UFO Roundup, June 21, 2021 – Britain’s Roswell, UFO Conspiracy, Oumuamua Revisited

The summer had hardly begun–the solstice was at 11:31 p.m. on June 20–when a smorgasbord of fascinating articles about UFOs appeared in a wide range of media.  And I thought 2020 was “the summer of the saucers”!  Even before the appearance of the Pentagon’s “UAP” report, even before the June 24 anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting (1947) that began the modern UFO era, 2021 had already, if you’ll forgive a summertime-oriented expression, put 2020 in the shade.

Here’s a quick summary of what the media had to offer on June 21:

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In The Guardian, whose excellent UFO coverage I’ve remarked on in my last post, there’s a fine piece by Alex Mistlin, profiling the UFO scene in a town that most of us provincial American UFOlogists have never heard of: Todmorden, England, declared to be “Britain’s answer to Roswell.”  Bookstore owner Colin Lyall is quoted: “The association between Todmorden and UFOs will always be there and that’s great because it makes it unique.”

I won’t try to tell the UFO stories connected with Todmorden; you can go to The Guardian for details.  Striking, though, that one of them has to do with the mysterious death of a coal miner named Zigmund Adamski–the same surname as George Adamski, perhaps the most famous of the 1950s flying saucer contactees.

And David Clarke, skeptic that he is, comments:  “UFOs are really just a modern manifestation of that desire for there to be a higher power … Places like Todmorden have got longstanding traditions of people seeing strange lights, losing time or even being abducted by fairies.”  Clarke, whom I blogged about six years ago, seems to me to oversimplify a rich and complex mythology with his “just a modern manifestation.”  But I’d love to know what those “longstanding traditions” are–what sources we have for them, and how they’ve been transformed in the age of the UFO.

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Another skeptic, Mick West, is the focus of a thoughtful article in The Hill, “The world’s most passionate UFO skeptic versus the government” by Marik von Rennenkampff.  Perhaps the headline does West an injustice by calling him “the world’s most passionate”; what makes West’s skepticism outstanding, and what has propelled him to the center of the current discourse on UFOs, is not the vehemence of his disbelief–he has been unfailingly courteous and respectful toward those who hold opposing views–but the calm expertise with which he’s proposed non-ET alternatives for such apparent pieces of UFO evidence as the Navy videos.

A curious irony: for years, UFOlogists have railed against government authorities for debunking UFOs.  But as von Rennenkampff depicts matters, it’s now the government that’s promoting UFO reality, and West the lone challenger saying, Whoa, let’s think again.  “This puts Mick in an odd position,” von Rennenkampff observes.  “As he noted just last year, convincing conspiracy theorists ‘that the government can be right about things’ is often an arduous task. In a fascinating twist, West now believes that the government is catastrophically wrong on a high-profile topic.”

I’m not sure I quite buy von Rennenkampff’s reading of the debate.  (Does he still hold with it, now that the Pentagon’s UFO report has come out?)  But I can applaud his conclusion:  “Stay tuned. Regardless of how Mick’s disagreement with government analysts plays out, this is just the beginning of a remarkable story.”

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You want vehemence?  Then go to Salon.com, where Chauncey DeVega interviews Jason Colavito for an article headlined “Why Tucker Carlson loves UFOs.”  The thrust of Colavito’s remarks is that the current fascination with UFOs–“hysteria,” DeVega calls it–is part of the toxic brew of conspiracy theories that range from the full-fledged lunacy of QAnon to the more mainstream-irrational belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.  That’s why Carlson is cheering it on.

And that is a very bad thing.

“Carlson has been all in on pushing flying-saucer conspiracy theories, in large measure because flying-saucer conspiracy theories have long been associated with right-wing extremism,” Colavito tells DeVega.  He goes on at once, however, to nuance this.  “Now, that is not to say that everyone who is interested in UFOs and flying saucers is a right-wing conspiracy theorist — but right-wing extremist groups have made a concerted effort to infiltrate flying saucer and UFO communities in order to use that belief in conspiracy theory as a wedge issue to draw more people into that type of conspiratorial thinking.”

(Michael Barkun said much the same in his 2003 book A Culture of Conspiracy.  “The most immediate advantage for New World Order [conspiratorial] ideas of being placed in a UFO context has been a reduction in stigma … a bridge to the territory of semirespectable beliefs”–UFOs being, yeah, maybe a bit flaky, but socially harmless, unlike the conspiracy theories “deemed both false and dangerous.”)

Colavito has a point, and Carlson is the perfect example with which to make it.  But his reading of the situation is way, way oversimplified.

Yes, the right-winger Carlson loves UFOs.  But so does veteran New York Times correspondent Ralph Blumenthal, co-author of the Times articles that (in December 2017) lit the fuse under UFOs’ current rocket-flight into respectability.  To judge from his Facebook page, Blumenthal’s political views are center-left, and harshly critical of Trump.  The December ’17 UFO flap seems to have been fueled mostly by the liberal East Coast media that Trump loves to bash; Trump-friendly media were indifferent or hostile.  And in the political arena, it’s not Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene beating the drum for UFOs–do UFOs even have a place in the lush jungle of Greene’s conspiracy world?–but John Podesta and Harry Reid.

Both Reid and Blumenthal appear, in more or less villainous roles, in Colavito’s polemic essay “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers,” published on The New Republic website on May 21.  The subtitle, which Colavito may not have written but which accurately represents the thrust of his article:  “A collection of well-funded UFO obsessives are using their Capitol Hill connections to launder some outré, and potentially dangerous, ideas.”

Or, in Colavito’s own words:

“Behind the creamy pages of high-end magazines and the marble columns of the Capitol, the media elite and Congress are being played by a small, loosely connected group of people with bizarre ideas about science. It’s easy to dismiss UFOs as a fantasy or a fad, but the money, the connections, and the power wielded by a group of UFO believers—embedded in the defense industry and bent on supplanting material science with a pseudoscientific mysticism straight from the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens—poses a danger to America more real than a flying saucer.”

For there’s “a deeper transformation” the UFO advocates want to bring about: “to delegitimize material science in favor of a magical, neo-medieval view of reality founded on spirit—or, in their terms, ‘consciousness’ and psychic powers. … UFOs, newly relevant as a security threat, are only the vanguard of a larger effort to undo the failure of Stargate and elevate spirit over matter. It’s bad science and dangerous as government policy, the kind of magical thinking that leads to lunacy and disaster.”

Danger to America … vanguard of a larger effort … hmmm.  Sounds kind of like a conspiracy theory to me.

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And, finally, Scientific American weighs in–with a disclaimer that the author’s views are not necessarily those of the magazine–with a column by John Gertz titled “Maybe the Aliens Really Are Here.” 

Subtitle: “But if so, it’s probably in the form of robotic probes—something both UFO enthusiasts and SETI scientists should be able to agree on.”

I don’t know that I’m particularly persuaded by Gertz’s thesis, that UFOs may very well be alien spacecraft but probably not with pilots inside.  What seems to me dramatic–I’m tempted to say, earth-shattering–is that Scientific American is willing to give a platform to an article claiming common ground between UFOlogists and those pursuing the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.  The SETI folk, insistent on their status as respectable scientists, have seldom wanted anything to do with us “enthusiasts,” as though we’re a bad smell that might seep into their  clothes if they come too close.

I would have expected that any discussion of robotic probes from other worlds would have included at least a parenthesis on Oumuamua.  This mysterious visitor to our solar system, normally depicted in the media as an elongated rocky object that (forgive me) strikes me as looking like a gigantic space turd, was first detected in October 2017.  A little over a year later, the distinguished Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb floated the idea that it wasn’t a natural object but an artifact of intelligence, a space probe sent our way from some alien civilization.  Just the sort of thing Gertz is trying to convince us might be behind the UFO sightings.  Surely he’d have to make some mention of Oumuamua, wouldn’t he?

Oddly, he doesn’t.  (Apart from the title of one paper in his bibliography, which I’ll talk about in a minute.)

Not that Loeb has any reason to care.  His book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, published last January, quickly made its way onto the best-seller charts; and Loeb achieved that supreme prize, an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

I listened to Extraterrestrial as an audiobook–admittedly, not the best way to absorb it–and found it unimpressive.  It is maddeningly repetitious, padded with anecdotes, observations and philosophical disquisitions of the most dubious relevance, plainly in the interest of making it long enough really to be a book.  Yet, despite his obvious eagerness to jack up his word count in every way possible, Loeb does not find a word to say about UFOs, even to disparage them.

This in spite of his claim, in Extraterrestrial, that Oumuamua isn’t as it’s usually depicted; rather, it’s an ultra-thin metallic disk.  (He says, if I recall correctly, that there’s a 91% chance this is correct.)  Maybe not quite the classic flying saucer, but close enough.  The scientific community has mostly responded to Loeb’s speculation with dismissal, much as they have to the UFOlogists; he responds, in classic UFOlogist fashion, with extended complaints about narrow-minded dogmatism, buttressed by invocations of Galileo.  The parallels would cry out for observation, for remark.  Yet in Extraterrestrial–only silence.

Call it karmic retribution: as Loeb snubs the UFOs as unworthy of notice, so Gertz snubs Loeb’s Oumuamua in his popular Scientific American piece.  He does deal with it in a more technical paper, “Oumuamua and SETI Scout Probes,” published in 2019 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.  There he declares himself skeptical of Loeb’s interpretation, though not dismissing it entirely.  So Gertz’s door is open to Oumuamua, if only a crack.

But for UFOs, his doorway is wide and welcoming.

“Purported sightings by military pilots of objects that defy all known aerodynamics in their sudden and steep accelerations may be delusions, hoaxes or optical illusions.  Nevertheless, many SETI scientists now agree with UFOers that the first alien detection plausibly could occur within our own solar system. Both UFOers and SETI scientists should also agree that if some UFO sightings are genuine sightings of aliens, then they must be of robotic probes rather than vessels crewed by biological beings. … The evidence is still lacking that would fully unify UFOers and SETI scientists—and yet the space between these two groups may not be so far vast [sic] after all.”

Talk about strange bedfellows!  Right on, Mr. von Rennenkampff: “just the beginning of a remarkable story”!  And the summer of ’21 is only ten days old.