Don't get me wrong, the gray lady is still as stuffy and arrogant as ever, but in terms of gullibility, it is edging ever closer to "I had a space alien's baby." (That's more of a Weekly World News headline, but you get my drift.)
What is it with the NYT and UFOs?
— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 22, 2023
Corrected headline: Conspiracy Theorists Pressure Government into Investigating Debunked Story.https://t.co/52wtxteRGw
When I say 'debunked' I mean now less credible than Uri Geller. For one thing, Geller put some real effort into fooling people. Remigio (Reme) Baca and Joseph Lopez (Jose) Padilla, two childhood friends from New Mexico, just started telling stories about how fifty years earlier they had encountered a crashed alien spaceship with both living and dead crew. Their only evidence was a part from a pump obviously of terrestrial manufacture. Their story kept changing and yet none of the versions checked out. They were both caught in numerous transparent lies. The claims that can't be checked are to incredible to treat seriously. After the story started making the rounds, the son of an army air corps pilot claimed that his father had transported the aliens' bodies from the crash site. The story was completely unsupported, changed from telling to telling, and followed attempts to insert his father into two other well known tales of UFO sightings.
That is the tl;dr version of the Trinity incident. If you have the time, you should read all of Johnson's posts on the subject -- it's a hell of a story -- but the paragraph above is what you need to know. Keep that in mind as you the NYT article mentioned in the tweet.
From Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945? A Defense Bill Seeks Answers.
Remy Tumin -- 2023/01/13
An amendment tucked into this year’s $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the Defense Department’s annual operating budget, requires the department to review historical documents related to unidentified aerial phenomena — government lingo for U.F.O.s — dating to 1945. That is the year that, according to one account, a large, avocado-shaped object struck a communication tower in a patch of New Mexico desert now known as the Trinity Site, where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated that July.
Experts said the bill, which President Biden signed into law in December, could be a game changer for studying unidentified phenomena.
“The American public can reasonably expect to get some answers to questions that have been burning in the minds of millions of Americans for many years,” said Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence. “If nothing else, this should either clear up something that’s been a cloud hanging over the Air Force and Department of Defense for decades or it might lead in another direction, which could be truly incredible. There’s a lot at stake.”
...
“This is what all scientists and my colleagues have always dreamed of,” said Dr. Vallée, who has helped study reports of U.F.O.s for the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, the French space agency. He said that the U.S. government’s agreement to dig into the past meant “the stigma has been removed.”
Dr. Vallée began studying the Trinity incident several years ago alongside a journalist, Paola Harris, and interviewed people who claimed to have witnessed the crash. Dr. Vallée and Ms. Harris chronicled their research in a book, “Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret,” including the details of the avocado-shaped object. They also spoke to witnesses who said they came across the object as children and found what they described as “little creatures.”
In the United States, Dr. Vallée said, “there has always been, on the part of the government, especially the Pentagon,” a sense that civilian sightings are unreliable. “The reason,” he said, “is that civilians don’t have the technology to really document what happens, and of course the Pentagon does.”
And the federal government is about to spend valuable time and money pretending this is real.
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