Being conned ….

Copyright 2019, InerAmerica, Inc.

A review by Scott Sherman in The New York Review of Books [June 27, 2019], Pages 64-65, of Reporter: A Memoir by slick muckraker and controversial, high profile journalist Seymour Hersh offers some interesting tidbits that may help clarify for some of you the situation we’re in with the DoD and Luis Elizondo affair.

Hersh, who is known by some old-timers in the UFO community wrote for The New York TIMES and other publications

Two things that stand out in the NYRB review:

Reviewer Sherman notes “ Hersh’s … articles suggest the dangers of … reliance on military sources.” [Page 65]

This goes to the wayward acceptance of those in the UFO community who are taking the U.S. Department of Defense’s statements that Mr. Elizondo didn’t head up the so-called AATIP program inside the Pentagon as gospel.

Would the DoD have any reason(s) or purpose(s) for trying to make that a statement of fact, even if it were false?

And then reviewer Sherman writes this [Page 65], “Hersh admitted to the journalist Robert Sam Anson in Vanity Fair that ‘Any investigative journalist can be totally fucking conned. We’re the easiest lays in town.' "

This goes to those who are writing favorably about Mr. Elizondo (like me or George Knapp) and also to those who are trashing him, even though many are not real journalists nor have ever been one: John Greenewald, Jack Brewer, et al.

When a real pro is wary of news and news sources, that provides a cautious overlay for the rest of us.

For some in the UFO community the U.S. government and military especially have been less than truthful for years and totally deceitful about UFOs particularly but now, when they provide information about a whistleblower, they are as truthful as Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.

And those of us who see Luis Elizondo and Tom DeLonge as angels providing messages from God have also got to be careful to check out whether they really have wings or not.

Just some tid-bits to think about.

RR

How did Roswell steal the spotlight from Ken Arnold’s spectacular “flying saucer” sighting?

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

I’m sure Bruce Maccabee is wondering that also, as he “celebrates” the iconic Arnold sighting and his recent book about it (reviewed here a while back).

My primary question about the Arnold observation was along the lines that I’ve often raised here about the appearance of clusters of UFOs: why would nine (9) saucers be cavorting in the skies over Mt. Rainier or anywhere?

That is, why would aircraft from outer space or even somewhere on Earth be flitting so cavalierly over or around populated areas (or just scooting around anywhere at all)?

No matter that question, I’m wondering how Roswell, without a credible account of a crashing or crashed flying disk became the heady stuff of UFO lore?

Yes. That Army press release of a captured disk stunned but the immediate recanting of that story put the Roswell event into mothballs, while Arnold’s sighting continued to resonate and still does.

Sure, the eventual (1978) exclamation by Jesse Marcel, via UFO researchers, especially Stan Friedman, that there was a crashed saucer that left unusual metal fragments got much attention among UFO fanatics, that information eventually exacerbating the foolish accounts of dead alien bodies.

The elaboration of the “minor” and discounted incident, at the time, has grown into a kind of extraterrestrial gospel for UFO devotees rivaling the resurrection of Jesus Christ among Christians.

Yet, it, Roswell, is almost all froth; it is froth.

And Arnold’s steadier story has been backburner minutia for most UFO aficionados.

Arnold’s flying saucers are as interesting, even more so, that anything built from the Roswell mythos.

So, why Roswell and not Arnold’s vanguard of flying ships that still excite Bruce Maccabee and a few other UFO worthies?

You tell me.

RR