New York magazine’s Dec. 19 interview with retired Navy pilot Chad Underwood – the actual guy whose F-18 gun camera caught the Tic Tac UFO red-handed, on video, in 2004 – marked the culmination of an utterly remarkable media transformation in its relationship with The Great Taboo. Getting the video pilot on record was a bona fide coup in a suddenly competitive market. This was original, proactive, straight up reporting, no longer delivered with the glib smirks that have characterized this arena of journalism for far too long. In the still-unfolding reconstruction of a profound military encounter with ridiculously superior technology, Matthew Phelan’s New York piece broke new ground.

More broadly, the tenuous sobriety of UFO press coverage at the end of the 21st century’s second decade bears little resemblance to the cultural garbage pit it wallowed in 10 years ago, and good riddance to all that. Because the phenomenon didn’t go into deep-freeze until the NY Times decided to break the Tic Tac story in December 2017. And it didn’t care if we acknowledged its activities or not. It just kept happening, the way it always has. And only now, in retrospect, can we see how naïve and willfully negligent our opinion-shapers have been.

“And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more” — Anne Frank/CREDIT: timeout.com

“I’m not a big believer in conspiracies because I don’t think our government is very good, frankly, at keeping secrets.” This was the anchorman CNN bills as “Keeping Them Honest,” Anderson Cooper, reassuring us during a clumsily conceived UFO one-off he emceed in 2012, even as the Pentagon was funding its then-secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Seven years later, after interviewing Tic Tac eyewitness/F-18 pilot David Fravor, Cooper did an about-face. “Wow … I mean, it’s fascinating hearing this coming from you, commander, I appreciate you taking the time, and obviously, uh, yeah, it’s just amazing. Um, I’m not even sure what to make of it …”

Here’s what De Void makes of it: In an era of truth implosion and social-media anarchy, legacy media still swings heavy lumber. A pity it took them so long to step up to the plate.

In 2010, during an interview with the NYT about his designs on space tourism, billionaire Robert Bigelow practically begged reporter Kenneth Chang to ask him about his interest in UFOs; after all, at the time, the FAA was formally directing UFO eyewitnesses to contact Bigelow’s Aerospace Advanced Space Studies project. And just three years before that (as we all discovered later), a spook with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached Bigelow about investigating weird goings-on at what became known as Skinwalker Ranch, in Utah. A Bigelow property.

“I’ve been a researcher and student of U.F.O.’s for many, many years. Anybody that does research … come(s) away absolutely convinced. You don’t have to have personal encounters,” Bigelow told Chang, before dropping this: “People have been killed. People have been hurt. It’s more than observational kind of data.”

How and why Chang failed to press Bigelow for details on such an intentionally provocative assertion is a puzzlement. But I do kinda get part of it. The stigma against applying dedicated journalism to this stuff, at least prior to December ’17, is visceral and intimidating. I especially felt it in 2013 during a press conference with retired Sec Def/CIA director Robert Gates. I got to ask the first question. And I knew none of the other local media at the table would have my back because they had never heard about how Gates’ buddy at the CIA, Chase Brandon, had gone on national media months earlier to proclaim that, while still employed by the Agency, he, Brandon, had discovered that the alleged Roswell crash was in fact the real deal. He said he’d located the evidence, documents and photos stashed in boxes, languishing in the CIA’s mothballed archives. Back when Clinton was president.

The room shrank when I finally dispensed with the setup and asked Gates the question: Do you think Chase Brandon is lying? Cool as a morgue slab, the old spymaster declined to answer directly. Gates said he had never, not once during his tenure at the Pentagon or Langley, confronted the UFO issue. He said only: “I have a lot of respect for Chase. I’ve known Chase, as a martial arts instructor for the Agency, or was. So I’m not going to question Chase. I’m just telling you what I said (about never dealing with UFOs).” Next?

Critics were, and still are, ready to pounce with insinuations of delusion, or worse. No matter that Leslie Kean, whose byline was part of the Times’ 12/16/17 game-changer, produced a bestseller so solidly sourced, it was endorsed by the likes of physicist Michio Kaku and astronomer Derrick Pitts. To debunkers, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record was gasoline sloshed on a fire.

“The book is laced with paranoia” — just one example, from the UK’s Weekly Standard — “suggesting that government officials have long been responsible for covering up investigation into UFOs and extraterrestrial activities.”

Sometimes it seemed as if the only person in America acting like a journalist was late-night comic Jimmy Kimmel, who wasn’t afraid of putting the UFO question — cushioned with yuks, of course — to former president Bill Clinton, then-chief executive Barack Obama, and contender Hillary Clinton. Maybe that’s because Kimmel was, well … he wasn’t a journalist.

Yet, throughout the decade, thorough and credible independent investigations into UFOs were being ignored by Big Media. Spearheading much of that research was Robert Powell, lately of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. And his interrogatories had consequences. As a result of a 2008 report he co-authored for MUFON on a massive bogey that alerted F-16s nearby and buzzed the no-fly zone over George W. Bush’s home in Texas earlier that year, the FAA made adjustments. In 2011, the class of radar records Powell employed to reconstruct that incident – the unfiltered raw data of pingbacks called ERIT, or En Route Intelligence Tool – was quietly exempted from mandatory FOIA disclosure.

Two years before the Times released the Navy’s Tic Tac images, Powell and SCU colleagues published an extensive analysis of UFO footage captured by government cameras off Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, in 2013. Tracked by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection plane on the lookout for drug smugglers, and leaked by a team member after his superiors yawned, this target was shown dipping into the Caribbean and splitting in two after re-emerging. But, as with the Stephenville report, the media skipped it.

Although CNN streamed it live, a Washington, D.C., press conference organized in 2010 by researcher Robert Hastings featuring seven military eyewitnesses to UFOs pranking U.S. nuclear facilities was largely shrugged off by the mainstream. Wrote John Kelly of the Washington Post: “The cookies they serve at press conferences at the National Press Club are the same as the cookies we have in meetings here at The Post. I happen to like these cookies …” Not much written about the testimony.

Some media did weigh in, three years later, on the Citizen Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club. This was a week’s worth of testimony from an eclectic lineup of UFO eyewitnesses before a panel of retired federal lawmakers in what was billed as a “mock Congressional hearing.” But much of the coverage turned jaundiced eyes at the $20,000 stipend paid to each committee member. “Cash-strapped has-beens,” declared one cybercritic. The San Jose Mercury News dissed the participation of its former home district representative this way: “Lynn Woolsey. Phone home.”

The MSM spent much of the decade trying to get audiences excited about lens flares and runaway balloons. De Void even came up with the Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award for the most predictable formulaic coverage. On the other hand, the UFO subculture was often its own worst enemy. It hit rock bottom after hyping Native American mummy photos as dead space aliens at a 2015 disaster in Mexico City. One of the cause’s biggest advocates, MUFON, fed into the carnage by dumping boxloads of unsolved cases into a History Channel spinoff called “Hangar 1.” It felt like a week’s worth of caffeine chasing methamphetamine crystals doled out in eight-minute segments.

Still — what a ride. What started out in 2010 with 425 confirmed exoplanets has since increased tenfold, with more than 1,000 candidates still pending; it has ended with astronomers openly contemplating the possibility of “alien megastructures” glittering around KIC 8462852, without feeling the need to say We’re not talking about little green men here, OK? It has ended with the Air Force announcing its exploitation of liquid metals, with the Navy issuing formal new UFO reporting directives to its pilots, with Fox’s Tucker Carlson popping the UFO question routinely to selected guests, and with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos bringing it directly to a disinterested Trump in the Oval Office. Trump in the Oval Office — a Gahan Wilson cartoon not even the Holy Trinity saw coming in 2010.

So here we go, rounding the corner into a scary new decade. The usual suspects will argue that our democracy is collapsing, and that allocating resources to the UFO riddle is a frivolous distraction. Others will argue there’s nothing to save anymore, that the experiment broke down and drowned in a sewage of money long ago, and that maybe the UFO riddle is the only compelling uncertainty left.

But maybe it won’t all be bad. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe we’ll all wake up together, and “Fifty Shades of Grey” will still be locked away in E.L. James’ hard drive, and no one outside of Newtown, Connecticut, will have heard of Sandy Hook, and Art Bell will still be alive, and when SETI zealots like Seth Shostak tell us UFOs are scientifically uninteresting, everyone will still believe them.

Or maybe, in the third decade of the third millennium, we’ll finally get the truth we were wishing for — and wish we hadn’t.