By Martin Willis
Since our blogger, Charles Lear is off the week, I thought I would inject a brief opinion about my thoughts on what has changed with UFOs since late 2017. What better time to do that than now with my guest, Lue Elizondo who played a key role.
It may have had an unusual title: “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program” but it certainly changed everything in the world of UFOs. There have been other great informative articles since in the New York Times, but this one was on the front page and it started the UFO ball rolling.
Those of us really fascinated with the UFO topic were really paying attention when To The Stars Academy Of Arts & Science launched in October of the same year and ran a livestream featuring their prestigious team consisting of: Luis Elizondo, James Semivan, Harold (Hal) Puthoff, Steve Justice, Chris Mellon, and president, Tom Delonge. We heard some amazing things that day, and there was a real bustle among the UFO community, social media was ablaze for several days, and then things seem to settle down. There was some talk here and there, but the needle wasn’t really moved too far from what I could tell.
Then a few months later, on a Saturday morning, December 16, 2017, I got a text from my son, a skeptic by the way, asking me if I had seen the New York Times. He was talking about the online version, and he said “You have got to check it out, it looks like a video of a real UFO and the article says that the Pentagon has been secretly looking into them”. When I searched and found the page, I could’ve sworn I had seen that video before, and then I read the article once and then again. A lot of what I read; I already knew from the livestream that I had watched in October. But what I read by the authors in this article; Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean was much more in depth. There were other perspectives that were very interesting to say the least.
What was also different is, the New York Times is not a tabloid looking for sensational fictional stories. It is the 18th most circulated newspaper in the entire world and has won 130 Pulitzer Prizes since the founding in 1851. In other words, it’s a very credible paper with an incredible story.
Within a week, there were over 120 cable news reports worldwide, all spawned from the December 16th article as well as countless newspaper articles and blogs. Social media was ablaze and not just within the UFO community.
There was a great follow-up article by Ralph Blumenthal published two days later titled: On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program
Since that time, cable news is taking a hard look at UFOs without a smirk or playing X-File’s theme music.
As I am always cautious about mentioning my interest in the topic during my real job, as an estate and art appraiser, a month or two later, I was in a home in Massachusetts and noticed a “Fly Navy” bumper sticker on a car in the driveway. After working in the home for an hour or two, I got the courage to ask if the gentlemen had seen the interview with David Fravor about the USS Nimitz “Tic-Tac UFO Incident”, he said he indeed saw it and thought there was really something unexplainable to it. This was the first time of many since that I felt as though I could speak about UFOs without much of a worry that it would jeopardize my professionalism.
As a podcaster, I have announced on my show many times that I would like to discuss the details of a well-known case as I have many new listeners on a weekly basis. Some of these new listeners write me emails, asking me for advice on who or what to trust, they occasionally tell me about their own experiences. It gives me great pleasure to guide them along, and I often wonder if it wasn’t for this turn of events spawned by the Times article, would these new interested listeners be looking into UFOs at all.
Our US government has communicated with the world, admitted to releasing videos, and we all await an upcoming report due out soon. All baby steps perhaps toward something, I will refrain using the word ‘Disclosure’ and hope for transparency.
To get another opinion, I asked longtime listener, retired scientist Phil Sanders what he thought and here is what he wrote me: “The biggest thing for me is how Pentagon spokespeople keep lying/ changing their story despite Harry Reid saying unequivocally that Luis did what he said he did. While the rhetoric from Mellon and Elizondo is ratcheting up towards UFOs being otherworldly, at least one person at Pentagon claimed to Luis that they are demons. It seems that the federal government does not have a unified voice.” I hope to discuss some of that above with Lue during the interview.
I think Phil’s point shows that things have certainly been stirred up and this leaves the door open for a lot of conversation.
I find that today, with the far-reaching effect of this one article, there is enough awareness out there about this topic framed in a non-fringe environment, that I do not have to worry so much in my professional life. This may not mean anything to a lot of people, but it certainly does to me.
Leslie and Ralph continue to write UFO related stories for the New York Times. The Times website shows that their May 2019 story on the sightings off of the Roosevelt was the #10 most read story in the Times for all of 2019.
Check out another article by Ralph Blumenthal: Do We Believe in U.F.O.s? That’s the Wrong Question
That title says a lot, maybe we do not know how to ask the right questions. Maybe we will figure that out someday while we keep searching for the answer to the mysteries in our skies.