Search Results for: Time Magazine

The First Time I Moved to New York

Alexander Chee in Polaroid, taken by Michael James O’Brien at the Lure in New York for XXX Fruit’s launch party.

Alexander Chee | Longreads | October 2018 | 10 minutes (2,448 words)

 

My first move to New York begins at the back of a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco in 1991, with a man visiting from New York with his boyfriend who tried to pick me up. I turned him down as a way of flirting only with him. He seemed at a loss as to what to say next, and so I said, When can I get you alone?

We stood at the back of that meeting for some time, not quite willing to walk away. We hadn’t known each other long but the attraction we felt that would end up tearing up our lives and remaking them was already in charge. We exchanged addresses, deciding to be pen pals, then wrote each other letters for months. We met up again at a writers conference, then wrote more letters. He broke up with his boyfriend and got an apartment by himself. The answer to my original question then seemed to be, Seven months from now, in New York. And so I put my things in San Francisco up for sale and boarded a bus for New York that summer, with a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as reading material, and my best friend, who we’ll call S.

S and I dressed more or less alike for the trip, as we had for much of our friendship. If memory serves, we were both reading the same book. We made White Goddess jokes the whole way. We wore jean cutoffs, combat boots, and sleeveless hoodies, and sat in seats next to each other, emerging from the bus for smoke breaks. Our aesthetic then was modeled mostly on the comic Tank Girl and what we could remember of issues of The Face, and I had recently shaved my own head after a long night in Oakland that served as something of a private goodbye to San Francisco. S was coming with me a little in the way of a best man or a bridesmaid, as if I were getting married. I wasn’t used to getting what I wanted from love, and survived through intense friendships instead. We had been inseparable best friends since meeting, writing in coffee shops and stalking used bookstores for books by Joy Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Hacker, and, yes, Joan Didion, and so while he joked he wanted to make sure of me, and I wanted him to — I didn’t trust myself — we were also, I think, preparing for being without each other on a daily basis.

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25 Years of Vibe Magazine

Courtesy of VIBE

For Billboard,  Dan Charnas compiles an oral history of Vibe magazine, the first issue of which was published in September, 1993. Founded by Quincy Jones in partnership with Time Warner (and still publishing digitally today), the magazine represented a “new black aesthetic” that “championed hip-hop but thought broad and wide about the genre’s connections to the past and the future.”

Mimi Valdes (editorial assistant, 1993-94; assistant editor, 1994-95; style editor, 1997-98; executive editor, 1999-2002; editor-at-large, 2002-03; editor-in-chief, 2004-06): Jonathan [Van Meter, editor-in-chief 1992-93] booked Madonna and Dennis Rodman as a cover. And Eddie Murphy’s publicist was mad as hell that Madonna was getting the cover over Eddie. We all wanted Eddie over Madonna, so we were upset about it too. When [word of the cover choice] started to get out in the industry, we all felt the need to save Vibe’s reputation.

Scott Poulson-Bryant (senior editor/writer, 1992-96): I said [to Jonathan], “The staff needs to have a conference. People are really not happy about this.”

Van Meter: I said, “This isn’t The Village Voice. We’re not unionized. You can’t come in here representing the staff.”

Valdes: We were all standing by waiting for Scott to give us the go-ahead to come in. When Jonathan saw us, he got really upset.

Van Meter: I felt like I was losing control. And I said [to Scott], “You’re fired.” People in the hallways started crying. Mimi Valdes was screaming as if she’d just found out her mother was shot and killed. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I made it worse.”

Poulson-Bryant: He came to my office: “You’re not fired. Look, we’ll have a staff meeting.”

Quincy Jones: I was staying away from editorial policy. I got involved when Jonathan put the Beastie Boys on the cover and told me he was following up with Dennis Rodman and Madonna. He had already shot it!

Van Meter: I guess Quincy was getting a lot of shit from people for putting the Beastie Boys on the cover, and when he sees the Madonna cover, he went crazy.

Jones: I said, “Over my dead fucking body! That’s the way you blow an urban magazine.”

Van Meter: Madonna was queen. You can’t not put her on the cover. I couldn’t conceive of killing the best cover story we had done so far. [Quincy and I] ended up having a fight on the phone, and I smashed my phone into a thousand pieces and cleared off the top of my desk onto the floor. I think I said, “I quit.” I went home. And then the phone calls started. Everyone tried to get Quincy to change his mind. Even Madonna called me at home. She was really pissed.

Jones: I called Madonna and I said, “I’m telling you as a friend: it’s not personal, but you cannot pander with an urban magazine this early.” She said, “Quincy Jones, you and I can take over the world if we want to. See you around, pal.” I haven’t talked to her since then.

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The Underground Magazine That Helped Shape Portland, Oregon

Snipehunt 1994, cover by Sean Tejaratchi, courtesy of Portland Mercury

It’s hard to imagine now, but Portland used to be a tiny ignored little city that a lot of bands didn’t want to play and national media largely ignored. Those were sweet times. In that relative cultural isolation, a poster artist named Mike King started a music fanzine named Snipehunt to both harness and serve Portland’s small arts community. Enlarged and fully realized by editor Kathy Molloy, her volunteer team designed, edited, published, and distributed the magazine themselves. Snipehunt had a devoted following and helped launch the careers of its then-unknown freelance writers. Then in 1997, it abruptly quit publishing, and Molloy ghosted everyone and moved to British Columbia.

In an oral history for the Portland Mercury, local writer Joshua James Amberson goes on his own snipe hunt for Molloy, and he lets those who were involved with her artistically piece together the magazine’s creation and influence. One artist called Molloy “the punk mayor of Portland.” Molloy remains a mystery who, like her magazine, cannot be found online. Thanks to Amberson, Snipehunt now sort of has web presence.

The scene that inspired Snipehunt featured bands that weren’t getting media coverage and writers and artists without an outlet. The magazine soon became a breeding ground for local creators, and its contributor list is a peek at the kind of local talent and energy emerging during that time: novelist and screenwriter Jon Raymond, current Portland city commissioner Chloe Eudaly, filmmaker and installation artist Vanessa Renwick, local writer and publisher Kevin Sampsell, novelist Rene Denfeld, Crap Hound and Liar Town creator Sean Tejaratchi. For many of the contributors, Snipehunt was their first publication, their first opportunity to regularly try out their ideas on an audience.

A typical issue of Snipehunt had interviews with local and national bands, pages of comics from independent artists, scene reports from West Coast cities, oddball prose pieces, political action coverage, and pages of reviews—albums, zines, live shows, films, and books. It was a broad take on DIY culture, loosely based in the punk scene but covering artists and subjects far beyond the imposed limitations of that world.

With the magazine’s history largely absent from the internet, its name unfamiliar to the majority of current Portlanders, and physical evidence of its existence difficult to come by, I reached out to a couple dozen of its contributors to provide me—and the rest of new Portland—with a much-needed history lesson.

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Sign O’ The Times: Paisley Park Offers A Public Tour

Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI on February 4, 2007 at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

For The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich tours Paisley Park, the home and recording studio of the late Prince. What she learns is that no matter how close you may get in physical proximity, even in death Prince maintains a carefully curated distance between him, his fans, and the world.

Mostly, the tour made me feel lonesome. Absent its owner, Paisley Park is a husk. In 2004, when Prince briefly rented a mansion in Los Angeles from the basketball player Carlos Boozer, he redesigned the place, putting his logo on the front gate, painting pillars purple, installing all-black carpet, and adding a night club. (Boozer threatened to sue, but Prince restored the house before he moved out.) Yet Paisley Park feels anonymous. His studios are beautiful, but unremarkable. There are many photos of him, and his symbol is omnipresent, but I was hoping for evidence of his outsized quirks and affectations—clues to some bigger truth. I found little that seemed especially personal. Paisley Park presents Prince only as a visionary—not as a father, a husband, a friend, or a son.

Although Prince’s estate has disregarded some of his preferences—his discography is now available on Spotify, a platform he pulled his music from in 2015, in part because he believed that the company didn’t compensate artists properly—there’s something profound about how Paisley Park insists on maintaining Prince’s privacy. It does not need to modernize him (which feels unnecessary), or even to humanize him (which feels impossible). In 2016, the most common response to Prince’s death was disbelief. His self-presentation was so carefully controlled that he never once betrayed his own mortality. He’d done nothing to make us think he was like us. During parties, Prince sometimes stood in a dark corner of the balcony and watched other people dance. Visiting Paisley Park now evokes a similar sensation—of being near Prince, but never quite with him.

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NYT Magazine’s Rita Dove on What Poetry Might Grant Unsuspecting News Readers

Longreads Pick

Brendan Fitzgerald interviews Rita Dove on how she plans to approach her upcoming one-year stint as poetry editor at New York Times Magazine. Taking over for Terrance Hayes this summer, Dove has free rein to select a poem that will appear in the magazine each week, along with her short introduction. Dove is the fourth poet to hold the poetry editor position.

Published: May 25, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,794 words)

Unearthing the History of Lynching, One Story at a Time

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 20: Names and dates of lynching victims are inscribed on corten steel monuments at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice on April 20, 2018 in Montgomery, Al. More than 800 corten steel monuments are on display representing each county in the United States where a lynching took place. More than four thousand victims are honored at the memorial. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On April 26, 2018, the first national memorial to honor victims of lynchings opens in Montgomery, Alabama. The memorial’s main feature is an installation of more than 800 suspended columns made of steel, one for each U.S. county where the murders occurred. The names of victims are etched into the markers — in places, the engravings simply read, “unknown.” Bryan Stevenson, whose Montgomery-based Equal Justice Institute,  compiled an official tally of burnings, hangings, shootings, and drownings of black Americans by white mobs from 1877 – 1950 and created the memorial, said he wanted to capture the “scale” of the 20th century’s racial terrorism.

The story of lynchings in the U.S can also be told on a smaller scale. Mob violence against blacks was wrought on communities, families and individual bodies. Throughout the memorial, details of some of the killings are listed along a walkway. But documentation of many of the murders is scarce: newspaper accounts are missing or unreliable, and memories of many witnesses and bystanders has been lost to silence and grief.

For New York Times magazine, journalist Vanessa Gregory unearths one story as she follows the descendants of Elwood Higginbotham, to Oxford, Mississippi, where they learn the details of the events surrounding his 1935 murder by a white mob and visit his possible burial site in an attempt to come to terms with their family history.

Higginbottom was 4 when the mob came for his father. He is now 87, with eyes set in a perpetual glaucoma squint and the strong voice of a younger man. He is the last remaining family member to have seen his father alive, and the thought of returning to Oxford was gnawing at him. The anxiety began when his daughters first proposed the trip, and it intensified that morning when he woke. And now Washington, the youngest of his six children, was peppering him with questions.

“So, who is your daddy’s mama?”

“I don’t know my grandmother on my daddy’s side,” he said.

“When did granddaddy and grandmama get married?”

“I don’t know when my parents got married.”

Higginbottom knew little because his mother and extended family fled Mississippi after the lynching. They raised E.W., the eldest, and his siblings, Flora and Willie Wade, in Forrest City, Ark., and later in Memphis. Higginbottom’s mother told the children their father had been hanged but didn’t share many details. And she almost never spoke of her dead husband’s character, habits or looks — the stories of his life. Maybe grief kept her quiet. Or fear. Either way, Higginbottom knew better than to mention his daddy. Sometimes he asked his cousins Dorothy and Olivia about him, but they told him to leave it alone. Don’t mess around in that, they said. You might get hurt.

Higginbottom had occasionally returned to Oxford when he was younger, chaperoned by uncles who wanted to visit relatives or take in a service at the family’s former church. But it had been a long time. He stared at the fields consumed by kudzu, the gravel drives, the hardwoods lush with summer growth, and saw only a foreign country. “I was trying to see something I recognized around here, but I don’t,” he said. “It don’t look like I ever lived down here.” As they sped closer to Oxford, he kept gazing out the window, scanning the landscape for even a spark of memory.

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Sometimes the Story Finds You: An Interview With Rachel Monroe

Rocky outcrop in the desert near Shiprock in far northwestern New Mexico. (Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)

For Esquire, Rachel Monroe spent time on the enormous Navajo reservation to examine how the Amber Alert system failed to protect a missing girl. Typically, child abductions launch immediate responses from local law enforcement, but when a Navajo sister and brother, Ashlynne and Ian Mike, went missing in Shiprock in 2016, the Navajo Nation Police Department didn’t put out an Amber Alert for eight hours after the girl went reported missing. Jurisdiction, a lack of resources, and confusion about procedure wasted vital time, and Ashlynne was found dead.

Monroe spent two years speaking with sources and unraveling the bureaucratic and cultural threads that kept the Navajo Nation Amber Alert system from working as well as is does off the reservation. Monroe tells a chilling story, especially to parents, but it honors Ashlynne’s memory and offers hope that the bipartisan bill that Ashlynne’s mother helped pass, a bill to fund a Amber Alert in Indian Country system, and renamed it after Ashlynne, will help save the lives of other Indigenous children when they go missing. I spoke with Monroe about the years it took to bring this story to publication, and why a complex story often needs to take the time.

***

You’ve been writing features for a long time and covered everything from the culture of living in vans to a West Texas fertilizer plant explosion. How did you find out about the abduction on the Navajo reservation?

In 2016, my editor, the wonderful Whitney Joiner, asked me to find an Amber Alert story since it was the program’s 20th anniversary. I dug around a bit and found the Amber Alert in Indian Country program, and went to Taos for a conference in April 2016. At the conference, I heard people talking about the mistrust, underfunding, racism and jurisdictional tangles that make it so challenging to deal with abductions on reservations. I just got kind of obsessed with how knotty and complicated it all was. And then, a few weeks later, Ashlynne and Ian were kidnapped. It was a perfect, awful illustration of all these issues I’d been thinking about.

One structural issue this kidnapping illustrated was an issue unique to many tribes: that talking about abductions and doing training exercises invites these particular evils into the tribal community. Were there other culture-specific issues that you wish you could have explored further?

There are more than 500 different federally recognized tribes in the U.S., and they’re all distinct, even though the issues they’re grappling with are similar. The story kept shrinking and ballooning and shrinking again as I tried to figure out how much to include about the specifics of this case, and of the Navajo Nation. A lot of the struggles with writing it had to do with questions of scale — how to write about this one child and colonialism without writing a 20 million word story. I also thought a lot about how to portray the culture-specific challenges, which many people discussed with me, without playing into tropes of Native people being exotic or mystical. I really didn’t want to do that.

Many Americans have little opportunity to interact with Indigenous people, so many don’t understand how tribal sovereignty works, or what life on reservations is like. It was interesting to learn about how accepting federal money to improve things like the Amber Alert system on Navajo land could undermine tribal sovereignty. What other things did you learn about the Navajo Nation that surprised you?

The community was so shaken by this crime, and I wanted to make sure that came across in the story. When it works well, crime writing can give you a portrait of a community and a place — the horror of a murder brings internal conflicts and debates into relief as people try to negotiate what happened, how it happened, what it means, what should be done.

I was surprised by the layers of bureaucracy that has to be negotiated to get anything taken care of on the reservation. Gary Mike told me about how he helped the FBI agents plan the raid on the sweat lodge where they arrested the man who was eventually convicted of Ashlynne’s murder. Gary was so anxious that they might mess it up, because the sweat lodge was on a patch of land that technically wasn’t a part of the reservation, so the jurisdictional rules and responsibilities were different in that particular spot. And he knew all of that just because in his daily life he’d had to deal with all these overlapping systems all the time.

How do you write a story of this size and complexity? What’s your process, from reporting to writing?

I started by going to that conference in Taos, which was useful in that it provided an overview of the various issues at play, and it also helped me connect with people working in the field. After Ashlynne was abducted, I knew I had to go to Shiprock. It was difficult to find contact information for anyone in advance, so I just crossed my fingers and drove out there, hoping it would all work out. I started by going through local leaders like Rick Nez and Chili Yazzie. It’s a very tight-knit community, so when those people met me and saw that I was sincere and committed to telling the story in its full complexity, they helped put me in touch with others.

Eventually I was introduced to Ashlynne’s dad. I also had one really intense, long off-the-record interview that I wasn’t able to use, but that proved to be really crucial in helping me understand the dynamics at play in Shiprock. Jim Walters, who has been involved with Amber Alert in Indian Country for over a decade now, was very patient in explaining the intricacies of the system to me over and over again. He also helped facilitate the connection with Pamela, Ashlynne’s mom. Basically all the important connections I made with this story were person-to-person. It’s always so daunting to approach a story like this and not know whether or not people will give you access, but I was fortunate that so many people were so generous and willing to share. After that visit to Shiprock, I just kept following the case through the court system, got all the documents I could get my hands on, FOIA’d some police departments, and attended various court proceedings.

 

Ashlynne’s mother helped get a bill passed to improve the Amber Alert system on tribal lands, and the alerts are named after Ashlynne. In the long-run, do you think the improvements will stick?

I try to avoid prognosticating. In one sense, I’m optimistic. People are paying more attention to violence committed against Indigenous women and children. At the same time, everyone working in this field is fighting such intense headwinds — poverty, trauma, racism, just to name a few. Even so, I have so much admiration for those fighting the good fight, and I think that their work does make a difference over time.

 

When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine

(Photo: Getty)

Agnès Poirier | Excerpt adapted from Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 | Henry Holt and Co. | February 2018 | 20 minutes 5,275 words)

In September 1945, together with their band of students and friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were working night and day finalizing the first issue of their journal Les Temps modernes. They had launched the idea at the end of 1944, choosing the title as a tribute to Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, apart from Camus who was too busy editing Combat, they could rely on almost everyone else to write for them — Communists, Catholics, Gaullists, and Socialists: their schoolmate and liberal philosopher friend Raymond Aron, the Marxist phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, the anthropologist and art critic Michel Leiris, the Gallimard supremo Jean Paulhan, and even Picasso, who had agreed to design the cover and logo, along with a new generation of writers who were submitting articles and ideas such as Jacques-Laurent Bost. The British writer Philip Toynbee would contribute a Letter from London, while novels and essays the committee particularly liked would be serialized prior to their publication or with a view to attracting a potential publisher. Les Temps modernes would be a laboratory of new ideas and a talent scout rolled into one. Simone de Beauvoir had personally approached the minister of information, the Gaullist and résistant Jacques Soustelle, to ask for an allocation of paper.

Gallimard had agreed to finance the journal and to give the team a little office where they could hold their editorial meetings. The first issue was planned for October 1, 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre was made the head of the publication, “Monsieur le Directeur,” and he thought it important to make himself available to everyone. This would be democracy and public debate in action. He committed to receiving anyone who asked to see him at the magazine’s office at 5 rue Sébastien Bottin every Tuesday and Friday afternoon between five thirty and seven thirty. This commitment was printed at the beginning of the magazine, along with the telephone number Littré 28-91, where they could be reached. Sartre had decided to dedicate the first issue of Les Temps modernes “To Dolorès,” in all simplicity. Simone did not blink an eye.

In the first issue, Sartre announced loud and clear what Les Temps modernes stood for. It was to be the megaphone that would carry their thoughts far and wide.

Every writer of bourgeois origin has known the temptation of irresponsibility. I personally hold Flaubert personally responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because he did not write a line to try to stop it. It was not his business, people will perhaps say. Was the Calas trial Voltaire’s business? Was Dreyfus’s condemnation Zola’s business? We at Les Temps modernes do not want to miss a beat on the times we live in. Our intention is to influence the society we live in. Les Temps modernes will take sides.

The tone was set, the thinking promised to be muscular and the writing fearless.
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“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

Getty / 123RF images, Composite by Katie Kosma

Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)

* * *

He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.

You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.
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It’s Time for Real Talk About Aliens

AP Photo/Roswell Daily Record, Mark Wilson

This December, The New York Times ran a front page story about the Pentagon program that investigated unexplained aerial phenomena. The US military recently had three prominent, documented encounters with unidentified flying objects. And the Chinese just built the world’s largest radar facility to listen for extraterrestrial life. What the hell is going on? I mean, Trump’s presidency seems like a dystopian sci-fi novel, but when did UFOs move from the Art Bell fringe into the mainstream?

At New York Magazine, a group of seven journalists dive deep into the realm of Ufology. Cataloguing the past and Ufology’s key players, they make a case that no time in human history has presented clearer, more compelling evidence that something unexplained is buzzing our skies, missile silos and nuclear facilities, if not aliens, then certainly things we have not yet identified. “In December,” the article says, “the Pentagon confirmed the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.”

The program was co-founded by then–Majority Leader Harry Reid, who tweeted, “We don’t know the answers, but we have plenty of evidence to support asking the questions.” It’s a convincing point. The funding supposedly ended in 2012, but sources say the program is going strong. Some of this information will be familiar to those of us who enjoy reading about unexplained phenomenon. The sense that some of this is just nuts-o is also familiar. What’s new is the Federal government’s transparency and mounting the burden of proof. Here’s the tip of the extraterrestrial iceberg as a teaser:

So much of what the program uncovered remains classified, but what little we know is tantalizing. Based on data it collected, the program identified five observations that showed mysterious objects displaying some level of “advanced physics,” also known as “stuff humans can’t do yet”: The objects would accelerate with g-forces too strong for the human body to withstand, or reach hypersonic speed with no heat trail or sonic boom, or they seemed to resist the effects of Earth’s gravity without any aerodynamic structures to provide thrust or lift. “No one has been able to figure out what these are,” said Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until last October, in a recent interview.

Elizondo has also talked about “metamaterials” that may have been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena and stored in buildings owned by a private aerospace contractor in Las Vegas; they apparently have material compositions that aren’t found naturally on Earth and would be exceptionally expensive to replicate. According to a 2009 Pentagon briefing summarized in the New York Times, “the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered.” This was a briefing by people trying to get more funding — but still.

Some of the accounts Elizondo and his team analyzed supposedly occurred near nuclear facilities like power plants or battleships. In November 2004, the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser escorting the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego, ordered two fighter jets to investigate mysterious aircraft the Navy had been tracking for weeks (meaning this was not just a trick of the eye or a momentary failure of perspective, the two things most often blamed for unexplained aerial phenomena). When the jets arrived at the location, one of the pilots, Commander David Fravor, saw a disturbance just below the ocean’s surface causing the water to roil around it. Then, suddenly, he saw a white, 40-foot Tic Tac–shaped craft moving like a Ping-Pong ball above the water. The vehicle began mirroring his plane’s movements, but when Fravor dove directly at the object, the Tic Tac zipped away.

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