The Washington Post: What was fake on the Internet this week: New UFO documents

The weekly column the Intersect from the Washington Post says,
"There is so much fake stuff on the Internet in any given week that we’ve grown tired of debunking it all... we’re rounding them all up in a quick, once-a-week Friday debunk..."



This week features two UFO stories, most notably the one about "newly released Air Force Blue Book UFO documents."
What was fake on the Internet this week: Thousands of pages of new UFO documents were not just released online.

3. NASA didn’t cut a live video stream from the International Space Station to hide a UFO. A minute-long video cropped from NASA’s ISS livestream, in which literally nothing happens, has been watched nearly 1 million times in the past week — apparently because the tinhats of YouTube find something suspect in it. Per the clip’s uploader, one Streetcap1, the tiny gray speck over Earth’s horizon is an alien spacecraft (not the moon, as it appears to be) and the feed cuts out because NASA is hiding something (not because these types of errors happen with some frequency). As Snopes has reported already, however, NASA’s camera equipment is notoriously glitchy, and the moon often appears odd in space. It’s also worth pointing out that ufologists have themselves declared Streetcap1’s channel a fake — several have accused him of hyping obvious non-UFOs for personal gain.

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Doble post

originally posted by: CardDown
This week features two UFO stories, most notably the one about "newly released Air Force Blue Book UFO documents."
What was fake on the Internet this week: Thousands of pages of new UFO documents were not just released online.

Thanks for bringing this Washington Post article to the attention of members of ATS CardDown.

For ease of reference, I'll embed some of the bit from that article about the documents below:

while the coverage of the Air Force’s “Project Blue Book” — a government investigation into UFOs — suggested that the files had been newly declassified and digitized, they’ve actually been online for years … and they’ve been declassified way longer than that, available for public perusal at the National Archives.

A spokesman for Fold3, an Ancestry.com subsidiary and one of several sites hosting the Blue Book files, confirmed to The Post that they’ve had the full document available online for free since 2007. It would appear that the misinformation springs from a site called the the Black Vault, which republished the files last week. As to the motives behind that site’s self-aggrandizing, well … we leave that to the conspiracy theorists among you.

a reply to: CardDown

Whats great about this article is that it corrects all the wrong information about the Project Blue Book documents being released this week, but it also links to the "Debunking Hoax Videos" thread here at ATS in the first UFO piece about the ISS UFO video.

It also calls The Black Vault and John Greenewald Jr an agent of misinformation. Which is completely true.

I'm astonished by the press in this, who mostly got things wrong by copying and pasting the other kid's paper. If they'd put in one phone call or email to the greenest UFO buff, it would have set the story straight. It's poor journalism, and you can be certain that it's not just UFO stories getting botched.

Secondly, it goes to show just how little the public knows about ufology. I'm glad to see the news coverage, but want to see it covered honestly and for the right reasons.

Looking for a silver lining, the public now realizes that Blue Book files are online and easy to use. Maybe that's something we can build on.

originally posted by: Jack Jouett

It also calls The Black Vault and John Greenewald Jr an agent of misinformation..

Well I can think of a few candidates for that description but I don't think John Greenewald Jr is one of them.

Here's a relevant snippet about the situation from Kevin Randle's blog (for what it's worth JGJ also gave Xtraeme full credit for compiling the data on this thread).

(Blogger’s Note: John Greenewald has posted the following at various sites and I thought it interesting enough to post here. He gave permission and provides his perspective on the situation as it has developed over the last few days. I think John is getting some unfair bad publicity out of this and thought all along that the problem were the reporters who know nothing about UFOs, care little about UFOs and are happy to wallow in their ignorance.)


John wrote:

Just wanted to set the record straight. ,

First off, I never, EVER, made it appear these documents were newly declassified. The media created that, and many outlets copied each other. Many of the stories you see, I was never even interviewed for, yet I am quoted extensively.

Second, I went out of my way to say these documents have been available, even in some places online, during the course of the interviews I did do. But, I converted them to a comprehensive and user friendly database, that quite simply was a format that was not available anywhere else and this was the first time the public could get unrestricted access to them. IE: it was free, required no registration, was searchable, and you could download them all with a few clicks in PDF format.

Third, I gave credit to the investigator who compiled the 130,000 jpeg images, which he then started circulating for someone to figure out how to convert them to a better format about 8 months ago. For a couple months, no one did anything with them (but circulated a torrent file), and although I offered to help store the files on the web, I felt I wasn’t smart enough to convert them to something that was web-friendly. After about 3 months, and I noticed no one cared or was able to take the project to the next level, with the full knowledge of the one who compiled the data, I built the entire database. Converted 130,000 jpeg images (which are just about as useless as microfilm, but at least they were digitized) to a us3r friendly format.

Here was the full process

- I created the scripts to convert the 130,000 jpegs into more than 10,000 .pdfs

- I then created acrobat action scripts to OCR (text recognition) 10,000 pdfs and at the same time, created filters to pass the images through to make them more readable to the human eye then their existing format

- I then programmed the entire site in HTML 5, built the indexes broken down by decade, and uploaded the 220GB of material to my server

- I then created a massive search engine that mined the 10,000 pdfs and created a searchable index which is what you see today

The original compiler wanted no credit but to that of a nickname which is what I’ve given out and posted on my page as the top, #1, credit.

There have been a select FEW that are going around claiming quite a bit, and attacking me personally. What the media says, or reports on, is out of my control but I have done everything to the best of my ability to circulate the proper information, nothing but the facts, and give credit to where credit is due.

At the end of the day, the media and the hundreds of thousands of people a day who are now hitting the archive obviously were not aware these records were available, so even though some of the news stories became factually incorrect, who cares? Regardless of that fact we can easily set them straight on, the mass media attention, much of which is very good press, is all fantastic for this field.

Those that are beating a dead horse, are simply wasting time.

link

One misconception that does seem to be doing the rounds on the corporate media front recently is that only 5% of Bluebook cases could not be explained (it was probably more like 20%).

a reply to: Jack Jouett

It also calls The Black Vault and John Greenewald Jr an agent of misinformation. Which is completely true.

Really ?
Is it completely true because the Washington post says so or do you have evidence that John Greenewald Jr is an agent of misinformation ?
I ask because I've always seen him as one of the good guys who's willing to put his money where his mouth is and bring the FOIA documents to public attention , I'd like to know if I am mistaken.

Guys, the point of posting it was to discuss the mainstream botching of this. Greenewald's issued a statement, and I'm inclined to accept it at face value. To me, the real problem was this story being run by dozens of outlets, all based on the same bad information without checking a fact.

Seriously, a 4th grader would get a D on a paper like that.

a reply to: Jack Jouett

It also calls The Black Vault and John Greenewald Jr an agent of misinformation. Which is completely true.

Proof please..

a reply to: gortex

Greenewald is a self-promoter and conspiracy jockey, he's in it for the $$$

a reply to: SecretKnowledge

The proof is in this story if you have been following it and right here on ATS. On Coast to Coast Greenewald states that he "doesn't know where the original scans came from" In this thread at ATS posting as "blackvault" he shows that he knows that the scans are being data mined from Fold3.

The 154 GB NARA Blue Book Archive

That proves it. Greenewald = agent of misinformation. He deliberatley misled the public.

a reply to: Jack Jouett

coast to coast am interview

Do you know who digitised the files?
Was it the Air Force?
The National Archives?
Did someone from Fold3 go to the National Archives and scan them all?
Why does it even matter?

a reply to: CosmicRay

The United States Air Force did not digitize the files. They are no longer the curator of the Blue Book documents. The National Archives and Records Administration did not digitize the Blue Book documents, they do not provide that service. The NARA will provide microfilm copies of microfilms that they hold. Fold3 obtained these microfilms and scanned them for their website, a private website, that hackers, including John Greenewald data mined, took the scans and put them up on his site. It matters, because the truth matters. But if some people prefer to live in fantasyland then they have the right to do so, just know this. They are holding the rest of us back.

a reply to: Jack Jouett

The point was that you're distorting the truth, again.

Scanning the original documents and downloading them from Fold3 are 2 completely different things.

originally posted by: Jack Jouett
a reply to: gortex

Greenewald is a self-promoter and conspiracy jockey, he's in it for the $$$

In other words you have nothing and are just slinging mud.
Thanks for clearing that up.

Billy Cox has a new article focusing on the bad reporting on the Blue Book news fiasco, and notes where it all started:

...try to imagine the bewilderment, in extremely small hardcore circles, over the MSM clusterf*#! when the Open Minds website announced on Jan. 12 how those Blue Book files — the ones with the censored names, which have been languishing in the public domain online for nearly eight years — were now available in John Greenewald’s Black Vault database without charge...

What happened a week after Open Minds produced its piece caught Greenewald flat-footed...

De Void by Billy Cox: At least nobody got killed

Another examination of the news media, this one by yours truly.
It's got a few nifty pictures and links, and somehow drags Charles Fort and Walter Winchell into the story.

"If you haven't read it, it's STILL news!"
Project Blue Book, UFOs, the news media and Charles Fort.

Lots of stuff is fake on the internet. Like its some revelation, lol