It’s not, as they say, your father’s New York Times.
Very definitely, it’s not my father’s New York Times. My father, who died over 30 years ago, swore by the Times partly on account of its well-deserved reputation for gravity and sobriety, partly because of the center-left politics that dovetailed nicely with his own. (I still remember his coming home one summer afternoon in 1972 proclaiming, “Good news!”–this being that the Times had endorsed George McGovern for president.) “All the News That’s Fit to Print” was and still is the Times’ slogan; and printworthy news, for the Old Gray Lady of American journalism and for my father who loved her, definitely did not include nonsense like unidentified flying objects.
How the times (pun partly intended) have changed.
I’ve posted several times about this amazing transformation of the Times, which began in December 2017 with the revelation of a Pentagon UFO program and videos of unknown objects taken by Navy pilots, and has continued ever since. (For my subsequent posts on the subject, click here and here.) The latest installment of the Times’ UFO coverage appeared on Thursday, July 23. It was co-authored by the now-familiar team of veteran Times correspondent Ralph Blumenthal and best-selling UFO author Leslie Kean–who prior to 2017 had had no connection whatsoever with the Times–headlined “No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public.”
Although the article’s claims were rather modest, it included a few nuggets which, taken by themselves, were capable of begetting headlines far more dramatic. (As in New York Magazine the following day: “The Pentagon Has Reportedly Found ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made on This Earth’”.) The Pentagon’s UFO program, supposedly disbanded in 2012, turned out to have continued at least through 2017. The program, as per remarks made about a week earlier by Senator Marco Rubio, was primarily concerned with the possibility that some adversary nation like China or Russia has advanced technology that we know nothing about. (Vs. what Rubio called the “boring,” and presumably more reassuring, explanations of the unidentified whatever-they-are flying around up there.) But some “retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds.”
Reid, and the views attributed to him, are a pivot of the article. They turned out to be a source of some embarrassment for the authors.
“Mr. Reid, the former Democratic senator from Nevada who pushed for funding the earlier U.F.O. program when he was the majority leader, said he believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.” That was what Blumenthal and Kean originally wrote. But Reid apparently complained that he had been misquoted (or mis-paraphrased), and the Times wound up replacing this with something more bland and tentative:
“Mr. Reid … said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied.”
Who could quarrel with that, right? And on July 24, the day after the Times article appeared, Reid sent out a tweet (@SenatorReid) that seemed designed to distance himself still further from it:
“I have no knowledge—and I have never suggested—the federal government or any entity has unidentified flying objects or debris from other worlds. I have consistently said we must stick to science, not fairy tales about little green men.”
Ouch. The “little green men” of UFO myth–never or almost never actually reported in connection with UFOs–are invoked with plain intent to disparage, and the most obvious targets of disparagement are Blumenthal and Kean.
On Saturday the 25th, Blumenthal and Kean were interviewed by Jay (whose last name I’ve not been able to discover) for “Project Unity.” They put a brave face on the Reid walk-back, assuring Jay that Reid is “a great ally to the search for truth” and “a true friend of transparency” (Blumenthal). At the same time, they seem to stand by their original account of what Reid told them.
My own guess is that they’re right, and that Reid became alarmed at what he’d told them, and that the topic of “crash retrievals” (now a standard phrase in the UFO lexicon), was just too disreputable for him to acknowledge. Which does not mean that UFOs have crashed or been retrieved; I quite emphatically don’t believe they have. But that a former Senate majority leader nonetheless seems to hold this belief–that I think is “News That’s Fit to Print.”
As is his hasty disavowal of it.
“Charlie Bro-own, I’ll hold the football, and you come running up and kick it, OK?”
That was a recurrent gag in the old Peanuts comic strip, invoked by UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer in connection with the endless promises, never materialized, of UFO “disclosure.” It’s a cruel comparison but an apt one, and I think it applies rather well to what I’m guessing Reid did to Blumenthal and Kean. (In case you don’t remember, Lucy always snatches away the football, and the endlessly duped Charlie Brown lands with a great WHAM on his back.)
Reid wasn’t their only source. Eric Davis, introduced by Blumenthal and Kean as “an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007,” told them that he “gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from ‘off-world vehicles not made on this earth.'” (Compare this with the New York Magazine headline quoted above; recall the “telephone” game we used to play as kids.) He claimed to have given similar briefings “to staff members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 21, 2019, and to staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee two days later.”
In conversation with Jay, Blumenthal and Kean invoke the fact (or alleged fact) that high-level government officials heard such briefings as something of significance. Blumenthal evades the question of whether he himself believes in crash retrievals. But “discussion of crash retrievals is the next step forward,” says Kean; and she declares emphatically that the question of whether UFOs are real is no longer a question.
And Blumenthal:
“Our reporting over the last few years certainly suggests that these things are real enough to be picked up on Navy videos. And that is a huge step forward, that we’re not talking anymore about imaginary objects or archetypes or, you know, all kinds of mythical, you know, things flying around, you know, religious manifestations. We’re talking about actual physical objects that have been tracked and seen. So the next question is, well, what are they, where are they from, who’s running them …”
“Archetypes.” “Mythical.” “Religious manifestations.” Sounds exactly like what I’ve said in Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
Dare I imagine that Blumenthal knows of my book, and takes pains to say, no, don’t believe it? On the contrary: the flying saucers are real.
Not, as I’ve said, your father’s New York Times.
In the interview, Blumenthal and Kean take pains to stress how the Times supports their reportage. Did Liz Bumiller, the Times‘s Washington bureau chief, oppose the story, as some have said? Blumenthal and Kean deny it. Dean Baquet, the Times’s editor in chief? He gave it, they tell the interviewer, at least his tacit approval.
Yet a subsequent article, published on July 28, hints at misgivings. They’re taken aback, Blumenthal and Kean say, by the question “Do you believe in U.F.O.s?” It’s “inappropriately personal,” and even “silly.” But no, they don’t “believe” in UFOs, because the UFOs’ “existence, or nonexistence, is not a matter of belief.” After all–and here they quote Margaret Mead–you don’t talk about “believing” in the sun or the moon, or the chair you’re sitting on.
The reply strikes me as evasive, even disingenuous. It’s just not true, as they quote Mead as having said, that “belief … has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry.” It would be wholly legitimate for you to ask me, “Do you believe in global warming?” (To which I’d reply: “Of course I believe in it. The scientific evidence for it is overwhelming.”)
Listen to the “Project Unity” interview. I think you’ll be hard pressed not to come away thinking that Blumenthal and Kean are UFO believers, and indeed crusading ones. (“We’re all after the same thing, which is the truth,” Kean says near the end of the interview.) And they’ve tried, with no small measure of success–how usual is it that a person who has no connection with a newspaper regularly gets a byline in that newspaper, as Kean has?–to make the nation’s classic “newspaper of record” part of that crusade.
And of all the “News That’s Fit to Print,” that’s perhaps the fittest of all.
by David Halperin
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Now ready for ordering from Stanford University Press–my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO.
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Well written, thanks for the mention David 🙂
Jay | Project Unity
Thanks for posting, Jay!