Holy moly – we haven’t seen UFOs light up the media this way since the New York Times broke the news about the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program back on 12/16/17. And when the U.S. Navy announced last week it was revamping its communications system to allow its pilots to accurately and without fear of reprisal report what they’ve been seeing in the skies, this was a story The Times should’ve owned. But it didn’t – that task fell to Politico, which had also filed its own 12/16/17 AATIP piece shortly after the Times clicked the send button first.

De Void would like to think this signals the beginning of an old-fashioned media war, something previously unimaginable with the ascendency of Donald Trump. After all, Hillary Clinton was the only candidate to voluntarily talk about UFOs during the campaign, and the press had no idea what she was talking about, the way they never do when it comes to The Great Taboo. After the incurious 45 delivered his “American Carnage” speech at the inauguration, it seemed pretty clear that nothing prescient or remotely visionary, especially on the UFO beat, would be happening for the next four years. Yet, by the end of 2017, hell shivered in a cool breeze when we learned about AATIP, the Nimitz/tic tac incident, and that the Navy’s elite fighter pilots weren’t afraid to man up talk on the record.

Covfefe! ET landing on the White House lawn these days might damage or destroy outright the event’s credibility/CREDIT: shirtpool.com

But could the media scrum that followed Wednesday’s Politico coup be directly proportionate to freakish surrealism Trump himself has imposed on the United States? Things are not normal in this country. Down is up, up is down, and when a culture is subjected to an unrelenting diet of suffocating lies, how surprising is the reaction, really, when suddenly one of the longest-running myths in living memory – that UFOs pose no threat to national security – is officially exposed as a fraud? Even as one of America’s top conspiracy theorists makes policy in the Oval Office? What does this mean?

Anyway, the axis did in fact tilt last Wednesday, after Politico and then The Washington Post got the Navy to admit that whatever’s happening upstairs isn’t ours, and that command would no longer pretend those charged with the defense of the realm are all drunk, delusional, liars or naïve. The Navy’s decision to make an honest and active effort to learn as much as it can about what appears to be advanced technology operating at will in our restricted airspace was like a Berlin Wall of the mind cracking open.

CNN, Time magazine, Stars and Stripes, The Atlantic, the Navy Times, Business Insider, you name it – the Fourth Estate pounced like it was starved for oxygen and fresh air, or at least something that didn’t come from a partisan script. It’s making Tucker Carlson of Fox News (12 UFO segments since 12/16/17) look like the dean of the Big Media truth movement. And hey, does anyone remember if 12/16/17 made ESPN2? Here’s David Jacoby of Jalen & Jacoby swerving off topic on Friday on the front end of a two-minute riff:

“This next bit of news is more impactful than anything that happens in the world of sports, pop culture, or the actual news. The U.S. Navy has changed their procedures and policies – there have been so many sightings of unidentified flying objects by Navy pilots that they have now put in a formal procedure to fill out the information for these to be investigated …”

Sports geeks, yo …

What we should never lose sight of during our long national night of aggressive stupidity is context for how some good news finally broke through. Last week’s announcement didn’t roll off some corporate whiteboard, and it sure as hell wasn’t an act of political courage by our elected representatives. What happened was the persistence of citizen advocates who, without a glimmer of hope for financial remuneration, were guided only by evidence, and a faith that said evidence would somehow, someday, find the right audience. And you can go all the way back to the 1950s to trace that arc.

More recently, of course, Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy’s blue-chip board members spritzed fresh fuel on those embers with news of the 2004 Nimitz incident. Researcher Dave Beaty’s related mini-doc, The Nimitz Encounter, offered a reconstruction respectable enough to draw nearly 1.5 million viewers into the story. And this month, the Scientific Coalition for Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Studies’ volunteer collaborators released the first detailed forensic analysis of the Nimitz encounter. Although SCU’s work didn’t get the nearly attention it deserved, it set a standard for transparency and gave all the right people something to work with.

The most comprehensive overview on the implications of what happened last week was provided not by legacy media, but from War Zone blogger Tyler Rogoway, a military hardware Joe Friday kinda guy who strays into UFO territory only when he’s obtained original FAA documentation and radar data. In an essay titled “What the Hell Is Going On With UFOs and the Department of Defense,” Rogoway writes that a defense establishment with more than seven decades of patrolling American skies without knowing what it’s up against because it hasn’t done its homework amounts to “an unfathomable dereliction of duty.”

Going forward, let’s hope the rest of the media can show similar diligence. Kudos to Washington Post reporter Deanna Paul for running beyond the canned statement and actually getting a real-life Navy spokesman to elaborate, at least somewhat, on the new policy. On the other hand, in an annoying companion video, WaPo backslid by letting political reporter Cleve Woodson, Jr., try to fake his way through some commentary using a lot of familiar buzzwords.

Woodson was all over the board, unfocused, bouncing from Area 51 to Roswell to Ray Santilli’s “Alien Autopsy” fiasco. His major takeaway on the Navy announcement was that it emboldens conspiracy theorists with “a small kernel of truth, that they can back it up with. They still have this excuse for all the holes that end up in all these theories, which is that, well, the government’s hiding, right? The government’s been spending decades and all this money trying to hide all these unexplained things.”

Attention WaPo: Readers are moving beyond this sort of soft chewed cud. You need to get smarter now. We all do.