If UFO Disclosure Is Coming, Is the World Prepared? Does It Even Care? - The Daily Grail
“When I was with the army in New Jersey in the 50s, we had an incident on the base where many people saw a UFO. The next day we were ALL told “Many of you went home last night and told your loved ones that you saw a ufo.” They then gave the order: “You will go home tonight and tell them that you were mistaken and that what you saw was not a UFO.” I have always thought that we are not alone in this universe. I remain agnostic. But I always wondered why they made such a point to tells us what was not seen.”
The above quote was tweeted by beloved TV and Hollywood actor Ed Asner, as a comment on the much MUCH discussed New York Times article that caught everybody by surprise during Memorial weekend. When even Mr. Fredricksen is freaking talking about UFOs, even critics of Tom DeLonge and TTSA have to concede things are getting interesting!
Unless you were hiding under a rock, you were also probably caught by the avalanche of mainstream media articles unleashed by the NYT piece: The Washington Post, The Hill, The New York Post, National Post, Washington Examiner, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and a long etcetera. At last! This is what UFO buffs always wanted, right? Right??
Well, Yes and No…
For starters, what would superficially seem like a deluge of UFO-related news is just the same story repeated and commented upon over and over again; namely the testimony of NAVY aviators who were part of the “Red Rippers” Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11) of F-18s Super Hornets, who had a series of bizarre encounters with unidentified objects while they were on training maneuvers on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt at the United States’ East coast in 2014-2015, prior to their deployment to the Persian gulf. One of those encounters would account for the famous ‘Gimbal’ video released by To the Stars in 2017.
Secondly, the drip-dripping of small tidbits of information pertaining to these encounters across UFO online circles, coupled with the timing of the first articles that hit the news early this week, seems to suggest they were all part of a heavy-handed PR campaign aiming to promote History’s TV series Unidentified, which premieres tonight at 10pm Eastern – and no, I’m not the only one saying that: De Void’s Billy Cox and The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway also share that opinion, albeit they may not express it as bluntly as I am. Some of those articles were op-eds written by people directly involved with To The Stars (Tom DeLonge and Chris Mellon) while the rest are natural reactions of modern mainstream media of seeing a hot topic and joining the trend –most media nowadays consist of 90% punditry and 10% actual investigation, after all.
We’ve also learned that some of the journalists who have been recently writing about these stories encounters also make an appearance as talking heads on Unidentified — like Politico‘s Bryan Bender, who failed to mention his involvement with the TV series when he wrote about the Navy’s new guidelines for reporting UAPs. In the service of transparency these journalists should have made a ‘full disclosure’ (pun totally intended) of their level of involvement with TTSA and the series’ producers.
So, if the current ‘UFO hype’ was orchestrated at some level, has it at least attained the desired effect? As an outsider observer of American society –and UFO Disclosure seems to be mostly centered in the United States at the moment– I can only comment on what I can assess from online interactions. Over the week popular influencers like Xeni Jardin and Chris Hayes expressed varying levels of interest on the New York Times article on social media, despite not being particularly interested in the UFO phenomenon per se, and remaining agnostic about its possible otherworldly implications. A cursory review on the comments found in Hayes’ thread ranged from the LOLzy (“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos”), to the Meh-sy (“This is a two-year old news”) to the witty-yet-poignant (“Until they are talking about it in a Midwest diner it doesn’t matter”).
The “two-year old” remark is worth pointing out, because it shows confusion mixed with apathy. The uninterested reader skims through the content and sees the same TTSA-watermarked screen grab of the Gimbal video that was first published by the NYT in 2017, and concludes this is yesterday’s news –after all, we’re all still here which means the aliens haven’t vaporized us (we’ll get back to that).
Cont...
“When I was with the army in New Jersey in the 50s, we had an incident on the base where many people saw a UFO. The next day we were ALL told “Many of you went home last night and told your loved ones that you saw a ufo.” They then gave the order: “You will go home tonight and tell them that you were mistaken and that what you saw was not a UFO.” I have always thought that we are not alone in this universe. I remain agnostic. But I always wondered why they made such a point to tells us what was not seen.”
The above quote was tweeted by beloved TV and Hollywood actor Ed Asner, as a comment on the much MUCH discussed New York Times article that caught everybody by surprise during Memorial weekend. When even Mr. Fredricksen is freaking talking about UFOs, even critics of Tom DeLonge and TTSA have to concede things are getting interesting!
Unless you were hiding under a rock, you were also probably caught by the avalanche of mainstream media articles unleashed by the NYT piece: The Washington Post, The Hill, The New York Post, National Post, Washington Examiner, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and a long etcetera. At last! This is what UFO buffs always wanted, right? Right??
Well, Yes and No…
For starters, what would superficially seem like a deluge of UFO-related news is just the same story repeated and commented upon over and over again; namely the testimony of NAVY aviators who were part of the “Red Rippers” Navy Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11) of F-18s Super Hornets, who had a series of bizarre encounters with unidentified objects while they were on training maneuvers on board the USS Theodore Roosevelt at the United States’ East coast in 2014-2015, prior to their deployment to the Persian gulf. One of those encounters would account for the famous ‘Gimbal’ video released by To the Stars in 2017.
Secondly, the drip-dripping of small tidbits of information pertaining to these encounters across UFO online circles, coupled with the timing of the first articles that hit the news early this week, seems to suggest they were all part of a heavy-handed PR campaign aiming to promote History’s TV series Unidentified, which premieres tonight at 10pm Eastern – and no, I’m not the only one saying that: De Void’s Billy Cox and The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway also share that opinion, albeit they may not express it as bluntly as I am. Some of those articles were op-eds written by people directly involved with To The Stars (Tom DeLonge and Chris Mellon) while the rest are natural reactions of modern mainstream media of seeing a hot topic and joining the trend –most media nowadays consist of 90% punditry and 10% actual investigation, after all.
We’ve also learned that some of the journalists who have been recently writing about these stories encounters also make an appearance as talking heads on Unidentified — like Politico‘s Bryan Bender, who failed to mention his involvement with the TV series when he wrote about the Navy’s new guidelines for reporting UAPs. In the service of transparency these journalists should have made a ‘full disclosure’ (pun totally intended) of their level of involvement with TTSA and the series’ producers.
So, if the current ‘UFO hype’ was orchestrated at some level, has it at least attained the desired effect? As an outsider observer of American society –and UFO Disclosure seems to be mostly centered in the United States at the moment– I can only comment on what I can assess from online interactions. Over the week popular influencers like Xeni Jardin and Chris Hayes expressed varying levels of interest on the New York Times article on social media, despite not being particularly interested in the UFO phenomenon per se, and remaining agnostic about its possible otherworldly implications. A cursory review on the comments found in Hayes’ thread ranged from the LOLzy (“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos”), to the Meh-sy (“This is a two-year old news”) to the witty-yet-poignant (“Until they are talking about it in a Midwest diner it doesn’t matter”).
The “two-year old” remark is worth pointing out, because it shows confusion mixed with apathy. The uninterested reader skims through the content and sees the same TTSA-watermarked screen grab of the Gimbal video that was first published by the NYT in 2017, and concludes this is yesterday’s news –after all, we’re all still here which means the aliens haven’t vaporized us (we’ll get back to that).
Cont...