Why ‘The New York Times,’ ‘The Washington Post,’ and Politico Didn’t Publish a Seemingly Bombshell Report About UFOs

On Monday, a headline-grabbing story about UFOs began to light up certain corners of the internet. “INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS SAY U.S. HAS RETRIEVED CRAFT OF NON-HUMAN ORIGIN,” read the headline of the piece published in The Debrief, a little-known website covering the science and defense spaces. In the story, a former intelligence official turned whistleblower, David Grusch, alleges that the US government is in possession of “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,” information about which “has been illegally withheld from Congress.” Grusch, the piece says, provided such classified information to Congress and the Intelligence Community inspector general, and “filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time.”

The story was written by Ralph Blumenthal, who spent more than 45 years on staff at The New York Times, and Leslie Kean, an investigative science journalist known for her writing on UFOs. The two are best known for authoring—alongside the Times’ Pentagon correspondent Helene Cooper—the explosive 2017 UFO report, in which the journalists revealed a defunct secret Pentagon program—initially funded at the request of former Senate majority leader Harry Reid—to investigate “unidentified flying objects.” (The A1 story was accompanied with a sidebar written by the three authors and titled: “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen.’”) On Monday, Saagar Enjeti, a political pundit and cohost of the Breaking Points podcast, proclaimed that Blumenthal and Kean’s latest report was “the biggest story in the UFO world since the 2017 NYT expose.” Tucker Carlson, in the first installment of his new Twitter program on Tuesday, declared (in what was a clear exaggeration of the reporting) that “UFOs are actually real” and hit the mainstream media for not covering the story: “In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell—the story of the millennium.” So why wasn’t it running in The New York Times? 

I’ve learned that Kean and Blumenthal did, in fact, bring the story to the Times, but the paper of record turned it down. The Times didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Blumenthal, reached by phone, confirmed the paper “passed on an early version” in April. The pair also pitched their story to Politico and The Washington Post. The Post had been trying to further report the story that the reporters had brought to the paper, but didn’t think it was ready for publication; among its reservations, according to a source familiar, was that it was unclear what members of Congress made of Grusch’s testimony. (The Post declined to comment.) Politico—which, a source familiar noted, had the story for mere days, while the Post had the story for weeks—also wasn’t able to turn around the story at the speed that Kean and Blumenthal wanted, Blumenthal said. “Every piece of journalism POLITICO publishes goes through a vigorous editing process to ensure we are providing accurate information for our readers,” a Politico spokesperson said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “Though we were interested in the submission, the authors insisted on a guaranteed publication date that would not have allowed us to complete our process and meet our standards.” The writers’ apparent time constraints have only raised more questions. “To be clear — the Washington Post did not pass on our story,” Kean wrote on Facebook Monday. “Ralph and I took it to the Debrief because we were under growing pressure to publish it very quickly.” Blumenthal told me that circumstances—including that Grusch’s identity as the whistleblower had leaked out on the internet—pushed them to “publish sooner than we’d hoped.” “If there had been no leaks, it might’ve been different,” Blumenthal said. But “people on the internet were spreading stories Dave was getting harassing phone calls and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out.” When the pair realized the Post “just needed more time and there was no clear sense of when we might finish that process,” they took the story to The Debrief, an outlet that had published the two before and was “willing and able to move quickly,” he said.

Now out in the world, the reporting process is raising even more eyebrows. During interviews on NewsNation with both Grusch and Kean, it became clear that neither had seen photos of the alleged craft. NewsNation’s Brian Entin asked Kean about the lack of receipts: “He has the credentials, but there’s no documents that he’s handed over, there’s no pictures, and as a journalist, you want to see documents; you want to see pictures.” But Kean said the lack of documents or photographs did not raise red flags for her because “all of that information is classified.” She believes it, she said, “because of all the sources I have who have told me the same thing… I don’t think there’s some conspiracy among all these people who don’t know each other to make something like this up.” 

Even as extraterrestrial life has moved to the fore of mainstream news media in recent years, the lack of first-hand accounts or available physical documentation to support such claims of such mysterious aerial phenomena has been a barrier to entry for many journalists and mainstream outlets. A number of publications have picked up the Debrief story—some noting their skepticism—since its publication, though the Times and Post have not. “What feels missing to me is there is still no one involved who says, I saw this thing. I touched this thing. Or I recovered this thing on this date. And over 75 years of this history, that’s always the level of specificity that is missing from these stories,” journalist Garrett Graff, who is currently working on a book about the US government’s decades-long quest to study UFOs, told me. “The deeper you get into covering UFOs, the more almost all of this feels like an intergalactic game of telephone.”

Still, during his NewsNation interview, Grusch painted what would be a monumental escalation in what the public knows about research into extraterrestrial life on earth. “These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch told journalist Ross Coulthart, claiming that the US has even retrieved “dead pilots” from such objects. ”I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” Grusch said. “People started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.” 

In response to the report, DoD spokesperson Sue Gough told NewsNation in a statement, “To date, AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently. AARO is committed to following the data and it’s investigation wherever it leads.”