Let Have A Ball And A Biscuit Sugah

Without attending a single kegger or Happy Hour whoop-de-doo to support her lead, here's how Associated Press reporter Hannah Dreier set up De Void for a massive heartbreaking disappointment last Friday: The Associated Press announced that UFO buffs and believers in space aliens celebrated Area 51 being official last week -- but the AP didn't prove it/CREDIT: goldstar.com "LAS VEGAS (AP) - UFO buffs and believers in space aliens are celebrating the CIA's clearest acknowledgement yet of the existence of Area 51, the top-secret Cold War test site that has been the subject of elaborate conspiracy theories for decades." In the next graph, Dreier informs us that the "recently declassified documents have set the tinfoil-hat contingent abuzz on the Internet, though there's no mention in the papers of UFO crashes, black-eyed extraterrestrials or staged moon landings." As a reporter, in the very next graph I expect to read all about the celebrations by all these buffs and believers in space aliens. I mean, put me there, right? Put me right smack-dab in the middle of the glory hole because my mind's eye is spinning with possibilities. Like, are we talking about urbane high-fiving shaken-not-stirred I-told-you-so yuppies flooding Times Square? Or something more ribald, like the glass-tossing swashbucklers in the Captain Morgan Rum/White Stripes commercial? Or were the celebrations - given the lack of black-eyed aliens and fake moon landings - jovial in a muted sorta way? Like a rainy Tuesday afternoon at Sloppy Joe's, where it's great to be off the clock, but dammit all, Duval Street's flooded and the drum-circle fire-eaters won't be out tonight... But no. Instead, you had to read seven more graphs of background and crap like that before Dreier got around to revisiting the setup. And this is how bad the payoff stank. UFO researcher Robert Hastings didn't appear to be celebrating anything at all: "The government will not release what it knows. My opinion is that whoever is flying these craft will break the story and will reveal themselves at some point in the future. The CIA is not going to release anything they don't want to talk about." Um, where's the champagne and confetti? Noisemakers and plastic ruffled luau garlands? Sensing, perhaps, she hadn't quite nailed it, Dreier moved another version a few hours later. This time, she managed to work one of those buffs up into the third paragraph. Alas, this particular buff, "who runs a support group for people like her who believe they have been contacted by extraterrestrials," didn't appear to be celebrating, either. All she said was, "I'm thinking that they're [the CIA] probably testing the waters now to see how mad people get about the big lie and the coverup." Aren't there any tinfoil-hatters buzzing "anywhere" in this story? Well, read a little farther down in the second version and, hmm, seems as if Hastings' name has been subbed out for researcher Stan Friedman. But Friedman doesn't sound all that KC & The Sunshine Band either: "The notion that the U-2 explains most sightings at that time is utter rot and baloney. Can the U-2 sit still in the sky? Make right-angle turns in the middle of the sky? Take off from nothing? The U-2 can't do any of those things." Well, no, U-2s can't do those things. Nevertheless, the AP and every other MSM outlet made a big splash from a tepid little asterisk last week when the CIA declassified 50-year-old documents stating its spyplanes flew out of Area 51. Zzz. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow with the National Security Archive, did a lot of the crowing. He said, "It marks an end of official secrecy about the facts of Area 51. It opens up the possibility that future accounts of this and other aerial projects will be less redacted, more fully explained in terms of their presence in Area 51." America learned about Area 51 in a big way back in 1996, when "60 Minutes" did a spread on the sort of state-financed paranoia that values information security over the lives of its worker bees. Two years earlier, the plaintiffs - or survivors of the dead - sued the Air Force and the Environmental Agency (just two of the myriad government agencies with a stake in that restricted federal sprawl) on the grounds that they were injured by inhaling toxic fumes from trash burnoffs. Their physicians wanted to know exactly what sort of chemicals their patients were exposed to in order to administer more effective treatments. But thanks to a 1995 executive order, President Clinton exempted the accused from disclosing classified information and the suit was tossed. Among the breathtaking lowlights of those proceedings was a manual for Area 51 employees, then available on the Internet, that plaintiff attorney Jonathan Turley attempted to enter into evidence. The Defense Department immediately classified the manual on the grounds that its release could jeopardize military personnel. Irony apparently unintended. Case closed. Anyway, if they want us to cheer this breakthrough in Area 51 glasnost, let's wait and see if the employee manual makes it back into the public domain first, for starters. In the meantime, please, AP and everybody else: Don't taunt me about UFO buffs and believers in space aliens celebrating this runny gruel. Take me to one of those parties. Put me in that special moment, that real moment, so I can feel the heat and get down tonight.

Categories: aliens, google maps ufo, multiverse