Beat the Press

Podcasters Now Scoop Established Journalists on UFOs

Journalists one day will look at the second half of 2021 and ask themselves: How did we not see it? Why didn’t we chase this?

Cristina Gomez is the host of the podcast ‘Shifting the Paradigm,” where she has interviewed some of the top names in ufology.

It’s easy to imagine potential “big picture” lines of historical inquiry in a post-Disclosure world — depending, of course, on what is actually disclosed.

The most obvious: What does the U.S. Government know, and for how long has it known it? What is known about what this intelligent “other,” whatever it may be, is doing here in the first place?

What really happened at Roswell in 1947? Are there other Roswells we don’t know about? To what extent have the world’s religions been a product of or influenced by this engagement with whatever is engaging with us? What’s the relationship between the UAP phenomenon and human consciousness? And how does bizarre, Skinwalker Ranch-type shit fit into it?

The role of the news media, of course, will also be subject to scrutiny. Along those lines, historians and sociologists would do well to look at the final six months of 2021 in order to understand how and why such an extraordinary and important story could have been so visible, and yet ignored by the press?

That story, which has been sketched by “conspiracy theorists” but has by degrees been at least validated, if not proven, by a few journalists and on-the-record government sources, is that the U.S. and other governments have over the decades retrieved what appear to be alien craft and conspired to keep that fact a secret while they raced to reverse-engineer the technology.

This “secrecy” notwithstanding, the broad outlines of the story have been in plain sight for decades, camouflaged by the stigma associated with it. That’s no accident. The government in the mid-20th century deliberately set out to disparage UFOs and marginalize those who “believe” in them. Insofar as that message resonated through America’s newsrooms, it worked.

The taboo was shattered in December 2017 by The New York Times, and while mainstream outlets were quick to jump on the bandwagon (much to the vocal consternation of Skeptical Inquirer magazine), coverage tended to…