I am a big fan of Tucker Carlson and his Fox TV show.  He brings a level of depth, cogency, entertainment, and even courage to his broadcasts that we have not seen in media since Rush Limbaugh at this best. 

Still, he has a few blind spots, the most obvious one being his infatuation with UFOs.  It's almost as absurd as Michael Medved and his hunt for Bigfoot.

Last week, 60 Minutes jumped on the UFO bandwagon, essentially showing the same "unexplained" video clips from military cameras leaked quite a while ago, often shown by Tucker.  Barack Obama then ominously weighed in about these encounters and the Pentagon not knowing exactly what they are. 

...only anyone who actually bothered to get the other side of the story finds out right away the Pentagon thinks nothing of these stories, as they are easily explained by normal misfocusing of cameras and radar.

The internet UFO debunker, Mick West, has long shown the truth of these video clips.  He has a nice post on the 60 Minutes story.  As Mr. West explains, the centerpiece is the so-called Tic-Tac UFO incident, which has been kicking around since 2004.  At the time, the USS Nimitz got a big radar upgrade and was having a hard time sorting out the super-sensitive images it was picking up.  Then as the Navy learned more about its new system, the UFOs disappeared.  

But that information ruins the cool UFO story.  It's media malpractice not to at least interview some of the many qualified people who can disagree with the tall tales.

What concerns me more, though, is what this tells us about official Washington and the absolute dummkopfs, in both parties, who inhabit it.  Who is the guy pushing this latest batch of UFO "evidence"?  Somebody named Luis Elizondo — who was on 60 Minutes, Tucker, and other outlets, claiming to be a big-shot intel guy in the Pentagon and tasked with exploring UFOs.  Except reporters who actually look into this fellow's background are finding nothing of the sort —either as a military officer or as a civilian contractor.  A story from his hometown newspaper explains that he was only a career enlisted Army man but was recruited for sensitive assignments.  Yeah, right. 

What isn't in doubt is the guy who is Elizondo's sponsor, Washington Brahmin Christopher Mellon.  Mr. Mellon was also on 60 Minutes and shuffled back and forth between the Pentagon and congressional staff for 30 years.  He has no military background and no skills or education in science or technology, yet thanks to his family wealth and connections, he has been able to be a key decision-maker in the most sensitive areas of American defense and intel.

Mr. Mellon is also a UFO hobbyist and is fronting the activity of Mr. Elizondo, along with punk rocker Tom Delonge. Just the team of serious guys you trust to get the facts on alien encounters. 

Mr. Mellon, with his Capitol connections, is also likely why Harry Reid, Daniel Inouye, and even Marco Rubio were caught up in this UFO nonsense. 

It reminds me of a previous Capitol Hill boondoggle: Sen. Claiborne Pell, the Democrat blue-blood, and his obsession with psychic phenomena.  He was convinced that the con man Uri Geller showed we had some kind of "psychic gap" with the Soviets.  Pell had the Pentagon spend vast sums on bizarre projects like remote viewing, which ended only when Pell finally retired from Congress.  Mr. Mellon is just another in a long line of America's ruling class so easily taken in by fraudsters. 

Once again, while our country has genuine security and intel threats looming about, obvious scammers peddle snake oil to the dimwits in charge in D.C.  It should be no surprise that former CIA chief John Brennan, along with many other non-technical people, like Jim Woolsey, in our intel services, are so easily conned.  

You don't need a doctorate in electrical engineering to be skeptical of the UFO tricksters.  Just a little common sense and analytic thinking — both always in short supply in D.C.  

That's why I find it so disappointing that Tucker Carlson would be bamboozled.  And just after he so deftly unmasked that Beltway phony Frank Luntz.  Tucker is always so good about underlining how mediocre and unthinking the people we have in power are, and how that explains the government craziness from the Green New Deal to Critical Race Theory to the Biden Open Borders policy.  It's a shame he can't see that the whole UFO scam is just another case of the gullibility of the Washington ruling class. 

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, KY.  

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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