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July 13, 2021 - Skeptoid
16:52
Skeptoid #788: The UFO Rogues Gallery Takes Over America - Part 2

An unlikely group of paranormalists has persuaded the American public that the government takes UFOs seriously. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The 2017 Times Story That Changed Everything 00:09:21
This week, the conclusion of our two-part examination of the group of paranormalists who successfully convinced the world media that the U.S. government takes UFOs seriously.
It's one of the most successful PR campaigns in the history of pseudoscience, and its actual roots should surprise and anger everyone.
Who are they is up next on Skeptoid?
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The UFO Rogues Gallery Takes Over America, Part 2.
Welcome to Part 2 of our episode revealing how, for more than 50 years, a small group of paranormalists and believers in reincarnation have been pursuing their interests on the payroll of the American taxpayers and finally got their biggest PR success with claims of Navy UFO videos and ever-failing promises of government disclosure.
This is a gallery of rogues who have presented a public face of UFOs that threaten our skies while keeping their true beliefs behind the scenes, which is that they believe UFOs and poltergeists are interdimensional beings who hold the keys to life after death.
Sound incredible?
Sound too hard to believe that the government could be duped into funding such nonsense?
Well, people forget one does not need to fool the entire government to win a research grant.
One needs only to find the right person holding the right purse strings.
To briefly recap last week's episode, in chapter one, we met the young paranormalist Hal Putoff in 1978 while he was working at the Stargate Project, testing psychic performers like Uri Geller for the CIA under the watchful eye of a fascinated government staffer named Chris Mellon.
In Chapter 2, Putoff was funded by the hotel billionaire and reincarnation aficionado Robert Bigelow at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah beginning in 1995, where they called themselves the National Institute for Discovery Science.
They tantalized Bigelow's friend, Senator Harry Reid, that poltergeists and flying saucers were the same manifestation of interdimensional beings and talked him into coughing up $22 million in taxpayer money to fund such an exploration, which he began dispersing to Bigelow in 2008.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 covered the transfer of this $22 million to at least three different entities over at least five years, all controlled by Bigelow.
The last of these various incarnations of the interdimensional poltergeist hunt was called A-Tip, the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, and was funded by Bigelow himself with exactly one employee, former military man Luis Elizondo.
It was the unveiling of A-Tip that first exploded onto the world news scene in 2017, accompanied by Navy UFO videos.
In today's episode, we're going to discover just how this group of fringe paranormalists, armed only with Bigelow's very deep pockets and his passion to discover the secret of life after death, managed to capture the world's attention, their appetite for the paranormal now somehow reframed for public consumption as a hunt to learn the truth about UFOs that could threaten the military.
Since getting the funding from Harry Reid, the Rogues Gallery had become increasingly fringe and had impressed the government less and less.
It seemed like it might all come to an end.
Chapter 6, The New York Times, 2017 But then we have that famous 2017 New York Times article that kicked off all the public interest in the UFOs.
It spoke about a serious Pentagon investigation into UFOs and made no mention at all of Robert Bigelow, Skinwalker Ranch, or interdimensional poltergeists.
There's a good reason, and it's rooted in how the article came to be and who wrote it.
Remember Chris Mellon?
Fascinated by the idea of UFOs as interdimensional constructs, he'd kept in peripheral touch with our Rogues Gallery all these years.
And now, as he had a very respectable resume from his public life as an intelligence official, they brought him back in.
Their funding cut off, their strategy was to go public, and to go public big.
Mellon would partner with Elizondo to announce ATIP to the world.
Mellon provided the three Navy UFO video clips we've all seen a million times, and the two men planned their PR strategy.
Mellon later told the UFO website Open Minds, We had a strategy from the outset and a plan before Elizondo even left.
We discussed what that would look like, and we've been executing on it ever since.
They needed someone to break the news, and they all knew Leslie Kane quite well.
She was a busy paranormal and UFO author and shared an intense interest in aliens with former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who'd even written the foreword to one of her UFO books.
Bigelow had known her for years.
Her boyfriend had been Bud Hopkins, whom Bigelow had previously funded to do alien abduction research.
Leslie Kane suggested bringing in an even bigger gun, Hal Blumenthal, who was tight with the New York Times and was currently writing a biography on John Mack, a disgraced Harvard professor who had been Bud Hopkins' partner in the alien abduction research.
The Rogues Gallery had formed the Dream Team to persuade the American public that the government believes in aliens.
The New York Times story, Glowing Auras and Black Money, the Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program, written by Leslie Kane, Hal Blumenthal, and Helen Cooper, ran in December 2017, and the headlines have never quite looked the same since.
Recently, Blumenthal said they deliberately downplayed the poltergeist and skinwalkers and emphasized UFOs and credible threats to give the story more credibility.
Gee, do you think?
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To the Stars Academy and Alien Claims 00:03:46
Chapter 7, To the Stars Academy, 2017 Simultaneously, their plan included launching To the Stars Academy, a public benefit corporation funded with a $50 million public stock offering.
At its head was Tom DeLong, lifelong UFO obsessive and burned-out former guitarist for Blink 182.
Hal Putoff was a co-founder.
Chris Mellon was a paid advisor and bought most of the small amount of stock that was ever actually sold.
Luis Elizondo was its head of global security, basically Tom DeLong's unnecessary bodyguard.
And Jacques Vallet handled all the testing of any alien spaceship wreckage they might obtain.
They had gotten the whole band all back together.
A 50-year through line of dedicated advocates of alien visitation.
Although nominally about scientific investigation, To the Stars Academy was actually filed as an entertainment company.
It has produced a handful of graphic novels, poetry volumes, and music albums.
And its one significant success was the short-lived TV series Unidentified, Inside America's UFO Investigation, for History Channel, of course.
By the end of 2020, most of the Rogues Gallery had left To The Stars, possibly realizing that Tom DeLong was even more spaced out than they'd been prepared for.
Some of his online videos are pretty sobering.
Chapter 8, The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies The Rogues Gallery was again without a home.
But once again, Robert Bigelow was quick to provide one.
He created and funded the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies to offer a million and a half dollars in prize money for the best evidence of life after death.
Its board of directors are also the judges for the contest.
And they are the same familiar faces.
Leslie Kane and Hal Putoff, of course.
Also Colm Kelleher, a biologist who led Bigelow's science team at Skinwalker Ranch.
Jessica Ootz, who had been engaged at the Stargate project to write a report to counter the fraud that Ray Hyman had uncovered.
Also a reincarnation author or two, and even the chairman of the metaphysics-focused Esselin Institute in California.
It is essential to understand that what is presented by the credulous news media as a serious reports that the U.S. military is keenly interested in UFOs and believes they might be alien is actually merely the most successful press campaign by a group of well-funded people who have,
for 50 years, dedicated themselves to their belief that psychic powers, telekinesis, poltergeists, life after death, shapeshifters, and interdimensional aliens are all closely interconnected.
They've won over a large number of people, including politicians, reporters, and even the few former legitimate scientists they count among their ranks.
But it's key to remember that they won them over by misrepresenting their beliefs, as the user-friendly soundbite, alien UFOs are in our skies.
Their true beliefs are far stranger.
Support Skeptoid Premium Members Today 00:03:41
None of what the Rogues Gallery have been up to has been investigation or discovery.
They had all the answers they wanted 50 years ago, and those conclusions have not changed.
As of this writing, HBO has announced it is producing a movie about Leslie Kane's life, and it will no doubt portray her as a brave Maverick reporter trying to dig up the truth from a government cover-up, and will likely omit any mention of the fact that she has spent decades as one of the primary creators of that very same mythology.
Elizondo has gone a different direction, co-founding a startup called Skyfort that appears to be positioning itself to win lucrative government contracts to interpret UFO videos as evidence of alien visitation.
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