Fringe Network: Alien State

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Image: Fringe Network

For more than seventy years, ufology languished on the fringes of popular culture. A slight resurgence and a modicum of respectability was achieved back when the Air Force's Project Blue Book took it upon itself to study a complex phenomenon that confounded mainstream science and challenged the supremacy and might of the United States armed forces.

Although Project Blue Book was later found to be nothing but a premeditated, prolonged, and relatively expensive whitewashing endeavor, it nevertheless brought the UFO issue to the forefront of mainstream media and managed to convert many skeptical scientific luminaries, who proverbially "saw the light" as they muddled their way out of an institutionalized pernicious culture of secrecy and ridicule we have yet to fully recover from.

With the termination of Project Blue Book, many reputable independent UFO investigators continued to carry the torch in the hopes of cracking open the mystery surrounding the unidentified machines flying in our skies. Favoring sober analysis in lieu of fantastical tales that strained credulity, these old-timers of ufology fought arduously to preserve the materialistic view of the phenomenon alive in a community that was gradually being co-opted by all manners of hoaxers, grifters, disinformation agents, and fame-seeking characters of questionable mental stability. In the midst of all this chaos, serious researchers slowly began losing faith that they would ever witness some form of official disclosure in their lifetime. Then - in 2017 - the unthinkable happened....

The meteoric rise of singer Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy, and the revelation by the New York Times of a secret Pentagon group studying UFOs, hit the mainstream media like a ton of bricks. No longer in the shadows, government whistleblowers burst onto the scene fast and hard, bearing solid evidence of their claims. The story of how this small band of government insiders managed to elevate the stigmatized topic of UFOs to an important issue affecting national security is recounted in extraordinary detail in an 8-part investigative series by leading journalist MJ Banias.