The media, truth and reality

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It’s getting harder to laugh off the idea of UFOs
UFOs are no longer a joke
Lawrence Osborne

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Since it’s the military who are recording these events, they are having more impact than, say, Harvard astronomer’s Avi Loeb’s recent claims that the interstellar object Oumuamua which crashed through the solar system last year was in fact artificial. Yet debunkers and naysayers have sprung predictably into action.

The physicist Adam Frank penned an editorial in the New York Times at the end of last month claiming to be both unimpressed by the Pentagon’s revelations and slightly miffed that his own expertise in extraterrestrial life had not got there ahead of a few putzes flying Super Hornets. He claimed Chinese and Russian drones as a possible explanation, without apparently considering that both the combat pilots and the Pentagon are unconvinced by it.

Others, mostly journalists and media professors with little aviation expertise, proclaimed that it was all a mythological narrative, a ‘comedy of errors’, a hysteria created by flaws in $6 million military targeting cameras or optical illusions created by commercial aircraft wakes. Or oblivious birds being misidentified. When lunatic conspiracy theories are debunked, it’s usually by calmly rational experts who with amused aplomb pull apart the ravings of delusional zealots who are themselves impervious to evidence. Curiously, however, the situation with UAPs now appears to have reversed these roles. The calm rational debunkers in this instance are the pilots themselves. The people who were there. The alternative theories they are debunking seem embarrassingly over-emotional. Weather balloons and Chinese drones, seagulls and optical illusions! As these pilots wearily point out, they can actually tell the difference between a seagull, say, and a machine moving faster than an F-18 then disappearing instantaneously.

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Truth embargo': UFOs are suddenly all the talk in Washington
After 75 years of taboo and ridicule, serious people can finally discuss the mysterious flying objects, and even skeptics say that's a good thing.

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“The ‘truth embargo’ is coming to an end now,” said Bassett, the executive director of Paradigm Research Group and the only registered lobbyist in Washington dedicated to UFO disclosure. “I am elated to finally see this movement achieving its moment.” Bassett is convinced the government is covering up proof of extraterrestrial life and that everything happening now is elaborate political theater to make that information public in the least disruptive way possible — a view, of course, not supported by evidence or most experts. “This is the most profound event in human history that's about to be taking place,” he said.

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The Last Time There Was a Craze About UFOs and Aliens
The academics and other figures who helped make alien abductions a major cultural phenomenon in the 1990s.
by DANIEL N. GULLOTTA JUNE 9, 2021

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The intense popular interest in aliens and UFOs during the 1990s dissipated around the turn of the century. By 2001, the weekly audience for The X-Files was half what it had been at the show’s peak. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which not only focused the nation’s attention on matters of national security and war, but also resulted in a rapid rise in Americans’ trust in their government. In that new atmosphere, the kinds of stories told on The X-Files—tales of government conspiracies and coverups about aliens—came, at least for a while, to seem frivolous.

Meanwhile, advances in consumer technology chipped away at the public belief in UFOs. As ever more people had phones with cameras on them at all times, blurry photos and amateur videos, once a staple in UFO sightings, seemed to disappear. The burgeoning market for drones meant that there was suddenly a plausible explanation always at hand for many strange sights in the sky. Over the 2000s, numerous alien interest groups were disbanded, and the frequency of UFO sightings was in freefall. And instead of movies about extraterrestrial encounters, audiences were being offered a different genre of blockbuster: superheroes.

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