{"id":4188,"date":"2026-05-26T09:35:56","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T09:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4188"},"modified":"2026-10-21T09:40:50","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T09:40:50","slug":"a-self-licking-ice-cream-cone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=4188","title":{"rendered":"A self-licking ice-cream cone"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Daniel Lavelle’s Chasing Aliens: Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands for New Scientist, 26 May 2026<\/em><\/p>\n

As he chases spirits around a graveyard in New Orleans, it occurs to Daniel Lavelle, who has won prizes for his hard-hitting and socially conscious journalism, \u201cthat I perhaps hadn’t been sceptical enough on this journey so far.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lavelle is in pursuit of alien visitors to Earth, or so he\u2019d have us believe, cozened into credulous optimism by that notorious New York Times front-pager “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’\u201d, published a few days before Christmas in 2017. Its co-authors claimed that the Pentagon had, for years, operated a secret $22 million program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects.<\/p>\n

It was a story that kept on giving. In April 2020 the Department of Defense relented to the power of YouTube (where the videos had been available for years) and released three formerly classified videos of aerial objects moving in ways that broke the rules of aerodynamics (and, arguably, physics); in June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence identified 142 objects — objects, yet, not mere \u201cphenomena\u201d — which it said were a potential national security threat; the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was launched in 2022 to consolidate UAP investigations across all US military branches and government agencies; and in July 2023, during a televised House Oversight Committee hearing, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified that the U.S. government had been running a multi-decade, highly classified UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program, all the while concealing it from congressional oversight.<\/p>\n

In a book that\u2019s a triumph of late-entry \u201cgonzo\u201d journalism, the least successful pages here are the ones where Lavelle rolls up his sleeves and attempts to disentangle this garbage, even in the teeth of copycat and wannabe pieces from CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Politico, the Washington Post and, well, just about every other newspaper and news channel across the global North. “Falsehood flies,\u201d wrote the satirist Jonathan Swift, \u201cand the Truth comes limping after it.” It\u2019s a thankless, going-on-impossible task, because how do you prove a negative? As Lavelle puts it: \u201cKonrad Kujau created a forgery of Adolf Hitler’s diaries, which fooled Rupert Murdoch and his Sunday Times newspaper, but nobody questions the validity of all diaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Might there be alien visitors on Earth, after all? Oh, probably. Why not? Just not these aliens, riding these UAPs, since every one of them succumb, eventually, to natural explanations of one sort or another.<\/p>\n

Briefly, then: former intelligence and counter-intelligence officer Luis Elizondo, whose resignation and testimony gave New York Times its credibility and impact, says he was recruited in 2009 to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a government program to investigate aerial threats including UAPs. He wasn\u2019t. The officially funded government program was called AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program), a $22 million initiative championed by former Senator Harry Reid and contracted out to private aerospace billionaire Robert Bigelow (\u201ca bargain-basement Elon Musk\u201d Lavelle calls him) who focused the funds on hunting for ghosts and cryptids at his ranch in northeastern Utah. AATIP was the unofficial nickname for an unfunded, informal hobby project, led by Elizondo when Bigelow\u2019s funding dried up, looking at \u201ctraditional\u201d military UAP encounters.<\/p>\n

For all its entertaining encounters with true believers of one stripe or another — and a visit to Sedona, Arizona, where Starseeds, people who believe they are aliens from another planet, are hosting a week of mini-retreats — Chasing Aliens is really chasing the money. It\u2019s about \u201chow a group of fanatics conned the Pentagon out of millions of dollars\u201d and created a self-sustaining echo-chamber of innuendo, conspiracy and lazy journalism that reverberates to this day. Even as I wrote this I saw late-show host Bill Maher just fashioned a YouTubed op-ed out of Dan Farah\u2019s recent conspiracy-propelled UFO documentary The Age of Disclosure. Author and national security analyst Peter Bergen calls this sort of thing \u201ca self-kicking ice-cream cone\u201d: Daniel Lavelle makes a great and entertaining display of gorging on it and then feeling mightily sick afterwards.<\/p>\n

Chasing Aliens is a hugely entertaining primer on UFOlogy\u2019s resurgence in a post-truth world, and its moral effect on a nation presided over by a head of state Lavelle dubs \u201cThe Obfuscator-in-Chief\u201d. Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux had better watch their backs, though in the end, Lavelle\u2019s faux-naive act fails to convince. He doesn\u2019t quite manage to contain his antipathy to the popular right in America, and this leads him to make statements so convoluted and stretched, I fear they boil down to a sort of unexamined anti-Americanism (as when he tries to convince us that those Starseed types — the one who think they\u2019re dolphins from Sirius B (no kidding) — might \u201cinadvertently\u201d infect the minds of millions of young people with eugenicist beliefs; why didn\u2019t he just call them \u201cdeplorables\u201d and be done with it?)<\/p>\n

Chasing Aliens reminded me of the old Irish joke about the chap who wants to know the way to Dublin. The local savant sucks his teeth and declares, \u2018Well, I wouldn\u2019t start from here.\u2019 Lavelle tries chasing aliens to a place where he can say things about information, truth and the media. He succeeds, but on the way he loses his temper a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Daniel Lavelle’s Chasing Aliens: Faith and Conspiracy in the UFO Heartlands for New Scientist, 26 May 2026 As he chases spirits around a graveyard in New Orleans, it occurs to Daniel Lavelle, who has won prizes for his hard-hitting … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[1255,1256,1105],"class_list":["post-4188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-conspiracy-theories","tag-gonzo","tag-ufos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4190,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4188\/revisions\/4190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}