Hi!
Here’s all the UFO-related stuff you need to know right now:
“High Strange,” a new UFO podcast, is pretty good!
I’ve long bemoaned the dearth of high- or even medium-quality UFO podcasts available these days, which remains sort of surprising to me, given how much overlap there is between true crime and conspiracy theory communities. It’s a big market! I’m admittedly self-interested in my assessment, because I would love to host a UFO podcast, but very few podcasts can succeed with a single host (Everything Iconic is one shining example); most people need someone to converse with, and I have not yet met my partner in UFO podcasting.
I was cautiously excited when I received a PR pitch about a new UFO podcast called “High Strange,” which was recently covered in the New York Times. The story doesn’t actually say whether it thinks the podcast is good or not, which is annoying; for the record, I think it was a solid start. It’s certainly well-produced, and includes a number of interviews with the usual suspects: Leslie Kean, Travis Walton, one of the Navy pilots from the 2017 Times story. None of it was new to me, an expert, but it would be a great crash course for anyone with a more casual interest. Something I didn’t care for: the last 10 minutes of each 35-40 minute episode delved into the next week’s subject, such that no topic’s coverage felt totally comprehensive. It also has only one host!! I think season two might benefit from another one ;) ;) ;)
The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch
When I called my mom on Mother’s Day she put her best friend Lisa on the phone to discuss the History channel show The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. Lisa lives in Utah, where the ranch (and alleged UFO “hot spot”) is, which no doubt adds to her interest; I would be 10 times more inclined to follow this show if the setting was, for instance, a patch of desert just outside LA. Lisa wanted me to know the new season of Skinwalker Ranch (its fourth) was quite good, so I decided to start the show from the beginning.
I have almost finished season two, and I still don’t know what to think. This show is enormously popular for reasons I don’t totally understand. I first watched an episode a couple years ago, but I was put off by leading role cattle mutilation played in the show’s drama. I just don’t go in for cattle mutilation conspiracies. It is not very surprising or mysterious to me that cows sometimes die and their organs are eaten by birds. Even if the circumstances are odd, I don’t want to look at it. I’m a pescatarian.
That said: I have found the show a more enjoyable background show than anticipated — which is to say I’ve left it on while working my day job, and absorbed just enough to feel a vague affinity for the cast: a group that includes a shockingly credulous aerospace engineer named Travis Taylor, a security guard named Dragon whose greatest fear is digging — because he thinks it will provoke the alien-ghosts to give everyone headaches — and the ranch’s dorky businessman owner Brandon. The model is very Ghost Hunters: they film stuff and test stuff and are routinely blown away by the “anomalies” they capture. I have never once understood what I am looking at.
Cosmic Sperm
At AlienCon, I saw George Knapp in the flesh. Mary and I walked by his booth, just as people were lining up to take selfies with him, and I shouted “That’s George Knapp!!!”
George Knapp is famous to me, another usual suspect: he’s in all the documentaries, an investigative journalist who covered Area 51 and various government coverup theories in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Knapp also worked on an earlier iteration of the Skinwalker Ranch UFO crew when it was owned Robert Bigelow (a name you might recognize from that 2017 story — he’s a shithead, politically, but relevant because he encouraged the founding of AATIP). ANYWAY — I guess he found some alien sperm at a Russian UFO crash site, according to the Daily Star? But then it went missing? I’m having trouble making heads or tails of this.
NASA Public Meeting on May 31
Later this month, NASA will hold a public meeting — followed by a media conference — to discuss UAPs (the other, modern term for UFOs, which I prefer because I’m a classicist.) I do not expect any major news to come from this event, but I will watch it I remember and am not playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at that time.
xo
Katie