Recording: Absence of Evidence is Not Evidence of Absence: (Un)covering the UFO Mystery

Ralph Blumenthal spent 45 years as a New York Times reporter — chronicling the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, divided Germany, the hunt for missing Nazi war criminals, political corruption, crime in the streets, and the FBI’s battles against the Mafia. He capped his career here in Houston in 2003–2008 as the Times’s Southwest bureau chief.

But little prepared him for the amazing story he stumbled across post-retirement as a Times contributor while writing a book on Harvard’s esteemed professor of psychiatry John Mack, who risked his career to investigate the stories of otherwise normal people who experienced encounters with alien beings. Mr. Blumenthal and his colleague Leslie Kean discovered a secret Pentagon program to investigate UFOs. They broke the story with exclusive videos on the front page of the Times in December 2017 and followed up with other groundbreaking coverage leading to congressional hearings. Mr. Blumenthal recounted this history to the Houston Seminar’s course subscribers.