Tuesday's postcard, and the remarkable news story you didn't get to read yesterday

June 6, 2023

Hawk Creek fjord, north of Creston, WA

Two years ago this April, the gold standard of American magazines, The New Yorker, produced a riveting package of journalism on a subject that’s out of this world.

In the print version readers got to pore over Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s lengthy article: “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.S Seriously.” Via internet and radio, listeners could dial in a companion audio story, narrated by Lewis-Kraus but introduced by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor for the past quarter century. In his run-up to Lewis Kraus’s story Remnick mused that if someone had told him when he became editor that he’d be running a magazine story on U.F.O.s he could only have imagined it as a humor piece.

That, in a nutshell, is the tricky part about reporting on U.F.O.s Collectively, we have a split-psyche. On one hand, we’re broadly conditioned to treat even the mention of U.F.O.s as a signal for delusion or comical paranoia. It’s a reliable punch line. On other hand, public opinion surveys indicate that two-thirds of Americans (younger people more than their elders) believe intelligent alien-life exists on other planets.

The story you (or nearly all of you) missed yesterday is by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, two of the journalists whose bylines were on a New York Times bombshell in 2017 revealing a secret Pentagon project to study UFO encounters. It is entitled Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin.

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