The mainstream press has for decades remained ignorant of ufology and mocked those who take it seriously, but they have everything they need to break the biggest story of them all.

Late Friday afternoon, June 25 as predicted, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence spoon-fed the media nine unclassified pages of the UAP Task Force report, reporters’ appetites having already been whetted by Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s boilerplate comments about it being “an important first step,” etc.

Journalists need to start working on the next step.

To be sure, the new seriousness in mainstream media regarding UFOs is a refreshing change, but there are still problems. Disclosure activist Steve Bassett reported today he’s archived more than a thousand articles in the last few months. Coverage by the New York Times, CBS News, Reuters, and New Yorker magazine, among others, has been admirable in recent weeks. But across the pond, BBC this week humiliated itself with a couple of reports showing there’s still work to be done.

First, there was a repugnant display of open contempt expressed by BBC News with Katty and Christian co-hosts Katty Kay and Christian Fraser-complete with giggling, smirks, eye rolls and even a lame joke about needing “X-Files music” to accompany the piece. The story itself, about the then-pending release of the American UAP report, was factual and straightforward. It included the now-famous video recorded by astonished American pilots tracking a UFO tearing across the ocean. When the report concluded, Fraser deadpanned, “I’m excited,” before both burst out laughing. Kay picked up the cue: “Stay with us on BBC News, more serious things still to come,” which led directly into teasing a story about a Hampshire man discovering he has an ancestral connection to President Joe Biden. This, from the BBC!

Over on the radio, there was a story — also serious enough, factual, etc. by Today’s Sophie Long [Go to the 1:23 mark] on how the U.S. is grappling with the UAP problem. After she signed off, co-host Nick Robinson, sounding amused by what he apparently regarded as the novelty of it, picked up the cue: “Sophie Long reporting there on something I didn’t know existed — the ‘UFO community!’ Who knew?”

Where even to begin?

A repugnant dispaly of open contempt

The BBC couldn’t possibly have illustrated the historical disconnect between the reality of the UFO phenomenon and mainstream journalism in a more embarrassing fashion. Britain, after all, was the site of one of the most fascinating and exhaustively reported UFO cases of all time, the Rendlesham Forest mystery. Here was an incident (a series of them, actually) not so long ago that’s been dubbed “Britain’s Roswell,” which featured allegations not of a crash but a landing for which there are living, on-the-record eyewitnesses, one of whom claims to have not only seen the craft, but touched it.

More recently, less than 50 miles from BBC’s London studios where Kay and Fraser whooped it up, there was the 2007 incident over the English Channel involving two UFOs (one of which was estimated to have been a mile long) and was seen by multiple commercial pilots, their passengers, was captured on radar and investigated by Britain’s equivalent of the FAA. One of the pilots, Captain Ray Bower, provides an astonishing detailed account in American journalist Leslie Kean’s absorbing book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record.

Imagine being a journalist in the 21st century and being unaware of such things. Imagine being surprised to learn — “Who knew?” — that people exist who are so inquisitive and driven to learn more about UFOs that they basically have been doing your job because you won’t.

Scientists and skeptics bristle that ufology is a “pseudoscience,” but that mistakenly presumes that ufologists are practicing science, or claim that they are. Generally speaking, they are not. Most lack the scientific training and education, and in any event, the subject of study basically defies the tools of science to unpack it.

No, ufologists are not pseudo-scientists, and they are not scientists.

They are journalists.

The UAP intelligence assessment released Friday covers 144 reports made between November 2004 and March 2021 (and fails to explain literally all but one of them). That time frame, along with the spike in serious government-and-UFOs reportage that has occurred since the New York Times story in 2017 gives the impression that the story — regardless of whether one defines “the story” as UFOs themselves or the government’s engagement with the phenomena — is new. It is not new, and implying as much is a disservice to the public.

Nor has it been entirely ignored by journalists. The problem is that these journalists are volunteers, citizen activists who have worked for decades to pry loose a tremendous amount of information that has been consumed by a limited audience. With notable exceptions such as George Knapp and Leslie Kean, they are not employed by any professional media outlet. They’ve been branded by the media as UFO “buffs” or “enthusiasts,” or “conspiracy theorists.” If they’re lucky, they might get “investigator.”

It’s time to cut the crap.

Woodstein Wouldn’t Touch UFOs | Cliff Owen, AP

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein made their first few steps investigating Nixon’s reelection campaign armed with fewer facts than are contained in a single chapter of Kean’s book, which was published in 2010 to wide acclaim. Two young reporters smelled smoke, and they found a fire that burned Nixon all the way back to San Clemente. The adage “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” applies here. In this case, the smoke is acknowledgement by the government that UFOs are real. Thanks to ufologists, we know that the government has been intensely interested in the phenomenon for since the mid-20th century and has gone to great lengths to keep that fact secret. The smoke is there; the fire is one with enormous implications for humanity.

Mainstream journalists have long been criticized (with some justification) of relying too heavily on official sources and statements when reporting on the government. So in newsrooms and journalism schools across the land, there will soon be fascinating conversations that take into account this astounding irony: When candid statements by government officials acknowledging the reality and inexplicable weirdness of UFOS were made on the record — which is what happened in May 2001 when dozens of ex-military, government officials and others addressed Washington D.C.’s National Press Club— journalists (for the most part) didn’t take advantage of that window of opportunity. It was a one-day story, then they moved on to other things.

Another topic to knock around: The history of American journalism, from coverage of the White House and wars all the way down to the smallest city and county governments, shows that some of the best work is the result of reporters digging into public records, prying them loose from bureaucrats who don’t want to release them.

Why, then, does it take a teenager to jump-start his own FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) operation to go after UFO documents (among others) and post them online? That’s what John Greenewald Jr. did in 1996 when he was 15, launching Black Vault. Today, there are more than 2 million documents there, includings thousands related to UFOs. He may not have had a degree (or training, for that matter) in journalism from the University of Oregon, but he did the work that no one else was doing.

Ufologists have been clamoring for and expecting “Disclosure” for decades, because they’d done enough investigating, reviewing documents, visiting sites, developing sources and interviewing witnesses and experiencers (i.e., journalism) to know that there is something to disclose, much more than we learned today. The mainstream press have been reluctant to follow, precisely for reasons identified in today’s report: “Sociological stigmas.” If anything positive has come out this, it’s that the stigma is evaporating.

Fact is, vast swaths of information and testimony about UFOs and the engagement by some unknown non-human “other” with humanity has already been disclosed. It’s been in plain view for decades. Those in the mainstream need to get caught up, and start having serious conversations about how they’re going to cover the story. Because this story is real, it’s not like “normal” stories, and it’s not going away. Today’s UAP report is but a tiny piece of the very tip of the iceberg. It’s time to dive deep.