OK, wait. Let me see if I’ve got this straight: In 2015, Silicon Valley Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has mortality on his mind. And legacy. He will drop $100 million on SETI in long-shot hopes of confirming the one non-random radio signal that will change everything. But, being in his late 50s, Milner figures he probably won’t be around for whatever success that mission might encounter. So he’s got this other idea, too. He calls it the Starshot Initiative. Milner wants to design a spacecraft capable of reaching Earth’s closest star system, Alpha Centauri, within 20 years or so. Ther ..read more

I didn’t know Angelia Joiner well. We never met in person. We’d exchanged emails, had a few phone chats, and she’d invited me on one of her podcasts, which I’d forgotten about until Grant Cameron posted it online Friday. And that was quite awhile back, a year or so after she broke the Stephenville UFO story in 2008. But we were Facebook friends who “liked” each other every now and then. She’d post pix of local shelter dogs who needed a home, an occasional classic-tune video (“I got sunshiiiiine, on a cloudy day …”), photos of her new grandson, and we shared the same political inclinations. Wha ..read more

In March, a Washington-based news site that focuses on Asian affairs speculated about what might happen if China became the first country to receive and identify intelligent radio signals from out yonder. “It is China, not the United States, that is in the pole position to detect a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence,” noted The Diplomat. Already, China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture  Spherical Telescope (FAST) has detected “bursts of extremely powerful radio-waves from deep space of varying duration whose origins remain a mystery.” This came well before the ignominious collapse of t ..read more

With bottomless appetites for devouring low-grade snake oil and cheap lies running at freakish levels, maybe it’s time to take a good hard look at the sort of reception that might be awaiting an authentic form of revisionism now banging on our doors. To wit: What happens when the longest-running conspiracy theory in contemporary American culture – a government coverup of the material reality of UFOs, cloaked in decades of denial –actually turns out to be true? What does it mean for us all – amid a cacophony of maskless hordes revolting against tyranny and Rudy Giuliani impersonating Alice Coop ..read more

“You were on the Nimitz. You weren’t on the Princeton. So, don’t act like you know what happened on the Princeton. These are things that happened on my ship – my ship.” This was Navy veteran Karson Kammerzell teeing off last month on Lt. Cmdr. David Fravor, maybe the single most important eyewitness in the long road toward de-stigmatizing the entire UFO issue. “So I don’t wanna hear you, no matter how far up the chain of command you are, bash my shipmates on my ship by saying what they saw happen on their ship didn’t happen. “Because, you got no room to talk, dude. You were on the Nimitz the w ..read more

With its no-more-letters-left-in-the-alphabet, end-of-the-line implications, Generation Z may be the dumbest appellation ever assigned to an age category. Far more appropriate in describing kids born between the mid-1990s and the early teens is a term coined in 2017 by psychologist Jean Twenge – iGen. In an Atlantic magazine article titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Twenge made a convincing argument that a world-wide, cross-cultural demographic fused to digital devices since early adolescence is “on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.” Citing skyrocketing ra ..read more

“The day the sun didn’t come up was so surreal. I mean, it was literally apocalyptic. There was this orange glow in the sky all day, the sky was orange and dark and everybody was walking around like they were in some matrix. It was eerie and spooky and unsettling, and it was like, let’s get the hell out of here, man, we can’t even breathe fresh air.” James Fox is doing the phoner from somewhere in Arizona, where the choking ashes from multiple conflagrations near his home in northern California aren’t filtering through the seams and powdering the pillows. He and his family left the state a cou ..read more

Twenty-four minutes into the long-awaited documentary “The Phenomenon,” director James Fox foreshadows its final act with a look back at what happened outside Australia’s Westall School in 1966. That’s when several hundred students came swarming out of their classrooms upon hearing about a disc-shaped UFO stunting in broad daylight over the power lines near the athletic field. They watched it descend below the treeline, rise again, turn on its broad side, and zip away at a crazy velocity. When director James Fox’s fourth UFO documentary, “The Phenomenon,” launches online next Tuesday, it will ..read more

With the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence expecting a transparent military audit on UFOs by December, the brass is warming up by blowing off its own foot. No sooner had the History channel wrapped the finale of its “Unidentified” second season last weekend, than John Greenewald’s Black Vault  detailed a bureaucracy’s determination to stonewall at the expense of its own internal logic. And in so doing, the Navy has demonstrated it won’t hesitate to toss its own people under the bus to cling to an increasingly uneasy status quo. There comes a point when you’ve gotten away with somet ..read more

A thin ray of light peeked through a recent article in the New Yorker during a discussion with retired Johns Hopkins medical historian Gianna Pomata. The topic was pandemics, with a focus on the 14th-century bubonic plague that annihilated uncounted millions in Europe. The remedy for affliction 700 years ago was “scholastic” medicine, in which empirical analysis took a back seat to blaming more abstract forces. Faculty at the University of Paris said the fleas-and-vermin-borne plague was triggered by “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the fortieth degree of Aquarius.” “For b ..read more