Category: Update

Paul Jacob’s assessment of Donald Trump’s success, last Tuesday — “King and Kingslayer” — was kept a tad open-ended, considering the Trumpian juggernaut’s biggest challenge was in Kentucky’s Representative District No. 4, where incumbent Thomas Massie was meeting Trump’s man in electoral battle. Massie lost. Here is the start of WLWT5’s report:

Reactions to the race have been . . . mixed. Or, divided.

On one side, we can witness Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire assessing the situation in . . . uh, what kind of terms are these? What’s the right adjective for this?

Thomas Massie versus President Donald Trump. Online versus reality. Woke right versus traditional Trump right.

And Trump won. Reality won.

It turns out the future still belongs to the rational Right.

It belongs to President Trump.

Reality? From that fabulist fibber, Trump?

Others are astounded at how someone who barely campaigned at all (except with TV ads) — this Ed “No Debater” Gallrein — increased voter turnout so astoundingly:

And is this yielding positive results for the mid-terms? And how about Trump’s approval ratings? Here are the latest results on that, from Friday’s aggregations:

• New York Times: 38% approve, 58% disapprove
• Silver Bulletin: 38.4% approve, 58.5% disapprove
• RealClearPolitics Poll Average: 39.8% approve, 58.2% disapprove

But remember, Thomas Massie is still in office, and he is still on X:

The War Department released another tranche of UFO files, yesterday. The first tranche was released on May 8. And they seem, for the most part, old hat: blips and lights and odd video of not-very-distinct things. Or audio about astronauts seeing “fireflies” in space, back in the Mercury days. (A not-very-exciting explanation is offered as definitive.) Most of the new video is from recent military sightings, but there are other things, too, such as a report from 1973 about a Soviet sighting of bright green object in the skies.

Most news reports covered the batch release like this:

Worth noting from this specific report is the relaying of an Avi Loeb comment that these initial releases are just the low-hanging fruit of UAP/UFO data. Later ones, we hear, will get more definitive and much stranger.

What does it all mean?

Eric Weinstein, who used to be a UFO denier got on board a few years ago, and now says that the UFO, Epstein, and nuclear science stories are likely going to converge:

But in case this all seems too objective and two-steps-removed from actual data, expand the scope and we discover that Bigfoot and mysterious disappearances are involved somehow in this, too:

Was anyone asking for a Bigfoot connection?

Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Burlison (R.-Mo.) relates that when President Trump was first briefed about UFOs and an alien presence on the planet, in his first term, he “joked in the briefing, whenever they said there were these halfbreeds, he joked that Adam Schiff must be one of them.”

What happened to 3I/Atlas — so often mentioned in these updates? Did it swing around Jupiter? Did it leave anything behind? Actually, its trajectory was altered by Jupiter’s gravitation, making it look awfully suspicious, as in a trillion-to-one shot. That being said, the interstellar “comet” entered our solar system from the direction of Sagittarius and is now departing in the opposite direction, toward Taurus.

Public discussion of the object has dropped off, however, replaced by sexier discussion of UFO disclosure files and, uh, gestures towards disclosure.

Which many people dismiss as a “distraction” — but from what? The war?

But what if the war serves a distraction from UFOs?

Meanwhile, there’s the eternal element of distraction, gold.

You’ve probably been hearing that there exists an asteroid in our solar system with enough gold to “make everybody billionaires.” 

There is such an asteroid, but this billionaire angle would be true only were the world on a gold standard — but then inflation would bring down the value of gold to nothing, leaving all those new billionaires no better off. Inflation of the money supply doesn’t make us richer.

But forget the meming of the asteroid. We aren’t on a gold standard: gold serves neither as a medium of exchange nor unit of account. So bringing earthside all that heavenly gold home would merely mean that our gold hoards would decrease in value, allowing lamposts and dog houses to be efficiently plated in gold.

The real story is that NASA is indeed aiming to take a close look at the situation:

“NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just flown closer to Mars than the planet’s own moons en route to the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche,” explains the aptly named Marielle Moon. “It was a planned maneuver so that the spacecraft can get gravity assist from the red planet and conserve fuel, specifically the xenon gas propellant its solar-electric ion thruster system uses. The flyby gave Psyche a speed boost and changed its trajectory so that it’s now aligned with its target asteroid’s orbit around the sun.”

But don’t dishoard your yellow metal just yet: “Psyche started its six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey towards its namesake asteroid in late 2023. It’s expected to reach its destination in July 2029 and to start working on its objectives the next month. The spacecraft will spend two years orbiting the asteroid ‘to take pictures, map the surface and collect data to determine Psyche’s composition.’”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) says that “American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke . . . well before they alerted the American public,” summarizes The Epoch Times.

Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records.

From the subpoenaed data — enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages — Johnson’s team found that the CDC was well aware of the myocarditis risk even in early 2021. Yet they downplayed it instead of alerting the public, Johnson said.

Johnson’s team also found that the White House modified wording about a safety signal for ischemic stroke with the bivalent booster for people over 65, changing “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated,” according to records

“Sen. Ron Johnson: Here’s What We Found in 11 Million Pages of COVID Records,” The Epoch Times (April 23, 2026).

The risk of myocarditis in young men was known by May 2021, says Senator Johnson.

Specifically referring to the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA therapeutic injections (popularly called “vaccines”), Johnson notes that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) results quickly signaled the danger. “All of a sudden, in 2021, it just spikes. I didn’t need a proportional reporting ratio analysis. I didn’t need empirical Bayesian analysis to tell me there was something seriously wrong here. I remember publishing my VAERS charts where there were a couple thousand deaths, then more thousand deaths, then 10,000, 20,000. We’re up to about 39,000 deaths.

Early on, there were 46 percent of those deaths occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. Now we’re about 24 percent. Of the 39,000 deaths reported worldwide on VAERS, 24 percent are occurring on the day of vaccination or within one or two days. And they say, well, you know, VAERS doesn’t prove causation. I mean, that’s a heck of a correlation.

Ibid.

Internal communications at the CDC, seen in the data Johnson’s team went through, was a repeated fear: telling the American people that deaths were associated with the jabs the government was promoting and even mandating would “encourage vaccine hesitancy.”

Johnson notes that this vaccine hesitancy has jumped the corral and now extends far beyond COVID to vaccines on the official childhood vaccine schedule.

“The Pentagon on Friday unsealed the first tranche of what it described as ‘new, never-before-seen’ files related to otherworldly encounters,” reports The Military Times, just a few “months after President Donald Trump directed the government to begin disclosing intelligence related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects.

Trump, in a post on Truth Social, characterized the dissemination of the archives as an effort to achieve “complete and maximum transparency.”

“With these new Documents and Videos, the people can decide for themselves, ‘WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?’” the president wrote, adding, “Have Fun and Enjoy!”

The Department of Defense — in coordination with the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Energy, NASA and the FBI — disclosed 162 files on its newly launched “UFO” website. Additional batches are expected to be released on a rolling basis as they are discovered and declassified.

The website is not on the much-ballyooed, newly registered domains of alien.gov and aliens.gov. It is, as linked above, war.gov/ufo.

There has been much commentary, no little amount of hype, and a sizable amount of frustration: this was a carefully curated conglomeration of arcana. Not a full disclosure of everything some people in the government know. For instance, the FBI was never a leader in accumulating UFO information, but FBI files lead this “tranche.”

Highly recommended, though, are the files from NASA on what astronauts saw in lunar missions Apollo 11, 12, and 17. Check them out.

Paul Jacob has been covering the UFO disclosure movement for several years now. Use the search bar, above, to put keywords “UFO” or “UAP” through the paces. Or just click on the category “government transparency.”

Artemis II astronauts saw meteors — micrometeoroids, specifically — hitting the far side of the moon during their eclipse-event view. This remains one of the more surprising findings of the mission.

On April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II mission, the Orion spacecraft flew over the Moon’s far side, allowing the crew to experience a unique “total solar eclipse” from their perspective (the Sun passing behind the Moon). In the resulting darkness, they observed six distinct flashes of light on the lunar surface, which NASA scientists confirmed were micrometeoroid impacts.

This was the first time humans traveling beyond Low Earth Orbit have directly witnessed micrometeoroid strikes on the Moon in real-time.

• “NASA’s Artemis II Crew Saw Meteorites Striking The Moon in Real Time” – ScienceAlert
  • This article explains the unique geometry of the eclipse that allowed the crew to see the dark side of the Moon illuminated only by the impact flashes.
• “‘Audible screams of delight’ from NASA scientists over micrometeorite impacts on the moon witnessed by Artemis 2 astronauts” – Space.com
  • This piece breaks down the specific number of impacts (six) and includes reactions from NASA scientists regarding the data value of these observations.
• “Artemis II Astronauts Witnessed 6 Meteorites Colliding With the Moon” – Wired
  • Wired explains why these flashes were visible and how this data helps refine models of the lunar meteoroid environment.
• “A Unique Eclipse, Meteorite Impacts, And New Geological Features Among The Science Views From Artemis II” – IFLScience
  • Connects the meteorite sightings to the broader scientific goals of the mission, including the observation of the solar corona and the geology of the Orientale basin. 

Key Scientific Takeaways:

• Visibility: The flashes were visible because the Moon’s surface was in total shadow, allowing the bright impact flashes stand out against the dark regolith.
• Data Value: These observations validate models predicting the frequency and energy of micrometeoroid impacts — critical for designing shielding for future permanent lunar habitats.
• Frequency: Seeing six impacts in a short window suggests the flux of micrometeoroids in the lunar environment might be higher or more energetic than some previous models predicted.

Business Base:

Paul Jacob wrote about Artemis’s extensive use of corporate technology, contracting, and the bid-purchase system on April 22, 2026. NASA estimates that the Artemis program engages over 3,800 businesses across the United States. This includes small machine shops, software developers, material suppliers, and research institutions. But here is a list of the major corporate contractors responsible for the core systems of the Artemis program:

1. Lockheed Martin: Prime contractor for the Orion spacecraft (crew module and service module integration).
2. Northrop Grumman: Prime contractor for the Space Launch System (SLS) Solid Rocket Boosters and the Human Landing System (HLS) variant for the Gateway (though Blue Origin/SpaceX are also HLS competitors).
3. Boeing: Prime contractor for the SLS Core Stage (propulsion and structural elements).
4. Aerojet Rocketdyne: Provides the RS-25 engines (for SLS) and the Orion Service Module propulsion system.
5. Blue Origin: Selected as a competitor for the Human Landing System (HLS) (National Team includes Lockheed Martin, Draper, Honeybee Robotics).
6. Dynetics: Selected as a competitor for the Human Landing System (HLS) (part of the team with Sierra Nevada Corporation).
7. SpaceX: Selected as the primary Human Landing System (HLS) provider (Starship HLS).
8. L3Harris Technologies: Provides the Orion Crew Module avionics and communication systems.
9. Maxar Technologies: Building the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) for the Lunar Gateway.
10. Astrobotic Technology: Selected for the Peregrine lunar lander (CLPS program) to deliver payloads.
11. Intuitive Machines: Selected for the Nova-C lunar lander (CLPS program).
12. Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC): Partner with Dynetics for the HLS.
13. Amentum: Provides mission operations and engineering support for the SLS and Orion.
14. MDA (MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates): Providing robotic systems for the Lunar Gateway.

The Virginia redistricting story got a new wrinkle on April 22: “Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) introduced legislation to repeal the 1840s retrocession that delivered the other side of the Potomac River to the Commonwealth of Virginia,” according to The Epoch Times.

“Influential conservatives who back the idea now include Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, and Mike Howell, president of The Oversight Project, a government watchdog group.” The report quotes Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon, who “has repeatedly testified to Congress on the issue of D.C. statehood, agreed with activists that Congress never had the authority to retrocede the Virginia portion of the district in the first place.

Rather than Congress doing this, an executive order from the president sure seems . . . easier. “Pilon sees Trump as the likeliest president to force the issue, despite the political risks of stripping thousands of Virginians of political power.” Since the move to re-incorporate very populated parts of Virginia would in effect disenfranchise its inhabitants, Pilon is not alone to question the “optics,” as The Epoch Times phrased it.

Paul Jacob last published on the Virginia redistricting brouhaha on April 23.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has been a deeply pernicious organization for a very long time. In 2017, Paul Jacob characterized one of the outfit’s key modi operandi as a scam, lumping “political opponents — conservatives and libertarians — in with Nazis and the KKK, in order to smear them.” That is, expand the enemies list the better to incite activist involvement.

It turns out that may not just be the judgment of SPLC critics like Paul.

The Department of Justice, last week, added another dimension to the story, bringing fraud and money laundering charges against the organization. What is the SPLC alleged to have done? A federal grand jury indicted the organization with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.”

Substantively, the claim is that the SPLC funded and directed infiltrators into racist organizations, including the organizers of the infamous Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, who — as leaders in those organizations — pushed radical, extremist tactics (including criminal acts) that the SPLC then used to gin up donor panic to increase the organization’s funding.

Whether the case succeeds in court, legally, remains to be seen, but already the revelations of the SPLC’s tactics show a twisted moral sense, a corrupt view of strategy and tactics, and a general ethical ickiness.

Journalist Tim Pool added more information, telling his video and podcasting audience of his own encounters with the SPLC — based on the “psy-op” run against him a few years ago, in which Biden’s egregious Attorney General Merrick Garland publicly proclaimed that the journalist had been funded by Russia. But Garland wasn’t the first to advance this accusation. The SPLC had done it earlier. Mr. Pool suspects that the CIA was involved in this, too, apparently trying to destroy him and some other non-woke alternative media voices. Pool says it did not work because there was nothing to it:

“Weird, isn’t it?” asks Mr. Pool.

Not-so-weird, once you know the history of the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to attorney Robert Barnes:

Barnes also notes an eerie CIA odor to the whole affair.

Speaking of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA “whistleblower” who has been making the rounds on podcasts in the last few months does not dismiss the charges, noting that they are specific enough that whether or not the crimes have happened can indeed be determined in court:

“Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced a new proposed rule on Thursday,” explains The Epoch Times, one “that seeks to end the use of ‘gender identity’ across all departmental programs, which is intended to ‘restore biological reality and protect women.’”

HUD plans to “remove radical definitions of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender, replacing them with sex” an April 23 statement from HUD clarifies.

Common terminology — including mother, father, woman, man, girl, and boy — will return to a commonsense usage, relating to a person’s sex as understood universally until just a few years ago with the rise of “gender theory” and “queer theory” and transhumanism, transgenderism and other now evidently transient fads in ideology.

In February the HUD secretary claimed that the new standards are in line with the infamous executive order signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office.

“In its February 2025 statement,” the Epoch Times concludes, “HUD said that the 2016 rule allowed men to take advantage of department programs directed at women.”

Not mentioned in Wednesday’s report on withheld information about the Trump “telephone call” is an odd “coincidence”: just a day earlier, one of the main Russiagate-mongers in Washington, D.C., Rep. Eric Swallwell (D-Calif.), resigned from Congress.

His resignation was not about the Russiagate nonsense, of course. Or a telephone call. Or anything of direct relevance to the voters. It was about sex. Sexual misconduct. Rape even. Reaction has included some gallows humor:

I had to laugh when I read this headline from the Babylon Bee, the conservative satire site: “With Swalwell Resigning, Just 534 Perverts Left In Congress.”

It’s funny (and sad) because there is some truth to it. 

Ingrid Jacques, “Swalwell, Gonzales rightly resigned. Let’s elect better people,” USA Today (April 17, 2026).

Swallwell resigned in tandem with Tony Gonzalez (R-Tex.), actually. But the focus of most articles has been on Swallwell. Maybe it’s the name, maybe it’s his prominence as a Trump critic.

While the House investigations against him have ceased, other inquiries are ongoing, “including one announced Saturday by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office,” reports an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The office plans to look into an alleged sexual assault reported by the Chronicle, which the former Swalwell staffer said took place after a charity gala in New York City in April 2024.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the main banana concocting and promoting the Russiagate psy-op, says he is “sickened” and “aghast” at the charges against Swallwell:

Had Schiff known what he now knows, why — he insists — he would not got near Swallwell “with a ten-foot pole.” His and AOC’s comments about partisanship are . . . interesting, if not quite believable.