Our show was entitled “The Pentagon UFO/UAP Report,” and it was recorded on July 23 and aired the following day. Dan Schneider of “Cosmoetica” (“the oldest and most popular non-commercial arts site online”) had brought me, Robert Sheaffer, and Preston Dennett together for an hour-long video interview. Given that Preston is a committed UFO advocate, Robert an equally committed debunker, and I–well, I neither believe nor debunk, but have devoted myself to seeking out a third way–serious fireworks among us were to be anticipated.
That there weren’t any, that we all maintained a high degree of civility and respect, is a tribute to Dan’s formidable skill as interviewer and moderator.
As it turned out, we spent rather little time talking about the Pentagon report, released on June 25 to great expectations by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Naturally. How much can you say about a report which, like a college paper written by a C student who never wanted to take the course in the first place, was dutifully produced in response to a requirement but shows itself to be completely clueless and mostly uninterested? “Boondoggle,” was Preston’s verdict; and Robert had to agree, although for reasons diametically opposed to Preston’s.
I agreed too. As I look back on the conversation, it was probably the only thing all three of us agreed on. The main thing that leaped out to me from this nondescript 9-page document was: “Give me money.” The task force assigned to produce the report hadn’t produced any very impressive results–out of 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomena” by military pilots, they’d managed to find an explanation for exactly one. But cross their palms with greenbacks, and they might conceivably do better next time.
(How different from the bumptious self-confidence of the old Project Blue Book “Fact Sheets” of the 1950s and 60s, where you could always trust the “unknowns” to be reduced to a mere 2%!)
So we mostly left the report undiscussed, and focused our conversation on the Navy videos whose release in 2017 set in motion the chain of events that led to the report’s appearance. Particularly the “Tic-Tac” video of November 14, 2004, part of the tangled and complex series of UFO-related events centering on the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, off the southern coast of California.
Predictably, Robert saw the videos as being of mundane aerial objects–a jet, a weather balloon–and Preston demurred. I found myself having to agree with Robert. I was troubled, however, by how murky the reports of the 2004 events were and remain.
How does the infrared video relate to the visual sighting experienced by David Fravor and his “wingman,” the very impressive Alex Dietrich who made her appearance last May on “60 Minutes”? (Also Jim Slaight, who was the Weapons System Officer aboard Dietrich’s plane and who appeared at an earlier stage of Nimitz saga as Fravor’s supporting witness; more on him presently.) What were the returns picked up by radar operators on the Nimitz, and how do these interact with the visual sightings and the video?
After all, “radar-visual sightings” have been hailed as the most convincing evidence of UFO reality, since back when I was a teen UFOlogist in the 1960s. But only if the radar signal and the visual sighting relate to the same place at the same time. If a UFO is picked up on radar and nobody can see anything unusual in the spot where it’s supposed to be, the natural inference is that there’s some glitch in the radar.
Robert stressed, appropriately, that the infrared video was not part of the Fravor/Dietrich/Slaight sighting. (Although, as we’ll see, Dietrich viewed it and claimed it was the same object that she saw.) It was made later that same afternoon by a different set of pilots. This emerges from the detailed report on the Nimitz incident published in March 2019 by the “Scientific Coalition for Ufology” (SCU)”: Fravor’s and Dietrich’s planes returned to the Nimitz shortly after 3:00 p.m.; another pair of jets took off a little over an hour later. “CDR Fravor had requested that the crew with the ATFLIR pod obtain a video of the object should they encounter it.”
I guess they did encounter it. That’s why we have the video. But did they see (visually) anything unusual, as Fravor, Dietrich and Slaight did? We don’t know the pilots’ names, and that doesn’t bother me. I can see why they might want to stay anonymous. But that it’s so hard to figure out what they experienced or claimed to have experienced, and that the SCU report for all its meticulous detail is so vague on this point–that, I have a hard time swallowing.
If there’s anything I regret about the Cosmoetica interview, it’s that we didn’t spend more time talking about Alex Dietrich. I’ve already blogged some about her, and the more I think about this remarkable woman, the more of an enigma she seems.
Under the title “2004 USS Nimitz Pilot Report,” the To The Stars Academy has posted to its website an account of an interview conducted on September 7, 2017, with a witness called only “Source.” Source’s identity is carefully concealed, with all personal pronouns put in the plural (“they,” “their”) so we can’t guess the pilot’s gender. In retrospect, it’s clear why: Source is none other than Dietrich.
I won’t try to summarize the report–you can read it for yourself, at the link above. (It’s also reproduced in Appendix C of the SCU report, pp. 106-112.) But some of the points Dietrich told the interviewer about the pilots’ return to the Nimitz are so interesting, I will quote them here:
“Upon recovery of both aircraft, Source, OK-1 [Slaight], OK-2 [Fravor], and OK-3 [Fravor’s Weapons System Officer, who remains anonymous] arrived for their routine intelligence debriefing only to find that no debriefing official was available. Furthermore, closed circuit television on board the ship had movies involving aliens and paranormal activities playing. (Field Comment – Source was furious that colleagues on the ship were not taking the incident seriously and were playing the movies ‘Signs’, ‘Men in Black’, and ‘X-Files’.) …
“During this time, Source made detailed written notes of the incident on available printer paper and mailed them to their Aunt with the notice ‘keep this because this is important stuff about some real X-Files shit.’ (Field Comment – Source is unaware if copies of the gun tapes still exist but maintains an original copy of their notes and log book entry.)”
Important stuff about some real X-Files shit???!!! Not the most sober way to describe the event. And I wonder: are these notes Dietrich made to send her aunt (why not her husband?) the same as the “written account” made “within, I would say, hours of landing” that she told Anderson Cooper about? Did she later retrieve them from her aunt? And, if she knew perfectly well that this is “important stuff,” why does she seem to have taken so little care to keep it where she could lay her hands on it?
“According to Source, [the anonymous pilots] OK-4 and OK-5 also encountered the same object later the same day … and obtained brief FLIR footage of the incident. When OK-4 and OK-5 later compared the video, Source identified the object affirmatively as being the same one they [i.e., she] saw earlier.” But again: did they actually see the thing? (In the introduction to the interview, the writer for the To The Stars Academy says the pilots who got the video “reportedly” saw the object. But is this based on information? Or simply a guess?)
And the following peculiar little note:
“No negative physiological or mental issues were experienced during the incident or afterwards. Source indicated they [i.e., she] experienced some time dilation during the incident but believes it was due to their heightened state of excitement and adrenaline and not a result of their interaction with the object.”
Does this imply that Dietrich thought that “time dilation”–does the phrase have meaning outside an Einsteinian context?–would be a natural result of a UFO encounter? If so–what would have given her this idea?
It’s natural, and wholly legitimate, to focus on the Nimitz event as an aerial and possibly also marine mystery. (Robert suggested that the “Tic-Tac” might have been triggered by the sight of a whale in the ocean below, and I suppose this is thinkable.) But there’s another perspective from which we can view it. Take it as the cultural phenomenon that it’s become, a public drama performed by a cast that’s partly constant, partly in flux.
Principal witness: David Fravor. This is the leading role, the one Fravor has played since December 2017, when the New York Times first broke the news of the Nimitz incident on the front page of its Sunday edition.
Supporting witness: Jim Slaight–in the show’s initial run. Slaight appears alongside Fravor in the Times article, which says that he “has given a similar account” to Fravor’s, but is unclear exactly what Slaight described or whether the Times reporters (Helene Cooper, Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal) actually spoke with him. A few days later, he’s interviewed along with Fravor on The Jesse Watters Show.
And then he disappears from the stage. His name, as far as I can tell, doesn’t even appear on the playbills.
In the “60 Minutes” UFO segment of May 16, he isn’t even mentioned. It isn’t even hinted that there was another witness to the incident beside Fravor and Alex Dietrich–who’s now cast in the supporting-witness role.
I wasn’t quite accurate when I said, in my earlier post, that Dietrich “appears, seemingly out of nowhere.” A Twitter user who calls himself “Mad Mick” (@RedsGoMarchin) was kind enough to refer me to Joe Rogan Podcast #1361 (October 5, 2019), where Fravor was interviewed and apparently spoke of Dietrich. (I haven’t listened to the podcast.) She may have been mentioned also, says “Mad Mick,” on an Alex Fridman podcast of September 2020. And, as we’ve seen, she was willing to speak about her experience, albeit anonymously, to the To The Stars Academy in September 2017, more than three months before the appearance of the Times article.
- A man is replaced in the second slot by a woman–and a strikingly attractive and capable woman, indeed. In the context of 2021 America, is that shift likely to be without cultural significance?
- Is it coincidence that the current lineup of “stars” of the Nimitz drama mirrors the figures at the apex of government, where our national “second” is now a woman, notably attractive and accomplished, much like Dietrich?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. But they’re the questions my kind of UFOlogy is bound to ask.
Dan wound up the show by asking for “some final opinions” from the three of us. I’ll let you watch the video to hear what Preston and Robert said in response to this. But here’s mine:
“Much as I may disagree with Preston about many things he said, there is one point on which which I would heartily agree with him, and that is that UFOs are not going away. Just as the UFOlogy community has been predicting some sort of a dramatic denouement or now ‘disclosure’ for decades and it never happens, similarly the skeptics have predicting for decades that we’re all going to lose interest in UFOs, and it seems clear now that the very opposite is happening.
“And I think that is because the UFOs are an essential part of who we are as human beings, and as, I would add, religious human beings.
“And I think this is the real UFO story, and I think it’s an amazing and wonderful story.”
by David Halperin
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My book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–published by Stanford University Press, listed by Religion News Service among “the most intriguing books on religion we read this year.”
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And we can conclude that…? It’s not easy to live suspended between belief or disbelief, science or religion, physical or mental, real or unreal, yes or no. Who wouldn’t prefer to settle on one side of that Aristotelian either/or? However, tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty, perhaps even welcoming them, sure helps to develop a flexible mind. A mind that can admit those odd inputs from the periphery without having to remake them into something manageable.
I, too, was one of those mid-’60s teens interested in UFOs, who read a book form of Project Bluebook I found in a local (Seattle) library. And then J. Alan Hynek’s later response. If asked, I explained this as coming from my long interest in astronomy. In 1957, when I was 9, the Sputnik launch resulted in crash courses in subjects like astronomy so we’d grow up to do science that would outdo the Russians.
But really it was for some reasons I didn’t want to talk about. Too scary, and it was clearly taboo. As an young adult, I could see that going too far into the weird side led to having your sanity questioned. To being dismissed, and worse, laughed at. Worst of all, most attempts I’ve made to discuss my own experiences with others hasn’t ended well. I’ve refused to recant my use of the word “abduction”– something I’ve encountered since childhood. No, I don’t take those experiences literally. I admit I don’t know how to process events for which there are no adequate categories. So I’m skeptical of any single explanation that is a claim to know exactly what is happening and why.
Especially those, which include claims by people with solid scientific and medical credentials, who are certain the UFOs and associated entities are benevolent. Often paired, usually implicitly but sometimes explicitly, with the idea that these will somehow rescue us. To me, this is way too passive. Uncomfortably close to being a PoMo version of savior sky gods. Furthermore, a version that perpetuates the western split between good and evil. Jung’s concept of the Shadow and his Answer to Job are ways to see our own darkness, to take responsibility for it. Which would help to heal that division whereby we are good and those enemy Others are bad, projection of what we don’t want to see in ourselves. So to assert that ETs and UFOs are all good is to me problematic.
I’m not at all saying the whatever-they-ares are hostile–a trope favored by conspiracy minded ultra conservative men. In contrast, the channelers, mostly women, who report messages of peace and love from the Space Brothers. I’ve asked several channelers if they’ve ever asked for specific instructions as to how to achieve the call for a better planet. None have; they just repeat what they receive.
The other influence I received at age 9 also contributed to how I reflect on these things. I had a teacher who read Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales to us kids, thus mythology became a favorite subject, part of the artistic side, quite different from the side of rationalism and empiricism. Put an apple, one multicolored like a Jonagold, in the middle of the table. Sit several artists around the table such that each has a slightly different perspective. Have them do paintings. Now decide, as rationalists would, which one is the real apple. Moreover, scientifically, a painting is a chunk of cloth with splotches of pigment. It is the mystical, poetic, artistic, spiritual, and mythological that give it meaning. That is what I think is the main function of ET/UFO phenomena. Whether or not they’re physical, or alien, or advanced technology doesn’t alter that we’re witnesses to an emerging mythology, to emerging archetypes, to meanings that can’t be understood by logical analysis alone. As experts on comparative religion like Jeff Kripal can see clearly.
I’ve seen the blurbs that describe your book as saying that UFOs are myth, and myth is real. I just sent for it and am really, really looking forward to reading it.
Rafi, thank you for posting and sharing your experience!
Do let me know your thoughts on my book, when you’ve had a chance to read it.
I received your book Sun. and read it through. I am doing so again, this time with my usual margin notes, questions, dog ears, rips–I physically converse with books. I’m also re-reading Jung’s book Flying Saucers (A Modern Myth.) I would like to send detailed commentary on your book, if you want. I presume you have my email address; write a short note to me and I’ll reply. It will take me a few days to compose something worth reading.
As evidence that despite decades of encounters with high weirdness I’m still relatively sane, I’m one of JJK’s correspondents. Or was prior to the COVID interruptions. IMO he’s onto something with what he calls “the traumatic secret.” Who/whatever he recommends or mentions in his research I read (or have already read): Vallee, Keel, Pasulka, Krohn, Crabtree, Strassman, Michael Murphy, DeConnick, Wolfson, Scholem, Mavromatis, et al. I have books on on both traditional Jewish and western esoteric KBL. Plus lots of Jung. An extensive collection of, as JJK titled it, “Mutants and Mystics.”
Although I have reservations about Whitley Strieber, in my opinion his comment that “perhaps this is what evolution looks like to a conscious mind” is pretty close to the truth.
And to do a Shaveresque etymological mash-up, I see Da’ath, Duat, and Death as indeed related. In the western Christianity of the RCs and their descendants, sin is the problem. For the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Christians, it’s death. Another piece to fit into that vast, complex jigsaw puzzle where most of it is sky.
( This is my 2nd post here, not sure if my previous comment is being ‘reviewed’-
I’m having problems with ‘outdated browser’ perhaps …
I’d like to mention my agreement with Rafi’s comment and note that the 3 of us are from the same generation – I was born Aug 1948- and was a huge fan of ‘monster movies’ and the early ‘Flying Saucer films’ – “This Island Earth”, “Invaders from Mars”( terrifying !) and “The Thing From Another World” ( the human eating PLANT that crash landed on Earth from outer space !)
Also, my first memories of Flying Saucers was noticing my Mother’s reaction to news on the radio as we were going to a Saturday night fireworks exhibit -she was very concerned and asked my Dad ( who was an aircraft mechanic at Norfolk Naval Air Station ) if it was possible – I actually hadn’t been paying attention to the radio but was in the back seat looking at people as we drove through a neighborhood –
and my Dad laughed in similar amazement responding “ Darn if I know ! “
I later realized this was news about ‘the DC Fly Over’ in July 1952 and the ’Saucers’ had been reported locally just across the Chesapeake Bay, where we also have Langely Air Force Base and Army air training bases – at Ft Eustis there is an army air transport museum with ( I think) an Avro flying disc experimental craft displayed at the entrance to the base – not far from the CIA training school just up the road ….
I also remember as we walked onto the beach among the packed crowd assembling for the show that there was a large light in the dark twilight sky and people were unusually quiet- as folks said ‘look at that ! What is it ! – then complete silence and then very clearly a child said with seriousness,
“It’s a frying pan.” and the crowd burst into laughter !
And soon an adult ‘authority’ stated it was just a helicopter from Langely ….where are the potato chips …
The DC ’saucer invasion’ with multiple radars on ground and in the air and pilot ‘sightings’ ( referred to by Ruppelt as ‘Washington Merry Go Round’ ) is still one of the best events – yet just more “Swamp Gas” according to UKW – and I wonder if Ruppelt actually ‘believed’ in the ‘temperature inversion explanation’.
( more likely Orgone Energy – re my earlier post )
But finally I’d like to say that I have actually never found any friend or relative who has been interested enough in this subject to have actually read a book on it !
And throughout my years I’ve never even found anyone ‘in the public places’ who responded with any interest to even a casual mention of UFOs in the news —
what do you think – just a blank don’t know head shake ???
Only exception was at the UFO events near DC early turn of the century …wow!
Thanks for posting, Mike! I love your story about the echoes of the 1952 DC incidents.
Like you, I seldom encounter people with a serious enough interest in UFOs to read a book on them. Yet some UFO books, like Leslie Kean’s, have become bestsellers, and I think the main attraction of Annie Jacobsen’s bestselling “Area 51” was the alleged connection of that site with a UFO crash. Not sure how to reconcile.
You posted some comments here at the beginning of June. Since then, I haven’t seen anything from you; certainly no comment of yours is being reviewed. Maybe swallowed up in cyberspace?
Actually quite often my comments here have never appeared ?
most likely my browser and ‘method’ of responding …
Also, due to the different ways ‘blog comments’ are handled, I’m usually expecting an Email response whenever someone has replied – and that doesn’t happen here either … I do receive notice at the end of the month, and at times ‘check in’ to see if you’ve posted …and found your latest response.
I have been wondering about your opinion on the very remarkable ‘son of Freud’ who seems to be completely forgotten these days : Wilhelm Reich and his theories , Character Analysis, “Mass Psychology of Fascism”, ”The Murder of Christ” and his theories of Orgone energy …
His son Peter wrote a book about ‘cloud busting’ and contact with a ‘flying saucer’…
I was reading Forte’s works as they were republished in paperback rather than ‘sci- fi’ ( my authors were Poe, Twain, Swift, O’ Henry …12yo on..)
Also, I’m wondering if perhaps the first x rays of the human fetus ( maybe on some tv show and later printed in popular magazines) could have ‘inspired’ the ‘classic big eyed alien’ ?
And finally my ’song of the day’ is from the marvelous Ray Stevens –
“ I Saw Elvis in a UFO “
Elvis is not alone !
btw enjoyed the ‘debate’ and your post- as usual very thought ‘inducing’
Yep, same age–June ’48 here. I did see briefly your 1st comment; also appreciated. As is the comment on orgone. Their nasty old “swamp gas” ain’t blue nor inspiring.
I’ve had serious conversations with informed, intelligent people. But very few UFO or alt. realities researchers can remain suspended in that cloud of unknowing. Many finally reach for relief, grabbing onto one explanation to the exclusion of alternatives.
At which point discussion is nearly impossible. If you ask questions, no matter how politely, about their frame of understanding or worse, suggest that other interpretations might have some validity, they often react in anger. Were it a theological dispute, such responses would be seen as typical of how righteous believers reject heresy.
Do an on-line search and you’ll be swamped by the numbers. Conspiracy theorists, fans of the many forms of Space Brothers, starseeds/indigo children, commiserating abductees, and even websites run by well-credentialed MDs, scientists, and academics. IMO few, if any, remain neutral very long.