THE UFO CHRONICLES

Showing posts with label Tyler Rogoway. Show all posts

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Four-Star Admiral Talks UFOs

During a panel at last month’s Aspen Institute’s Aspen Security Forum, an audience member asked Admiral Philip Davidson about reports of UFOs. Davidson replied that the Navy has new UFO reporting guidelines and that the UFO events occurred during “a finite period.”

By The Roswell Daily Record
8-16-19

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Tuesday, June 11, 2019

USS Nimitz, USS Roosevelt "... Video Footage of UFOs Acquired Through New State-Of-The-Art Detection Technology"

In search of the hidden hand

This History channel “Unidentified” series — ever think it really might be a government information-management project? The thought never seriously occurred to me until this week, when De Void got a load of Tyler Rogoway’s ruminations in The War Zone. Rogoway, a defense-tech reporter whose informed and welcome reporting on UFOs has lately become more aggressive, made connections that weren’t so much new as they were assembled in a way that blurred the lines between the jockey and the horse.

By Billy Cox
De Void
6-7-19

OK, to whoever’s running the show, riddle me this: Why does your script resume after each commercial buzzkill with a summary of what we saw just three minutes ago? This is not a model of efficiency. Can we skip the micro-rehash, please, we’re not all ADHD or Alzheimers (yet). And if you’re using “Unidentified” as a social experiment, clue us in: How, exactly, do you want us to think? We’ll go there, just tell us. You’ve already played your Black Aces, and you’re definitely holding our attention. In less than two years, you’ve given us certified Defense Department videos of F-18s chasing UFOs, pursuit-pilot testimony, on-the-record assessments by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Chris Mellon, plus a couple of independent video experts struggling for analogies. You’ve spoiled us so rotten, we’re impatient and ungrateful.

But guess what? You’ve had a clumsy product rollout, and you can’t control everything. What happens next is contingent upon media competence. And what’s happening journalistically lately is unprecedented, and atypical. There’s no guarantee it’ll last. And there’s plenty of erratic, lazy, formula-driven, obstructionist dreck waiting to fill the lapses. Which means we can’t stop calling that stuff out. Just for the hell of it, let’s start with space.com – clearly one of the most slammin’ domain names of all time.

Something with an audacious flag like space.com should not only own news from the high frontier, that ownership should be creative and oracular. (De Void is glad De Void’s name isn’t space.com.) But just look at what space.com does when it tries to keep up with a conversation instigated by the likes of Politico, the NY Times, and the Washington Post. Space.com decides to interview – yup, yup, bingo – Seth Shostak. Good god — not again. Look, if space.com wanted to justify their headline “UFOs Are Real, But Don’t Assume They’re Alien Spaceships,” they had a much more credible path to that hypothesis. They could’ve consulted with, oh, say, Tyler Rogoway.

Last week, Rogoway and co-author Joseph Trevithick took a detailed look at the operational parallels between what happened with USS Nimitz aviators in 2004 and USS Roosevelt pilots in 2014-15.

Both strike groups, a decade apart, were conducting their first exercises after undergoing, by orders of magnitude, major systems upgrades, including radar and surveillance overhauls. And both training runs produced video footage of UFOs acquired through new state-of-the-art detection technology. Trevithick and Rogoway make a not-implausible argument that the UFOs might have been, in both cases, military assets deployed to give the new configurations a rigorous workout. The authors aren’t saying that’s what happened. But given The War Zone’s dispassionate track record for reporting on UFO activity using FAA records, its journalism doesn’t appear to be promoting an agenda.

Anyhow, space.com could’ve used that sort of sourcing to blow off the phenomenon. Instead, space.com dusted off tired reliable old Seth Shostak again. Probably on speed dial. And it isn’t fair, not to readers or to the SETI Institute’s Most Famous Radioastronomer. It just makes him look bad at this point; Shostak knows nothing about The Great Taboo, and he isn’t interested in knowing. But space.com knows that. Maybe they’re tired, too.

Shostak wouldn’t flinch or say “Ow!” if a UFO took a wet towel and popped a stinging welt on his fanny. He’d say something like “That’s a good policy. Let them do it.” No kidding, that’s what he told space.com last week when asked about the Navy’s frankly astonishing public announcement to encourage pilots to report “unexplained aerial phenomena,” without making them fret about career repercussions. Shostak didn’t say hmm, that’s interesting, wonder what’s behind all that? Just That’s a good policy. Let them do it

Sorry, space.com, that kind of “reporting” won’t cut it anymore, at least not in this new competitive media environment. And for all of Tucker Carlson’s evolving tenacity on this UAP story, and despite Brian Kilmeade’s creditable interview with former DoD honcho Chris Mellon, Fox News’ apparent designs on leading the network pack on this issue won’t amount to much, either, if they keep cut ‘n’ pasting junk stories like the aforementioned space.com snoozer on their website.

If only parroting sloppy work were the biggest challenge going forward. The worst will come from the dead-enders, whose clawbacks will grow increasingly desperate as whoever’s running the show lays down more cards. To wit: the most talked about piece in the aftermath of “Unidentified’s” premiere last week was published in The Intercept by freelancer Keith Kloor.

OK, I’m slow, I’ll admit it, but I really hadn’t heard of Keith Kloor until April. That’s when, writing for the National Academy of Sciences’ quarterly journal “Issues in Science and Technology,” Kloor dispensed with the finesse.

Working with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, Kloor had exclusive dibs on breaking the results of the first technical analysis of the ’04 Nimitz/Tic Tac incident. Lots of sound bites cluttered the airwaves on the Nimitz affair, but until SCU assembled an impressive team of volunteer investigators to work the images for math and physics, anything less was just talk. Kloor used his prestigious NAS connections to gain access, and SCU in turn timed the release of its report to coincide with the publication of Kloor’s article. Huge mistake.

In an article referring to the SCU crowd as “a community of believers in extraterrestrial visitations,” Kloor never addressed the actual contents of the report; instead, he used the occasion to divert the increasingly focused UFO debate onto an exhausted trope — the latest chapter in America’s mental dysfunctionality. Perhaps because Kloor ignored his own scoop and wadded it up into something all too familiar, media competitors never bothered to look at what SCU produced.

Kloor struck again last Saturday, when he went after Luis Elizondo, the controversial former intelligence operator and catalyst behind the release of the F-18 UFO vids. Kloor’s line of inquiry was reasonable enough. The To The Stars Academy, which Elizondo joined in 2017 after resigning from the military, has the sort of serious transparency issues that SCU does not. In efforts to understand Elizondo’s role in the $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program first reported by the NY Times in 2017, Kloor reached a Pentagon spokesperson who cast Elizondo as a phony.

“Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in (the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence), up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017,” stated DoD’s Christopher Sherwood. As Kloor pointed out, Sherwood’s disclaimer refuted Elizondo’s assertion that he ran AATIP. Thus, Kloor — nobody’s fool — was quick to charge that Elizondo, and TTSA colleague Mellon, have been manipulating “a largely passive and credulous press to generate sensational UFO headlines” over the past 18 months.

Ignoring Navy veterans’ eyewitness testimony as well as 270 pages of SCU analysis that he failed to report on two months ago, Kloor dismissed the UFO imagery as “grainy footage of tiny, darting objects.” Seriously, that’s the entire sum of Kloor’s assessment of 270 pages of science. Oh, and he said the videos “made for great television.”

De Void started Googling the guy and discovered a Whac-A-Mole whose UFO snark has also lately been popping up in the likes of Slate, Newsweek, and the maybe irrelevant online platform Medium.

Four months ago, in yet another long-winded eulogy for common sense titled “America’s Enduring Obsession With UFOs,” Kloor lamented the MSM’s new “wide-eyed coverage” of “crusading actors” pushing “extraterrestrial enchantment” which “until recently … had largely been relegated to the tabloids and fringe outlets.” Sounding nostalgic for simpler times and suspiciously like Seth Shostak in his refusal to confront hard data, Kloor figured it all out. “I argue it’s the news media,” he proclaimed, “that keeps the specter of extraterrestrials alight in our skies and minds.”

De Void would argue that inept media coverage is what kept The Great Taboo on the fringe for so long. But this is Kloor’s show, and he wants us to bundle everything we know about the Navy’s recorded UFO incidents into whether or not Elizondo misrepresented his duties. Elizondo’s credibility is not a tangential matter. But implicit in the assumption that he lied is Kloor’s own credulity. Maybe he’s getting played as well. Would a government flack ever try to bamboozle anybody? Maybe Christopher Sherwood is really Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I mean, who’s to say?

One last thing about the article. Kloor wrote Elizondo had “a pug face and billy-goat beard” — and he complained that Elizondo won’t call him back.

But here’s all you need to know: The genie that neither Kloor nor anyone else can jam back into the bottle is the Pentagon’s DD-1910 form vouching for the authenticity and release of the videos. So what’s really in there? We’ve all seen the footage, but what does it really show? Evidence of military stress tests? Hardware or software glitches? An Achilles heel, maybe? Ours?

SCU’s team analyzed only the Tic Tac footage, and the results about velocity and g-forces were startling. Somebody not connected to the National Academy of Sciences really should put some decent journalism into what the GoFast and the Gimbal vids can tell us. Or maybe whoever’s steering the “Unidentified” project is merely planning to string us along for just five more weeks. Either way, we’ll wait. Obviously.

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Sunday, April 15, 2018

'Getting the Mainstream Media to Approach the UFO Puzzle as Legitimate News

A media turning point … maybe

If To The Stars Academy contributes nothing more to the debate, if its sole legacy is getting the mainstream media to approach the UFO puzzle as legitimate news, it will have accomplished what no one else has been able to do since the cessation of Project Blue Book nearly 50 years ago. Right now, the signs are encouraging. Just look at everyone who’s suddenly paying attention to The War Zone blogger Tyler Rogoway.

By Billy Cox
De Void
4-5-18

Avoid the alien spaceship references, work the FOIA angles, stick to hard data, decline to interpret — could this be the formula for grabbing and sustaining mainstream media interest in The Great Taboo?

A military hardware aficionado who has harbored a longstanding but closeted interest in UFOs, Rogoway cultivates sources by keeping tabs not on The Great Taboo, but the latest developments in war technology, at home and abroad. Journalistically, and with good reason, he has kept a healthy distance from the UFO quagmire. Until recently, that is, when he followed a lead on incidents that played out over California-Oregon in October, and Arizona-New Mexico in February.

Swiftly working those sources for Federal Aviation Administration data, Rogoway augmented his detailed analyses on both of those episodes by posting voice recordings among pilots, air traffic controllers, and FAA officials. He steered clear of interpretation, an area where so many people screw up, and let the presentation speak for itself. What was also remarkable, as Rogoway told Alejandro Rojas this week in the Open Minds podcast, was the amount of cooperation he got from the FAA.

The results have been astonishing. Rogoway’s revelations have been circulated by all the corporate heavy hitters – ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, The NY Times, WaPo, Fox, Time, etc. etc. And that publicity windfall comes on the heels of an equally viral shot across the bow from former Department of Defense administrator Christopher Mellon. In a March 9 Washington Post op-ed, accompanied by F-18 video footage of an object its pilot struggled to lock onto, Mellon excoriated the Pentagon for its failure to rigorously investigate this potential flight safety hazard.

Mellon’s credentials pinged the media radar last December when, as an adviser to TTSA, he figured into the NY Times scoop on the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which included two F-18 videos tracking UFO activity. So it’s a fair question to ask if the MSM would’ve been as receptive to Rogoway’s reporting without the TTSA having breached the restraining walls four months ago. Lately – or to be safe, let’s just say for now – it appears as if the Fourth Estate might actually be rousing from its slumber.

But at a moment when this issue appears to be gaining traction, we’re not hearing a peep from TTSA, which should be shaping coverage, not evaporating. Unlike Rogoway, who documented every step of his investigation into the civilian UFO events, TTSA has little to show in the way of establishing under whose authority, specifically, an investigation of those recorded incidents occurred, especially the one associated with the USS Nimitz carrier task force off California in 2004. Unable to produce chain-of-custody records, TTSA has evidently walked away from that obligation.

To get a feel for how bad this looks, check out John Greenewald’s updates at his Black Vault website. In an effort to verify statements made by retired intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who oversaw the AATIP before retiring in frustration last October, Greenewald has pursued every lead for substantiation. And at every turn, his FOIAs have been answered with no-records-found snubs. Although it’s still a little early to go all X-Files on these denials, it doesn’t look like TTSA much cares about following up, either.

Robert Powell, the researcher who co-authored the ground-breaking, radar-based evaluation of the 2008 Stephenville Incident, and anchored the investigation into the equally intriguing 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, encounter, offers another disappointing twist. Following his appearance on one of Rojas’ podcasts, Powell was contacted by a radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, the flagship for the Nimitz group during the 2004 encounter.

“He’s retired now, and he said nobody had ever contacted him about what happened,” recalls Powell. “And he wanted to talk.”

The radar guy told Powell the UFO(s) that mystified the carrier pilots were tracked by five separate military systems, which included two destroyers and an airborne E-2 Hawkeye. Powell says the Navy veteran commented for the record, and his credentials passed the smell test. Given the military’s inability to produce radar data for his FOIAs, Powell says his source’s perspectives are invaluable.

“You can’t really conclude anything from video, and that’s why radar returns are so important because they’re primary sources,” says Powell who, like Greenewald, is having little luck on the FOIA front. “They say they don’t have any radar records, but why would our government keep the video and throw away everything else? That doesn’t make sense. They could easily release the video and put this to bed without revealing any national security secrets.”

Like the Aguadilla footage, the Navy F-18s followed the UFO(s) using the same sort of infrared optics employed by Border Patrol agents in the skies above coastal Puerto Rico five years ago. Unlike the Navy incident, radar records from Aguadilla helped Powell’s team — called the Scientific Coalition for Ufology – render a more accurate accounting of a smallish object that not only buzzed a city at treetop level, it dipped into the Caribbean and split in two when it re-emerged.

Among Powell’s SCU team members is Morgan Beall, who played a lead role in the Aguadilla study and is now collaborating on reconstructing the Nimitz encounter. Once the Florida director for MUFON, Beall like Powell is severing his ties to the increasingly sensationalist and marginalized national volunteer organization. (“MUFON,” says Beall, “is promoting an agenda and placing more value in entertainment and celebrity than research”.)

Beall says SCU hopes to have a white paper on the Nimitz incident completed within a few months, and that it will be more thorough than anything TTSA has published.

“I think what they’ve (TTSA) done has been good in terms of, there’s a little bit more ease of public discussion (about UFOs), and the giggle factor isn’t quite what it was,” says Beall. “But they’ve been no help to us at all, and the stuff they’ve put out there isn’t going to get into Nature magazine or Scientific American. There’s no executable data.”

If, as De Void hopes, journalists like Tyler Rogoway continue to file solid work on The Great Taboo, and big media continues to handle it with sobriety, then TTSA will have contributed mightily to our cultural evolution. But unless TTSA gets a bit more fastidious about documenting what else, if anything, it has up its sleeve, its best moment may already be receding in the rear-view.

The $50 million crowd-funding goal it set to develop shareholder-financed innovations like “beamed energy” and “advanced electrogravitic” propulsion systems remains stuck at $2.5 mil, and hasn’t budged in months. In fact, at last glance, TTSA isn’t even bothering to post the latest numbers anymore. When it comes to headline-grabbing UFO material, the TTSA, Powell suspects, is out of gas.

“I think they’ve already shot their wad,” he says, “and that’s probably the end of it.”

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

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Tuesday, April 10, 2018

'Project Sphere Recommended Pilot-Awareness Training'

F-18 in pursuit of a small, white or luminous, oval or ball-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).

An ounce of prevention?

Huzzahs to New York magazine for this week’s attempt to play the UFO thing straight, plus Eric Benson’s followup interview with retired Sen. Harry Reid. Reid raised a number of familiar but worth-repeating issues, including the social stigma that keeps pilots from filing reports. And he added this well-deserved smackdown of the mainstream media:

“Let me give you something that the press has totally failed and conjured. We have hundreds and hundreds of papers, pages of paper, that have been available since this was completed,” Reid said, ostensibly referring to the work produced by the Pentagon’s once-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. “Most all of it, 80 percent at least, is public. You know something? The press has never even looked at it. Not once. That’s where we are. I wanted it public, it was made public, and you guys have not even looked at it.”

By Billy Cox
De Void
3-22-18

De Void has yet to see that documentation posted anywhere, but never mind. Reid’s larger points are spot on, and the AATIP data is hardly the only material the MSM has ignored over the years. What comes first and foremost to De Void’s mind is a report titled Spherical UAP and Aviation Safety: A Critical Review. It has languished online since 2010, perhaps because its language is forbiddingly technical. Project Sphere, as it’s known, is the work of a now-dormant nonprofit called the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. Among other things, NARCAP was able to bring good science to bear on strong cases because it promised anonymity to pilots fearing professional blowback. Its work is especially relevant now, given the jet fighter video released by erstwhile Defense Department official Chris Mellon via The Washington Post on 3/9/2018.

The whateveritwas that went zipping across the video viewfinder of the Navy F-18 looks like it could qualify, at least superficially, for inclusion into NARCAP’s Project Sphere. Relatively small, white or luminous, oval or ball-shaped unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) often displaying what looks like impossible aerodynamic characteristics, these elusive and transient spheres have been raising flight-safety concerns for decades.

As NARCAP executive director Ted Roe reported eight years ago, “The majority of spherical UAP reports involve initial detection by aircrews. It is uncommon for ATC (air traffic control) to detect spherical UAP and vector aircraft around them though, in some instances, spherical UAP are detected on radar after aircraft request confirmation.”

Among other things, Project Sphere recommended pilot-awareness training, as in-flight over-corrections when confronted with the abrupt and unexpected appearance of these UAP could end with catastrophic results. “If a jumbo jet should crash because of impact (or other negative interaction) with a UAP, the total financial burden will be enormous (along with the negative publicity and political fallout that will occur) and our present warnings (then as hindsight) suddenly will come clearly into focus,” the NARCAP summary stated. “The total financial burden of such a disaster is likely to be orders of magnitude greater than the cost of doing the research now.”

We got a glimpse of that potentiality two weeks ago. Tyler Rogoway, the War Zone reporter who, using recorded ATC chatter, reconstructed a November UFO/UAP event over California-Oregon that resulted in a jet-fighter scramble, came up with another gem that sounded like a case study ripped from Roe’s script.

Last month, a Learjet pilot flying over Arizona asked Albuquerque ATC if it was tracking a mystery without a transponder that had just flown overhead. ATC said there was nothing on the screen, but it alerted a nearby American Airlines Airbus to keep an eye open. Moments later, the Airbus pilot responded: “Yeah, something just passed over us, like a – I don’t know what it was, but it was at least two-three thousand feet above us. Yeah, it passed right over top of us.” Rogoway has posted the conversation online and it’s definitely worth a read.

Bottom line, Mellon’s cautionary remarks in his WaPo op-ed need serious scrutiny. By citing potential technological gaps between the U.S. and its adversaries, including a nod to Vladimir Putin’s “recent chest-thumping claims about propulsion breakthroughs,” Mellon makes his best and perhaps only realistic play for getting congressional attention. No doubt his proposal to apply focused analysis on “infrared satellite data, NORAD radar databases, and signals and human intelligence reporting” will make a lot of federal acronyms nervous. But what happens if and when a plane goes down in an accident that might’ve been prevented with a little pilot training? Especially given how well-reasoned advocacy for such situational awareness has been sitting in the public arena for years. Who wants to go for a swim in that hell-broth of litigation?

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See Also:

Two Pilots Report UFO in Arizona Skies | FAA Recording

OREGON UFO EVENT: Air Traffic Control Audio Tapes Released via FOIA Request

Secret Pentagon UFO Study – Interview with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Christopher Mellon | VIDEO

The Military Keeps Encountering UFOs – Why Doesn’t the Pentagon Care? | VIDEO

What the Government Knows About UFOs | Interview with Harry Reid

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

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Thursday, August 22, 2019

Four-Star Admiral Talks UFOs

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

USS Nimitz, USS Roosevelt "... Video Footage of UFOs Acquired Through New State-Of-The-Art Detection Technology"

Sunday, April 15, 2018

'Getting the Mainstream Media to Approach the UFO Puzzle as Legitimate News

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

'Project Sphere Recommended Pilot-Awareness Training'