Billy Cox pour le Sarasota Herald Tribune - Florida, USA
"Hey, ABC: Reporting Is Believing !"Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Not that the Air Force really had anything to fear from the
hacks at ABC News. But you do have to wonder if the brass at
Carswell Field outside Fort Worth were splitting a gut during
its PrimeTime show last night and going, "What a bunch of
morons! They're rippin' off Larry King!"
It's a little too easy to get hung up in the fact that Tuesday
evening's UFOs: Seeing Is Believing microwaved 90 minutes of
leftovers from Peter Jennings' 2005 report by the same name.
Because, yeah, after all, they tossed in the whole laundry
basket again - alien abductions, Roswell, the Phoenix Lights,
radio astronomers vs. flying saucers, even the same old B-52
incident over Minot, S.D., from 1968.
What made this show such an inadvertent glittering jewel was its
utter lack of irony. Because David Muir, the standup blow-dry
who had to paint the lipstick on this pig, actually said,
"Tonight, we'll report what's new."
He said that.
Now, to be fair, we can't blame it all on David. The guy had a
team of writers and producers and probably a bunch of marketing
suits armed with flash cards and timers warning that devoting
more than six minutes would lose the entire audience.
And did you notice how the narrative made such a breezy
transition from the Phoenix Lights to NASA's Phoenix Lander, the
probe that discovered ice on Mars? Aside from the word
"phoenix," neither had a thing to do with the other. So that
segue had to be a group effort. No one person dreams up that
sort of non sequitur by themselves.
The only "What's New" aspect to Seeing Is Believing was the
lead segment - the Stephenville, Tex., incident. But ABC's
irresponsible management of it attains tragic proportions only
if one assumes investigative journalism, not entertainment, were
the imperative.
Let's <sigh> run through it again real quick: A massive UFO
passes over a rural region of north Texas. Multiple witnesses
also report jet fighters in hot pursuit. Some contend the bogey
was heading toward George Bush's ranch in Crawford.
A spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the nearby Joint
Reserve Base Naval Air Station (Carswell Field) denies any
warplanes were in the sky that night.
Two weeks later, aware that investigators with the Mutual UFO
Network are filing radar records requests with various military
and civilian agencies, the USAF realizes it's about to be caught
in a lie. In a pre-emptive motion, it concedes it had 10 F-16s
in the air. Conducting "routine" training missions.
All military agencies in receipt of Freedom of Information Act
requests from MUFON - as well as the Department of Homeland
Security - stonewall the release of radar data. But it's too
late. Federal Aviation Administration and National Weather
Service returns tell the story: F-16s were all over the place
that night, straying out of their military operating areas and
closing to within a mile of the UFO on its southeast trajectory
toward Crawford. Nothing routine about this. And when the object
bore down on a straight path to the Bush ranch no-fly zone, the
military inteceptors were nowhere in the vicinity.
ABC compresses this stuff into a four-minute feature dominated
by civilian eyewitnesses. There's a sound bite with MUFON report
co-author Robert Powell. But no serious examination of the radar
data, no airing of the redacted flight logs from Carswell, not
even any indication that PrimeTime attempted to resolve the
USAF's information embargo.
Perversely, PrimeTime concluded its broadcast with an
exhortation from physicist Michio Kaku, who wondered if UFOs
embody the technology needed to circumvent the constraints of
time and space: "Let this investigation begin!"
Exactly. Because ABC can't handle it.
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