I knew at once what she was talking about. It wasn't the strange goings on at the International Space Station, which has apparently been single-handedly fighting off an alien attack for the past few weeks. No, the big news this morning was that, thanks to intrepid UFO website The Black Vault, the U.S. Air Force's TOP SECRET Project Blue Book UFO files had just been made available online for the very... first... time... ever!!!!
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| Project Blue Book officers on the job. And, yes, that's really Col. Flagg from M*A*S*H! |
- USA Today says "Air Force UFO Files Hit the Web"
- Fox News just repeats what USA Today said: "Air Force UFO Files Hit the Web" (or did USA Today copy them?)
- CNN says "Air Force UFO Files Land on Internet"
- The New York Post says "Air Force has 701 'Unidentified' UFOs in Records Now Online" (which is pretty funny in a moronic kind of way if you think about it a second)
- ABC News says "Trove of 130K Air Force UFO Documents Available Online"
- Even the great io9.com was duped, saying "U.S. Air Force Releases Thousands of Pages Of Declassified UFO Files" (but at least they had the guts to admit that the story was, perhaps... not entirely correct)
- I heard that the 'Black Vault' guy was even on The Today Show this morning!
My favorite of all is this idiotic video segment from USAToday.com in which two "journalists" discuss the significance of the release of the Blue Book files. They both seem amazed to learn that pilots, scientists and military people have reported UFOs, and one of the guys says this proves that it's not just "drunk yahoos" seeing things in the sky. Now, that's some kind of cracker jack reporting, eh?
So, anyway, WOW, big news, right? Except for one small thing:
The Air Force's TOP SECRET Project Blue Book files have been available online for years... In a searchable format... At two different websites... For free.
Don't believe me, USA Today? Check it out yourself:
I'm not going to get into why the proprietor of The Black Vault website has gone this route, because I don't know anything about the guy or his website. All I can say for certain is this: any claim that "new" Blue Book archives now available at The Black Vault are better than the records available at The Blue Book Archive or at Fold 3 should be taken with a grain of salt.
Here's why: I can only speak for certain about The Blue Book Archive, because that's the site I depend on for my research, but a quick check of the Blue Book file for the 1966 Dexter-Hillsdale, Michigan UFO sightings showed that the "newly" archived document at The Black Vault was redacted, while the very same archived document at bluebookarchive.org was unredacted.
Which site would you rather rely on?
3 comments:
Greenwald (and The Black Vault) was a "hot stuff" young UFO Turk when The X-Files was in its first season. Since then, he and his blog have dropped off almost everybody's radar. He probably just blasted a press release to the entire known universe because everyone's pretty much forgotten he's still around.
Since nobody does actual journalism these days and just writes stories directly from press releases, we end up with this kind of misinformation. God only knows how many other non-UFO stories presented to us are this far off the mark for the same reason.
See also Kevin Randle's detailed deconstruction of this story at:
http://bit.ly/1GtHRlU
It's rather amazing, but not unexpected given MSM history, how badly reported this story about "Project Blue Book finally declassified!" has been so ignorantly and blithely presented by our primary TV and online outlets.
I guess none of these reporters even tried to use Google search for even the most basic facts, which is that PBB was declassified nearly 30 years ago, and that Greenwald's version of the documentation is really not even done well or searchable in a linear manner, as it is at:
www.bluebookarchive.org
The coverage was extraordinarily superficial and shallow.
Truly kind of shameful -- the mainstream media is incompetent to either report on or research the "great taboo" of the UFO phenomenon.
There are really two errors here: 1) the claim that the Blue Book files have been posted online for the first time, and 2) the claim that the Air Force is only now releasing these documents. Both assertions can easily be proven to be false, and yet all the news sources got them both wrong...
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