Podesta’s association with the book and its author, Leslie Kean, almost certainly helped persuade The New York Times to publish, in 2017, a page-one news story based on Kean’s reporting. Kean even got a byline on the story, along with the Times’ Helene Cooper and Ralph Blumenthal, a retired Timesman, a friend of Kean’s, and a fellow UFO-head. (I’m indebted here to a pioneering May 2021 New Republic story by Jason Colavito, “How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers”; see also Colavito’s December 2021 follow-up, “Congress Is About to Send the Pentagon on a Wild Flying-Saucer Chase.”)
The 2017 Times story was mostly a straight-ahead investigative piece revealing the existence of an Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program created at the behest of then–Senate Majority Leader (and Democrat!) Harry Reid of Nevada. (“My staff warned me not to be seen to engage on the topic,” Reid would recall in a 2021 op-ed, also in The New York Times, headlined “What We Believe About UFOs.” He ignored them.) But the 2017 Times story also described, uncritically, “footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves.” As Art Levine pointed out in a comprehensive skeptic’s review of Washington’s UFO moment (“Spaceship of Fools”), published last week in The Washington Spectator, pilot sightings, on which Kean’s book is heavily reliant, are notoriously unreliable. By one expert calculation, pilots misperceive airborne objects nearly 90 percent of the time, a much poorer record than that of people standing on terra firma. “Pilots are susceptible to overinterpretation, especially of vague, rapid, and unclear experiences,” according to Ronald Fisher, a lecturer at Miami’s Florida International University. The Times made no mention of this well-documented tendency.
Reid’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program closed shop in 2012, but, prodded in part by widespread attention to the 2017 Times story, Congress in 2020 created a successor agency, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force. In 2021 the Defense Department created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, and in 2022 (after The New Yorker lent its own imprimatur to the UFO craze), that was given more money and renamed the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. Also in 2022, NASA created a study team on UFOs.