Let’s revisit the Chicago O’Hare UFO, because there’s an important lesson here that offers insight into professional UFO and “alien” skepticism. It came to me as an epiphany of sorts, related to the debate Robert Schaeffer and I had last year about the O’Hare UFO. Once I understood it, it…

Are you vaccine hesitant? That’s okay. But kitchen table ‘research’ is no substitute for listening to a genuine expert in virology — You’re expecting this story to have something to do with vaccinations, and it actually does, but first I want to tell you a little about William Shakespeare … My first encounter with Shakespeare’s plays was as a senior in high school when I was cast as Antipholus of Epheseus in…

The famed Chicago film journalist represented the comfortable cohabitation of the Geek with the Intellectual — I’ve been thinking about Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who passed away in 2013. Settling into my still-early fifties inspires reflection on influences, and his go back to the late 1970s, when U.S. …

It’s fun to imagine aliens making a dramatic Washington D.C. entrance. Asking why they don’t highlights a problem in the way we think about extraterrestrials. — On Sunday, The New York Times published a guest essay online by Dr. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who is active in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Declaring himself to be unimpressed by the UFO phenomenon, Dr. Frank asks rhetorically:

The case of an unusual aerial object that is quickly identified offers a nice contrast with UFOs that remain unidentifed. — The most remarkable thing about the Chinese “spy” balloon that was made public this week was how quickly it became unremarkable. It was visible to the public mid-week. At 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, a Billings, Montana man sitting in his driveway shot video of a large, white sphere against the…

You were out in front of the UFO story … until you weren’t. What happened? Was it all nonsense? Get cold feet? Something else? — Hey 60 Minutes, while we wait for the new government report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena to be released, the time is ripe to check in on where you’re at right now with … well, where you were on UFOs. Flashback to May 2021: Your segment produced by Graham Messick and…

Ufologists and skeptics react to the latest UFO piece in the nation’s flagship newspaper that seeks to shut down debate. — The New York Times on Friday published an article by Washington-based national security reporter Julian E. Barnes that sought to shut down any notion that there might be an extraterrestrial explanation behind the UFOs that Pentagon analysts have been grappling with the last few years.

In the run-up to a government report on UAPs, a former UFO skeptic seems to have made UFO Disclosure his mission. — Yes, the U.S. Government is expected to release another public report on UFOs by Oct. 31; yes, James Fox’s new UFO documentary Moment of Contact is available to stream; yes, the UAP story was hot last week thanks to the “racetrack” UFOs spotted by commercial airline pilots, first reported by…

History gives us plenty of scientists who were first to solve a problem, make a discovery, or venture a hypothesis and were scorned by colleagues and even the press. Sound familiar? — With scientists like Dr. Garry Nolan, Avi Loeb and many others finally confronting the UFO phenomenon head-on — and catching crap for it flung by skeptical kibitzers in the peanut gallery — it seems like a good time to consider how what we call ufology may one day fit into…