"Today’s Latest Waste of MSM Space on UFOs Comes From Time.com’s M.J. Stepney . . ."

Sunday, December 20, 2009

"Today’s Latest Waste of MSM Space on UFOs Comes From Time.com’s M.J. Stepney . . ."

Miller Time magazine, maybe …

By Billy Cox
De Void
12-17-09

Today’s latest waste of MSM space on UFOs comes from Time.com’s M.J. Stepney, who has decided to regale us with his/her — timpani, please — “A Brief History of UFOs.” De Void can almost figure out how it happened.

The newsies are out one night, brooding over suds, one says to another, “Hey, there’s another anniversary-hole comin’ up on the grid. Any ideas?” One of the older guys says, “Well, you know, the Air Force got out of the UFO business 40 years ago this month. I mean, if you’re desperate …” Nobody’s that desperate, but it’s either that or the Rolling Stones/Hell’s Angels disaster concert at Altamonte Speedway. The fellas tentatively agree UFOs will get more hits than Altamonte. But still. Somebody’s gotta actually crank it. They draw straws. Stepney loses.

Stepney’s out of his/her league here, but whatever, nobody who reads Time magazine’s gonna know. He/she checks the USAF press release on Project Blue Book and gets a whiff of what his/her Brief History should say. ”Thanks to such a meager percentage (of unknowns) and an overall drop in sightings, officials axed the program and ended the research,” he/she writes. But a more contemporary hip cultural reference would be nice, too. Hm. “So much for the truth being out there.” Zing! Oh, and he’s/she’s gotta cover that Roswell thing, too. Hm. That was where “a rancher stumbled upon a 200-yard long swathe of rubber strips, tinfoil, wood sticks and Scotch tape.” Nailed ‘er.

What else? Vietnam and Watergate disillusionment — right, Americans started believing all kinds of government-conspiracy crap after that. Maybe throw in a little Shirley MacLaine, too. Add a dash of Dennis Kucinich. And oh yeah, that Japanese chick, whatzerface, the prime minister’s wife who wrote about getting abducted by aliens from Venus
— and look, we’re up to 2009 already.

Well, that pretty much sums it up. One more graf and it’s Miller time: “The real breeding ground for UFO believers seems to be Tinseltown. Forget the films: just check out the laundry list of celebrities who practice Scientology, or talk to Dan Aykroyd, who” etc., etc.

OK. Why bother? Really. What’s the point?

De Void has this infantile impulse to link this guy/gal to the panel of blue-chip authorities who attested in 2007 to the national security isses in play. Or maybe to the MUFON report correlating eyewitness accounts of a huge UFO and pursuit jets with radar data as the drama played out near President Bush’s Crawford ranch in 2008.

But seriously? To paraphrase Escobar’s advice to Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes at the end of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Miller Time.”