Thread by @TheUfoJoe

1 Decent VF article from 12/22/17 that many may have missed.

"For Times editors, the primary considerations that led to the A1 publication of 'Glowing Auras and Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program' were more earthly in nature. 'The reason this was a story was

2 "'because the Pentagon acknowledged it had spent $22 million of taxpayer money to investigate U.F.O.s from 2007 to 2012 - & because Harry Reid had pushed for the funding, and was proud of it, on the record,' Washington Bureau Chief Elisabeth Bumiller, who oversaw the reporting,

3 "told me. 'We talked about it the way we talk about all stories - it had to be airtight.' Bumiller also noted that 'the story did not have a huge presence on A1 in print—it had only a small run on the front. On the Web, it had great play, in part because the video was so

4 "'compelling.' (On that note, it topped the most-e-mailed and most-viewed lists, and a Times spokeswoman said: 'Millions of people have read the story. It continued to draw large audiences days after publication. The videos that accompanied the story got huge audiences, too.')

5 "Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, agreed with Bumiller’s assessment. 'It was a story about government, and fights over funding and priorities. And it was damn interesting,' he said. 'That feels to me like the makings of a story worth putting on the front page.'"

6 "Since the Times story broke, Kean said, she has been flooded with new tips - legitimate and otherwise. She said she expects to pursue follow-ups with additional revelations. I also asked her if the new revelations had an impact on her own beliefs. “I don’t think this is a

7 "matter of belief,' she said. 'We still don’t know a lot about the unknown vehicles, but we do know that they exist, and they are physical.'

"But when I asked Baquet the same, he replied: 'I wouldn’t say it made me a believer.'"

vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/w…