If Aliens Decide To Visit, Would You Want Trump In Charge? Just Asking For A Friend

For some reason, the government wants to keep its UFO programs secret. The Pentagon hides the UFO office and makes it almost impossible to find in its budget requests. Congress obliges with increasingly secretive appropriations for the military UFO hunters, even though the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program went the way of the dodo bird with the retirement of its greatest advocate, Harry Reid. Yesterday, the NY Times had a team on the case, which reported that "For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by the New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties."

The shadowy program-- parts of it remain classified-- began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.



On CBS’s 60 Minutes in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft-- including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee-- Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat-- also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an emailed statement, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.

The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”

He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.

...The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.

“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

I certainly do not know-- and I had 3 scary but not aggressive UFO experiences in the 1970s (long after I had quit using drugs, one near Sitges south of Barcelona, one on the North Sea near Alkmaar northwest of Amsterdam and one in Noe Valley in San Francisco). The most physical one was on the beach in Holland when my girlfriend and I, late at night, watched a tiny speck of light rapidly descend and hover just above us, as big as a barn-- a big barn. We never saw who was driving but they communicated with us both telepathically. They wanted us to come with them-- seemed completely aware of what was going on with us (a breakup)-- but didn't insist. In fact they were very amicable and reassuring that they had no intention of forcing us to do anything. When we said we weren't going to go with them, they said bye-bye and took off and because a speck of light again. Years later in San Fran, they indicated it was my last chance to come with them and I got the feeling it was either the same beings or beings that the ones on the beach near Alkmaar had told about me. I said no and they said bye-bye again. I never heard from them again.

Blink-182's big breakthrough third album, Enema of the State had sold over 15 million copies when lead singer Tom DeLonge left the band. If the anti-Hillary Wikileaks leaks are to be believed, DeLonge has some kind of a relationship with Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta (a lobbyist and former Obama chief of staff). Podesta's in a documentary DeLonge produced about UFOs and the two of them emailed about UFOs as well. Hillary's campaign didn't want to talk about UFOs but certainly blamed the Podesta-Blink-182 leak on the Trump's pal Vlad in the Kremlin.

Evangelicals May Be Abandoning Trump... But Where Do The UFOs Stand?

A member of Trump's "evangelical council," James MacDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel, an Illinois megachurch, emailed the other members of the Trumpist council that Trump's "grab-the-pussy" comments were "truly the kind of misogynistic trash that reveals a man to be lecherous and worthless-- not the guy who gets politely ignored, but the guy who gets a punch in the head from worthy men who hear him talk that way about women... No more defending Mr. Trump as simply foolish or loose lipped."

The Satanic-controlled wing of the American evangelical movement-- hucksters and right-wing prostitutes like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Robert Jeffress, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr.-- are all firmly in thrall to Trump and 100% in his sulphuric camp. Christianity Today's editors... not so much. The influential magazine is politically neutral but the editorial on Trumpy-the-Clown wasn't. "We are especially not indifferent," executive editor Andy Crouch wrote, "when the gospel is at stake... [W]e recognize that all earthly governments partake, to a greater or lesser extent, in what the Bible calls idolatry: substituting the creation for the Creator and the earthly ruler for the true God."

This past week, the latest (though surely not last) revelations from Trump’s past have caused many evangelical leaders to reconsider. This is heartening, but it comes awfully late. What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest-- indeed, sexual assault-- might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.

Indeed, there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. Idolatry, greed, and sexual immorality are intertwined in individual lives and whole societies. Sexuality is designed to be properly ordered within marriage, a relationship marked by covenant faithfulness and profound self-giving and sacrifice. To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one’s desires an idol. That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

...Most Christians who support Trump have done so with reluctant strategic calculation, largely based on the president’s power to appoint members of the Supreme Court. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.

But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry-- an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength-- the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome-- at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.

Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us-- in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.

That's not nearly as odd as a Facebook posting from Glenn Beck this week that said "If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice." You go, girl!



You must have liked a Blink-182 song some time in the late '90s, no? They're still around, kind of, but not really because lead singer Tom DeLonge left the band. Their big breakthrough third album, Enema of the State had sold over 15 million copies. If the Wikileaks statements are to be believed, DeLonge has some kind of a relationship with Hillary campaign chairman John Podesta (a lobbyist and former Obama chief of staff). Podesta's in a documentary DeLonge produced about UFOs and the two of them emailed about UFOs as well. Hillary's campaign doesn't want to talk about UFOs but blames the Podesta-Blink-182 leak on the Russians.

Should Congressional Democrats Run Against Obama?

Blue Dogs have been running away from Obama since the day he was inaugurated. In fact, when you compare the Blue Dogs tendency to cross the aisle and vote with the GOP since Obama was elected with that tendency over their whole political careers, you see the Blue Dogs have been far less likely to vote with the Democrats than ever before. Let's look at the half dozen most GOP-leaning non-freshmen Blue Dogs and the half dozen least GOP-leaning non-freshmen Blue Dogs. The number indicate first their career-long scores on substantive legislation and, second, their scores since Obama became president. First, from bad the worse, the Blue Dogs most in Boehner's pocket:

Travis Childers (MS)- 22.55/15.15
Joe Donnelly (IN)- 33.90/27.27
Jason Altmire (PA)- 36.95/25.76
Brad Ellsworth (IN)- 37.97/36.36
Heath Shuler (NC)- 38.78/30.30
Chris Carney (PA)- 39.31/30.65

Even more extreme are Blue Dog neo-Confederates Gene Taylor (MS- 47.17/17.19), Dan Boren (OK- 44.75/19.70) and Charlie Melancon (LA- 55.45/21.54). Below are the Blue Dogs who have voted a bit less often and less automatically with the Republicans, again, from bad to worse:

Jane Harman (CA)- 71.53/62.90
Joe Baca (CA)- 74.85/65.62
Loretta Sanchez (CA)- 81.15/70.00
Mike Michaud (ME)- 81.17/65.15
Mike Thompson (CA)- 81.19/75.76
Adam Schiff (CA)- 82.03/78.79

In both cohorts every single member-- including members in overwhelmingly strong Democratic districts (Harman, Baca, Sanchez, Schiff and Thompson)-- has voted more frequently with the GOP this year than they have across their already miserable career averages. This is true of the entire Blue Dog caucus. Eerily, when one of these Blue Dogs bitched to Obama that his agenda was too liberal for red district Blue Dogs, and that his support of healthcare reform would result in the loss of dozens of seats in the Midterms, the way it has in 1994 when Clinton tried passing healthcare reform, Obama pointed to his (then) high personal approval ratings and said "Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me." Yesterday, that Blue Dog, Marion Berry, citing health concerns, announced his retirement.

But Obama doesn't seem content in just making congressional life not worth it for Blue Dogs-- at least a dozen are likely to be defeated in November, although it could easily rise to over two dozen; his latest swing to the right is untenable for progressives! There was already the Rahm thing and the Afghanistan thing making more and more progressives uncomfortable and now... the clueless and insupportable Herbert Hoover routine, one that not only emulates Bush Economics but even mimics the deception that surrounded it then. Like most progressives-- at least so far-- Krugman is appalled:

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness.”)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view-- and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

Now that he's embraced the McCain approach to the economy that he vanquished during the election campaign, the man who is already embracing the inevitability of being a single-term president is also trying to embrace the resistant Republicans themselves! I don't know how many progressives are going to want to run on Obama's reverse coattails; probably not many more than the Blue Dogs. Apparently everyone in America has learned the adage that voters, when forced to choose between a fake Republican and a real Republican, will go for the real thing.

And I would expect progressive challengers to be the tip of the spear on this. Today Marcy Winograd's campaign sent out a press release disagreeing with the whole idea of a budget initiative that once again highlights bloated military spending over anemic education funding and other essential government domestic programs.

Though the majority of school funding comes from the states, the Obama proposal could freeze spending on items funded with federal dollars: supplementary books, reading programs, English as a Second Language classes, and modifications for students with disabilities.

"Public schools need more stimulus dollars to preserve music programs, reduce class size, and pursue quality professional development.  A three-year spending freeze on education sends the wrong message to our children, who should be considered our nation's greatest resource for innovation."

..."If the President wants to appease the neo-conservatives, the deficit hawks," says Winograd, "I would encourage him to cut our bloated military budget, which is now paying for multiple perpetual wars that create new enemies." 

The President's deficit reduction plan would not touch military spending, slated in 2010 to include 30 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan, 700-billion for the defense budget.  Spending on air traffic control, education, and national parks would, however, be frozen. 

Though the freeze, which the President hopes will save 250-billion over 10 years, does not affect Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security, Winograd warns those mainstays of our safety net could be next.  "Watch out," says Winograd, "for anything billing itself as a bi-partisan independent commission to restore the nation's fiscal balance.  In English that translates into cuts for the poor who rely on Medicaid and for seniors who worked their entire lives to receive Medicare and Social Security.

In 2008, Blue America was happy to see McCain defeated in his bid to extend Bushism for another term. We never collected one dime for Obama, but, I admit, we never expected him to be also looking to expend so many elements of Bushism! In 2008, we urged our readers and our donors to support genuine progressives and leave the blue corporate team and the red corporate team to fight it out among themselves. That's what we're doing again this year. And Sending the Democrats A Message They Can Understand is the first step. You wanna help"

I know they're not exactly Bob Dylan, but these three guys from behind the Orange Curtain seem to be saying it better, albeit inadvertently, than anyone today:

So sorry it's over
So sorry it's over

There's so much more that I wanted and
There's so much more that I needed and
Time keeps moving on and on and on
Soon we'll all be gone

Let's take some time to talk this over
You're out of line and rarely sober
We can't depend on your excuses
Cause in the end it's fucking useless

You can only lean on me for so long
Bring your ship about to watch a friend drown
Stood over the ledge
Begged you to come down
You can only lean on me for so long

It's just about the lyrics. Forget the video. Although... I guess you can think Rahm, Geithner and Summers if you want to. It works.