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November 24, 2021 — Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Asst Sec of Defense for Intelligence under Clinton and Bush, who stepped away from his government position to force the subject of Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) into the public sphere, and Luis Elizondo, former Director of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), have both responded to this week’s announcement that the Department of Defense is creating a new working group to study UAPs.

Mellon’s open letter to Rep. Ruben Gallego (AZ) politely counsels the representative that placing the group within USDI (the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence) is ill-advised.

Elizondo warns that the USDI is “the same organization that has underplayed and tried to kill the UAP effort for years” and has “persecuted whistleblowers”.

There is speculation in The Washington Examiner that this office was announced now to undermine a bipartisan effort to create a new office to investigate these extraordinary events. The bipartisan plan detailed in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s (NY) amendment to the 2022 Defense Act would mandate “regular reporting, engagement with foreign allies, and a coordinated effort to research and possibly replicate UFO technologies”, whereas the plan announced by the Secretary of Defense does not.

The Pentagon’s announcement to which they are responding may be read at the following link:
Establishment of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (pdf) (Nov 23, 2021)

Monthly Chosun (South Korea): A South Korean current affairs magazine, Monthly Chosun, touts “the first Korean media to interview ‘UFO abductees'” in its November issue. The article by Youngnam Kim includes interviews with Susan Manewich (contributor to JAR Magazine), Alan Steinfeld (editor of the new book Making Contact), and Will Bueché (archivist at the John E Mack Institute). Please note that Google’s translation services do not accurately convert Korean to English. A manual translation may become available later; we will update this item then. “‘UFO 납치 경험자들’ ‘외계인이 인종 개량을 위해 납치!’ (November 2021)

In the previous issue, Monthly Chosun covered the the US government’s report on UAPs (UFOs), presenting interviews with Leslie Kean, Ralph Blumenthal, and Avi Loeb. “미국 정부의 UFO 보고서 발표를 이끈 주역들 한국 언론 최초 인터뷰. 이제는 ‘미확인비행물체’가 아니라 ‘실존물체’다! (October 2021)

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GQ magazine (UK edition): “This man ran the Pentagon’s secretive UFO programme for a decade. We had some questions.” by Charlie Burton. “Early last year, the US government officially acknowledged videos of ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ filmed by its Navy pilots. Was it evidence of extraterrestrials? Here, Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon intelligence officer in charge of investigating these incidents, reveals (almost) all he knows…” (November 9, 2021)

October 19, 2021 — Sen. Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, spoke about the possibility of an alien presence in a podcast held by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

“[You’ve seen] what those Navy pilots saw in 2004. And there have been some 300 sightings since then. And I’ve talked to those pilots, and they know they saw something. Their radars locked onto it, and then all of a sudden it was here on the surface and then it’s there. And they don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what it is. We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something. And so, this is a mission that we’re constantly looking at: What or who is out there? Who are we? How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns in billions of other galaxies? It’s so large I can’t conceive it. […] My personal opinion is that the universe is so big, and now there are even theories that there might be other universes, and if that’s the case, who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours? But I’ll tell you what that makes me think. I better be a better steward of what we have. Because we’re messing it up, and we’re messing it up even just the way we’re treating each other. And so I know what my mission is: to be a better steward of this planet and be a better citizen of planet Earth.” — Bill Nelson, former Senator and current head of NASA (Oct 19, 2021) Sen. Bill Nelson was sworn in as the 14th NASA administrator on May 3, 2021, tasked with carrying out the Biden-Harris administration’s vision for the agency. Nelson chaired the Space Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years and later served as the Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. During his time in Congress, Nelson was a strong advocate for NASA’s Earth science programs and authored numerous pieces of legislation to combat and mitigate the effects of climate change. Click for full bio at NASA.

A roundtable discussion among the people featured in the article has been released by The Experiencer Group (recorded Sept 26, 2021). “This special episode came about spontaneously and organically while meeting as a group over Zoom to talk about the process of the article and ‘coming out’ as experiencers of non-human entities,” writes Jay King. “As the conversation progressed, the conversation turned toward how media has handled stories like this in the past, and being inspired to work toward a better way forward for public and private dialogue about anomalous and non-human experiences.” Learn more about The Experiencer Group at their website. An interview with the author of the article, from The Debrief‘s Cristina Gomez, is also available.

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September 30, 2021 — The 2022 Intelligence Authorization Act has passed, which states that “not less frequently than quarterly … the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or successor entity, shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report on the findings of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, or successor entity”.

June 25, 2021 — The Department of Defense report on UAPs (UFOs) has been released.

“Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (the public report) may be downloaded now at dni.gov

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An outcome of the report is a DoD order to “develop a plan to formalize the mission”:

The Debrief: “Pentagon told to ‘formalize’ its investigation of UFOs, possibly expand UAP task force” Moments after the long anticipated UAP report was released to the public, the Department of Defense has been tasked to expand the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force’s efforts to improve their mostly inconclusive findings. (See official statement, “Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Assessment”, June 25, 2021)

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Curated links to coverage of the report:

Politico: “Government report can’t explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens”

USA Today: “‘Important first step’: Highly anticipated UFO report released with no firm conclusions”

NBC News: “UFO report: Government can’t explain 143 of 144 mysterious flying objects, blames limited data”

BBC News: “UFO report: US ‘has no explanation’ for sightings”

CNN: “US intelligence community releases long-awaited UFO report”

Reuters: “US report on Pentagon-documented UFOs leaves sightings unexplained” A senior U.S. official, asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial explanations for the observations, said: “That’s not the purpose of the task force, to evaluate any sort of search for extraterrestrial life.”

ABC News: “Few answers in unclassified UFO report” “…we have no clear indications that there is any non-terrestrial explanation for them – but we will go wherever the data takes us,” said a senior U.S. government official.

The Verge: “Everything You Need to know about the Pentagon’s UFO Report”

The Debrief: “Government Releases Highly Anticipated Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” The report states that a majority of incidents that were examined “probably do represent physical objects,” noting that they were detected by multiple sensors [and] also visual observations…

New York Times: “US Has No Explanation for Unidentified Objects and Stops Short of Ruling Out Aliens” The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions…

The New Yorker: “The Unexplained Phenomena of the UFO Report” A new intelligence document examines a hundred and forty-three sightings that might have been caused by errant balloons, foreign drones, or “Other” — a reserved way of saying aliens. (June 26, 2021)

Historical perspective: Astronmer Carl Sagan did not believe in alien encounters but he believed aliens existed among the billions of worlds that lay beyond our solar system. And like John Mack, he felt that communicating with such life could have a positive, unifying effect on humankind: “I think its one of the most fascinating questions that humans have ever asked: Are we the only kind of intelligent life that there is in the universe, or are there others, evolved under different physical circumstances, with different bodies and different ways of thinking with whom we can communicate? Its the ultimate attempt at deprovincialization, and I think its a very good objective for the human species at this critical moment when we are in this halting and tentative and not fully successful way trying to bind up all the peoples of the Earth into what we clearly are – one species and one planet. The very thought of there being other beings, different from all of us, can have a very useful, cohering role for the human species.” — Carl Sagan (“Carl Sagan on the search for intelligent life outside our solar system” CBC News, 1988)

June 4, 2021 — Officials have no idea what UAPs are, according to an early preview of the upcoming Department of Defense report. “…senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.”

Source: “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either”, New York Times, June 4, 2021

Restatements of the New York Times article: Washington Post report on NY Times report, June 4  ·  The Guardian report on NY Times report, June 4  ·  CNN report on NY Times report, June 4  ·  NBC News report on NY Times report, June 4

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Related: Vladimir Duthiers and the rest of the CBS This Morning hosts are not impressed by the evasiveness (June 4, 2021):

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More June news coverage of the upcoming Department of Defense report on UAPs:

“Experts Weigh In on Pentagon UFO Report“, Scientific American (June 8, 2021)
There is not going to be any “big reveal,” says Robert Sheaffer… “There are no aliens here on Earth, and so the government cannot ‘disclose’ what it does not have.”
(Sheaffer is a former columnist for Skeptical Inquirer, and fellow of the skeptics’ society CSICOP)

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NBC News: “‘Truth embargo’: UFOs are suddenly all the talk in Washington” After 75 years of taboo and ridicule, serious people can finally discuss the mysterious flying objects, and even skeptics say that’s a good thing. (June 13, 2021)

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June 15, 2021 update: The House Intelligence Committee received a classified briefing on UAPs with U.S. Navy and FBI officials. This is the second briefing to have occurred in June and the first to include the FBI; it is unclear why the FBI was present. New York Post (June 16, 2021)

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BBC News made their own overview piece, featuring new interviews with Dietrich, Kean, and Mellon: BBC Breakfast via Reddit (June 20, 2021)

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Luis Elizondo, former Director of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), speaking on a live June 22, 2021 podcast, “Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal“, said that if the public knew information that he is aware of (but cannot speak of), the public’s first reaction will be “somber”, followed by “turning inward and trying to reflect on what this means to us and our species and ourselves.”

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Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Asst Sec of Defense for Intelligence under Clinton and Bush, in a self-published essay, “Don’t Dismiss the Alien Hypothesis” (June 24, 2021), says if Russia and China are ruled out as the source of the Nimitz “Tic Tac” (which seems to be the conclusion that the DoD report will draw), then “non-human origin is presently the theory that best fits all the facts.”

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Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files tv series, has an editorial in The New York Times: “I Created ‘The X-Files.’ Here’s Why I’m Skeptical of the New UFO Report” (June 25, 2021). When we were dressing the original set for Agent Mulder’s office on “The X-Files,” I came up with the poster with a UFO on it that reads “I Want To Believe.” And I think that’s where most people come down on the whole extraterrestrial business. Not quite there yet, but waiting for a sign…

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Earlier: Comments by President Barack Obama, June 1, 2021:

Ezra Klein of the New York Times asks President Obama how he would be affected if the UAPs turn out to be alien-made but are only drones, with no evident way to contact their makers: Click to read and listen to the audio interview at NYTimes or download the podcast from Apple

May 17, 2021 – Media coverage of UFOs in the lead-up to the release of the Department of Defense’s report on what they are now calling UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), is intensifying.

Links to newscasts are being regularly posted to the John E. Mack Facebook page. Another Facebook page that is updated (often within hours of a newscast being released) is that of Leslie Kean, the co-author (with Ralph Blumenthal) of the 2017 and 2020 New York Times articles (link, link, link) at the start of this entire process.

A couple highlights: 60 Minutes (May 16)  |  Anderson Cooper 360° (May 18)

Subscribers to The Washington Post and The New York Times have also been afforded a good selection of articles and editorials on the subject in the past couple months; see for example “We Need To Talk About UFOs Again” by Dan Drezner, in which he notes that if UAPs are “extraterrestrials actively observing us…they seem to be doing so in a way that is not destructive,” and questions whether these aliens would be as eradicative as humans:

“The assumption is that powerful, technologically advanced civilizations will act in a destructive manner. That is possible, but perhaps civilizations that reward destructive entrepreneurship are less likely to generate the technological wherewithal for interstellar travel. And if those UAPs are ETs, maybe there is more hope for interstellar relations than either scientists or science fiction envision.”
— Dan Drezner, “We Need To Talk About UFOs Again”, Washington Post, April 1, 2021

Sample of CNN Newsroom coverage from May 17, 2021:

Alisyn Camerota (CNN): …from all of your reporting, how do we explain that Navy pilots keep seeing things without wings, without propulsion, that can defy all of the laws [of physics] … is it plausible that this could be from Russia or China, that they would have technology that is that many light-years ahead of the United States?

Ralph Blumenthal (guest): Extremely unlikely. Sources that we talked to at The New York Times say they cannot imagine that an Earthly adversary has this advanced technology. And as for our own technology showing up there, it’s even more unlikely that we would risk accidents or disclosure of our secrets – if they are our secrets – in our own airspace. So everything points to an extraterrestrial explanation, but of course no one wants to say that because it’s so outlandish and so unprovable that they’re sticking with what they know, which is that these things are unidentified and they’re real. But beyond that, no one knows. …

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Sample of Russell Brand commentary from May 19, 2021:

RUSSELL BRAND: With the pandemic and the complications that have come from it, people are saying “well, how can we ever go back to normal again? What is normal now?”.

As a father of young children and a person that’s always been suspicious of power and authority, I am reflecting on how the world could be organized differently – more fairly. My sense is that in certain areas like comfort and consuming we need to be ready to compromise and change. But we might be able to re-engage once more with [a] sense of community.

We might be able to live together tribally, communally, connected to nature and one another with the new knowledge that what’s happening on Earth is special and magnificent but not unique – there is life elsewhere, there are different layers to reality, there are different technological solutions outside of the limitations of what human beings previously thought of as possible.

And [what of] our new kings, the tech billionaires and their financial heft and might, which is being transposed into ideological might? I.e., “Well, we’ve built this company and that company, so we should be in charge of the future”.

Well no, not necessarily! Not if there are extraterrestrial intelligences that we’re interacting with which are inconceivably advanced. They’re at a point that we’re not going to see in 5, 10, 20, 30 lifetimes, [in which] people are manipulating gravity, and potentially manipulating time, and operating not only in this dimension in ways that we can’t conceive of but potentially outside of this dimension. … The philosophical connotations of an advanced technological species interacting with the Earth is by its nature paradigm shifting. It opens up new potentials of reality. It means we can look at established authority and established order with new eyes, with the possibility of real change.

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Sample of commentary by comedian, actress, and syndicated columnist Pam Stone:

“Unless each pilot is wrong, and the Pentagon is wrong and these things have all simply been bugs in the system or actual bugs on the camera lens, the only other possibility appears to be visitors from ‘a galaxy far, far away.’  It’s not that hard to believe. Think how technologically advanced we’ve come in 100 years. My parents lived from the very beginning of aviation to man on the moon and the Space Shuttle. Imagine what we’ll be capable of in the next 100 years — if we don’t kill ourselves, first. And maybe that’s why we’re being visited, to prevent just that. If they mean to do us harm, with their technology, they could have easily neutralized us by now. And really, if you think about it, they’ve already brought us a bit of hope.”
— Pam Stone, “Is intelligent life visiting our planet?”, Index-Journal, May 30, 2021

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Commentary in GQ magazine, UK edition, by editor Charlie Burton, May 18, 2021:
“The Pentagon says UFOs are real. So why do we still dismiss them as a joke?”

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CNN interview with Luis Elizondo, former Director of AATIP (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), May 23, 2021: CNN The Lead (6 min excerpt)

Historical perspective from The Debrief, April 15, 2001: “Strange balls of light, impervious to machine-gun fire” were seen by pilots throughout the second world war. “No one ever managed to put forward an explanation that stood the test of time. The Foo Fighters are as much a mystery to today’s researchers as they were to the intelligence officials of 1944.” “Today’s Pilots Encounters with UAP are Nothing New” by Graeme Rendal

May 4, 2021 — Mention of “a dual human/alien identity” was evidently a step too far for the editors of Omni magazine to take back in 1994. The deleted references to this remarkable element of some alien encounters appear in an unpublished early draft, presented here for the first time. (The published version is followed by the unpublished version; scroll down to see the differences).

• A Harvard psychiatrist says alien encounters, while traumatic, may be our gateway to God

If you are a publisher interested in releasing Passport to the Cosmos in your country, please contact us.

March 30, 2021 – A classic 1997 debate between two researchers of alien encounters – Harvard psychiatrist John Mack and New York-based artist / author Budd Hopkins – is now available as a free download on John Mack’s website.

The audio edition of this event has been expanded to an hour and 52 minutes in length – more than 50 minutes longer than a previously-released video version.

Click here for: Budd Hopkins & John Mack: A Dialogue on the Alien Abduction Experience (Expanded Audio Edition)

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Best-selling author of Communion, Whitley Strieber, interviewed Ralph Blumenthal, author of the new biography about John Mack, The Believer.

Whitley says, “I’ll never forget the moment that John called me to tell me that both his tenure and his license to practice psychiatry were on the line. I said to him that he had to get legal help immediately, that he could not advocate for himself against such opposition. He did, and the story that Ralph Blumenthal tells about his life, his battles and his tremendous courage will stir your soul and open your mind to a great mystery in a whole new way.”

The first hour of Strieber’s interview with Blumenthal is available for free on Strieber’s website: unknowncountry.com/dreamland

Members of Strieber’s website can watch an expanded version of the recording that includes discussion about Mack’s visit to the Ariel School in Zimbabwe.

And here is the photo from Mack’s archives that Whitley refers to in the interview, taken in May 1997 at Medway. Pictured left to right are Whitley Strieber, Trish Pfeiffer, John Mack, and Laurance Rockefeller.

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March 11, 2021 – JEMI is pleased to announce that German translations of several articles on this website will be provided over the next few months by Patrik Hübner. A native German-speaker with an interest in this subject matter, Hübner is perfectly suited to providing these translations as his time allows. The translations will also be appearing on his blog. We are grateful for his volunteer service.

In advance of the first article, Hübner kindly provided a primer on how some common alien encounter terms appear in German.

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Join the Virtual Book Launch of the biography about Dr. John Mack live on Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:30pm EST via Zoom.

Update: A replay of this event is now available at youtu.be/BMOBoaSqegc