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:

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…

Microbiologist Garry Nolan is the latest scientist to face derision for taking the possibility of extraterrestrials seriously. — For several decades now, professional UFO skeptics have made it their highest priority to “debunk” UFO sightings. Sometimes they’re successful. With others, they declare a case “debunked” simply because they’ve satisfied themselves with a prosaic explanation, usually by using Occam’s Razor to slice away anything they don’t want to believe…

It’s been eight months since you interviewed Luis Elizondo. Since then he’s been pretty talkative. It’s time to follow up on this story. — First, let me congratulate the team there at CBS on finally wading into the UFO waters last May with your report on the Phenomenon. Sure, you went with the more fashionable “UAP,” but those of us who follow this issue understand the acronyms. In any event, you put several credible…