The main article is decidedly short on specifics. In this case: What exactly did Elizondo’s team uncover? These techniques are great for exciting an audience, but they’re better suited to Ancient Aliens than the pages of the New York Times because the net effect is to cloud rather than illuminate key issues. Selectively omitting key details can make a mundane fact seem uncanny. Leaving a question unanswered implies that it is unanswerable. Making portentous assertions out of context is a powerful technique for creating a sense of mystery and drama. Were the produced documents credible? In what way were the buildings modified, and why was it necessary to modify them in order to store this material? What does it mean for an object to be associated with a phenomenon? What were the claimed physical effects, and were any physiological changes found? The straightforward presentation of these assertions implies that the authors believe them to be true. In addition, researchers also studied people who said that they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for physiological changes.” Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. “The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift,” the article asserted, later adding: “The company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. In reporting this part of the story, reporters Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean were much less careful about maintaining a critical eye. What got people excited was the implication that the program had collected evidence of encounters with unidentified flying objects. The fact that the program really existed was the part that the Times touted as its big get, but that wasn’t what set the internet on fire. (Fox News justifiably raised an eyebrow at the men’s lucrative interconnection.) What made the story Times-worthy was the fact that Elizondo’s account was vouched for by the man who’d arranged for its funding, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, as well as by the billionaire donor who won the contract to manage the program, Robert Bigelow. The main source in the Times article was a former Pentagon employee named Luis Elizondo, who ran a small program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification from 2007 until it was shut down in 2012. The tl dr appeared to be “flying saucers are real.” But a closer reading suggests a murkier proposition. As put it, “The article is shocking, and arguably represents a historical inflection point in our attitudes regarding UFOs.” Twitter user Space Traveller wrote: “How is everyone not losing it over this Pentagon #UFO report and footage?!” Even inveterate bubble-burster Neil deGrasse Tyson accepted that something was out there, reminding CNN viewers that just because an object was unidentified didn’t necessarily mean it came from outer space. Appearing first on the web on Saturday, it came out in print on Sunday as a front-page story entitled “Real U.F.O.s? Pentagon Unit Tried to Know.” As if wary of the waters into which it was about to wade, the piece started out in a sober and measured tone, describing the existence of a heretofore little-known Department of Defense program, but then after the jump to page 27 loosened up and gave free rein to claims that the program had found evidence of strange aircraft that flew in seemingly impossible ways.įor Ufologists who had dreamed of being taken seriously by the mainstream media, the story was a dream come true. government has been tracking them for years. The internet went slightly more bananas than usual last weekend over the New York Times’ story implying that extraterrestrials are real and the U.S. A photo of a UFO spotted spotted on October 16, 1957, near Holloman Air Force Missile Development Center in New Mexico, which was released by the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization.
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