The Sun ran a UFO story this week and somehow made it worse than ignoring it would have been

Did everyone see The Sun's piece on the Pentagon UAP hearings? I realise expecting rigorous journalism from The Sun is like expecting a badger to recite Keats, but blimey. The entire article was framed around a quote from a Z-list reality TV personality who'd apparently "always believed in aliens" and the actual testimony from the congressional hearing - which was genuinely extraordinary by any measure - got about two sentences near the bottom.

My favourite bit was the sidebar which linked to a piece about a bloke in Doncaster who photographed a bin bag floating past his window and "couldn't explain it." I mean... it's a bin bag, Gary. The wind is a documented phenomenon.

I suppose the frustrating thing is that legitimate UAP disclosure is actually happening, slowly, in boring bureaucratic increments, and the British press response is either to completely ignore it or to drown it in such a thick sauce of mockery and stupidity that anyone who takes it seriously looks like a nutter by association. We're stuck between total dismissal and credulous nonsense, with no actual middle ground.

Anyone else feel like the media landscape around this stuff has actually gotten worse in the last few years despite - or maybe because of - there being more genuine official acknowledgement than ever before?

Completely agree about the quality getting worse but I'd push back slightly on the idea that there's less serious coverage full stop. The Guardian has actually run some pretty measured pieces on UAP disclosure and the BBC did a reasonably decent radio documentary about the cultural history of UFO sightings last year. The problem is it's scattered and you have to go looking for it. The tabloids are a lost cause obviously - always have been, always will be. Stop reading The Sun about anything, let alone this.

The real tragedy is that Nick Pope spent years at the MoD doing legitimate investigation work and whenever he appears on telly now they stick him next to someone in a tinfoil hat and play the X-Files theme. The framing does all the work before he's even opened his mouth. It's the same trick they pull with climate scientists and economists - find the most outlandish adjacent voice and make everyone look equally unhinged by proximity.

Though I will say Nick Pope on a panel show is still better television than most things on at the moment so swings and roundabouts.

The Doncaster bin bag thing sent me. Honestly local news UFO coverage is its own beautiful genre. My local paper in West Yorkshire once ran a front page about mysterious lights over the moors that turned out, after four paragraphs of breathless speculation, to be a farm doing controlled burning. The headline was "MOOR MYSTERY: RESIDENTS BAFFLED". The residents were not, in fact, baffled. One of them set the fire.

Hot take: the mockery is functional, not accidental. Keep the topic associated with credulity and you never have to seriously answer questions about what governments have or haven't been doing. It's a very efficient system. The laugh track does the work of censorship without any of the associated fuss. I don't necessarily think there's a coordinated effort - more that it's an emergent property of how media incentives work. Serious treatment doesn't get clicks. Man-with-colander-on-head gets clicks.

I worked in regional telly for about twelve years and I can tell you the editorial decisions around anything paranormal-adjacent were genuinely bizarre. Pitches for serious investigative pieces got killed at commissioning stage routinely, but anything with a ghost hunter or a medium sailed through. The logic from above was always about entertainment value but the practical effect was that the only paranormal content that got made was the kind that nobody could take seriously. Make of that what you will.

Rant fully justified but also... did you read the Daily Star's take? Because at least they're upfront about being completely unhinged. There's something almost refreshing about a paper that just goes "ALIEN INVASION IMMINENT SAYS MAN" without any pretence of editorial balance. The Sun trying to have it both ways - mock it AND get the clicks - is somehow more annoying.

The coverage situation in the US isn't much better to be honest, it's just that they have more outlets so the serious stuff is slightly less buried. The New York Times UAP pieces from 2017 onwards were legitimately game-changing but even those got a lot of mockery domestically. I think we're in a transitional period and the media just hasn't caught up with the fact that this is now - officially, on the record - a thing that serious people are taking seriously. The muscle memory of mockery is stronger than the evidence of changed circumstances.

Can we also talk about how every single article has to use the word "X-Files" within the first three sentences? Every time. Without fail. It's like a legal requirement. I haven't watched The X-Files since about 2001 and I am still, apparently, living inside it according to every journalist who covers this topic.