Donald Trump vs. ET? – UFOs, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books

“‘Unexplained’ doesn’t mean alien, as the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson emphasised on CNN after the footage was released: ‘Just because you don’t know what it is you’re looking at doesn’t mean it’s intelligent aliens from another planet.’  Well, yes, but credible alternative explanations are lacking.”

This quote, apropos the UFO videos released by the government last December, sounds like it might have been taken from one of the more solid UFO journals of years gone by–say, International UFO Reporter.  It’s in fact from a column entitled “Elves and Aliens,” published by Nick Richardson in the August 2 London Review of Books, the hard copy of which my friend Professor Fred Behrends was kind enough to pass along to me.

The article is interesting in its own right.  It’s still more interesting as an example of what I see as a media trend, which began with the New York Times coverage of the UFO videos eight months ago and has continued, again on the venerable pages of the Times, over the past three weeks.

Let’s start, though, with the London Review of Books article.  It’s about 3000 words, six long columns of small print.

Richardson begins with the video footage made public last December, expressing the highest respect for the pilot-witnesses, acknowledging how baffling their experiences were.  He shifts into speaking of the organization that published the footage online, the “To The Stars Academy” founded by former pop singer Tom DeLonge.  How easy it would have been to make fun of DeLonge, to depict him as a dilettante, a “cultist” (to use the term beloved of UFO debunkers), a “kook”!  But Richardson doesn’t do that.

DeLonge, Richardson writes, “sounded crazy then, but less so now.”  He’s surrounded by his colleagues in “To The Stars,” “five veterans of the US military and intelligence communities, all of whom look like they know where the bodies are buried.”  One of them, Luis Elizondo, director of a now discontinued Pentagon UFO project and the pivotal figure in last December’s news reports, is “an expert in microbiology and parasitology and an inventor with several patents: he doesn’t need UFOs to make a living.”  If DeLonge and the rest can be criticized for anything, it’s being naive about the probable extent of governmental chicanery and deception in dealing with UFOs.  (The stories from the 1980s of Paul Bennewitz and Richard Doty, appalling if true, are invoked in this connection.)

And now Richardson shifts into describing the theories of UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, to whom the lion’s share of the last two columns are devoted.  His admiration for Vallee seems to know no bounds.  There’s no question, Richardson thinks, that UFOs are real.  There are too many sightings by good witnesses, multiple witnesses, “for their accounts to be explained away as clouds or hallucinations.  But as Vallee continued his research, he came to realise that the eyewitness reports were at odds with the idea that UFOs and their pilots come from outer space.”

Rather, the “entities” observed seem to act like the “fairies, gnomes and elves” of folklore, pointing to a shared substrate in reality, which “humans have come into contact with … throughout history and have sought to explain them in the dominant terms of their culture: as angels, elves, or aliens.”  This is Vallee’s understanding of the UFO, enthusiastically endorsed by Richardson.

He concludes:  “What if To The Stars exists because it’s safer to have Tom DeLonge let us believe in aliens with superior technology than it is to acknowledge that reality itself may be different from what we think it is, and that the US government doesn’t understand it either?”

And maybe, neither does Neil deGrasse Tyson.  DeLonge and the rest of the UFOlogists are on the right track–certainly more so than debunkers like Tyson.  But they haven’t yet arrived at the more profound understanding proposed by Vallee.

I suggest we pause for a moment to reflect how extraordinary these assertions are (whether or not they’re true) on the pages of a highbrow journal whose political leanings, Professor Behrends informs me, are strongly to the left.  I might go so far as to call them, a respectabilization of the long-despised UFO.  At least on the liberal left, where not so very long ago that was the last place you’d expect to see it.

Which brings us to the New York Times.

My friend Mike Brown sends me a link to an article posted to www.nytimes.com on July 21, under the title “Suspicious Minds: Mingling with wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to ‘Ancient Aliens.'”  (It appeared in the print edition the following day, as “E.T., We’re Here.”)  “Wariness and wonder” is an apt description of the article’s stance.

The author, Steven Kurutz, is plainly unconvinced by the “ancient aliens” theorists.  He ends his piece with a particularly inspiring quote from one of their opponents.  Yet in sharp contrast to a Smithsonian piece to which Kurutz links, animated by the writer’s frantic loathing for the people and ideas he describes, Kurutz’s portrait of the “ancient aliens” conferees is sympathetic and appealing.

“Many Americans of the internet age have been in a mood to challenge established ideas. … We now know that the history that had been taught for years excluded the experiences of so many (African-Americans, women, the working poor).  What else had been left out?”

A lawyer from Arizona, come to Pasadena for the conference with 10,000 or so others, tells Kurutz:  “We shouldn’t accept blindly things we’ve been taught by quote-unquote scientists.”  And a woman says how she wants her children to “ask questions and not believe everything they’re told.”

Kurutz interviews Kevin Burns, the executive producer of the TV show “Ancient Aliens.”  The show succeeds, according to Burns, “because it explores spirituality and the mystery of life in an increasingly secular, data-driven culture.  Like religion, it offers seekers an origin story. … The questions posed by the ancient astronaut theorists, however far-fetched, serve a rare purpose, according to Mr. Burns: ‘It allows the audience to wonder.  And very few things on television do that.'”

This may be wrong-headed–perhaps we’re better off being driven by “data” than by “mystery”–but it’s far from contemptible.  The New York Times, by running Kurutz’s article, allows us to see that.

And as to the “modern aliens,” a.k.a. UFOs …

“A Radar Blip, a Flash of Light: How U.F.O.s ‘Exploded’ Into Public View.”  That’s the title of a piece by Laura M. Holson, posted to www.nytimes.com on August 3.  It’s about the radar-visual sightings, famous in their time, over Washington, DC, in July 1952, and is illustrated with photos of New York Times headlines from the period.  It’s also unabashedly “pro-UFO.”

Reading Holson’s article, I find myself wondering why it was published.  1952 is not exactly current events; if it was intended as an anniversary commemoration, it’s a couple of weeks too late; and the 66 years that have elapsed since then are not a smooth-edged chunk of history (as, say, 50 years would be).

Perhaps the best explanation is this paragraph from the middle of the piece:

“The topic is back in the headlines.  Last year, The Times wrote about a little known project founded in 2007, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, to investigate U.F.O. sightings.  A search of The Times’s historical archives reveals a rich bounty of U.F.O. sightings, lore and explanations since the 1950s.  And who can forget in 2016 when Hillary Clinton said she would reopen the real X-files if she were president?”

Actually, a search of the Times’ archives would reveal decades of glib dismissals.  Take, for example, the editorial of March 23, 1966, snidely headlined “Those Flying Saucers” (referring to the recent sightings in Michigan).  “Men have a strange propensity for seeing what they expect or want to see. …  The scientific community and the armed forces, as such, have dismissed such reports with thinly disguised scorn.  The astronomers say other worlds that could support beings like ourselves are so distant that travel here would border on the impossible and frequent visits would be preposterous. … The flying saucer enthusiasts demonstrate human frailties that are likely to sail on forever.”

If you imagine this might be exceptional, look up “New York Times” in the index of David Jacobs’ scholarly 1975 study The UFO Controversy in America, which speaks (page 71) of the newspaper’s “consistently hostile attitude toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis.”

This is the tradition that’s now being overturned.

The thread that holds Holson’s story together is the experience of Captain Pierman, who took his plane up in the early morning hours of July 20, 1952, to investigate unidentified radar blips.  He saw “as many as seven bluish-white lights that looked ‘like falling stars without tails.'”  Holson interviewed Pierman’s daughter, now 68 years old, and heard from her that her father never believed the official explanation, that what he’d seen was weather-created “temperature inversions.”

“‘I don’t want to use the words “cover-up,”‘ she said, of her father’s view.  ‘But it was very clear.  He saw it.  Everything was seen on radar.'”

That’s the way the article ends, and it’s about as blatant a piece of partisanship as can be imagined.  Four paragraphs earlier, Holson has approvingly quoted UFOlogist Kevin Randle as discounting the official explanation.  “‘I don’t think temperature inversion had much to do with it, but the news media accepted that explanation at the time,’ said Kevin Randle, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who has studied the events of July 1952 and is the author of the 2001 book, ‘Invasion Washington: U.F.O.s Over the Capitol.'”

Not “Kevin Randle, a flying saucer enthusiast whose frailties just keep on sailing.”  (I’ve always wondered: how does a frailty manage to “sail”?)  Rather, “Kevin Randle, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army,” with all the implications of gravitas this entails.  This is the new New York Times, whose new perspective on UFOs continues to boggle my mind.

Why are we getting this lovely attention, all of a sudden?

I’ll offer a short answer: Donald Trump.

The long answer?  I can’t give it.  I don’t know why one of the aftershocks of the seismic election of 2016 should have been that the liberal media–precisely those that Trump loves to bash–are lining up to support Unidentified Flying Objects.  (Contrast the right-wing polemic published last month under the title “More Democrats Believe In UFOs Than America”–apparently authored, interestingly, by an Orthodox Jew–which buries liberals and UFOs alike under mounds of abuse.)  But the correlation seems to me real, and to call for analysis.

As one more of those liberal East Coast media, New York Magazine, put it last March in a sympathetic UFO article:  “Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET versus Trump.”

As an epigram, it’s funny but also profound.  And important.

The New York Times, and now the London Review of Books, have taken ET’s side.

by David Halperin
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