Well, The History Channel, or History, or whatever they’re calling it these days, couldn’t ask for better publicity than what it got on Monday – a surprise Memorial Day plug from the New York Times. And whoa, what a talker. For starters, The Times’ on-the-record interviews with Navy pilots — at least one of whom has shared his testimony with members of Congress — moved CBS White House correspondent Paula Reid to grab a contextual interview with UFO historian Richard Dolan. ABC’s “Good Morning America” ran excerpts from History’s upcoming “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” and The Washington Post ran a related op-ed from Tufts University international politics professor Daniel Drezner.

Drezner’s column reminded us that this whole “disclosure” thing isn’t playing out the way Dolan or anyone else might’ve anticipated, at least not on the front end. Dolan’s projected scenario imagined top-down revelations, with the U.S. chief executive, in concert with foreign leaders, breaking the ET news with a formal announcement on account of an undeniable series of events going down beyond anyone’s control. But Drezner revisits “Sovereignty and the UFO,” an overlooked essay from 2008 in the journal Political Theory by Raymond Duvall and Alexander Wendt. Those co-authors couldn’t imagine a legitimate bottom-up line of inquiry into The Great Taboo because that would require us all, including the media, to concede that maybe anthropocentrism isn’t the center of cosmic intelligence after all — and demonstrably not. “What is interesting about this latest news cycle,” Drezner offers, “is that DoD officials are not behaving as Wendt and Duvall would predict.”

Is this what’s going on upstairs? Hey, yo, I’m putting my $$$ on the one that can withstand bone-sloshing g-forces/CREDIT: mpe.dimacs.rutgers.edu

True that. For reasons unknown, the military bureaucracy – and let’s face it, they’re really the ones running the show, since White House occupants are only temporary employees – has broken form in a big way this year. They’re not giving us the kind of transparency we’d like, but compared with past practices this is a regular gusher, man. In April, the brass told Politico the Navy was revamping its instructions for its people to report UFO activity. Hungh? Say what? Just eight years ago, upon being pressed for more information by Huffington Post reporter Lee Spiegel about an Air Force manual directive to specifically log all UFO incidents, the Pentagon freaked and scrubbed the entire UFO category from its books the very next day.

Now, apparently, the Navy has no problem allowing its pilots to talk to the NYT about the unsettling UFO events off the eastern seaboard in 2014-15. At least one of those encounters was significant enough to have instigated a near-miss incident report, and if you haven’t read the Times story yet (where have you been?), you’re not much of a UFO nerd and you can check it out here. A cube inside a translucent sphere threading the needle between two warplanes 100 feet apart? WTF? Swamp gas disguised as geometry?

As with its ground-breaking reporting on the 2004 Nimitz incident on 12/16/17, Monday’s Times piece raised more questions than answers, even as it filled in critical gaps from its first UFO story 18 months ago. We now know, for instance, that the previously sketchy “Gimbal” and the “Gofast” videos were recorded off Jacksonville in early 2015 by F-18 pilots prowling with a unit known as the “Red Rippers.” But what else is being embargoed?

Robert Powell, co-founder of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, was caught just as flat-footed as everyone else by the Times report on Monday. He had been aware of the 2014-15 incidents associated with the USS Roosevelt task force as early as January 2018, but he had no pilot testimony and little material to work with. Besides, he was just beginning to assemble an SCU team for a deep dive into available data from the Nimitz incident, and they released that forensic analysis in April.

Powell’s unnamed source told him last year that the Gimbal and Gofast videos were acquired by pilots attached to the Roosevelt. He was also told there was footage from at least five incidents, not two, and that one sequence was especially harrowing.

“He said he didn’t believe it would ever be released,” Powell recalls, “because it would show we’re definitely not at the top of the totem poll.” Powell was told the clip shows a bogey, embedded metadata intact, on what looks like a head-on collision course with an approaching Navy pilot. But the intruder swerves away before the potential disaster. If accurate, that’s an intentional and majorly aggressive maneuver. And it would be insane to imperil our aviators by telling them to never mind the Leprechauns. Still — why not just quietly reinsert UFO reporting procedures back into the handbook, without any fanfare at all? “This doesn’t seem to fit,” says Powell.

Exactly who’s calling the shots on what to release and what to withhold is more than a bit murky right now, but the To The Stars Academy, which lured military intelligence agent Luis Elizondo out of the shadows in 2017, obviously has major clout. TTSA is an official partner with the History channel on this one, whose six-part and now hugely anticipated series begins Friday night. Is there an actual game plan here, or are they just winging it to see what sticks?