Table of ContentsOptions
- UFOs and Space Aliens
- The Remarkable Beliefs of the UFO Community
- The Powerful Contrary Argument from Silence
- The “No Planes Hypothesis” of the 9/11 Attacks
- The Apollo Lunar Landing Hoax
List of Bookmarks
UFOs and Space Aliens
EPub Format⬇
Decades ago I became fully convinced that UFOs were real. I even accepted that past visits to our planet of such space aliens had been the basis for many of the religious myths of different societies all around the world, just as Erich von Däniken had argued in his massive 1971 bestseller Chariots of the Gods?
However, I was just in elementary school at the time, and once I’d reached my teens and entered junior high, my views sharply changed. I remember doing a term-paper on UFOs, and after reading a couple of books on the subject, I forcefully rejected those theories as pseudo-scientific nonsense.
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Since then, I’ve never paid the slightest attention to stories about UFOs, alien abductions, or similar matters. Indeed, I’ve occasionally even cited those theories as stark examples of the total rubbish that can sometimes infect the minds of individuals after they discover the truth about the JFK Assassination, the 9/11 Attacks, and similar controversial historical events long-suppressed by our dishonest mainstream media. But given that roughly a half-century has now elapsed, I decided to take a second look at that subject and see whether the case seemed more plausible today than the one I had summarily rejected at the age of thirteen or fourteen.
Our very lightly moderated website attracts commenters holding a vast range of different conspiratorial beliefs that are unwelcome elsewhere, and while some of these are plausible, others are much less so. Given that I’d seen so many different eccentric beliefs advocated in some of the discussions, I thought that these might represent nearly the entire spectrum of ideas ignored or belittled by the mainstream media. UFOs and space aliens almost never came up as subjects, so I’d vaguely assumed that movement had largely faded away over the last generation or two, but I turned out to be completely mistaken.
The recent wave of strange drone sightings on the East Coast led to some renewed talk of UFOs, and this prompted one of our occasional contributors to drop me a note strongly suggesting that I investigate that latter subject:
In light of the recent ‘drone’ activity that’s been all over the news, I’ve wondered for some time if you’re ever going to write an article about our government’s UFO/UAP cover-up? If there’s one subject where the government has worked tirelessly to prevent the American people from knowing, it’s surely in the realm of UFOs, reverse engineering of UFO craft, and the 2017 NYT article in which it exposed the Pentagon’s black programs investigating UAPs.
Honestly, I think if you looked into it, you would find an incredible number of admissions and concessions on the part of our government that we do indeed have downed UFO craft, and that we have been in contact with Non-Human Intelligence for quite some. I know that sounds a little crazy, but the evidence is available if one is assiduous in reviewing it.
If you’re curious to begin, I can think of no other book than the one written by Richard M. Dolan, “UFOs for the 21st Century Mind: The Definitive Guide.” Dolan is level-headed and not prone to sensationalism. He’s a good writer and clear thinker too. It’s available on Amazon.
I think the subject matter would be terrific for your American Pravda series.
My response was rather dismissive:
…I’m *extremely* skeptical that there’s anything to the UFO nonsense. I think the notion that it has anything to do with aliens is utter, total crackpottery…
In fact, I’ve occasionally cited UFO stories as a perfect example of conspiracy-nonsense accepted by the gullible…
Now it’s perfectly possible that a few of the old UFO sightings were real but were merely of experimental American military aircraft or something like that, but that’s about as far as I would go…
Still, I pride myself on my open-mindedness, and I obviously have had a very long track record of being 100% wrong on all sorts of other controversial issues, so I’ve gone ahead and ordered that book you suggested and will take a look at it. Maybe it will convince me that there’s something to the theory, or if not, perhaps I’ll write up a piece setting forth my own contrary views in more detailed fashion.
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Given that my UFO knowledge was a half-century out of date, I had to start somewhere, and just as had been suggested to me UFOs for the 21st Century Mind: The Definitive Guide seemed an excellent and very comprehensive introduction to that complex subject, running more than 560 pages. There were 245 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars, with a full 68% giving it the maximum rating and only a tiny handful of 1 or 2 star responses. The average 4.3 star rating on Goodreads was nearly as positive.
Although I’d never heard of him, the author was Richard M. Dolan, apparently a fairly prominent writer within the UFO community. The Introduction was written by George Noory, the longtime radio host of Coast to Coast AM, the widely syndicated late-night radio program specializing in conspiratorial or paranormal topics, whose regular weekly audience numbered a couple of million, with Dolan having been a frequent guest over the years. Dolan had previously written several other UFO books, notably including UFOs and the National Security State, a two volume set that Noory described as “probably the most comprehensive and reliable guides to the modern history of UFOs.”
The first edition of Dolan’s latest book had been released in 2014, while my second edition was completed in December 2022 and contained a long additional chapter. In it, Dolan argued that over the previous few years public acceptance of the reality of UFOs had greatly increased, indeed it had “gone through a transformation” due to positive coverage in the mainstream media.
This especially included the notoriously establishmentarian New York Times, which had run a long, very respectful front-page story on UFOs in December 2017, together with a sidebar. A short, explanatory follow-up came a couple of days later along with a somewhat more skeptical science piece towards the end of that month. This was probably the most space that the influential Times had devoted to the subject of UFOs in several decades.
- Glowing Auras and âBlack Moneyâ: The Pentagonâs Mysterious U.F.O. ProgramHelene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean ⢠The New York Times ⢠December 16, 2017 ⢠2,200 Words
Although I’m sure that I had read those Times articles when they appeared, I’d been busy with other things and having no interest in UFOs, I’d completely forgotten about them. But now carefully rereading those pieces, I could easily understand why so little of the material had stuck in my mind.
The main “bombshell” disclosure supposedly justifying the front-page treatment had been the revelation that the annual $600 billion Defense Department budget had over several years spent a total of $22 million investigating reports of unidentified flying objects, amounting to roughly one dollar in every 100,000 spent by that notoriously bloated and poorly-administered government bureaucracy, probably far less than what it annually spent on paperclips. The funding for the UFO program had apparently been secured through the personal efforts of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had a long-time interest in UFOs, and had been paid out to a billionaire contractor who was one of Reid’s personal friends and major donors in Las Vegas, exactly the sort of log-rolling for which the Pentagon had become infamous.See Alsoamazon grooming beauty hair skin products 0% or low BP✨ KeaBabies 3 in 1 Postpartum Belly Support Recovery Wrap and Bamboo Viscose Nursing Pads Bundle - Pregnancy Belly Support Band - 14 Washable Pads + Wash Bag — 🛍️ The Retail MarketArrow Word Answers [All Answers in Single Page] » Puzzle Game Master
The substance of the Times story hardly seemed all that new or shocking. There were a few reports of pilots seeing strange objects moving in unusual fashion, and a video showing something similar, nothing much different than what the original UFO reports of the 1950s had provided. Indeed, this lack of interesting new material was emphasized in a highly critical New York Magazine piece by a science journalist published later that same month.
The crucial source for the Times story was a certain Luis Elizondo, the alleged former director of the Pentagon’s UFO program, who had angrily resigned from the government over what he claimed was their coverup of the reality of UFOs. He had then helped launch a for-profit UFO-investigation startup for which he was trying to raise funds and with media coverage an important part of that effort, he later proclaimed himself a whistleblower and successfully pitched his exciting story to the Times. The one detail mentioned by Elizondo that I found potentially intriguing was his claim that the contractor administering the UFO program had stored special metal alloys possibly recovered from UFOs at a site in Las Vegas, seeming to imply that these had very unusual or futuristic properties.
As a result of his Times coverage, Elizondo soon became an enormously popular figure within the UFO community, being featured prominently in the final chapter added to the updated 2022 edition of the Dolan book. According to various media stories, he gave numerous public lectures on UFOs and helped to produce a television documentary on the subject, while also appearing on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated FoxNews show. I found a couple of clips containing some of the dramatic claims he made in that major broadcast interview:
Luis Elizondo, point man for the Pentagonâs UFO program (AATIP) stating he believes the US Government has #UFO wreckage. #TTSA https://t.co/b7cwQ2sS7P pic.twitter.com/BMOJAXqh4q
— Danny Silva (@SilvaRecord) April 28, 2020
However, as I quickly discovered with a little casual Googling, there may have been some serious sourcing problems with the Times story. Eighteen months later, The Intercept published a long, investigative piece arguing that Elizondo seemed to be a fraud:
- The Media Loves This UFO Expert Who Says He Worked for an Obscure Pentagon Program. Did He?There is no discernible evidence that Luis Elizondo ever worked for a government UFO program, much less led one.Keith Kloor ⢠The Intercept ⢠June 1, 2019 ⢠2,900 Words
Under normal circumstances, I would have found it difficult to believe that the Times could have failed to verify such claims. However, not long after running that original UFO story, the Times had produced an even higher-profile series interviewing an alleged ISIS executioner that won Peabody and Lowell Thomas awards and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, but whose source turned out to be entirely fraudulent, a massive humiliation and an indication of extremely weak Times fact-checking.
But although the Times never retracted the UFO story, a piece that Kloor published the following year in Wired noted that Elizondo had still never provided any evidence of his alleged government role, perhaps explaining why several subsequent Times follow-ups in 2020 seemed much more defensive about those previous claims. I also noticed that the lead writer in the original pieces, the only current Times staff writer actually involved in the project, no longer contributed her byline to those later stories. Carlson also seemed to eventually back away from his position, and in an interview six months ago, he declared that he had abandoned his interest in UFOs, no longer regarding them as likely to be aerial vehicles based upon advanced technology.
According to the original 2017 Times story, Elizondo’s new UFO research organization was carefully analyzing materials it believed might have been recovered from crashed UFOs. There was speculation that these would have other-worldly properties, and I had regarded this item as by far the most solid element of such UFO claims. But when Elizondo appeared in a very friendly Sixty Minutes segment four years later, that supposedly hard physical evidence was never mentioned, strongly suggesting that all the scientific tests had come up completely empty.
Thus, we were left with exactly what we had back in the 1950s, namely American pilots reporting their brief, occasional sightings of strange objects that seemed to fly in unusual ways, but lacking any evidence of their origins. Indeed, the only change in the last seventy years seemed to be that the official government acronym of UFO for “Unidentified Flying Object” had become too ideologically-charged for government use and therefore was being replaced by UAP, standing for “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon.”
The Remarkable Beliefs of the UFO Community
If this solidly factual material had constituted the entirety of Dolan’s book, it would have been a fairly short volume so extremely dull that I probably would have dozed off after just a couple of dozen pages, while I suspect that few members of the UFO community would have bothered purchasing copies. But instead, perhaps 98% of Dolan’s contents were of a far more exciting but very doubtful nature. I found all of this quite interesting less for the scientific content than for the insights it provided into social behavior and abnormal psychology. Dolan’s documentation usually seemed extremely thin, but I think this accurately reflected the general standards prevailing in the large and excitable UFO community.
The military pilots whose stories were featured in the Times and on Sixty Minutes seemed to say that the UFOs they occasionally saw were roughly the size of their own aircraft but generally oblong-shaped, and this seemed reasonably consistent with the declassified footage, though the images on the latter were too small to easily judge such things.
But the UFO reports that filled Dolan’s pages were totally different than this, greatly surprising me with the tremendous variety of the various mysterious airborne vehicles whose observations the author seemed to regard as highly credible, with those spacecraft appearing in a huge profusion of different shapes and sizes. Many of the UFOs he described followed the classic saucer-shaped design, but others were round or oblong or triangular or rod-shaped or boomerang-like. They could be enormously large, measuring several football fields in length or quite small, or any size in between. Some zipped along at unimaginable speeds, while others could barely outpace our ordinary aircraft of the 1950s. So either our alien visitors were eccentric enough to reject any sort of standardization for the craft they piloted, or else a huge variety of different aliens had been paying us numerous visits.
That latter possibility was strongly reinforced by the eyewitness accounts of the aliens themselves, who seemed just as varied as the UFOs they used for travel, and those astonishing stories dominated Dolan’s text. A majority of the reported aliens seemed to be what UFO activists call “Grays”—somewhat child-like beings who were “[s]hort in stature with very large heads, black wrap-around eyes, thin bodies and ears, and tiny noses and mouths.” But many others were extremely tall and reptilian in design or sometimes insectoid. Others were “robed beings in the manner of Greek gods,” or “beings of pure light.” Some of our other alleged visitors seemed to be human-alien hybrids or instead fully human-looking, often taking the form of extremely attractive blond Nordic super-models or quasi-Asian women, who eagerly had sex with the human men they had captured, apparently in hopes of producing additional hybrids.
Although none of the mainstream media stories had ever even hinted at any such direct alien contacts, Dolan himself rendered a sweeping, positive verdict on the huge profusion of such widely dissimilar stories: “Over the years, I have formed the opinion that all of these types and more might well be real.”
According to Dolan, some of these many aliens often walked among us in their fully human-looking guises, being found in shopping malls or Las Vegas casinos or as fellow participants in local church services. Such aliens were perfectly formed humans, indeed extremely attractive ones, so they could only be detected due to the ability of certain psychically-gifted UFO activists who heard voices in their own heads, with those voices representing their sensitivity to the powerful alien telepathy of the mysterious beings found in their near vicinity.
This raised another important point. Based upon the contents of Dolan’s book, the UFO community substantially overlapped with those people who accepted all sorts of other paranormal beliefs and psychic abilities, notably including various forms of ESP, “remote viewing,” and “channeling.” That last ability referred to a widespread means of communicating with these alien beings, in which individuals became the physical mouthpiece for a particular alien, thereby exhibiting some of the classic symptoms of what had traditionally been described as demonic possession. Dolan further suggested that the aliens traveling in these UFOs might come from a different dimension or even possessed the secret of time travel.
The 2017 Times article had mentioned the claims of strange materials possibly obtained from UFOs, and I’d regarded this as about the only hard evidence suggested. Since it quickly disappeared from subsequent discussions, I assumed that its mysterious nature had failed to pan out.
But according to Dolan and other leading UFO activists, the remains of numerous crashed alien spacecraft have been recovered over the decades, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, and these had long been hidden away by our military, which had used the marvelous scientific secrets they obtained to achieve our own technological advances. These UFO-based discoveries notably included an enormous, near-infinite power source, perhaps based upon the “zero point energy” of the vacuum, and Dolan repeatedly emphasized that this UFO technology could “quickly replace oil, coal, and natural gas as the world’s main source of energy.” Indeed, the author strongly suspected that the corrupt political influence of our economically-threatened fossil fuel industry had probably been a major factor behind the longstanding UFO cover-up.
These claims obviously raised major doubts about our government competence. If as far back as the 1950s, the Pentagon had already learned the super-science secrets of UFO interplanetary propulsion and anti-gravity, it’s difficult to understand why our recent space program has been plagued by so many major embarrassments. This obviously includes the recent failure of our space-station vehicles that have now left a couple of our astronauts marooned for six months on a mission that had originally been scheduled to only last about one week.
It’s also quite odd that despite decades of absorbing and assimilating such powerful alien technology, our ordinary space launch systems work so badly and are so inefficient and expensive compared to what Elon Musk’s private SpaceX company has developed in just the last few years. Musk’s name appears nowhere in Dolan’s lengthy text, but perhaps many in the UFO community are gradually beginning to suspect that instead of being South African, the extremely successful technology entrepreneur might actually be a very different sort of alien, merely clad in a human disguise.
It’s also possible that some members of the UFO community may wonder whether Musk’s trace of a foreign accent might have a far more sinister origin than his alleged roots in Pretoria.
A large majority of UFO enthusiasts were sure that the mysterious flying objects they study are alien vehicles from a non-human civilization, but as Dolan explained a significant minority were instead convinced that at least some of these have fully terrestrial origins. For example, citing the work of several influential UFO writers, he devoted a half-dozen pages to the detailed belief that UFOs are actually craft powered by the anti-gravity super-science developed by Nazi Germany near the end of World War II, being launched from their large and powerful Nazi homebase located in the frozen continent of Antarctica.
In all fairness, I should emphasize that although Dolan treated these Nazi theories in very respectful fashion, he did not explicitly endorse them, instead noting the lack of solid documentation and writing:
It is unclear how much of “The Legend” (as the story of Nazi UFOs has sometimes been called) is true, and how much fantasy”…
Few of the critical details can be known for sure. Clearly, if the saucers were being manufactured by a rogue post-war Nazi group that was beyond the reach of the American military machine, this would have been explosive news for the American and world public…
Still, there is cause for believing that some Nazi technology during the war was of a genuine proto-UFO nature.
He went on to describe the belief that the American government had launched “a failed military expedition against the secret Nazi base” in Antarctica during late 1946, while being not entirely sure whether or not that story was true.
The major flurry of respectful media coverage of UFOs in the last few years had been a consequence of the front-page New York Times story revealing a small Pentagon program to investigate that phenomenon, and as mentioned that program had been created at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and one of his billionaire donors, both UFO enthusiasts.
According to Dolan, quite a number of other leading American political figures had expressed an interest in UFOs over the years, sometimes making commitments to reveal the truth about those alien vehicles to the American people once they reached high office, but never fulfilling those pledges.
For example, Bill Clinton had promised that if he became president, he’d get to the bottom of UFOs, but he afterward declared “that he did do that, and that he didn’t find anything.” However, Dolan noted that during her own 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton had made a similar vow, thereby attracting the enthusiastic support of many UFO people, who were therefore greatly disappointed when Trump’s unexpected victory prevented the release of all those important UFO truths.
This merely reflected the latest disappointment, with Dolan explaining that such expectations of a looming and transformative governmental “Disclosure” event had been common among UFO activists for generations, with a previous high-water-mark coming around the time of the Carter Administration when so many other disclosures of important government secrets had occurred. They had especially been hopeful because Carter himself claimed to have personally seen a UFO a couple of years before he was elected Governor of Georgia. In 2012, Dolan had co-authored A.D. – After Disclosure, a book anticipating the huge consequences of that historic event that he was certain would eventually come to pass.
Among other things, he noted the widespread belief within the UFO community that many of the great religious or spiritual figures of our past such as Jesus, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, and Zeus had actually been extraterrestrials, and that the discovery of that fact might have a drastic impact upon so many of our traditional religious faiths. As he puts it, “Christianity, Islam, and Judaism will either have to adapt to this new reality, or they will be replaced.”
Dolan himself seemed imbued with similar sentiments. The first edition of his book appeared in 2014 and by that date the author had already spent two decades studying UFOs, which had almost “become an obsession” to him. As he explained:
I will never forget my first year of true attention and research into this field, and the many nights of lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to reconfigure my worldview in a way that made sense with the new facts I had learned.
Some of the personal stories that Dolan related and seemingly accepted as credible were quite remarkable. For example, he described how an engineer named Bill Uhouse spent many years working on antigravity propulsion systems for the military, being assisted in his efforts by the alien survivor of a 1953 UFO crash who called himself J-Rod. That being was more than 200 years old, with all these claims allegedly confirmed by government documents.
Since Dolan and other UFO enthusiasts were certain that there existed a vast quantity of such secret government documents proving the existence of UFOs and aliens, he suggested in the original 2014 edition of his book that these would surely soon be dumped onto Wikileaks, leading to the “disclosure event” that he and his colleagues had long awaited. Yet despite numerous subsequent exposures of other troves of secret public and private documents, nothing has yet happened in the decade since then regarding UFOs, obviously a major disappointment for Dolan and his friends.
But the new chapter added in his 2022 second edition opened on an even more sour note, describing the enormous embarrassment that had befallen the UFO community in December 2012, probably around the time that he had been finalizing the manuscript of his first edition. That same month I’d recently published my lengthy Meritocracy analysis of elite college admissions and had been very pleased that the New York Times organized a forum on the strong evidence of Asian Quotas that I’d uncovered and invited me to participate. But I remained blissfully unaware that many other individuals in America had been focused on entirely different matters, of vastly greater potential importance.
According to Dolan, a very large portion of the UFO community had adopted “New Age” beliefs and convinced themselves that an event of world-shattering importance would take place on December 21, 2012. That date marked the end of a long cycle of the old Mayan Calendar, which for some reason was followed by all the space aliens who regularly visited our planet. As Dolan explained:
Although there were some who wondered about cataclysmic doomsday scenarios, most believers seemed to pin their hopes on something much more positive: “ascension.” Mostly, this was a 21st century version of age-old millennialist beliefs, a new spin on deus ex machina. If a person had more than fifty percent “positive” karma, then after the fabled date, their “etheric” DNA would “activate” and transform the person into a being of higher “density” and consciousness. How this would change human nature—or biology, as was often stated—depended upon who you spoke to. To say nothing of what any of this terminology meant.
It is difficult to overstate the pervasiveness of this type of thinking within the UFO community of believers during the lead-up to December 21, 2012. Not surprisingly, it dominated the many new age-oriented events and conferences, particularly on the west coast of the U.S. but more or less everywhere, including in Europe. By comparison, the rest of the world was mostly spared…
To the surprise of no one other than the cult-like movement pushing this ideology, the world did not end or transform on the appointed date. After it passed, no one in that community made an honest account of the situation, nor reflected on the damage caused by such a waste of time and years-long distraction from real issues.
Yet despite that dramatic failure, Dolan still remained confident that the truth would come out and towards the very end of that same added 2022 chapter, he forcefully declared:
Here is a safe prediction. A century from now, leading historians, be they human, robot, or alien, will look back on our time with a full understanding not only of the deep presence of aliens here in our world, which of course they will…Aliens have not arrived in our world in large numbers for no reason. They were here perhaps for several reasons, but the imminent entry of the human race to their community must be high on their list.
The Powerful Contrary Argument from Silence
Dolan’s apparently unshakeable confidence in the reality of UFOs and the certainty of their ultimate disclosure was probably due to the absolutely enormous number of annual UFO sightings that have still continued to occur. At the beginning of Chapter 7 he wrote:
Since the 1990s, perhaps the most striking feature of the UFO phenomenon has been the sheer number of incredible, inexplicable, and just plain impossible sightings. Doing justice to all of those which are good and genuine would fill several thick volumes…
Conservatively speaking, there are no less than 10,000 UFO reports generated every year in North America alone, judging only from the top two websites that collect them…
Of course, readers should remember that ninety percent or more of all UFO sightings are explainable in more-or-less prosaic terms. However, it is also true that most people do not report their UFO sightings, and very possibly this is by a factor of ten or more. In other words, there is a good chance that these two factors roughly even out.
To consider that there may well be something like 10,000 genuine UFO sightings each year, simply in one region of the world, forces us to take a fresh perspective on the nature of our society, our world, and our reality.
Moreover, at least some of these sightings have been quite remarkable. Towards the beginning of the first chapter he described one of the most impressive of these.
Consider the following scenario.
You are outside on a large front lawn after a nice dinner, relaxing with five of your friends, all adults and professionals. It is around 7 p.m., toward the end of a beautiful spring day. The sky is still light, and you are all enjoying the picturesque scene. Then, to everyone’s great surprise, an enormous, round craft approaches from the horizon. It is moving slowly, perhaps thirty or forty miles per hour. White lights are visible at its outer edges and it is rotating slowly in a counter-clockwise direction. What is truly astonishing, however, is the object’s immense size. Your best estimate is that it is perhaps one thousand feet wide, more than three football fields. Unfortunately, the sunlight makes it hard to notice most of the details of this gargantuan object. Then, as it appears over you, it stops. Perhaps it noticed you, you wonder.
From here, your experience becomes even more incredible, more impossible. You watch, dumbfounded, as this giant in the sky splits into four smaller, wedge-shaped, craft. You wonder, how can this be? Then, almost instantaneously, the four objects zoom away to the North, South, East, and West. Almost as baffling is the silence, because throughout this amazing encounter, no one has heard a sound coming from this aerial display. The event is so shocking to you and your friends that, for many years after, none of you ever speak about it, not even among yourselves.
This event occurred in the town of Hydes, Maryland, on May 15, 1976. Not until 1999, however—twenty-three years later—was it reported anywhere, in this case to the National UFO Reporting Center, on the Web.
This type of sighting is extraordinary, inexplicable, and utterly commonplace. UFO reports include many examples of craft that are silent, divide into smaller segments, and zip away noiselessly at amazing speeds.
Note that he described this particular sort of UFO sighting as “utterly commonplace.” Given the number and nature of these alleged events, it’s very easy to understand why both Dolan and his fellow members of the UFO activist community have convinced themselves that UFOs are real and that their existence will soon become recognized and admitted by the entire world.
However, near the beginning of Chapter 3, Dolan declared that “A good UFO story can be a bit like a good ghost story” and I do think that strong analogy should be carefully considered. One of the main points made by UFO activists was that the enormous number of reported UFO sightings around the world proved that the phenomenon was real rather than merely illusory, but I strongly suspect that over the centuries the number of reported sightings of ghosts, goblins, demons, angels, spirits, gods, miracles, and all other manner of supernatural phenomena has been vastly greater than the number of UFOs, so if we apply the same logic, would this not prove that the former were also real?
But I think there is actually a much stronger argument on the other side of the debate. Indeed, the exact same evidence that Dolan cited for the reality of UFOs has instead convinced me that they do not exist, at least in the manner that he has described across his many chapters.
Just as recounted by Dolan’s book, sightings of UFOs and aliens have been reported for decades, but the only solid evidence provided usually consisted of a few blurry photos, unable to convince anyone except true believers and sometimes even plausibly accused of being faked.
However, that situation would have completely changed in 2009 with the release of the Apple iPhone 3GS, which introduced the feature of video recording. So for the last fifteen years, the vast majority of Americans have always been carrying those sorts of smartphones, which double both as still cameras and easy video recording devices. If a noteworthy UFO or some strange alien creature suddenly appeared, within seconds a powerful photographic or video record could be produced, documenting that reality in extremely convincing fashion.
Consider, for example, that immense UFO—larger then three football fields—that allegedly hovered over the heads of those five solid Maryland citizens at their dinner-party. If smartphones had existed in 1976, three or four of those individuals would surely have produced a convincing video record of that remarkable encounter, and with exactly the same scene captured from several different angles by such camera footage, a fabrication would have been impossible. Those Maryland eyewitnesses could have sold their collection of videos to our television stations for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the reality of UFOs would have immediately become accepted worldwide. Yet although Dolan claims that America alone has “something like 10,000 genuine UFO sightings each year,” absolutely nothing like this has ever happened.
According to Dolan “the last spectacular American UFO account” backed by “quite a few eyewitnesses” was reported over Stephenville, Texas and consisted of an object so large that it was described as “a flying Walmart” that after coming in at a very high speed just stopped overhead for a while, where “it blocked out the entire sky.” Oddly enough, that particular dramatic incident occurred in 2008, the year before Apple released the first smartphone with video-recording technology. Perhaps such a strange coincidence of timing suggests that the UFOs and the aliens who ride them might be so camera-shy that they decided to stop coming to our planet in highly-visible fashion the moment that large numbers of people began carrying devices that could easily photograph or video their activities. But I have a very different explanation.
So although the committed members of the UFO community have obviously failed to recognize it, I personally regard this argument from silence as absolutely conclusive evidence against the reality of such UFOs.
The strange flying objects occasionally seen by our pilots may be optical illusions, experimental human aircraft, alien vehicles, or something else entirely. But Dolan’s comprehensive book seemed to constitute the heart of the UFO movement and I’d consider at least 98% of the factual claims he presented as total rubbish.
The “No Planes Hypothesis” of the 9/11 Attacks
Thus, fifteen years of universal smartphone video cameras have failed to document the existence of a single UFO or space alien, and although I would hope this would convince many UFO adherents that their ideas were mistaken, I doubt that’s the case. Within the conspiratorial community, beliefs are very tightly held, and even video evidence, whether positive or negative, will rarely change any minds.
Consider a similar, though polar-opposite example. Over the last few years I had been shocked to discover that a significant fraction of the most vocal and active 9/11 Truthers these days have firmly convinced themselves that no actual planes struck the WTC towers, despite an ocean of video evidence to the contrary, along with considerable eye-witness testimony to the same effect.
As I wrote last year:
As it happens, I recently came across a short video taken by a visitor to New York City who was filming the first tower as it burned and then captured the second plane as it hit. The street scene and all the other details seem totally authentic to me and I would hope that the partisans of the No Planes Hypothesis will watch it and abandon their mistaken theories but I doubt that almost any of them will do so.
Naturally, the No Planes supporters claimed that the video in question had been faked by nefarious groups in order to trick people into believing that the actual planes had hit the towers that day, although their motive seems rather obscure to me.
However, I later discovered that a couple of years ago some helpful soul had produced a video compilation containing fifty separate clips all showing planes hitting the towers. Surely, faking dozens of video clips taken from such a wide variety of different angles and perspectives would be a tall order for any organization. The particular citizens who captured those scenes and uploaded them to YouTube are even identified by name in most of the clips, though this was only provided in the original, somewhat better quality version of that video, which unfortunately is age-restricted and therefore non-embeddable.
One very crucial point I’ve always emphasized is that after the first tower was hit, probably tens of thousands of local residents had their eyes fixed to the huge burning building, and therefore would have obviously seen the second plane hit the neighboring tower as well. So although the number of eyewitnesses to the first plane strike might have been relatively small, an enormous number would have seen the second one. Therefore, if no such plane strike had occurred, we would expect YouTube to be filled with hundreds or thousands of statements by angry eye-witnesses denouncing that hoax, but the silence seems absolutely deafening.
The Apollo Lunar Landing Hoax
Another surprising discovery I made in the last few years was that a considerable fraction of the conspiratorial community had convinced themselves that the historic 1969 Lunar Landing had been faked by our government and that Americans had never set foot on the Moon, a belief that has gradually become so widespread that it now even has its own 17,000 word Wikipedia page.
More than five years ago, our website published one of the longest and most comprehensive articles promoting that theory, and it has remained very popular since then, continuing to attract sufficient residual traffic that it always appears on our Home Page. The resulting discussion-thread reached nearly 200,000 words before it grew so long and unwieldly that I was forced to close it down, and I think that intense debate may constitute one of the largest compilations of such material found anywhere on the Internet.
- The Moon Landings: A Giant Hoax for Mankind?An introduction to the mother of all conspiracy theoriesMoon Landing Skeptic ⢠The Unz Review ⢠April 1, 2019 ⢠6,500 Words ⢠1,563 Comments
However, I’ve always emphasized that I do not necessarily endorse any of the articles published on our website, and this case constituted a perfect example. I personally regarded that Moon Hoax theory as total nonsense, and forcefully explained my reasoning in a series of lengthy comments, which naturally attracted extremely hostile responses from the many agitated Moon Hoaxers. Here are a few of my most substantial remarks.
My Comment
Well, Iâd never even known that Moon Hoax theories existed until a year or two ago, and my initial impression was that they seemed totally ridiculous. Now after reading this lengthy exposition of the material, my current view is thatâ¦they still seem just as totally ridiculous.
Americaâs space program and moon landing dominated the headlines and were enormous cultural phenomena during the 1960s and early 1970s, and there must have been a vast number of interviews and media accounts. So the fact that an absolutely infinitesimal fraction of these contain some statements that might be construed as possibly suggesting a fraud hardly seems significant. Aside from that sort of loose speculation, there seems essentially zero solid evidence supporting a Moon Hoax.
All my history books claim that Columbus discovered the New World in 1492. But suppose some analyst pointed to various minor discrepancies in the historical record and the explorerâs public statements to argue that the voyage was a hoax, and perhaps Columbus himself never existed. Would that be enough to overcome my presumption that every major historian writing about those events had been dishonest or deceived? Absolutely not! A huge amount of overwhelmingly solid substantiation would need to be provided in such a situation. Extraordinarily remarkable claims require extraordinarily remarkable evidence, a situation regularly ignored by conspiratorially-minded individuals.
Various assertions are made about some of the Moon photos looking very suspicious, and given my lack of expertise I personally canât evaluate them. But even if some of the photos were doctored, a vastly more parsimonious hypothesis seems obvious. The Moon program apparently cost U.S. taxpayers something like $150 billion in current dollars, and represented a gigantic American commitment of money and prestige. Now suppose that trip went fine, but the actual photos taken by the astronauts came out blurry or were otherwise poor in quality. Isnât it quite plausible that embarrassed NASA officials might just have had someone in their photo department quietly touch them up or even fabricate them to avoid public embarrassment? A very minor âwhite lieâ like that, involving just a couple of NASA employees, would hardly be earth-shattering. After all, PR people are always touching up the photos for celebrities and politicians, and such touched-up photos hardly constitute evidence that the celebrity is fictitious.
A gigantic number of Americans were directly involved in the space program. If it were a hoax, surely thousands or even tens of thousands of the employees must have been aware of that shocking fact, and yet after fifty years not a single clear whistleblower has come forward. This total silence renders a hoax extremely implausible.
The counter-argument is made that huge numbers of Americans were also involved in the Manhattan Project, which was successfully kept secret, but that seems silly. Obviously, during wartime, itâs less likely that vital military secrets would get out into the media, and since almost no one had ever heard of atomic bombs, the workers might simply have mentioned to their family or friends that they were working on a super-powerful new bomb, which is exactly what everyone experts during a war. Also, the secrecy only lasted for a few years rather than a half-century.
But I think a different argument from silence totally kills the Moon Hoax theory. As everyone knows, one of the biggest reasons for our space program and moon landing was the zero-sum competition for international prestige with Russia during the Cold War, and although it eventually fell behind, the USSR had a very solid space program of its own, with numerous satellites and telescopes. If our Moon landing were just a fraud, it seems totally impossible that the Soviets werenât aware of that, and they could have totally destroyed Americaâs international prestige by revealing the hoax. Yet they never made a single such claim at the time. Unless this gigantic issue is effectively addressed, any Moon Hoax theory can be immediately dismissed.
But hereâs a slightly different Moon Hoax âconspiracy theoryâ that seems vastly more plausible to me. Itâs well-known that U.S. government officials and intelligence agencies have grown quite concerned with the spread of popular âconspiracy theoriesâ after the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks, with the published documents by the CIA and the statements of Cass Sunstein demonstrating this.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-the-cia-invented-conspiracy-theories/
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-what-happened/
Now people who come to believe in one or two unorthodox âconspiracy theoriesâ are obviously much more likely to easily accept others as well. So it wouldnât really surprise me if various âdisinfo agentsâ began promoting the Moon Hoax as a sort of poisoned bait for conspiracy-activists, hoping lots of them would begin accepting it and making themselves look totally ridiculous. In fact, isnât that *exactly* what Sunstein had personally suggested a decade or so ago? Perhaps itâs more than a pure coincidence that apparently the only book ever published endorsing a Moon Hoax theory came out in 2005, just as the 9/11 Truth movement was starting to really take off. Hasnât there also been big wave of Flat Earth videos being promoted on YouTube?
Anyway, thatâs my own âconspiracy theoryâ regarding a Moon Hoax.
Moreover, whenever weâve published an occasional article having any relation at all to the Space Program, itâs been very irritating that âexcitableâ Moon Hoax people have frequently cluttered up the comment-threads with their strange ideas. Now that they have this dedicated comment-thread for their extended discussion, it will be much more reasonable in the future to just summarily trash their off-topic comments on other articles.
My Comment
Well, Iâll admit Iâve only skimmed over the more than 30,000 words of angry comments on both sides of the issue, but I think my argument from silence is still very strong.
For example, my original training was as a theoretical physicist and I donât really know anything about the Van Allen radiation belts. But Iâd think that there are many, many thousands of astrophysicists and astronomers who certainly do, and large numbers of these surely had been working for NASA. Most of the Moon Hoax people claim that astronauts would have faced certain death from radiation in their trip, thereby proving it never happened. But if that were true, then all those thousands of scientists knew the lunar trip was an impossible suicide mission and therefore an obvious hoax. Yet 100% kept their silence for fifty years, which seems exceptionally implausible to me, especially since so many of them worked for the rival USSR. Science is science and radiation calculations donât lie.
The Moon Hoax people also claim itâs obviously impossible for the return module to have had the fuel to lift off the lunar surface, returning the Moon-walk astronauts to orbit. Once again, this is a question of simple engineering, and if it really were impossible, many tens of thousands of aeronautical engineers, including all the NASA employees who allegedly designed the return module, would have known that, and therefore must have been aware of the hoax. Yet none of them spoke up at the time or during the fifty years that followed, which seems very implausible to me. Once again, science is science and lift/fuel calculations canât be that difficult to check.
It looks like many of the Moon Hoax people similarly believe that earlier Gagarin space mission was also a total hoax. But why would America have not exposed it at the time, and humiliated the USSR? One possibility suggested by some commenters is that the entire US-Soviet Cold War was also a complete hoax, with both the US and the USSR secretly controlled by closely-allied Masonic sects. I suppose that possible, and Khrushchev and Nixon had actually exchanged secret Masonic hand-shakes before their harsh public denunciations, but Iâd really need to see some hard evidence before I accept that theory.
According to the Moon Hoax people, itâs very simple and ironclad science that the astronauts would have been killed by radiation and that they couldnât have possibly had the fuel to lift back off from the lunar surface. Well, maybe. But apparently, the silence of tens of thousands of astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers over fifty years suggests that either that they disagree with this simple scientific assessment or that they were participating in a remarkably large and long-lived conspiracy, one which seems rather unlikely to me.
The 9/11 Truthers endlessly refer to the thousands of architects and engineers who have publicly signed the 9/11 Truth Statement, saying the official story of the WTC attacks is physically impossible.
If the Moon Hoax people are correct that the official Apollo story is so blatantly impossible based on very simple radiation and aerospace issues, why havenât they put together a website with the public signatures of thousands of astrophysicists and aerospace engineers confirming this position?
My Comment
Well, let me further clarify a few thingsâ¦
First, as I mentioned Iâve never frequented âconspiracyâ websites, nor did I ever have any interest in the Space Program. Thatâs probably the reason I never heard about Moon Hoax theories until a couple of years ago. Since I never paid any attention to the Space Program, I donât have the technical expertise to evaluate the claims, nor any interest in investing the time to do so. But on the other hand, if the Moon Landing turned out to be a hoax, Iâd be very surprised, but hardly shattered in my world-view since it was a topic I never followed. I donât care all that much one way or the other.
But hereâs a further question. During the 1960s and (especially) the 1970s, the JFK assassination and Watergate had made âconspiracy booksâ enormously popular, and vast numbers of them became huge national best-sellers. These even included all sorts of books with a space-connection, like UFO conspiracies, âancient astronauts,â aliens, and that sort of thing. Meanwhile, the Space Program was still one of the biggest national news stories.
Yet during all those years, no one seems to have ever published a single Moon Hoax book, and apparently the first and only such book ever published came out in 2005, long after the overwhelming majority of the tens of thousands of direct Apollo participants had died or otherwise left the scene. Why didnât someone jump on such a huge, unfilled market, especially since so many thousands of NASA employees would have been aware of the hoax and gossiped about it to their friends and relatives.
I think the only plausible explanation is that if any Moon Hoax book had been published earlier, many thousands of the rank-and-file workers in the program with first-hand knowledge of its non-fraudulent nature would have gone public and denounced the book as totally ridiculous, and their obvious sincerity and personal eyewitness testimony would have shattered any hoax claims. Itâs very suspicious to wait until almost all the eyewitnesses to a huge historical event have died or become extremely elderly to declare something a hoax.
With apparently not a single eyewitness whistleblower to the alleged hoax, the attacks are therefore almost entirely based upon alleged âscientific impossibilities.â Okay, maybe, but I just donât have the personal expertise to evaluate those claims. And just because a few random (and mostly anonymous) people on the Internet say that something is âscientifically impossible,â doesnât necessarily make it so.
Since the scientific impossibilities are supposedly so numerous and so blatant, based on radiation, fuel/lift and various other things, surely it wouldnât be too difficult to set up a website and persuade a couple of hundred respectable professional astrophysicists and aeronautical engineers to declare the Moon landing a scientific impossibility. And also maybe a couple for hundred professional photographers about the un-starry Moon sky photos and such.
But until that happens, I really wonât pay any attention to the silly issue, and I doubt any sensible people will.
My Comment
First I believe very few individuals would actually know it was faked. Everyone is going on information being broadcast from the module.
Iâll admit I just donât understand that argumentâ¦
The main claim made by all the Moon Hoax people is that the supposed Moon Landing mission was totally impossible for scientific and engineering reasons. Okay.
But NASA employed many, many thousands of scientists and engineers tasked with overcoming all the various technical obstacles, and surely they must have been aware that they had failed and the purported achievement was an impossibility, with the announcement of a successful Moon walk by the top NASA people being just a hoax.
Are you saying that almost none of NASAâs own scientists and engineers were aware of the hoax as it was actually taking place, but it was only discovered decades later by random non-scientists browsing around on Internet websites and watching old Stanley Kubrik films?â¦
To the considerable consternation of many website readers, I’ve sometimes mentioned that although I’ve encountered a multitude of so-called “conspiracy theories” floating around on the Internet, I’ve concluded that at least 90-95% of these seemed to be false or at least unsubstantiated. Only the residual 5-10% have seemed sufficiently well-documented and important that I’ve included them in my lengthy American Pravda series, a series that now numbers well over one hundred articles and nearly 900,000 words.
- American Pravda SeriesRon Unz ⢠The Unz Review ⢠880,000 Words
Based upon such careful consideration, I think that UFOs, alien abductions, the 9/11 No Planes Hypothesis, and the theory that our 1969 Lunar Landing was a government hoax all fail to pass that crucial test and should be rejected by sincere conspiracy-researchers.
Related Reading:
- Bibliography
- American Pravda: How the CIA Invented âConspiracy Theoriesâ
- American Pravda: The Destruction of TWA Flight 800
- American Pravda: Remembering the 9/11 Truth Movement
- American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and âCognitive Infiltrationâ
- The Controversy Over âMr. Brigitte Macronâ and âMr. Michelle Obamaâ
- American Pravda: Michael Collins Piper, Miles Mathis, and Proving Pi=4