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:

Over the last few years I’ve grown accustomed to having frustrating and occasionally heated conversations with UFO skeptics and debunkers, but I had one earlier this week that took my breath away. But first, a story about a UFO. The tale is told by J.F. Martel, who co-hosts with Phil…

The lethargy of the New York Times and an absurd column by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank point to a crisis in journalism. — Perplexed by the lethargy of the New York Times’ coverage of the UFO disclosure movement now sweeping through the U.S. Congress like a wildfire, a reader asked me yesterday on Twitter: Whenever I would hear someone say “fake news” the last few years, I’d roll my eyes and dismiss that…

The New York Times finally gets around to writing about David Grusch and buries an otherwise perfunctory story on Page A18. — The New York Times on Wednesday finally staggered out of the starting gate. They had no choice. The UFO disclosure story that their own reporting unearthed in 2017 before vanishing into the hazy ether of Julian Barnes’s dutiful stenography finally escaped from Podcastland, The Debrief, News Nation and #UFOTwitter and…

Let the record show: The congressional UAP hearing on Wednesday, July 26, 2023 is the one that finally mattered. — The capacity for hyperbole, to say nothing of great expectations raised and dashed, is baked into ufology. And “making history” is overused in virtually every realm of human activity. But it’s no exaggeration to say that the House Oversight hearing today on UAPs was of immense and profound historic significance.

The Grusch allegations and Wednesday’s hearing could, like the ‘alien autopsy’ and infamous Majestic-12 documents, fizzle and die. Or, it could lurch us into something profoundly different. — We’ve been here before — with the Majestic-12 documents, with Bob Lazar and with the infamous televised “alien autopsy” in the 1990s. Each time, the tiny, insular ufology community was like, “This is it!” Until it wasn’t.