THE 2024 UFOLOGY AWARDS (because most of ‘em earned them)

The Golden Globes, The Emmys, The Grammys, The Academy Awards, The (countless) Country Music Awards…No matter where you look – or how hard you try not to – there is an award season, and it never seems to end. Why should UFOLOGY be any different?! Because, indeed, as Ecclesiastes, Pete Seeger and The Byrds remind us, “To everything there is a season.”

So, in no particular hierarchical order, here we go. Note to Reader: this contest used no quantitative measuring rod, ballot box or bar code to score or rank “winners” (and let’s face it, some of these were pretty rank!), other than what seriously struck or ridiculously tickled your Chronicler’s fancy last year. Henceforth the First Annual  2024 UFOLOGY Awards – aka The UFIES.

Best Actor in the Role of a Bad Guy: Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, formerly of AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) earned this whether he’s a bona fide Bad Guy or not. He fiddled while real Ufology heroes like whistleblower David Grusch burned brightly in front of Congress – under oath -- on national TV, podcasts and various online forums. Kirkpatrick brought no credence to the newly formed office that many now view as a modern version of Project Blue Book, another hollowed out program to deal publicly with the so-called UFO issue while not offering any real value. Ever. Let’s see where Capt. Kirk lands next and if AARO will amount to anything in 2024.

Best Actor in a Comedic Role: The Academy, er, the Assemblage of One, was clearly split here, given how long it took to choose its winner (about 2 minutes). Competition was heady. But in the end, astrophysicist and public “science communicator” Neil deGrasse Tyson Bested debunker Mick West who made many nostalgic for le debunker extraordinaire, the much more colorful and dead Phil Klass. Both Neil and Mick displayed a profound lack of knowledge about the history of Ufology despite all the self-serving perceptions they made whenever the subject came up. Still, deGrasse Tyson with his much wider “platform,” underscored time and again that fellow astrophysicist profs like Avi Loeb at Harvard, Tyson’s alma mater, truly understand this is a real subject, and one not to play cutesy on topic every time he’s tossed a microphone.

Best Actor in a Leading Role: You loved him (or at least I did) in the Iran Contra Scandal, the tragic Karen Silkwood tale, or name your favorite Daniel Sheehan legal moment here____. Like the best public servants, a la Jimmy Stewart going to Washington, constitutional lawyer Sheehan is never despoiled of his virtue or vision while traipsing about the nation’s capital amongst all the lobbyist gypsies, media tramps and elected thieves roaming congress. A councilor to Lue Elizondo, Dr. Steven Greer and former President Jimmy Carter, not to mention the Jesuits he repped in Rome at the Vatican (where he futilely tried to penetrate its secret UFO/ET archives), Sheehan is back on the scene with a new non-profit The New Paradigm Institute.  How it fares in the new year will be worth watching, and perhaps give Danny boy a shot at one of the higher achievement awards next time.

Best Special Effects: A lesser category of diminishing importance, sure -- given how easy it is for a 12-year-old to create some truly bad-ass looking visual UFO shit with some key computer strokes, software add-ons and a vivid imagination --  even the public at large still admires and covets convincing Ufological visuals. Early on, Kirkpatrick/AARO trotted out the gray, steel-looking ball as perhaps their one concession to things the government has in its weird files that no one – NO ONE – can explain. So the prize goes to the steely deal ‘cuz it does leave a lot to the imagination, and it could be one of ours, or extraterrestrial. Or both.

Roswell Commemorative Award: In an unprecedented move, UFIE voters (ok, the Assemblage of One) locked firmly on a 4-way tie for an award that commemorates a time and place where high strangeness events allegedly went down, like Roswell, the Rosetta Stone of Ufology that sticks in most people’s minds even more than a Taylor Swift song (or her gross national product figure) whenever UFO issues arise.

So, four awards will be issued to Mexico for again parading its latest round of alleged ET mummies (found in Peru?!) in its possession; to Las Vegas for its alleged sightings by a freaked  out Earthling family who claimed they saw “9-foot beings” last July; to Peru for its alleged alien “green goblins” – aka “face peelers”  in the Amazon rain forest where mining companies are greedy-ass hungry for its reported gold and other enriching metals belonging to the Indigenous people of that area, of course; and to Miami where a similar big ‘ol something was reported amidst a bayside rampage of rioting teenagers! (OK, true: this occurred just a few days ago in 2024, but the rules committee has allowed it, if only to have its trusted, knowing readers rightfully wonder, “WTF, are all these psyops?!”)

Donald E. Keyhoe Lifetime Achievement Award: Named after a Marine Corps Major and the renowned director of NICAP  in the 50’s and 60’s (the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena), Donald E. Keyhoe. He courageously and frequently went up against the Pentagon and media in his honest crusade for the truth. “The Lifer” award recognizes not just longtime achievement, but dedication, disclosure efforts and outright chutzpah for activities related to the research and analysis of what everyone today wants to call “the Phenomenon” – when in reality what they really mean is good olde ET (Note to the Assemblage, obfuscation like this should really have its own award category).

Dr. Steven Greer, MD, who’s devoted half his life to the UFO/UAP, ET subject and gave up a stellar medical career to do so, was a shoo-in for this first-year award. Grumblers and detractors – and there are many – will complain of his mothership-sized ego, occasional arrogance, the fees he charges for his CE-5 “Ambassadors to the Stars” workshops, the color of his underwear and sundry other perceived “faults.” But if you listen and watch closely to some of the disclosure movers and shakers in congress like Rep Tim Burchett,  Rep. Anna Luna and others – including Grusch – you’ll hear the Talking Points Greer provided them in recent time, if not a semi-complete analysis that he has been putting out there for more than 30 years, half his adult life.

After penning at least two essential books on topic 20+ years back, more recently he successfully crowd-funded several films about UFO secrecy, technology and the Close Encounters of the 5th Kind initiative, which is no mean feat. Then he staged three disclosure events over three decades with witnesses in Washington, most solid, some mushy as mashed potatoes, years ahead of the federal lawmakers attempting to do it officially in the last couple years. But folks opened their wallets and cracked their piggy banks for these films, disclosure events and the CE-5 field work. Why? Cuz  people are hungry for nutritional knowledge, not the constantly scented hogwash they’ve been fed for 70+ years from so-called official sources, pop culture and the daily rantings on Twitter/X and other non-disinfected channels.

Geer’s no saint (to fall back on a necessary cliché here) and neither are his other esteemed peers, Whitley Streiber, Richard Dolan, Leslie Kean, the late John Mack, Linda Moulton Howe, George Knapp, Jeremy Corbell, Ross Coulthart and a short list of others….I spent most of the 90’s as his communications/PR guy, flak and I know well his m.o. and if you read or have read my book, you can see it in action frequently. It hasn’t changed in 30 years even though we rarely communicated over that same length of time. And it’s that consistency and urgency of his to get the truth out that marks him as a deserving award recipient.

Keyhoe, if were alive, would be a staunch ally. But SG’s got hundreds of Keyhoe’s now in his witness program – 750 and counting -- and if you want to see what the tireless 68 year-old doc has in mind for 2024, listen to him discuss the state of disclosure and the past year in review as we head into an election year and the Year of the Dragon  (hang onto to your hats) – and why allowing the ET’s to do disclosure is not a good idea, besides a lot of other thought-provoking thinking and revealing backroom insights (1 hour, 24 minutes):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpWcFfo4d8

The J Allen Hynek Award: Hynek went from being a scientific UFO snob dead set against allowing for an ET presence, let alone a hypothesis, to being a certifiable champion of the ET reality, saying there is an embarrassment of evidence – if people were willing to look at it. Your Chronicler has cynically always felt that awards like this and similar Lifetime Achievement prizes – regardless of award shows – were somehow sympathy awards based on this bitter pill: “We feel sorry for you since our members have never awarded you with anything despite you being eminently qualified for one.” Either that, or the said recipients were ill and not long for the world, stage, screen or TV. Alas, there is a parcel of truth in both assessments.

Stephen Bassett has always been a champion of the ET reality as the sole registered “ET lobbyist” in Congress long before the subject became fashionable and acceptable (roughly since that New York Times story broke in December 2017). What a lonely gig! But Stephen takes it in stride, without fail or financing by industry overlords. So, this year’s Hynek award goes to Mr. Bassett, who, from all reports, is still in good health and of sound mind. Long may he run in the hallowed and hellish halls of government, with his Sisyphean task.

Director of the Year: Michael Mazzola. For just a couple hours, drop what streaming series you are binging currently and tune in The Lost Century (and How to Reclaim It) – a documentary film that is the latest crowd-funded Greer flick exploring how Earth-changing, energy technologies from Nikola Tesla forward have been suppressed by secret government and corporate oligarchies. Cowritten and researched by Greer and writer-director Mazzola, the movie will help you understand why ET technology and other zero-point, or quantum energy systems are regularly squashed, and how they would undo the global petro economy, but also most likely save our bacon from the deleterious effects of burning fossil fuels until we fry like the planet Venus.

Mazzola’s work, his deft hand, keen visual choices and viewer-friendly documentary style, never talks down to audiences but rather pulls them into a rarified realm where jarring, uncomfortable truths are easily made comfortable and credible. The third film he’s helmed for Herr doctor, he gets extra points with this award for having to …you know …work alongside side him in the trenches. If you know you know.

Best Ufological Column or Reporting: Another head-scratcher for sure. Reporting on our favorite topic has improved light years in just a few years. So, our Assemblage of One felt inundated with good choices. The Hill has done excellent work, and Ross Coulthart  with NewsNation is making competitors on cable and elsewhere look seasick. But for straight up informed reporting and insider insight – plus he’s just a damn good and entertaining read --  this year’s award must go to Billy Cox, whose frequent posts in his “Life in Jonestown” blog is worth every cent of the 50-buck annual subscription!

The former Sarasota, Florida, newsman is a rare ”UFO” journalist, although saying Cox is a journalist who happens to cover the UFOP issue is much more accurate. He‘s all that, plus well connected in the UFO community, inside the military and among his fellow pencil-pushing word wizards trying to unravel what he famously calls “The Great Enigma” and sometimes “The Great Taboo.” His “Between Two Ferns” parody/column about Dr. Kirkpatrick’s exit from his AARO orbit was so good, I’ve pasted it below.

The Assemblage of One debated about giving a related but special media honor to Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach for turning out some of the most fetid dreck on UFO issues since at least 2000. Perhaps a Douche of the Year Award, noting that Mr. Achenbach would be a perennial winner, which makes him a long time Loser by any Ufology standard. Cooler neurons prevailed, however, and it was decided the Wash Post guy deserved his own column at some point. Watch this space.

In the meantime,  Billy Cox, take a bow.

The “It’s About Time Person of the Year Award”:  The choice was clear halfway before the year was even over, and no one should be surprised. David Charles Grusch is the ”It’s About Time Person of the Year,” for his trail-blazing testimony, grace under pressure and passion to put the UFO/UAP/ ET reality and its cover-up into the textbooks of history and the global public consciousness. According to the people’s Internet history, Wikipedia, this decorated Afghanistan combat veteran and former Air Force intelligence officer worked in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the  (NRO), and from 2019 to 2021, he was the representative of the NRO to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

Grusch is not fresh from the turnip truck of military ladder climbers but an experienced, heroic figure and true patriot. We should hope that he will continue to share all that he knows without doing so in a SCIF or in another closed-door Classified congressional briefing. Despite predictable attempts to put him off his game by heavy insiders and at least one nasty character assassination attempt in the media by The Intercept, brazenly laying out his past personal struggles with mental health issues, Grusch stands on the shoulders of those before him trying to tell the truth about this trying subject with its global and cosmic implications (plus, you have to treasure his 2-minute exchange on camera – under oath in congress and under the microscope in the court of public opinion  -- last July 26 with Congresswoman Mace. It’s one for the ages: https://twitter.com/planethunter56/status/1692050239396761992?t=lrGk1S1haWxJ8nXVJ9dpgA

We should all salute  him for this particular brand of selfless service. And hope and pray his efforts will not be in vain but bear even more fruit in the year ahead. Because the truth is never out of season.

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SPECIAL NEW YEAR’S BONUS:

Sean Kirkpatrick: Between Two Ferns

(With apologies to Zach Galifianakis)

Billy Cox, Nov. 24, 2023

After last week’s atrocious UFO forum between AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick and two senior softball league journos, it’s doubtful The Press could’ve pulled it off even if they’d decided to grow some stones. That scenario probably would’ve gone something like this . . .

The Press: Why don’t you like UFOs?

Sean Kirkpatrick: Great question. It’s not that I don’t “like” UFOs. Lots of people do like UFOs, which — pay attention — we’re calling UAP these days. It’s just that UAP are beneath my own professional station. As you know, I bring more than two decades of experience and a significant depth of expertise in scientific and technical intelligence to bear on this issue. I’ve spent much of my professional life in space policy, research and development, acquisitions and operations, with an emphasis on space and counterspace mission areas. At the University of Georgia – go Dawgs – I finished my doctoral work in nonlinear and nonequilibrium phonon dynamics of rare earth doped fluoride crystals. While I was investigating laser-induced molecular vibrations of high explosives under an AFOSR program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I discovered –

TP: You have a pocket square shaped like a vulva. Why aren’t you wearing it now?

SK: (Thousand-yard stare, silence)

TP: Where do you think space aliens come from?

SK: I love that question. As our sensor technology matures with machine learning and develops a more robust domain awareness, we expect increasing numbers of unknowns to be resolved as software glitches, lens flares, seagulls, balloons, surveillance platforms from our terrestrial competitors, as well as near-foreground houseflies, also known formally as Musca domestica. We’re not discounting alternative possibilities, of course. You may recall earlier this year, in a paper called “Physical Constraints on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” we –

TP: You were furious with him, weren’t you?

SK: Furious with who?

TP: Avi Loeb. For leaking that paper without your permission. Do you wish you had gone to Harvard instead of Georgia?

SK: (Grimace) Dr. Loeb and I were addressing the challenges of acquiring reliable data on UAP. As I’m sure you know, radar cross-section scales similarly to meteor head echoes as the square of the effective radius of the sphere surrounding the object, while the radar cross-section of the resulting ionization tail scales linearly with the radius of the ionization cylinder. Given these factors –

TP: It was the mothership wording, wasn’t it? The paper mentioned how and I quote “an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth.” And Avi slipped that phrase in there when you weren’t looking because he knew it’d make headlines. You don’t dare complain too loudly about it now because, as a sop to your critics, it makes you look open-minded. But when you interview for your next gig with an unacknowledged special access program, that could potentially suck because they’re gonna go, oh gee, I dunno, man, you let the cat out of the bag by putting that mothership thing out there – am I right?

SK: That’s actually pretty ignorant.

TP: Oh! Well, um, isn’t that kinda racist? I mean, Louis Farrakhan saw Ezekiel’s “mother wheel” in the sky and here you go calling people like him ignorant . . .

SK: (Fingertips in a prayer steeple, eyes closed)

TP: Is Roswell real?

SK: Do you believe my check’s in the mail?

TP: Ouch, good one – I think my glass jaw’s broken! What about that transmedium UFO in the Aguadilla video? What’s that all about and why isn’t AARO looking at it?

SK: Great question. Every physicist with even a modicum of competence, even those with degrees from Ole Miss, knows there’s nothing new to analyze here. We know what this is, we know where it came from and we know how it works. It’s all in Relativity: The Special and General Theory and it’s been out there for nearly 120 years. Designers at Lego and Hot Wheels have been monetizing those principles for decades, and we call them geniuses.

TP: The Customs and Border Protection agency declassified the Aguadilla video two months ago and they didn’t have an explanation for it.

SK: That’s why they’re Customs and Border Protection.

TP: You know what I don’t get? The Tic Tac video, right? The one without any supporting data because the spooks confiscated it? Here’s what I don’t get. The special effects seem really dated, like something out of “Warcraft: Orcs and Humans.” If space aliens are so advanced, why couldn’t they come up with something that doesn’t look so lame?

SK: I don’t have enough data to answer that, and I’m not going to speculate. That’s not how science works.

TP: Is David Grusch still on your shit list?

SK: He was never important enough to make it on there. A lot what Mr. Grusch says is turning out to be true, but it’s information we already know.

TP: Such as?

SK: Have you read Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory?

TP: Even my 5-year-old’s read that one, hello. Hey, by the way. Kirsten Gillibrand – you think she’s hot?

SK: What?

TP: Let’s put it another way. Back in April during your Senate testimony, you said, quote, “AARO’s mission is to turn UAPs into SEP – somebody else’s problem.” Whose problem should UFOs be?

SK: Not mine. Yours. Hollywood’s. Biden. China. The CIA, Space Force. Not mine. Great question.

TP: What if somebody from Area 51 came to your office and dumped a box of extraterrestrial wreckage on your desk. Would you be convinced then?

SK: If you were in my class, I might give you an F-plus. That’s not how science works. First, you start with a hypothesis, or hypotheses. Then you look at what you’ve got and say, how can we explain it away? If it’s an unknown unknown, you compare it with the signatures of your known knowns, your unknown knowns and your known unknowns and if you don’t have a match, you say, is this a sensor calibration problem? And what science tells us is, the answer is always yes. Then you look out into the universe for life and say, how hard has it been to find exoplanets in habitable zones? Right? Then you put it all out there to the entire academic and scientific community and you say guess what? We know exactly what this is because of all our hypotheses, and it’s just an engineering problem. So if you folks think it’s important enough to try to turn NHI – whatever that means, I’ve never heard of it, it came out of a fake book in the 1950s – into HI, well, by all means have at it. Then it's somebody else’s problem.

TP: Last weekend at Stanford, they had, like, the most prestigious scientific UFO symposium ever. I know you heard about it — it was this nonprofit called the Sol Foundation and the auditorium was packed with 300 people and all the heavy hitters in the research field were there. Even Avi. Even the former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community was there. Since you’re the nation’s leading UFO expert but you weren’t invited, what’s it like to get snubbed and humiliated that way? Do you ever feel like Quasimodo? By the way, do you follow Steven Greer? You should, you’re both doctors, so he might be able to get you a discount on some Ambassador to the Universe training. Also, thanks for letting us know you’re planning to finish the first installment of UFO history before you leave AARO in December, and I hope you plan to include something about Kenneth Arnold and Allen Hynek — nobody’s ever heard of them before. And oh, one last thing, I promise: E.T. and Yoda, mano a mano, cage match — who’s your money on . . .?

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