Hm. I'm a skeptic and I typically hit all the standard checkmarks on dismissing nutjobs. It's almost a mental stamp worn down to the nubs. But this right here reminded me of the time I scratched my head.

Cue the weird release of the NYT pieces on Navy recordings of UFOs released over the past year. Did you happen to see that one? If not, look it up. There were basically two FLIR recordings of something pretty spooky and, wow, it was something else. The videos were followed up by a leaked NIMITZ carrier group report of the incident cataloging and verifying pretty much everything the pilots said in the interview. The pilots were made fun of by their peers. Means of propulsion in the video was nothing like I'd ever seen anywhere before. The Navy basically said "we don't know what this is" and "it demonstrated propulsion capabilities beyond any known means." One of the videos is downright spooky in places.

First thing skeptical me did was check the provenance of the videos themselves. They were directly provided to NYT by a weird organization headed by an ex band member from Blink 182. Nutjobs, check.

Second thing I checked was who the writers of the article were. One was a general assignment reporter (meh, they have to put someone on it and they were all out of stolen tomato plant stories that day), another was a has-been burnout whose name got used to elevate the story, and last author was a person who wrote books on ghosts and spirituality or some such. Cranks, check.

Then WaPo and other orgs released a bunch of regurgitated hashes of the same story. So I sifted through to see if there were any more details. Nope, they were all borrowed from NYT. Nothing original, lazy re-reporting, check.

Then just to be sure the guy was just lazy I reached out to a WaPo reporter. Nothing.

Then two weeks went by.

He got back to me and told me that they got caught with their pants down. They had been working on the story long before NYT published it - in cooperation with the bizarre group with the ex-Blink 182 guy, and WaPo were under the false impression that they had an exclusive story with them. So when NYT's came out, they felt betrayed and buried what work they had and scrambled to get their own GA reporter to finish the deal. Not lazy. They just cut their losses best they could.

Here's the kicker. The guy verified the provenance of the flight cameras. They WERE provided by the Pentagon under a FOIA act request. Despite the fact that NYT's videos were provided by the Blink 182 people, WaPo had an independent copy of it obtained from the military.

The part that made me scratch my head was that it wasn't just an empty boast. I was given a tip on making a very specific FOIA request to the Pentagon. Goes something like "query seeking cockpit videos cleared for release to Luis Elizondo in the Fall of 2017 (Sep-Oct)."

So what of it? Well, our high energy physics people are making discoveries, and while I don't know what to make any of this, for the first time in awhile I'm feeling like we're making some forward progress in science that might make its way to engineering, or our understanding of its limits. Just recently scientists identified 2-3 candidate anomalies as potential new particles (sigh, some reporters kept calling it a ghost particle). Maybe something will come of it, maybe not. But we're trying, and once these are eliminated there will be more observations, more research, more science. We still have a very poor understanding of gravity and how it relates to things we feel we know.

But for once in this horrible climate we find ourselves in, both political and social, I'm feeling optimistic that we're even looking.

[1] Interview with the pilot: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/unidentified-...
[2] Leaked NIMITZ report (PDF): https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document...