The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas

He asks some questions, though: “How much did they pay you to write this trash? Do you still have a gag reflex or did they take that along with the journalistic integrity?” He closes with a scatological insult, which, in an undeserved favor to him, I don’t repeat.

Numerous outreaches to the MIT Mr. Fridman went unreturned, but presumably my emailer meant to suggest I was being paid by aliens to cast doubt on alien sightings. The email in question arrived in response to a column, “The UFO Bubble Goes Pop,” which didn’t mention him but dealt with a phenomenon with which he is closely associated. My skepticism had been recently fortified by a

New York Times

leak about a pending declassified U.S. intelligence report. Expected in October, that report is delayed and will be released during the holidays—not to bury it, officials have assured Sen.

Kirsten Gillibrand,

a promoter of UFO disclosure, but to make sure the report is “well written.”

Uh huh. The climbdown the report portends is overdue even if poorly written. A previous June 2021 report, based on “unclassified” information, fed the public only a loosey-goosey impression of the skies above U.S. military training ranges being overrun by mysterious physical objects demonstrating advanced technology.

This followed years of questionable Pentagon statements lending credence to military UFO sightings. With these came a pronounced up-rating in the mainstream media and academic blogosphere of the likelihood that aliens are already among us. The New Yorker devoted 13,000 words to the subject, under the heading, “How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously.”

Then the Russia-Ukraine war changed everything. Misinterpretation was already a risk. Sen.

Marco Rubio,

NASA chief

Bill Nelson

and other officials were in the habit of going on TV and warning that UFOs, if not alien…