UFOs and Journalism

Saucer Talk

Trail of the Saucers editors Bryce Zabel and David Bates talk about covering the UAP/UFO world as a breaking news story that’s moving with the speed of a Tic Tac. Plus the state of Disclosure, and a pair of black-and-white photos taken in 1950.

Bryce Zabel and David Bates are a couple of native Oregonians who both went to the University of Oregon and got degrees in Journalism. Yet both writers had never met (and still haven’t except virtually) until the middle of 2021. With this conversation, Bryce, who created Trail of the Saucers and brought it to Medium last year, welcomes David as both an editor and a writer.

Bryce: It’s been historic, writing about this when the UAP report came out.

David: Well, journalism is the “first draft of history,” as they say. The assessment, you wrote, what’d you call it … ?

Bryce: That Pesky Catchall ‘Other’ Bin of UFOs. Because that’s what the report literally called the category, I’m not making this up, quote, a ‘catchall other bin,’ end quote. It’s a phrase that may just live forever because that bin is where all the good stuff lives.

David: It obviously was very carefully written, probably to buy the Pentagon time, and arguably — if you believe Disclosure activist Steve Bassett — engineered to give Congress a tangible tool to justify hearings. Nothing really new in it, of course, for ufologists. But in the larger scheme of things, it’s huge. UFOs are real, period. Let’s all get on the same page and move forward.

Bryce: Look, the report could have been more direct, it certainly could have been written more honestly about the history instead of seeming like the whole mystery just popped up in 2004 and surprised everyone. Even so, it will be remembered for a few key things. It confirms that they looked into 144 cases and only identified one of them. That they believe these are physically real, can fly rings around us, and that we, the U.S., does not make them. And that they’ve seen zero evidence that Russia or China makes them either. As I like to say these days, do the math. Some of them are probably being flown by somebody who isn’t us from someplace that isn’t quite here. Figuring out who that is and what they want is the work of our time.

David: It really is the story of a lifetime, one that challenges the tasks and role of journalism like nothing before.

Bryce: I watched the Sunday morning news shows this weekend, or at least Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulus. Not a peep about the report, still not being seen as serious news, knocked aside by the Miami condo collapse, the infrastructure bill, and everything else. Chuck Todd should have had Gadi Schwartz on to explain the report but he would never do that because Todd doesn’t think that UAP is a real story. Now why is that?

David: That’s a huge question, but one we need to look at. And then there was Senator Mitt Romney on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday unambiguously ruling out anything made by Russia, China, or us. “Quite frankly, China and Russia just aren’t there, and neither are we,” he said. Host Jake Tapper then takes a pass on following up, which blows my mind.

Bryce: Me, too. It’s frustrating, of course, because one rumor going around as yet unconfirmed is that the briefings done a few weeks ago in congress were about a 70 plus page report and included 14 videos that went on 45 minutes and left our nation’s representatives “gobsmacked,” which is a word you don’t hear much anymore but should probably be revived to help describe early confrontation with UFO reality. My point is that why couldn’t the people be trusted with a few details from the 143 unsolved cases the report mentions? Why couldn’t we see some full-length videos and high-definition photos? I guarantee that if we had gotten that, we’d be having a very different conversation right now and Chuck Todd might even pay attention.

David: It’s interesting that Romney doesn’t currently sit on any of the committees that, by my understanding, were given the closed-door briefing, and yet he seemed pretty confident saying what he did. Why is that?

Bryce: I want to say that he was briefed, one way or another, or he has heard compelling reports from others who were briefed. You know, staying with the subject of journalism, I have to say that I doubt the University of Oregon School of Journalism ever thought we’d be putting our degrees to work covering UFOs.

David: No, that really wasn’t on the radar, mine or theirs. I mean, by that point I was familiar with some of the literature, Project Blue Book, and so on, but with classes and career looming, my mind was on other things.

Bryce: Like girls?

David: Well that, but I was a pretty serious student. First year at UO I had no journalism courses, and I remember just chomping at the bit to get inside that building.

Bryce: Well, so that our professors still like us, wonderful folks like Duncan McDonald, Tim Gleason, Lauren Kessler, so many others, what do you think journalists are getting right and what are they getting wrong these days on the UAP topic?

David: There’s definitely a level of seriousness that wasn’t there before. I think it’s not so much a matter of what they’re getting ‘wrong’ as it is being unfamiliar with the historical context and the vast amount of research that’s already been done by citizens who have had to develop journalistic skill sets on their own — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And also starting from a place where they conflate some of the more exotic claims and wild theories with stuff we know from old-fashioned shoe leather reporting. I put the question to UFO researcher Jeremy Corbell the other day during a live podcast he was on, and his message to mainstream journalists was: Get caught up, and dive deep. He’s absolutely right.

Bryce: There are some great journalists working today in the UAP space. And they should be there. In my generation of J-School, it was about Watergate. Today, to borrow from the late Stanton Friedman, it’s a Cosmic Watergate that journalists are only slowly waking up to.

David: Well, let’s give Leslie Kean her due, and Ralph Blumenthal, of course, for getting this started in the New York Times back in 2017. They blazed a trail, and with what I’m sure must have been extremely rigorous editing and fact-checking, they showed that the UFO story can be reported responsibly. Well hell, they literally got the nation’s “paper of record” to say that there is a story.

Bryce: For sure, and I wonder if they’re working on another big one right this second.

David: Oh, you know they absolutely are. I can hardly wait to see it.

Bryce: Meantime, for me, George Knapp remains the lion of investigative journalism. Then there are a whole group of people who I call the New Gods of UFO reporting. You mentioned Corbell, but also James Fox, Tyler Rogoway, Michah Hanks, Tim McMillan, Jazz Shaw, MJ Banias, and others, there’s so many. People like UFO Jane, Joe Murgia, Danny Silva, and Maureen Elsberry, Ryan Sprague. and Cristina Gomez. And I have to give a special nod to Ryan Robbins, who many people know by his original nom de plume, UFO Jesus, a name he doesn’t use much anymore, but his hair is still past his shoulders and, you know what, he’s doing some of the absolute best UFO analysis out there through his Twitter account and, even more importantly, through his videos. I got an idea.

David: We’re going to need a lot more than one to pull this off.

Bryce: Right, yeah. I’m going to get in touch with Ryan. You know what we ought to do is publish transcripts of his YouTube videos the day after he releases them. That would be awesome.

David: Yeah, that’ll be awesome as long as I don’t have to transcribe them.

Bryce: Maybe we can borrow an alien A.I. set-up.

David: It will be interesting to see how the larger media outlets approach covering this story going forward. I mean, who do you assign this to? Your best investigative reporter? The intern? Does the military reporter get it by default, or whatever reporter has the best sources? Obviously there’s other vitally important news to cover, you can’t stop covering climate change, the economy, social unrest, and everything else.

Bryce: Climate change? You mean like when McMinnville, Oregon gets to 110?

David: You’ve outed me. It’s a great little town. And things are cooling off finally. Today it’s supposed to be only 108.

Bryce: Well, we just have to talk McMinnville, though, don’t we? My parents moved to Nelscott, Oregon, now it’s Lincoln City, in 1950 which is very close to McMinnville and in the same year as the famous Trent sighting there. I’ve been through McMinnville a dozen times in my life. And you live there now. Coincidence?

David: I know, it’s crazy. I grew up in the Willamette Valley and I’ve lived in McMinnville since the mid-1990s. Yeah, we take pride in the Trent sighting, I worked for the paper that first published those famous photos. They have that front page framed on the wall.

Bryce: They should. I’ve always been drawn to the Trent sighting because of those stark black-and-white photos. Not only did it feel real, but these were decent people, the Trents, and I knew their type from growing up in that part of Oregon. I wanted to read more about it. What I found out was there was no single source where someone just told the complete story. I figured that every year it was getting less likely that someone would. That is the brilliance of the Trail of the Saucers concept to me. I ended up writing the story that I wanted to read. It took me a while, it’s what we call a “deep dive” at the publication. This one is a 17-minute read. It’s not perfect, but it is, so far as I know, one of the most complete tellings of the story you can find anywhere. Do you think the photos are authentic?

David: I’m not a photography expert, but I believe they’re real. I base that in part on conversations I had with Phil Bladine, who was the retired publisher when I moved here and was obviously in the thick of it as a reporter when it happened. Or, he may have been the editor by that point, I can’t recall. Phil was old-school, ink-on-his-fingers, a straight-shooter, and he didn’t seem to think Trent faked it.

Bryce: At the end of that 17-minute read, I venture my opinion after all that time I spent investigating and analyzing. I actually encourage people to read it on our site. Consider it a tribute to the Kents who would appreciate an honest attempt at trying to tell their story. Okay, spoiler, I think they’re real.

David: No way! Really?

Bryce: I wouldn’t bet my house on it, maybe your house, but yeah. Moving on, I’ve often asked this of myself so it’s a relief to ask it of someone else. But what is Trail of the Saucers?

David: Hah! A grassroots journalism start-up. Which, just to make clear to everyone, I had nothing to do with until recently. I mean, really, it sort of is. We’re hardly the only ones, obviously, it’s a very crowded and wildly uneven field. What about you? You started it.

Bryce: Trail of the Saucers started out as part of the title of a speech I gave at the International UFO Conference. That’s the IUFOC and it’s run now by a couple of my friends, Karen Brard and Alejandro Rojas. Anyway, I had an hour and a half Apple Keynote presentation, it was awesome truly, from a visual POV if nothing else, although it did float some controversial themes that have become a key part of the dialogue here at Trail. And I called that presentation, “Fear and Loathing on the Trail of the Saucers.” I was inspired by a Ralph Steadman cartoon [editors: buy his art here] and, of course, the even more from from Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972, which I read a kid and thought was honest and weird and wonderful. I liked the title, but it was too much for a Medium publication, or a book for that matter, so I shortened it to Trail of the Saucers. It implies that there’s a hunt, a search for the truth. Whether you write for it or just follow it and leave comments and such, you are part of a new conversation.

David: It’s an important conversation for which I think a lot of people are unprepared. It’s a high-wire act, really. There’s a lot we can do to get the general reader and even professional journalists caught up on, but we don’t want to freak them out or overwhelm them. Certainly, we don’t want to give the impression we have all the answers, because we don’t. The weeds are tall and thick with this subject, there’s a tremendous amount of misinformation and UFO “noise” out there, so you sort of have to beat a path.

Bryce: True, and one of the other things I like about the site is that it is ad free and our stories do not exist behind a paywall.

David: That’s two things.

Bryce: Well, here’s a third one. The lack of ads give the work just a clean unfiltered look. We can really concentrate on laying big ideas out there and let people think about them. Sometimes we’ll have an article that is simply the Zen of Contact. We did one that described the entire UFO/UAP reality situation through a couple dozen haikus, about half I wrote, and the other half came from our readers.

David: What’s your vision for it?

Bryce: I think what can distinguish Trail of the Saucers beyond what we hope will be the quality of its writing is the individual voices that can and will emerge. Here’s a fun game. You describe what you think my writing voice is, and I’ll describe yours.

David: Your ufology background obviously is deeper than mine, you did Dark Skies, which must have involved a ton of research, and you’ve written a book, A.D. After Disclosure. You write tighter than I do, I always find myself going for — or maybe falling into — the 150-word sentence. I’d say yours is the voice of someone who knows how to write well, is light years ahead of most people on the issue, and while irritated that we have to fight to pry the biggest story of all time out into the daylight and get everyone caught up, you’ve got a sense of humor about it.

Bryce: That’s probably fair. Let’s face it, these things are real, we don’t make them, neither do our adversaries, and so the issue now is who is making them? And what do they want? I’m less interested in trying to convert all the skeptics or inform all of the uninformed and more compelled by the opportunity to be a part of a global discussion about how this contact can best be done. I think we need to level up as a species and fast. For as many years as I have left, I intend to devote at least part of my energies toward helping out in that process. Do I have to describe your voice now?

David: That was the deal.

Bryce: Your voice from the beginning was writing about UFOs using the same tone as your other journalistic work. Finding stories in the news around us and, in particular, by the people around us. Your first articles about Sam Harris and Lue Elizondo and then Eric Weinstein really gave a human side, no pun intended, to this endeavor. People can trust your voice because they know you’re informed on the topic, you respect the issue, and you are trying to use each article to add a piece to this puzzle of contact. We also share some common work experience in the breaking news aspect of journalism that, hopefully, will inform more of our work in the future. I like how you go get new information and expand it instead of recycling the same litany as everybody else.

David: I have to confess something.

Bryce: Oh no …

David: I never watched Dark Skies.

Bryce: That cannot stand! I’m sending you a DVD set in tomorrow’s mail. Do they still have snail mail, or should I have Amazon deliver that to you?

David: I’ve ordered it! It looks very cool. And, given what’s going on, it sort of qualifies as Must-See TV. Yeah, I had just landed the job in McMinnville when it was on NBC and I was just all in with that. Honestly, I don’t think I was really watching much of anything there for a year or two.

Bryce: Dark Skies was on before DVRs. So it was on at 8 pm on a Saturday night and if you missed it, that was just tough. And we weren’t even able to get the DVD set produced until 2011 because of issues with music rights. It’s been a hard show to watch, but people keep finding it. God bless all of them.

David: There will come a point where they’ll have to do a reissue to keep up with the demand. Hopefully Space 1999 will ride that wave.

Bryce: Right now I’d be happy if Sony, which owns the show, would make a streaming deal somewhere. Ah, but no sour grapes here. Tell me how you first tipped to the UFO issue?

David: We had pretty eclectic bookshelves in our home when I was growing up, I think there might have been some UFO books there. But the light bulb moment for me, honestly, was Whitley Strieber’s Communion. I remember the ‘holy shit!’ experience of reading that. But I believed that he was being as honest and as accurate as he could in describing what he experienced. Some will laugh when I say this, but I suspect a day will come when Communion is ranked as one of the most important memoirs ever written. By the way, have you ever seen one, a UFO?

Bryce: I haven’t, but I’ve talked to plenty of people who have. I agree about Communion. It blew my mind. Over the years, I’ve had the chance to spend some time with Whitley who continues to write from the heart, and always has something compelling to say.

David: For someone as intelligent and thoughtful as he is, he didn’t deserve the ridicule that greeted Communion from some quarters.

Bryce: I have a feeling that the UFO issue isn’t done with the ridicule factor even if we all call them UAP from now on.

David: True. So, as a new editor, I have to say that this transcript already exceeds our word budget.

Bryce: So, next time?

David: Sure.

Bryce: It was a wild June. Wonder where July takes us?

Here are links to several of the articles mentioned in the above transcript —