Tucker Carlson likes to scare his viewers with exaggerated or simply nonexistent stories about illegal aliens, but on Friday he pivoted a bit: He talked about aliens from outer space instead. The sometimes braying Fox News host, who every now and then likes to turn his attention to the skies, spent his latest show addressing an issue that, as he put it, “could be the most consequential thing to happen to this country, this world, maybe ever.”
What was it? It involved the forthcoming report from the U.S. government about UFOs, which will be released this summer and will let the public in on whatever they know about alien life forms from other planets. It may be mindblowing. It may be an anticlimactic nothingburger. But Carlson believes it will be bigger than big, and to prove it he drew from segments Pentagon employee, Luis Elizondo, who has asserted that when the report goes live, we will, in Carlson’s words, “find an intelligence failure on the part of the U.S. intel community on the level of 9/11.”
Elizondo, who worked in a division of the Pentagon that focused on alien life, has already done some scaremongering elsewhere. He recently told The New York Post that “there is something in our skies, we don’t know what it is, we don’t know how it works, we don’t know fully what it can do, we don’t know who is behind the wheel, we don’t know its intentions, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.”
In his segment, Carlson played some UFO footage, then got all hot and bothered. “I’m embarrassed I haven’t thought of it before, these objects are potentially a very grave threat to nation-states,” he said. “So where was the intelligence community in warning about this, or learning more about it?”
Carlson also re-played a clip from an interview he did in October with UFO “expert” Nick Pope, in which his guest said some over-the-top things. “We are under siege, it’s like there’s a war of nerves going on,” Pope told Tucker last fall. “If these were drones belonging to a foreign adversary there would be an absolute outcry. And yet the situation we’re in where we don’t know what these things are and they might even be extra-terrestrial, that’s worse. This is a potential catastrophic failure of intelligence.”
These may seem like hysterical threats, but Carlson claims his sources are on the level. “There are a lot of these, it’s not like, you know, some drunk guy on a road in rural New Hampshire saw something weird,” he said. “This is the U.S. military regularly, very often recording these objects.”
The report will be released on June 1, so we’ll see if Carlson was right to scare the bejesus out of his more gullible viewers. You can view the whole segment over at The Wrap.