Decades ago I became fully convinced that UFOs were real. I even accepted that past visits to our planet of such space aliens had been the basis for many of the religious myths of different societies all around the world, just as Erich von Däniken had argued in his massive 1971 bestseller Chariots of the Gods?
However, I was just in elementary school at the time, and once I’d reached my teens and entered junior high, my views sharply changed. I remember doing a term-paper on UFOs, and after reading a couple of books on the subject, I forcefully rejected those theories as pseudo-scientific nonsense.
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Since then, I’ve never paid the slightest attention to stories about UFOs, alien abductions, or similar matters. Indeed, I’ve occasionally even cited those theories as stark examples of the total rubbish that can sometimes infect the minds of individuals after they discover the truth about the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and similar controversial historical events long-suppressed by our dishonest mainstream media. But given that roughly a half-century has now elapsed, I decided to take a second look at that subject and see whether the case seemed more plausible today than the one I had summarily rejected at the age of thirteen or fourteen.
Our very lightly moderated website attracts commenters holding a vast range of different conspiratorial beliefs that are unwelcome elsewhere, and while some of these are plausible, others are much less so. Given that I’d seen so many different eccentric beliefs advocated in some of the discussions, I thought that these might represent nearly the entire spectrum of ideas ignored or belittled by the mainstream media. UFOs and space aliens almost never came up as subjects, so I’d vaguely assumed that movement had largely faded away over the last generation or two, but I turned out to be completely mistaken.
The recent wave of strange drone sightings on the East Coast led to some renewed talk of UFOs, and this prompted one of our occasional contributors to drop me a note strongly suggesting that I investigate that latter subject:
In light of the recent ‘drone’ activity that’s been all over the news, I’ve wondered for some time if you’re ever going to write an article about our government’s UFO/UAP cover-up? If there’s one subject where the government has worked tirelessly to prevent the American people from knowing, it’s surely in the realm of UFOs, reverse engineering of UFO craft, and the 2017 NYT article in which it exposed the Pentagon’s black programs investigating UAPs.
Honestly, I think if you looked into it, you would find an incredible number of admissions and concessions on the part of our government that we do indeed have downed UFO craft, and that we have been in contact with Non-Human Intelligence for quite some. I know that sounds a little crazy, but the evidence is available if one is assiduous in reviewing it.
If you’re curious to begin, I can think of no other book than the one written by Richard M. Dolan, “UFOs for the 21st Century Mind: The Definitive Guide.” Dolan is level-headed and not prone to sensationalism. He’s a good writer and clear thinker too. It’s available on Amazon.
I think the subject matter would be terrific for your American Pravda series.
My response was rather dismissive:
…I’m *extremely* skeptical that there’s anything to the UFO nonsense. I think the notion that it has anything to do with aliens is utter, total crackpottery…
In fact, I’ve occasionally cited UFO stories as a perfect example of conspiracy-nonsense accepted by the gullible…
Now it’s perfectly possible that a few of the old UFO sightings were real but were merely of experimental American military aircraft or something like that, but that’s about as far as I would go…
Still, I pride myself on my open-mindedness, and I obviously have had a very long track record of being 100% wrong on all sorts of other controversial issues, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered that book you suggested and will take a look at it. Maybe it will convince me that there’s something to the theory, or if not, perhaps I’ll write up a piece setting forth my own contrary views in more detailed fashion.
Given that my UFO knowledge was a half-century out of date, I had to start somewhere, and just as had been suggested to me UFOs for the 21st Century Mind: The Definitive Guide seemed an excellent and very comprehensive introduction to that complex subject, running more than 560 pages. There were 245 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars, with a full 68% giving it the maximum rating and only a tiny handful of 1 or 2 star responses. The average 4.3 star rating on Goodreads was nearly as positive.
Although I’d never heard of him, the author was Richard M. Dolan, apparently a fairly prominent writer within the UFO community. The Introduction was written by George Noory, the longtime radio host of Coast to Coast AM, the widely syndicated late-night radio program specializing in conspiratorial or paranormal topics, whose regular weekly audience numbered a couple of million, with Dolan having been a frequent guest over the years. Dolan had previously written several other UFO books, notably including UFOs and the National Security State, a two volume set that Noory described as “probably the most comprehensive and reliable guides to the modern history of UFOs.”
The first edition of Dolan’s latest book had been released in 2014, while my second edition was completed in December 2022 and contained a long additional chapter. In it, Dolan argued that over the previous few years public acceptance of the reality of UFOs had greatly increased, indeed it had “gone through a transformation” due to positive coverage in the mainstream media.
This especially included the notoriously establishmentarian New York Times, which had run a long, very respectful front-page story on UFOs in December 2017, together with a sidebar. A short, explanatory follow-up came a couple of days later along with a somewhat more skeptical science piece towards the end of that month. This was probably the most space that the influential Times had devoted to the subject of UFOs in several decades.
- Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program
Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean • The New York Times • December 16, 2017 • 2,200 Words
Although I’m sure that I had read those Times articles when they appeared, I’d been busy with other things and having no interest in UFOs, I’d completely forgotten about them. But now carefully rereading those pieces, I could easily understand why so little of the material had stuck in my mind.
The main “bombshell” disclosure supposedly justifying the front-page treatment had been the revelation that the annual $600 billion Defense Department budget had over several years spent a total of $22 million investigating reports of unidentified flying objects, amounting to roughly one dollar in every 100,000 spent by that notoriously bloated and poorly-administered government bureaucracy, probably far less than what it annually spent on paperclips. The funding for the UFO program had apparently been secured through the personal efforts of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had a long-time interest in UFOs, and had been paid out to a billionaire contractor who was one of Reid’s personal friends and major donors in Las Vegas, exactly the sort of log-rolling for which the Pentagon had become infamous.
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The substance of the Times story hardly seemed all that new or shocking. There were a few reports of pilots seeing strange objects moving in unusual fashion, and a video showing something similar, nothing much different than what the original UFO reports of the 1950s had provided. Indeed, this lack of interesting new material was emphasized in a highly critical New York Magazine piece by a science journalist published later that same month.
The crucial source for the Times story was a certain Luis Elizondo, the alleged former director of the Pentagon’s UFO program, who had angrily resigned from the government over what he claimed was their coverup of the reality of UFOs. He had then helped launch a for-profit UFO-investigation startup for which he was trying to raise funds and with media coverage an important part of that effort, he later proclaimed himself a whistleblower and successfully pitched his exciting story to the Times. The one detail mentioned by Elizondo that I found potentially intriguing was his claim that the contractor administering the UFO program had stored special metal alloys possibly recovered from UFOs at a site in Las Vegas, seeming to imply that these had very unusual or futuristic properties.
As a result of his Times coverage, Elizondo soon became an enormously popular figure within the UFO community, being featured prominently in the final chapter added to the updated 2022 edition of the Dolan book. According to various media stories, he gave numerous public lectures on UFOs and helped to produce a television documentary on the subject, while also appearing on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated FoxNews show. I found a couple of clips containing some of the dramatic claims he made in that major broadcast interview:
Luis Elizondo, point man for the Pentagon’s UFO program (AATIP) stating he believes the US Government has #UFO wreckage. #TTSA https://t.co/b7cwQ2sS7P pic.twitter.com/BMOJAXqh4q
— Danny Silva (@SilvaRecord) April 28, 2020
However, as I quickly discovered with a little casual Googling, there may have been some serious sourcing problems with the Times story. Eighteen months later, The Intercept published a long, investigative piece arguing that Elizondo seemed to be a fraud:
- The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?
There is no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one.
Keith Kloor • The Intercept • June 1, 2019 • 2,900 Words
Under normal circumstances, I would have found it difficult to believe that the Times could have failed to verify such claims. However, not long after running that original UFO story, the Times had produced an even higher-profile series interviewing an alleged ISIS executioner that won Peabody and Lowell Thomas awards and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but whose source turned out to be entirely fraudulent, a massive humiliation and an indication of extremely weak Times fact-checking.
