OK, so: I assume, by now, you’ve seen news that a former U.S. intelligence official named David Charles Grusch, who is 36 (my age — which for some reason I find untrustworthy), told reporters Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal that covert government programs have retrieved “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”
In a follow-up interview, published on a website called NewsNation, Grusch claimed these programs have also recovered bodies, explaining: “Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed… sometimes you encounter dead pilots and believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true.”
??????????
Obviously, these are among the most exciting sentences I’ve ever read in my life. It is HUGE news — to me. But if you aren’t someone who routinely seeks UFO news, and follows the sort of people who share it on social media, you might have heard very little except some vagueness about UFOs and a whistleblower. As was the case with the bombshell 2017 NYT story, there’s the perception of a major interest gap between those who get it, and those who don’t. (I say “perception” because nobody should try to gauge any cultural artifact’s mainstream popularity based on Twitter chatter, and yet, we all do it all the time.)
I bring up the Times story for another reason: it was written by the same reporters of the new whistleblower story, which was published on a website called The Debrief, a science and tech website with a dedicated UAP section. My first thought on finding this story there was: Hm. I assumed the Times must have passed on the story, which didn’t seem like a great sign of its strength. Then, that afternoon, Blumenthal clarified that he and Kean pulled the story from The Washington Post because “under growing pressure to publish it very quickly.” The Post needed more time, presumably to fact-check the story’s wildest claims.
Today, Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair published a story with some fun industry gossip about the story’s trajectory from Times pitch to thedebrief.org’s biggest hit story by far (I assume). The Times did, indeed, pass on the story; though the Post and Politico also considered it, both wanted more time with the story than the authors were willing to give up. Their main defense for the rush was that it was for the sake of the whistleblower, whose name was leaked online in the days prior to the story, and whom they say received threatening calls. Still: the reporters owe the public their rigor as much as they owe sources their care.
Now: the VF story doesn’t quote anyone from the Times or the Post, so we don’t know for sure what their hesitations were. There is also a guy on Reddit who thinks the Times has its own story coming this weekend, based on a “lifelong friend who writes for” the paper. (Care to chime in, NYT friends of mine???) They could easily be wrong, but Reddit (via #ufotwitter) did have the heads up on the would-be Post story, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for more information, soon, ideally from a news outlet I’ve heard of even once before. (This is not very conspiracy brained of me; I definitely believe that certain mainstream publications are beholden to certain corporate/government interests, and might therefore face substantial pressure to publish or not publish certain stories. Still… I worry the sites willing to publish these claims as-is are, um, perhaps not as judicious as they ought to be.)
But here’s my favorite part from the whistleblower story, not just because this guy’s codename is Jonathan Grey, which MUST be a reference to the Greys, right???
I mean, wow.
By the way, a little fun fact: NASIC is headquartered at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH, which is where the real UFO shit is said to go down.
Wright-Patt is also a major setting in my novel, so I feel very fond of it. I stopped there on my cross-country drive from New York to Los Angeles last year, hoping I could “have a look around.” I don’t know know what I expected — that I might chance upon a Close Encounters of the Third Kind-style UFO landing from just outside the gate? — but I could see very little of the base’s 12.5 square miles: armed guards at every gate; electric fencing; squat, far-off buildings; and trees. Even in winter, the trees blocked whatever view might have otherwise been available from the roads I followed around the perimeter. It was exhilarating.
Before I left New York, I sent a tour request via the WPAFB website. I said I was a writer who just wanted to get an idea of the place for a book I was writing (fiction, I clarified!). I said I understood if I couldn’t see everything. They did not write back.
xo
Katie
The use of “have a look around” is so late-era Didion that I knew I was in the right place. ❤️
Excellent summary. When I saw this headline the other day I didn’t really understand/care (sorry!) but reading this, *I* got chills, too!