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:

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…

Intelligence officer Scott Bray’s slippery answer to a question about a UFO over ICBM missile silos at Malmstrom AFB in 1967 makes it clear the Pentagon’s ‘transparency’ is empty rhetoric. — In an otherwise predictably lame congressional hearing on UAPs Tuesday, there came a brief exchange nearly an hour in illustrating that Pentagon officials are playing disingenuous word games so they can avoid talking meaningfully about UFOs — even when they’re talking to Congress and C-SPAN is streaming it live.

The former head of AATIP has never said it’s aliens, but he’s just saying: It’s aliens. Enough already. It’s time for Elizondo to testify. — Whether you love him or hate him, whether you think he was the mastermind of AATIP or an ex-spook investigating werewolves at Skinwalker Ranch, whether you think he’s actually on to something or that he’s full of crap, Luis Elizondo must testify under oath to Congress about Unidentified Flying Objects.

The Harvard-trained math physicist acknowledges on Twitter that he and podcaster Sam Harris were contacted about a mind-bending, paradigm-shifting UFO disclosure. — Mick West’s UFO “conspiracy spectrum” presumably includes the supposition, accusation, claim, etc., that the government knows more about UFOs than they’ve let on and have covertly engaged select members of the scientific community in their internal discussions and hand-wringing.

Ufology demands healthy skepticism, but some take it so far they rebel against the fact that scientific anomalies can and do exist. — 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 Sheaffer and I had last year about the O’Hare UFO, and once I understood it…