Would American culture be able to tell the difference if Uncle Sam announced the UFO phenomenon also creates “profoundly altered perceptual environments”?
Journalism, the sausage factory that produces history’s first drafts, is a sloppy hot mess in the healthiest of competitive environments. You know your beat, you know the rules, you know the players and their agendas, sort of, but you’re not an insider and there are always unknown unknowns. So you trust your sources, let ‘er rip – and then steel yourself for that imminent cringe-inducing voice on the phone, telling you what you got wrong.
But consider a more anemic media climate: The object of your pursuits resides in a journalistically barren landscape, a cultural ghetto stigmatized by decades of official derision and Bat Boy tabloids. Your quarry has nothing in common with the stock market or the delta variant or the latest papal encyclical or the fascist rally down the street or any other event with designated institutional wisdom standing by to provide meaningful context. There are no omniscient village elders who speak in instructive riddles, no libraries of record from the directors and stage managers who erected the walls and bolted the locks.
Should you muster enough curiosity to peek inside, you wind up squinting into a blizzard of arcane acronyms and secret agencies and anonymous sources and spiderwebs of staggering anecdotes and X-Files tropes and bureaucratic obfuscation and the repellant odor of conspiracy culture. Once you organize this chaos into a narrative and tap the send button, a storyline this complex will inevitably goad insiders into telling you how you screwed up.
Thus, last month, nearly four years after the New York Times and Politico raced each other to blow the lid off the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, the chief architect behind that project stepped forward to produce the first official response to how that $22 million was spent – “to correct the record,” in his words. But in so doing, Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program has complicated the big picture even more. It is fearless in scope, and perhaps even reckless in its regard for image-conscious lawmakers voting on budgets. It has provoked another spasm of internecine vitriol, and its aftertaste leaves at least one taxpayer who thinks accountability matters feeling cheated.
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