Common Sense with Paul Jacob

“Is it funnier,” asked Paul Jacob regarding a Rand Paul critic who had mocked the senator and called the whole picnic episode funny, “than the Deep State admitting that it had been faking and fanning the flames of the UFO craze all along?”

It is worth taking a few moments and digesting that UFO story, apart from the picnic invitation kerfuffle. The new spin on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) issue was provided by the first of a two-parter by Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha in the Wall Street Journal [link above]. The title and blurb provide an adequate précis:

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology: U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs

Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.

Now, Paul Jacob, on this site, has been covering the drip-by-drip UAP disclosure for a number of years now [feel free to use the search bar, above]. It has been obvious that the government has been lying to us. For a long time.

But about what? And how much?

The Wall Street Journal story is that the government made the whole thing up, or nearly so. “The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames [of the UFO craze], in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

Unfortunately, we knew this was true from before the New York Times debut of the disclosure story in 2017. The sad, strange case of Richard Doty, who fed a hapless citizen who had stumbled upon a secret military operation a wild story of aliens and extra-terrestrial civilizations, was covered in the 2013 documentary Mirage Men.

But the wrinkle on the story is that Doty has gone on to push UFO stories publicly. Look for him on YouTube. Very odd, to say the least — and Doty is just one liar among many.

Speaking of liars, the CIA was created during the same summer that the modern UFO story started, 1947. That year featured multiple UAP reports (over Mount Rainier, most famously) and an alleged UFO crash (near Roswell, New Mexico). But the story had at least one strange precursor: the foo-fighters in World War II.

To what extent did the Deep State (and that freshly-debuted CIA, specifically) create a craze? Or, on the other hand, direct it and capitalize on it? Control it?

And what part was played by the pulp literary movement of science fiction? That is a question rarely asked, much less answered.

No answers here. But it is worth digesting how ufologists have handled the Wall Street Journal article. Here are two:

The thing is, if the UFO/UAP subject is almost completely a government psy-op, what does that tell us about our government?

To say that the government lies to us would be to understate the enormity of this.

Yesterday, Paul Jacob implied that Senator Rand Paul and Representative Tom Massie, both of Kentucky, could have observed the turning of the federal debt to from thirty-six point-something trillion to $37 trillion at the White House picnic. Considering that the picnic is already over, and the debt, as calculated by USDebtClock.org, still lingers under $36.98 trillion, that was obviously not possible. Of course, with such ritual observances, exact markers of the exact moment are hardly required.

But it does call attention to a mildly interesting question: when?

A quick consultation with the artificial intelligence called Grok3, supplied by X, suggests that the $37 trillion mark will be reached around June 19th, with June 15th or 16th well within the realm of possibility. But Grok also adds some caveats as well as this piece of useful information:

The Congressional Budget Office and other sources estimate the federal debt will reach $37.1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2025 (September 30, 2025). However, real-time data from USDebtClock.org and posts on X indicate the debt is growing faster than some projections, with some analysts predicting $37 trillion well before the fiscal year-end. A Joint Economic Committee report specifically projects $37 trillion by approximately October 31, 2025, based on a three-year average daily growth rate, but current trends suggest it could happen sooner.

Grok3, consulted June 13, 2025.

A fact to bring up at this summer’s family picnic, no? Be the life of the party. We dare you.