intriguing chatter from people who had or have higher than top secret clearances who normally would not be expected to indulge in UAP speculation.” But they do—all the time, going back to Harry Truman. His examples are particularly poor, Barack Obama’s comments, not from this year (which caused such a stir) but from 2021, and Marco Rubio’s “interest” in UFOs, which he had before he ever entered government. That’s not a “growing stream,” and it fails to account for the obvious fact that the current generation of officials grew up in a UFO-saturated media environment, so of course they have interest in them and speculate about them, just like nearly half of the older adults in their age bracket. 

​The biggest news in the article is that the Trump Administration now has a plan for how to handle the news of extraterrestrial intelligence should it be confirmed—which, no one in the article notes, implies that they have not confirmed any such thing.
 
The worst part of the article was the third-hand implication that Donald Trump knows that America has a secret cache of space alien technology and is just waiting for the right time to reveal it to the faithful. (Trump has repeatedly denied having knowledge of aliens, for whatever a congenital liar’s word is worth.) Read the sourcing on this claim carefully:

​An anonymous “expert” who spoke with an unnamed person who has “knowledge” of Trump’s feelings, but no direct evidence. And the claim about Trump’s belief in an alien conspiracy is not attributed to the unnamed insider but rather to the UFO “expert’s” feelings about what Trump “seems” to think—again, contradicted by Trump’s own statements.
 
Now, since there is no such thing as a UFO expert, given that UFOs are by definition “unknown,” what we are really talking about is a very small group of interested UFO disclosure advocates who make their living from the subject. We have seen several of them make similar claims in recent months, but each time it turns out to be hype and hope masquerading as evidence. You can guess as well as I can which of the “experts” Politico talked to who wanted to poison the discourse with hype without having his name attached.
 
The remainder of the article is a profile of the UFO-mad scientists, including Loeb and Garry Nolan, who promiscuously veer from saying UFOs require investigation because the sightings are unknown (true, and uncontroversial, despite their assertions otherwise) to ranting about scientists and the media failing to take seriously that these must be alien spacecraft and interdimensional vessels (a complete fantasy with no evidentiary basis outside science fiction). They also offered some conspiracy theories about the CIA trying to stop the truth about aliens from being revealed, with Nolan calling it his “nemesis.” Loeb claims that other scientists are simply jealous of his genius, which has failed to find any meaningful evidence of aliens. Alexander Wendt, a professor hawking a new UFO book, wants a 50-year (!) news blackout to prepare humanity for the revelation of aliens, saying the revelation would lead to wars that would end civilization—again, presupposing secret evidence of aliens that no fuzzy blob caught on video has heretofore provided. (Never mind the presumption that we are in control of when and how the aliens reveal themselves.)
 
And that remains the problem: The current government-adjacent “UFO” research can’t decide whether it is a scientific inquiry into things seen in the sky that are by definition unknown or whether it is a transcendental adventure canvassing the known universe for evidence of an extraterrestrial intelligence. While the science fiction that forms the core of the UFO myth has done much to conflate the two, they are not the same, and lurching between them makes any government inquiry both suspect and ridiculous. You can’t go from “What is this blob caught on camera?” to “How will our imminent contact with the super-genius space squid from Zeta Reticuli impact our relationship to the divine?” without passing through some intermediate layers of evidence that, as of yet, have never been proven to exist.
 
Perhaps that is the whole reason for the effort to get the government to “reveal” that aliens are here and they have always known: to skip over the hard work of actually proving their assumptions—something eight decades of ufology has never accomplished—to get to the fun part where they get to be priests of the new alien faith.

​Dan Farah, the filmmaker behind The Age of Disclosure documentary that took Washington by storm last year, has made good on his promise to acquire the rights to former UAP Task Force director Jay Stratton’s forthcoming UFO memoir Out of the Shadows in order to turn it into a drama series, Variety reports. Farah, who negotiated Stratton’s book deal with the TV deal as a sweetener, has secured the services of Sopranos writer Terrence Winter to enter intro preproduction on the series, which they claim will be political thriller mixed with a domestic drama centering on the impact on Stratton’s family life of his investigation into the government’s UFO coverup conspiracy. There is currently no pickup deal from any network or streamer, and it is unclear who might want an inferior version of The X-Files when the real thing is returning to television soon for its latest reboot. Stratton alleges that supernatural werewolf (almost certainly a black bear) began stalking his family after he spent time at Skinwalker Ranch. His memoir will be published on October 13.