This is funny. And sad.
NY Times, 11 Jul 2026 (though in today’s print paper): Non-Disclosure: In Roswell, New U.F.O. Docs Are a Declassified Bummer [gift link]
Subtitled: Roswell’s annual U.F.O. festival was supposed to be full of triumphant “told you so’s” after the Trump administration declassified its alien files. Instead, apparently, the coverup continues.
Like so many earthlings, John Darr came to Roswell, N.M., looking for answers. Yet he left the city’s annual U.F.O. festival this month with even more questions. “Tell us one way or the other: Is there or is there not aliens?”
This was supposed to be the summer of revelation. President Trump had promised to unveil all of the government’s secrets about unidentified flying objects and their extraterrestrial passengers. Adding to the hype was Steven Spielberg’s newly-released lore-steeped blockbuster with its own convincing footage of the fabled alien crash at Roswell.
But when the Department of Defense began publishing tranches of material on U.F.O.s, or in Pentagon parlance, U.A.P.s, unidentified anomalous phenomena, the promise of a real-life “Disclosure Day” frittered into Disappointment Du Jour.
Lots of interesting photos in this piece. Gift link; browse them.
No, UFOs are not evidence of aliens. The evidence continues to be dicey; the photos are just as fuzzy as they’ve always been, and suspiciously centered in the video clips.
Like so many things, I am beginning to gather, these are evidence of the biases of the human mind. We want to interpret strange things we see in terms of familiar things we already know. And via social media find tribes of fellows who have the same biases as we do.
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Same diagnosis. These are people who don’t understand how the real world works — in real, physical and chemical and biological, ways — and who are tribal to the extent that they attribute things they don’t understand and that upset them to their enemy tribe.
Facebook, Brian Tyler Cohen, 3 Jul 2026: BREAKING: MAGA is now saying that Democrats have “geoengineered” the weather to be extremely hot in DC this weekend.
Nonsense, of course. Also the item from JMG I mentioned yesterday.
