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The same holds true for those of us who are currently employed in design and development. Having worked on the web for about three years at this point, I’ve seen the typical wax and wane of concepts, strategies, and systems. Every day we as developers and designers re-enter a routine pattern, a brand-new concept or technology emerges to shake things up and completely alter our world.

How we got below

I built my first website in the mid-’90s. Design and development on the web back then was a free-for-all, with few established norms. For any layout aside from a single column, we used table elements, often with empty cells containing a single pixel spacer GIF to add empty space. We styled text with numerous font tags, nesting the tags every time we wanted to vary the font style. And we had only three or four typefaces to choose from: Arial, Courier, or Times New Roman. When Verdana and Georgia came out in 1996, we rejoiced because our options had nearly doubled. The only safe colors to choose from were the 216 “web safe” colors known to work across platforms. The few interactive elements (like contact forms, guest books, and counters) were mostly powered by CGI scripts (predominantly written in Perl at the time). Achieving any kind of unique look involved a pile of hacks all the way down. Interaction was often limited to specific pages in a site.

the development of online requirements

At the turn of the century, a new cycle started. Crufty code littered with table layouts and font tags waned, and a push for web standards waxed. Newer technologies like CSS got more widespread adoption by browsers makers, developers, and designers. This shift toward standards didn’t happen accidentally or overnight. It took active engagement between the W3C and browser vendors and heavy evangelism from folks like the Web Standards Project to build standards. A List Apart and books like Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman played key roles in teaching developers and designers why standards are important, how to implement them, and how to sell them to their organizations. And approaches like progressive enhancement introduced the idea that content should be available for all browsers—with additional enhancements available for more advanced browsers. Meanwhile, sites like the CSS Zen Garden showcased just how powerful and versatile CSS can be when combined with a solid semantic HTML structure.

Server-side language like PHP, Java, and.NET took Perl as the primary back-end computers, and the cgi-bin was tossed in the garbage bin. With these improved server-side equipment, the first period of internet programs started with content-management techniques (especially those used in blogs like Blogger, Grey Matter, Movable Type, and WordPress ) In the mid-2000s, AJAX opened doors for asynchronous interaction between the front end and back end. Pages now no longer needed to reload their pages ‘ content. A crop of JavaScript frameworks like Prototype, YUI, and jQuery arose to help developers build more reliable client-side interaction across browsers that had wildly varying levels of standards support. Techniques like image replacement enable skilled designers and developers to display fonts of their choosing. And technologies like Flash made it possible to add animations, games, and even more interactivity.

The industry was reenergized by these new tools, standards, and methods in many ways. Web design flourished as designers and developers explored more diverse styles and layouts. However, we still relied on numerous hacks. Early CSS was a huge improvement over table-based layouts when it came to basic layout and text styling, but its limitations at the time meant that designers and developers still relied heavily on images for complex shapes ( such as rounded or angled corners ) and tiled backgrounds for the appearance of full-length columns (among other hacks ). All kinds of nested floats or absolute positioning ( or both ) were necessary for complicated layouts. Flash and image replacement for custom fonts was a great start toward varying the typefaces from the big five, but both hacks introduced accessibility and performance problems. And JavaScript libraries made it simple for anyone to add a dash of interaction to pages, even at the expense of double, even quadrupling, the download size of basic websites.

The web as software platform

The balance between the front end and the back end continued to improve, leading to the development of the current web application era. Between expanded server-side programming languages ( which kept growing to include Ruby, Python, Go, and others ) and newer front-end tools like React, Vue, and Angular, we could build fully capable software on the web. Along with these tools, there were additional options, such as collaborative build automation, collaborative version control, and shared package libraries. What was once primarily an environment for linked documents became a realm of infinite possibilities.

Mobile devices increased in their capabilities as well, and they gave us access to the internet in our pockets at the same time. Mobile apps and responsive design opened up opportunities for new interactions anywhere and any time.

The development of social media and other centralized tools for people to connect and use resulted from this combination of potent mobile devices and potent development tools. As it became easier and more common to connect with others directly on Twitter, Facebook, and even Slack, the desire for hosted personal sites waned. Social media made connections on a global scale, with both positive and negative outcomes.

Want a much more extensive history of how we got here, with some other takes on ways that we can improve? ” Of Time and the Web” was written by Jeremy Keith. Or check out the” Web Design History Timeline” at the Web Design Museum. A fun tour of” Internet Artifacts” is also available from Neal Agarwal.

Where we are now

It seems like we’ve reached yet another significant turning point in recent years. As social-media platforms fracture and wane, there’s been a growing interest in owning our own content again. There are many different ways to create a website, from the tried-and-true classic of hosting plain HTML files to static site generators to content management systems of all varieties. The fracturing of social media also comes with a cost: we lose crucial infrastructure for discovery and connection. Webmentions, RSS, ActivityPub, and other IndieWeb tools can be useful in this regard, but they’re still largely underdeveloped and difficult to use for the less geeky. We can build amazing personal websites and add to them regularly, but without discovery and connection, it can sometimes feel like we may as well be shouting into the void.

Especially with efforts like Interop, browser support for CSS, JavaScript, and other standards like web components has increased. New technologies gain support across the board in a fraction of the time that they used to. When I first learn about a new feature, I frequently discover that its coverage is already over 80 % when I check the browser support. Nowadays, the barrier to using newer techniques often isn’t browser support but simply the limits of how quickly designers and developers can learn what’s available and how to adopt it.

We can prototype almost any idea today with just a few commands and a few lines of code. All the tools that we now have available make it easier than ever to start something new. However, as the initial cost of these frameworks may be saved in the beginning, it eventually becomes due as their upkeep and maintenance becomes a component of our technical debt.

If we rely on third-party frameworks, adopting new standards can sometimes take longer since we may have to wait for those frameworks to adopt those standards. These frameworks, which previously made it easier to adopt new techniques sooner, have since evolved into obstacles. These same frameworks often come with performance costs too, forcing users to wait for scripts to load before they can read or interact with pages. And when scripts fail ( whether due to poor code, network issues, or other environmental factors ), there is frequently no other option, leaving users with blank or broken pages.

Where do we go from here?

Hacks of today help to shape standards for the future. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with embracing hacks —for now—to move the present forward. Problems only arise when we refuse to acknowledge that they are hacks or when we refuse to take their place. So what can we do to create the future we want for the web?

Build for the long haul. Optimize for performance, for accessibility, and for the user. weigh the costs of those user-friendly tools. They may make your job a little easier today, but how do they affect everything else? What is the price to the users? To future developers? To adoption of standards? Sometimes the convenience may be worth it. It’s occasionally just a hack that you’ve gotten used to. And sometimes it’s holding you back from even better options.

Start with the basics. Standards continue to evolve over time, but browsers have done a remarkably good job of continuing to support older standards. Not all third-party frameworks are the same. Sites built with even the hackiest of HTML from the’ 90s still work just fine today. Even after a few years, the same can’t be said about websites created with frameworks.

Design with care. Consider the effects of each choice, whether your craft is code, pixels, or processes. The convenience of many a modern tool comes at the cost of not always understanding the underlying decisions that have led to its design and not always considering the impact that those decisions can have. Use the time saved by modern tools to consider more carefully and design with consideration rather than rush to “move fast and break things”

Always be learning. If you’re constantly learning, you’re also developing. Sometimes it may be hard to pinpoint what’s worth learning and what’s just today’s hack. Even if you were to concentrate solely on learning standards, you might end up focusing on something that won’t matter next year. ( Remember XHTML? ) However, ongoing learning opens up new neural connections, and the techniques you learn in one day may be useful for guiding future experiments.

Play, experiment, and be weird! This website we created is the most incredible experiment. It’s the single largest human endeavor in history, and yet each of us can create our own pocket within it. Be brave and make new friends. Build a playground for ideas. In your own bizarre science lab, conduct absurd experiments. Start your own small business. There has never been a place where we have more room to be creative, take risks, and discover our potential.

Share and amplify. As you play, experiment, and learn, share what has worked for you. Write on your own website, post on whichever social media site you prefer, or shout it from a TikTok. Write something for A List Apart! But take the time to amplify others too: find new voices, learn from them, and share what they’ve taught you.

Make a move and make it happen.

As designers and developers for the web ( and beyond ), we’re responsible for building the future every day, whether that may take the shape of personal websites, social media tools used by billions, or anything in between. Let’s give everything we produce a positive vibe by infusing our values into everything we do. Create that thing that only you are uniquely qualified to make. Then, share it, improve it, re-create it, or create something new. Learn. Make. Share. grow. Rinse and repeat. Everything will change whenever you believe you have mastered the web.

The personalization gap is real, between the dream of getting it right and the worry of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” similar to a company’s constant plea to regular people to purchase additional bathroom seats ). It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because powerful customisation is so dependent on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

But you can ensure that your group has packed its bags rationally.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

It’s known as prepersonalization.

Behind the audio

Take into account Spotify’s DJ feature, which was introduced last season.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be conceived, budgeted, and prioritized before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

So how do you decide where to position your personalisation wagers? How do you design regular interactions that hasn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many well-known budgeted programs to support their continued investments, they initially required one or more workshops to join vital technologies users and stakeholders. Create it count.

We’ve witnessed the same evolution up near with our clients, from big tech to budding companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Effective workshops consistently separate successful future endeavors from unsuccessful ones, saving countless hours of time, resources, and overall well-being.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a tech stack switch-flip. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:

1. customer experience optimization ( CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation )
2. always-on automations ( whether rules-based or machine-generated )
3. mature features or standalone product development ( such as Spotify’s DJ experience )

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. These cards are not necessary for you. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The evaluation activities that we suggest including can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Here are a summary of our broad approach and information on the most crucial first-day activities.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of your engagement as you concentrate on both your team’s and your team’s readiness and drive.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage consists of making it possible for team members to individually pitch their own pilots that each include a proof-of-concept project, business case, and operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization in your company. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. These are in the cards, which we have a catalog of. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

It’s all about setting the tone. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broad perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to both the benefits of ongoing investment and the difference between what you currently offer and what you intend to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to demonstrate how various departments may view their own advantages over the effort, which can be different from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final kickstart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will data and privacy protection be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? It’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution ( we’re fairly certain that you do ). In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable behaviors that prevent progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your advancement in the future. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? You’re all set to go on, good.

Hit that test kitchen

What will you need next to bring your personalized recipes to life. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. Their capabilities are broad and potent, and they give you a variety of ways to organize your company. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

What’s crucial here is to avoid treating the installed software like a dream kitchen from some imaginary remodeling project ( as one of our client executives memorably put it ). These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

Like a good product manager, you’ll make sure you have everything ready to cook up your desired interaction ( or figure out what needs to be added to your pantry ) and that you validate with the right stakeholders present. These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

This is not just about identifying needs. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a common method for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider the construct of a who-what-when-why

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you provide for them, what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

Five years ago, we created these cards and card categories. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And we still come across fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

In the cards in the accompanying photo below, you can typically follow along with right to left in three examples of subscription-based reading apps.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent when a new user registers to highlight the breadth of the content catalog and convert them to happy subscribers.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

We’ve also found that sometimes this process comes together more effectively by cocreating the recipes themselves, so a good preworkshop activity might be to think about what these cards might be for your organization. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The workshop’s later stages, which shift from focusing on cookbooks to focusing on customers, might seem more nuanced. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better architecture is necessary for better kitchens.

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

A team overfitting: they aren’t designing with their best data, is what causes personalization to become a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can withstand the heat without a doubt.

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a deliberate and cooperative approach will produce the desired outcome. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to burn off the fantastical ideas that the doers in your organization have in store for time, to preserve job satisfaction and security, and to avoid unnecessary distractions. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

You have a better chance of lasting success and sound beginnings with this workshop framework. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, if you use the same cookbook and the same recipes, you’ll have solid ground for success. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are costs associated with purchasing this type of technology and product design, time well spent on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the heroes and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. Perhaps my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer research is story. And you must show a compelling story to entice stakeholders, such as the product team and decision-makers, to learn more in order to get the most out of consumer research.

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act narrative construction: the layout, the turmoil, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. Act two sets the scene for the fight and introduces the action. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. And the solution is the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.

Use story as a framework for conducting research

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. Research is frequently one of the first things to go when expenses or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may lead some groups, but that approach can so easily miss the chance to solve people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by consumer study. It keeps it on trail, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of the problems with your goods and taking action can help you be ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s examine the various functions and how they relate to consumer analysis.

Act one: installation

The setup consists entirely in comprehending the history, and that’s where basic research comes in. Basic research ( also called conceptual, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. Like in the movies, you’re learning about the difficulties users face, what options are available, and how they are affected by them. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which can assist you in identifying both prospects and issues. It doesn’t need to get a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall discusses the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Provide that one ask. Locked up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to protect both your objectives and yourself. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. According to Hall, “[This ] will likely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

This makes sense to me in all its entirety. And I love that this makes consumer studies so visible. You don’t need to make a lot of paperwork; you can only attract people and do it! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. That’s exactly what work one is all about: understanding where people are coming from.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it really type the bulk of your research. If you can supplement what you’ve heard in the basic studies by using any more user data that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, to make recommendations that may need to be investigated further, you might as well use those that can be drawn from those that you can obtain. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its inadequacies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And maybe partners are now doing the same. Their concern may be with their company, which could be losing money because people are unable to complete specific tasks. Or probably they do connect with customers ‘ problems. In either case, action one serves as your main strategy for piqueing interest and investment from the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can influence product team ‘ focus on improving. This gains everyone—users, the goods, and partners. It’s similar to winning an Oscar in terms of filmmaking because it frequently results in your item receiving good reviews and success. And this can be an opportunity for participants to repeat this process with different items. The secret to this method is storytelling, and knowing how to tell a compelling story is the only way to entice partners to do more research.

This brings us to work two, where you incrementally review a design or idea to see whether it addresses the problems.

Act two: issue

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in operate one. This typically involves conducting lateral study, such as accessibility tests, where you evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see if it addresses the problems you identified. The issues may include unfulfilled needs or problems with a circulation or procedure that’s tripping users away. Additional problems will arise in the course of action two of a film. It’s ok that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this work.

Usability tests should generally consist of five participants, according to Jakob Nielsen, who found that that number of users can usually identify the majority of the issues:” As you add more and more users, you learn less and less because you will keep seeing the same things again and again… After the second user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings regularly but hardly learning much new.”

There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more memorable and accessible to other stakeholders when presenting the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also do them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like attending a play and remote sessions as more of a movie watching experience. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more extensive experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time feedback on what they’re seeing, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about them. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can conduct your research by meeting users at their locations. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that is frequently absent from remote usability tests.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote training sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make access to a much wider user base geographically. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

The advantage of usability testing, whether conducted remotely or in person, is that you can ask real users questions to understand their reasoning and understanding of the problem. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. Additionally, you can test your own hypotheses and determine whether your reasoning is correct. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that are said by participants frequently alter how you view things, and these unexpected developments in the story can lead to unexpected turns in your perception.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is also frequently the only research technique that some stakeholders believe they ever need, and too frequently. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you’re narrowing the scope of what you’re receiving feedback on without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, whereas the first two acts are about understanding the context and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to act. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes all members of the product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They offer the stakeholders their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: they create a conflict that needs to be settled by reminding people of the status quo and then revealing a better way, according to Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded by bridging the gaps and offering suggestions for improvement. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps and, hoped, the motivation to take those steps!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). The plot begins here. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists face problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. Usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices can be included in the output of these.

Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. Researchers may use techniques like presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience are the stakeholders. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to address the product’s flaws.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. In the end, user research is beneficial for everyone, and all you need to do is pique stakeholders ‘ interest in how the story ends.

As a solution contractor for too many times, I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen promising ideas go from being heroes in a few weeks to being useless within months.

Financial items, which is the industry in which I work, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and hope someone sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and a crammed market. However, this strategy is a formula for disaster. Why, you see this:

The drawbacks of feature-first growth

It’s simple to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing client journeys from paper or phone channels to online bank or mobile apps. They may think,” If I may only add one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll enjoy me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your security team’s negligence? don’t like it, right? When a battle-tested film isn’t as well-known as you anticipated, or when it fails due to unforeseen difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) comes into play in this context. Even though Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to it that way, his podcast Rework and his book Getting Real frequently address this concept. An MVP is a product that offers only sufficient value to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although it seems like an easy idea, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a ruthless edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because it is easy to fall for” the Columbo Effect” when there is always” just one more thing …” to add.

The issue with most funding apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an experience created exclusively for the customer. This implies that the priority is to provide as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the requirements and desires of competing inside sections as opposed to a distinct value statement that is focused on what people in the real world actually want. As a result, these products can very quickly became a mixed bag of misleading, related, and finally unhappy customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What’s a better course of action then? How may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, and, most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play here. The main component of your item that really matters to customers is Bedrock. The foundation of worth and relevance over time is built upon it.

The rock has to be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the world of retail bank, which is where I work. Individuals only look at their existing account once every five minutes, but they also look at it daily. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a quarter.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that individuals want to complete and therefore persistently striving to make them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

But how do you reach the foundation? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving ease precedence, and working iteratively toward a clear value proposition. This means avoiding pointless extras and putting your clients first, making the most of them.

It also requires having some fortitude, as your coworkers might not always agree with you immediately. And in some cases, it might even mean making it clear to consumers that you won’t be coming over to their home to prepare their meal. Sometimes you need to use “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e., clumsy workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something else.

Realistic methods for creating financially successful products

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and practice?

1. What trouble are you trying to solve first, and make a distinct “why”? For whom? Before beginning any construction, make sure your goal is completely clear. Make certain it also complies with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many characteristics at once and focus on getting that right first. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial goods, clarity is often over difficulty. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a fixed destination. Continuously collect customer feedback, improve your product, and work toward that foundational state.
5. Stop, glance, and listen: You must test your product frequently in the field rather than just as part of the shipping process. Use it for yourself. A/B tests are run. User opinions on Gear. Speak to users and make adjustments accordingly.

The foundational dilemma

Building towards rock implies sacrificing some short-term expansion potential in favor of long-term balance, which is an interesting paradox at play here. But the reward is worthwhile because products created with a concentrate on core will outlive and outperform their competitors and provide people with ongoing value over time.

How do you begin your quest for rock, then? Get it gradually. Start by identifying the underlying factors that your customers actually care about. Focus on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker ( whew! The best way to foretell the future is to make it, he said.

Warning: contains spoilers for season six of The Handmaid’s Tale and show seven of” Shattered.” The Handmaid’s Tale has a picture that is more heartbreaking than the sex-trafficked people being rounded up and killed. The brain has a way to [ …] [ Not to say there haven’t been many such scenes on this show over the years.

On Den of Geek, the second publish The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 Episode 7 Review: Shattered appeared.

A recently retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations ( OSI) agent claimed on live television in 1988 that Area 51, a key foundation in the Nevada desert, was being run by foreigners under the strict control of the foundation. The suppliers blacked out the OSI agent’s experience in the program, and he adopted the name Falcon instead. &#8221,

Richard Doty, the agent’s real title, is what it is. It&#8217 is listed on the show’s IMDb section. Doty has acknowledged that he had been spreading false information about foreigners and Creatures with the UFO area during his time working as an Ios agent, beginning in 1980. A person in Nevada named Bob Lazar allegedly worked on alien aircraft at Area 51 within days of the playing of the life UFO program. He claimed to have worked on them at Area 51. Area 51, one of the most secret military installations in the United States, rapidly gained notoriety as a result of Lazar’s statements, which were unsupported.

Reports like this make me wonder how much of the UFO mythology was created by the US government, and why. Although it sounds like another UFO conspiracy theory, Congress is even interested in this one. They demand that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office ( AARO ), produce a report that includes &#8220, the key historical account of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any attempts to obfuscate, deceive public opinion, conceal, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities. &#8221,

Is there any reason to believe that the United States government misled the public about Sightings? Although Mr. Doty’s history is not well known, the CIA has admitted lying to the public about Creatures in a research published by the CIA&nbsp, book Research in Intelligence, titled &#8220, A Die-hard Matter: CIA&#8217, s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990. &#8221,

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, reliable UFO observations, in the opinion of the study, were a major focus for the internet. This led to the CIA and the U.S. Air Force having to launch UFO analysis programs&nbsp. Both companies chose to lie about it because the CIA didn’t want people to know that it was monitoring UFO information and speaking with the US Air Force about it. This hiding of CIA interests, according to the review, was significant in the development of further allegations of a CIA crime and cover-up. &#8221,

When U-2 spy plane checking began in the late 1950s, the issue only got worse. The models were extremely reflective, which heightened the information to the USAF UFO analysis program at the time, Project Blue Book, and the plane flew much higher than any other aircraft at the time. The CIA afterward estimated that U-2 aircraft were to blame for half of the UFO information during this period. The Air Force is alleged to have made false and misleading statements to the public in order to dispel common fears and safeguard an extremely delicate national surveillance project, according to the report. &#8221,

The report also includes the CIA’s participation in a University of Colorado assessment of UFO information in the late 1960s, which resulted in the USAF shutting Project Blue Book down and completely ejecting people UFO study. Both organizations made the decision to keep the CIA’s involvement in the report secret.

Even Roswell was a cover-up, though not of the extraterrestrial kind. Unfortunately, this event is glossed over in the AARO report‘s first volume. According to the AARO report, in the 1990s, &#8220, USAF&#8217, s research did not locate or develop any information that indicated the &#8216, Roswell Incident&#8217, was a UFO event, nor was there any &#8216, cover-up&#8217, by the USG. &#8221,

The USAF then goes on to explain how Project Mogul, a classified program to monitor Russian nuclear testing, was the subject of the report. It does not include the fact that the USAF&#8217 research also revealed that General Roger Ramey, the person in charge of researching the material, had taken it upon himself to conceal that the debris was a classified project. He instead stated to the press that they had discovered a typical weather balloon before turning the debris out before taking any press photos.

The Air Force may have chosen to use a weather balloon at his press conference because he was aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to deflect interest from it, or because he actually believed the material to be a weather balloon based on the identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton, according to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, &#8220. &#8221,

Colonel Thomas DuBose, Ramey’s chief of staff, can be seen in one of the photos, claimed in an affidavit that the material in the photos taken at Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The material’s explanation of the weather balloon served as a cover story to divert the press’s attention. &#8221,

DuBose does not make any claims regarding the information that the USAF discovered. Even so, Ramey’s removal from the source material and DuBose’s statement contribute to Roswell’s conspiracy theories to this day.

Doty, who is the first to claim that Area 51 was home to alien bodies, is the subject of this claim. He did this in a document asserting that a cabal of powerful individuals both inside and outside the government controls alien secrets and UFOs. Because the show was allegedly based on Doty &#8217, s stories, if this sounds like the X-Files, that is.

Doty started his employment at the Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the summer of 1980. A local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, who had just started his position as an OSI agent, claimed to be receiving images and signals from UFOs over the base shortly after taking over his position. Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had discovered, but they didn&#8217, notwithstanding the documents I and others have received via Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) requests.

Doty claims that shortly after meeting with Bennewitz, someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA ) approached him. Doty refers to the DIA agent by the moniker” Falcon” or” Falcon” ( which he later used in the TV show mentioned above ) as well. Doty claimed that Falcon wanted Doty to pass on false information to Bennewitz and convince him that what he saw were aliens. Falcon claimed that Bennewitz was capturing images and signals of top-secret activity at the base, and that the disinformation was intended to discredit him and any Russian spies who might be monitoring him.

No proof that Falcon exists or that Doty was given the order to launch his disinformation operation against Bennewitz, but it succeeded and put him in a perilous mental state. Even worse, the X-Files ‘ propagandization of disinformation and its amplification have resulted in mythos that may even fool government insiders.

The FBI questioned some of Doty &#8217, s documents and questioned the U.S. Air Force about their knowledge. The words” BOGUS” and” #8220,” respectively, were written on the returned documents in thick black marker. However, the issue is not whether they are false. Why did they originate from an active OSI agent is still a mystery.

Former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year that “our efforts were ultimately overshadowed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence but attracted the attention of policy makers and the public, causing legislative battles and dominating the public narrative. &#8221,

I concur with Kirkpatrick on the detrimental impact that sensational but unsupported claims like 8221 have on the advancement of UAP research. The government must also be transparent and cooperative, and it needs to look into and accept responsibility for its role in UAP disinformation.

The first post on Den of Geek: Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation

This article contains THUNDERBOLTS* SPOILERS. Back in 2009, a still-nascent Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Writers Program in which the studio selected a small group of promising new screenwriters to literally sit in the company’s offices for a year and develop different projects based on the vast Marvel canon. Some of the scribes who toiled […]

The post Thunderbolts* Writer Reveals Who the Original Villain Almost Was and Other Marvel Secrets appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1988, a recently-retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) agent claimed on live television that the government was working with aliens at a secret base in the Nevada desert called Area 51 and that the “extraterrestrials have complete control of this base.” In the program, the producers blacked out the OSI agent’s face, and he went by the codename “Falcon.”

The agent’s actual name is Richard Doty. It’s listed on the IMDb page for the show. Doty has admitted that during his career as an OSI agent, beginning in 1980, he had been sharing disinformation about aliens and UFOs with the UFO community. Within weeks of the airing of the live UFO program, a man in Nevada named Bob Lazar approached reporters in Las Vegas claiming he had worked on alien spacecraft at Area 51. Despite lacking evidence, Lazar’s claims made headlines, and Area 51, then one of United States’ most secret military bases, quickly became its most famous.

Stories like this leave me wondering how much of the UFO mythos is disinformation created by the U.S. government and why. It sounds like another UFO conspiracy theory, but Congress is interested in this question also. They require that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), produce a report that includes “the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.”

Is there any reason to believe the U.S. government has deceived the public about UFOs? Mr. Doty’s story is not well known, but the CIA has admitted to deceiving the public about UFOs in a study published by the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence titled “A Die-hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990.”

According to the study, much like today, credible UFO sightings in the late 1940s and early 1950s brought media attention to the topic. This pressured the U.S. Air Force into creating UFO investigation programs and the CIA to discreetly monitor the situation. The CIA didn’t want attention to the fact that it was monitoring UFO reports and interfacing with the U.S. Air Force on the matter, so both organizations chose to lie about it. The report states, “This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up.”

The problem worsened in the late ’50s when testing of U-2 spy planes began. The aircraft flew much higher than any others at the time, and the prototypes were highly reflective, causing a spike in reports to the USAF UFO research program at the time, Project Blue Book. The CIA later estimated half of the UFO reports during this time were due to U-2 aircraft. The report claims, “This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.”

The report also covers the CIA’s involvement with a University of Colorado review of UFO information in the late ’60s, which led to the USAF closing Project Blue Book and exiting public UFO research completely. Both agencies decided to keep the CIA’s involvement in the report hidden.

Even Roswell was a cover-up, albeit not of the extraterrestrial kind. Unfortunately, the first volume of the AARO report whitewashes this event. According to the AARO report, in the 1990s, “USAF’s research did not locate or develop any information that indicated the ‘Roswell Incident’ was a UFO event, nor was there any ‘cover-up’ by the USG.”

It goes on to explain how the USAF found that the debris collected in the desert in 1947 was part of a classified project to listen for Russian nuclear testing called Project Mogul. It does not include the fact that the USAF’s research also found that the person in charge of researching the material, General Roger Ramey, had taken it upon himself to hide that the debris was part of a classified project. Instead, he told the press they had found an ordinary weather balloon and switched out the actual debris before taking press photos.

According to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, “the Air Force did not find documented evidence that Gen. Ramey was directed to espouse a weather balloon in his press conference, he may have done so because he was either aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to deflect interest from it, or he really perceived the material to be a weather balloon based on the identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton.”

Ramey’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Thomas DuBose, who can be seen in one of the photos, claimed in an affidavit, “the material shown in the photographs taken in Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.”

DuBose does not claim to have seen or known anything about the material that the USAF found. Still, Ramey’s switching out of the material and DuBose’s statement help fuel Roswell’s conspiracy theories to this day.

This brings us back to Doty, who is the first source of the claim that the USAF took alien bodies to Area 51. He did so in a document claiming a cabal of influential people inside and outside of the government controls UFOs and alien secrets. If this sounds like the X-Files, it’s because the show was allegedly based on Doty’s stories.

In late 1980, Doty worked at Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Only months after beginning his position as an OSI agent, a local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, claimed to be getting images and signals from UFOs over the base. According to documents I and others have received via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had found but didn’t see anything worth researching.

Doty claims that someone in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached him soon after meeting with Bennewitz. Doty refers to the DIA agent with the codename “Falcon”—the same name he later used on the TV show mentioned earlier. According to Doty, Falcon wanted Doty to feed disinformation to Bennewitz and make Bennewitz believe what he saw was aliens. Falcon said Bennewitz was capturing signals and videos of top-secret activity at the base, and the disinformation was intended to throw off Bennewitz and any Russian spies that might be monitoring him.

There is no evidence that Falcon exists or that Doty was ordered to conduct his disinformation program against Bennewitz, but it was effective and drove Bennewitz into a dangerous mental state. Even worse, the disinformation Doty spread and its amplification by the X-Files has created mythos that may even fool government insiders.

The FBI investigated some of Doty’s documents and asked the U.S. Air Force what they knew. The documents were returned with the word “BOGUS” written on them in thick black marker. But the question isn’t whether they are bogus. The question is why they came from an active OSI agent—a question still unanswered.

In an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year, former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote: “…our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.”

I agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the negative effect “sensational but unsupported claims” are having on moving UAP research forward. However, the government has to be open and cooperative as well and needs to investigate and take responsibility for its role in UAP disinformation.

The post Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation appeared first on Den of Geek.

Nearly four years after Line of Duty’s sixth season ended on a final ( ish ) note, there is speculation about the BBC crime thriller’s rumored return. That means cast members are once more “breaking their silence,” exclusively revealing “little of the truth” to outlets like The Sun ( who previously scooped a three-part special that ]…]

The only time Line of Duty returns is when” There’s a Story to Tell.” Unfortunately, There’s No Deficit appeared first on Den of Geek.

A recently retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations ( OSI) agent made the claim on live television in 1988 that the government was working with aliens at a secret base in Area 51 in the Nevada desert and that the aliens have complete control of this base. The manufacturers blacked out the OSI agent’s experience in the program” and he went by the name Falcon. &#8221,

The agent’s real name is Richard Doty, but it is not. It is listed on the show’s IMDb section as #8217. Doty has acknowledged that he had been sharing misinformation about creatures and UFOs with the UFO area during his time working as an Ios broker, beginning in 1980. A person in Nevada named Bob Lazar allegedly claimed to have worked on alien aircraft at Area 51 within days of the playing of the life UFO system. Area 51, one of the next most secret military bases in the United States, immediately became its most well-known despite lacking any supporting proof. Lazar&#8217, s claims made headlines.

Reports like this make me wonder how much of the UFO mythology was created by the US government, and why. Although it sounds like another UFO crime theory, Congress is even interested in this one. They demand that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office ( AARO ), produce a report that includes &#8220, the key historical account of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, conceal, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities. &#8221,

Is there any reason to believe that the United States government has misled the public regarding Sightings? Although Mr. Doty’s history is not well known, the CIA has admitted lying to the public about Creatures in a research published by the CIA&nbsp, book Research in Intelligence, titled &#8220, A Die-hard Matter: CIA&#8217, s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990. &#8221,

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, reliable UFO observations, in the opinion of the study, were a major focus for the internet. Due to this, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force were forced to launch UFO analysis programs&nbsp. Both companies chose to lie about it because the CIA didn’t want people to know that it was monitoring UFO information and speaking with the US Air Force about it. This hiding of CIA interests, according to the review, was significant in the development of further allegations of a CIA crime and cover-up. &#8221,

When U-2 spy plane checking began in the late 1950s, the issue only got worse. The models were extremely reflective, which heightened the number of studies to the USAF UFO analysis program at the time, Project Blue Book, and the plane flew much higher than any other ones at the time. Eventually, the CIA estimated that U-2 plane were to blame for half of the reported UFOs during this period. According to the report, this allegedly led the Air Force to make false and misleading statements to the general public in order to quell public concern and safeguard a highly delicate national security project. &#8221,

The report also includes the CIA’s participation in a University of Colorado late 1960s UFO review that resulted in the USAF shutting Project Blue Book down and completely ejecting people UFO research. Both organizations made the decision to keep the CIA’s role in the statement secret.

Also Roswell was a cover-up, though not of the interplanetary type. However, the AARO report‘s second volume whitewashes this occasion. According to the AARO record, in the 1990s, &#8220, USAF&#8217, s study did not find or create any data that indicated the &#8216, Roswell Incident&#8217, was a UFO event, nor was there any &#8216, cover-up&#8217, by the USG. &#8221,

It goes on to explain how the USAF discovered that Project Mogul, a defined venture to monitor Russian nuclear tests, was a result of the dust collected in the plain in 1947. It does not include the fact that the USAF&#8217 research also revealed that General Roger Ramey, the person in charge of researching the material, had taken it upon himself to conceal that the debris was a classified project. He instead stated to the press that they had discovered a typical weather balloon before turning the debris out before taking any press photos.

The Air Force may have chosen to use a weather balloon at his press conference because he was aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to deflect interest from it, or because he actually believed the material to be a weather balloon based on the identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton, according to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, &#8220. &#8221,

Colonel Thomas DuBose, Ramey’s Chief of Staff, who can be seen in one of the photos, claimed in an affidavit that the material contained in the photos taken at Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The material’s explanation in a weather balloon was used as a cover story to stifle the press. &#8221,

DuBose does not make any claims regarding the information that the USAF discovered. Even so, Ramey’s removal from the source material and DuBose’s statement contribute to Roswell’s conspiracy theories to this day.

Doty is the first person to claim that the USAF brought alien bodies to Area 51, which brings us back to Doty. He did this in a document asserting that a cabal of powerful individuals both inside and outside the government controls alien secrets and UFOs. Because the show was allegedly based on Doty &#8217, s stories, if this sounds like the X-Files, that is.

Doty started his employment at the Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the summer of 1980. A local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, who had just started his position as an OSI agent, claimed to be receiving images and signals from UFOs over the base shortly after taking over the position. Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had discovered, but they didn&#8217, based on documents I and others have received through requests for the Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) and didn’t find anything worthwhile to investigate.

Doty claims that shortly after meeting with Bennewitz, someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA ) approached him. Doty refers to the DIA agent by the moniker” Falcon” or” Falcon” ( which he later used in the TV show mentioned earlier ) and is now known as. Doty claimed that Falcon wanted Doty to spread false information to Bennewitz so that he could convince him that what he saw were aliens. Falcon claimed that Bennewitz was capturing images and signals of top-secret activity at the base, and that the disinformation was intended to discredit him and any Russian spies who might be monitoring him.

No proof that Falcon exists or that Doty was given the order to launch his disinformation operation against Bennewitz, but it succeeded and put him in a perilous mental state. Even worse, the X-Files ‘ propagandization of disinformation has led to mythos that could even fool government insiders.

The FBI questioned some of Doty &#8217, s documents and questioned the U.S. Air Force about what they knew. The words” BOGUS” and” &#8220,” respectively, were written on the returned documents in thick, black marker. However, the issue is not whether they are false. Why did they originate from an active OSI agent is still a mystery.

Former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year that “our efforts were ultimately overshadowed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence but attracted the attention of policy makers and the public, causing legislative battles and dominating the public narrative. &#8221,

I concur with Kirkpatrick on the detrimental impact that sensational but unsupported claims like 8221 have on moving UAP research forward. The government must be transparent and cooperative as well, and it needs to look into and accept responsibility for its role in UAP disinformation.

Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation first appeared on Den of Geek.

Squid Game season 2 had everything fans of the first season wanted to see again and then some. Seong Gi-hun’s (Lee Jung-jae) return to the titular games as Player 456 featured a fresh batch of deadly schoolyard contests, the evolution of old enemies like “Front Man” Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), and a new crop of […]

The post Squid Game Season 3 Teaser Reveals the Return of Controversial Characters appeared first on Den of Geek.

In 1988, a recently-retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) agent claimed on live television that the government was working with aliens at a secret base in the Nevada desert called Area 51 and that the “extraterrestrials have complete control of this base.” In the program, the producers blacked out the OSI agent’s face, and he went by the codename “Falcon.”

The agent’s actual name is Richard Doty. It’s listed on the IMDb page for the show. Doty has admitted that during his career as an OSI agent, beginning in 1980, he had been sharing disinformation about aliens and UFOs with the UFO community. Within weeks of the airing of the live UFO program, a man in Nevada named Bob Lazar approached reporters in Las Vegas claiming he had worked on alien spacecraft at Area 51. Despite lacking evidence, Lazar’s claims made headlines, and Area 51, then one of United States’ most secret military bases, quickly became its most famous.

Stories like this leave me wondering how much of the UFO mythos is disinformation created by the U.S. government and why. It sounds like another UFO conspiracy theory, but Congress is interested in this question also. They require that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), produce a report that includes “the key historical record of the involvement of the intelligence community with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.”

Is there any reason to believe the U.S. government has deceived the public about UFOs? Mr. Doty’s story is not well known, but the CIA has admitted to deceiving the public about UFOs in a study published by the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence titled “A Die-hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990.”

According to the study, much like today, credible UFO sightings in the late 1940s and early 1950s brought media attention to the topic. This pressured the U.S. Air Force into creating UFO investigation programs and the CIA to discreetly monitor the situation. The CIA didn’t want attention to the fact that it was monitoring UFO reports and interfacing with the U.S. Air Force on the matter, so both organizations chose to lie about it. The report states, “This concealment of CIA interest contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up.”

The problem worsened in the late ’50s when testing of U-2 spy planes began. The aircraft flew much higher than any others at the time, and the prototypes were highly reflective, causing a spike in reports to the USAF UFO research program at the time, Project Blue Book. The CIA later estimated half of the UFO reports during this time were due to U-2 aircraft. The report claims, “This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.”

The report also covers the CIA’s involvement with a University of Colorado review of UFO information in the late ’60s, which led to the USAF closing Project Blue Book and exiting public UFO research completely. Both agencies decided to keep the CIA’s involvement in the report hidden.

Even Roswell was a cover-up, albeit not of the extraterrestrial kind. Unfortunately, the first volume of the AARO report whitewashes this event. According to the AARO report, in the 1990s, “USAF’s research did not locate or develop any information that indicated the ‘Roswell Incident’ was a UFO event, nor was there any ‘cover-up’ by the USG.”

It goes on to explain how the USAF found that the debris collected in the desert in 1947 was part of a classified project to listen for Russian nuclear testing called Project Mogul. It does not include the fact that the USAF’s research also found that the person in charge of researching the material, General Roger Ramey, had taken it upon himself to hide that the debris was part of a classified project. Instead, he told the press they had found an ordinary weather balloon and switched out the actual debris before taking press photos.

According to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, “the Air Force did not find documented evidence that Gen. Ramey was directed to espouse a weather balloon in his press conference, he may have done so because he was either aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to deflect interest from it, or he really perceived the material to be a weather balloon based on the identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton.”

Ramey’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Thomas DuBose, who can be seen in one of the photos, claimed in an affidavit, “the material shown in the photographs taken in Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The weather balloon explanation for the material was a cover story to divert the attention of the press.”

DuBose does not claim to have seen or known anything about the material that the USAF found. Still, Ramey’s switching out of the material and DuBose’s statement help fuel Roswell’s conspiracy theories to this day.

This brings us back to Doty, who is the first source of the claim that the USAF took alien bodies to Area 51. He did so in a document claiming a cabal of influential people inside and outside of the government controls UFOs and alien secrets. If this sounds like the X-Files, it’s because the show was allegedly based on Doty’s stories.

In late 1980, Doty worked at Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Only months after beginning his position as an OSI agent, a local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, claimed to be getting images and signals from UFOs over the base. According to documents I and others have received via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had found but didn’t see anything worth researching.

Doty claims that someone in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached him soon after meeting with Bennewitz. Doty refers to the DIA agent with the codename “Falcon”—the same name he later used on the TV show mentioned earlier. According to Doty, Falcon wanted Doty to feed disinformation to Bennewitz and make Bennewitz believe what he saw was aliens. Falcon said Bennewitz was capturing signals and videos of top-secret activity at the base, and the disinformation was intended to throw off Bennewitz and any Russian spies that might be monitoring him.

There is no evidence that Falcon exists or that Doty was ordered to conduct his disinformation program against Bennewitz, but it was effective and drove Bennewitz into a dangerous mental state. Even worse, the disinformation Doty spread and its amplification by the X-Files has created mythos that may even fool government insiders.

The FBI investigated some of Doty’s documents and asked the U.S. Air Force what they knew. The documents were returned with the word “BOGUS” written on them in thick black marker. But the question isn’t whether they are bogus. The question is why they came from an active OSI agent—a question still unanswered.

In an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year, former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote: “…our efforts were ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence yet captured the attention of policy makers and the public, driving legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.”

I agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the negative effect “sensational but unsupported claims” are having on moving UAP research forward. However, the government has to be open and cooperative as well and needs to investigate and take responsibility for its role in UAP disinformation.

The post Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation appeared first on Den of Geek.

The next teaser for Grand Theft Auto 6 was released by Rockstar Games during essentially the most arbitrary Tuesday you could think of. Check out the new teaser below if you haven’t yet seen it. The good news is that the fresh GTA 6 truck has much more substance than the original game.

The second postGTA 6 Video 2 Break: Voice Actors, Soundtrack, and Easter Eggs You May Have Missed appeared initially on Den of Geek.

A recently retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations ( OSI) agent claimed on live television in 1988 that the government was working with aliens at a secret base in Area 51 of the Nevada desert and that the &#8220, extraterrestrials have complete control of this base. The suppliers blacked out the OSI agent’s experience in the program, and he adopted the name Falcon instead. &#8221,

Richard Doty, the agent’s real title, is what it is. It is listed on the show’s IMDb section as #8217. Doty has acknowledged that he had been spreading false information about creatures and UFOs to the UFO area during his time working as an Ios agent, beginning in 1980. A person in Nevada named Bob Lazar allegedly claimed to have worked on alien aircraft at Area 51 within days of the playing of the life UFO system. Area 51, one of the next most secret military bases in the United States, immediately became its most well-known despite lacking any supporting proof. Lazar&#8217, s claims made headlines.

Reports like this make me wonder how much of the UFO mythology was created by the US government, and why. Congress is even interested in this subject, despite the fact that it resembles another UFO conspiracy idea. They demand that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office ( AARO ), produce a report that includes &#8220, the key historical account of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, conceal, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities. &#8221,

Is there any reason to believe that the United States government misled the public about Creatures? Although Mr. Doty’s history is not well known, the CIA has admitted lying to the public about Creatures in a research published by the CIA&nbsp, book Research in Intelligence titled &#8220, A Die-hard Matter: CIA&#8217, s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-1990. &#8221,

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, reliable UFO observations, in the opinion of the study, were a major focus for the internet. Due to this, the CIA and the U.S. Air Force were forced to launch UFO research programs&nbsp. The CIA didn’t want people to know that it was monitoring UFO reports and speaking with the U.S. Air Force about it, so both companies decided to lie about it. According to the report,” This hiding of CIA interest significantly contributed to eventually accusations of a CIA crime and cover-up,” &#8221,

When checking of U-2 detective planes began in the late 1950s, the issue got worse. The models were extremely reflective, which heightened the number of studies to the USAF UFO analysis program at the time, Project Blue Book, and the plane flew much higher than any other ones at the time. The CIA afterward estimated that U-2 aircraft were to blame for half of the UFO information during this period. According to the report, this allegedly led the Air Force to make false and misleading statements to the general public in order to quell people fears and safeguard an extremely delicate national security project. &#8221,

The report also includes the CIA’s participation in a University of Colorado late 1960s UFO review that resulted in the USAF shutting Project Blue Book down and completely ejecting open UFO research. Both organizations made the decision to keep the CIA’s role in the review secret.

Also Roswell was a cover-up, though not of the interplanetary type. However, the AARO report‘s second volume whitewashes this occasion. According to the AARO record, in the 1990s, &#8220, USAF&#8217, s study did not find or create any data that indicated the &#8216, Roswell Incident&#8217, was a UFO event, nor was there any &#8216, cover-up&#8217, by the USG. &#8221,

The USAF then goes on to explain how Project Mogul, a defined program to monitor Russian nuclear testing, was the subject of the report. It does not include the reality that the USAF&#8217 research also revealed that General Roger Ramey, the person in charge of researching the material, had taken it upon himself to conceal that the particles was a defined project. He rather stated to the press that they had discovered a typical weather balloon and had removed the true debris before taking any press photos.

The Air Force does have chosen to use a weather balloon at his press conference because he was aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to divert attention from it, or because he actually believed the material to be a weather bubble based on the recognition from his weather officer, Irving Newton, according to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, &#8220. &#8221,

Colonel Thomas DuBose, Ramey’s chief of staff, can be seen in one of the photos, claimed in an affidavit that the material in the photos taken at Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The material’s explanation of the weather balloon served as a cover story to divert the press’s attention. &#8221,

DuBose does not make any claims regarding the information that the USAF discovered. Despite this, DuBose’s statement and Ramey’s switching out of the material continue to support Roswell’s conspiracy theories.

Doty is the first person to claim that the USAF took alien bodies to Area 51. This brings us back to Doty. He claimed in a document that a cabal of powerful individuals both inside and outside the government controls aliens and secrets. Because the show was allegedly based on Doty &#8217, s stories, if this sounds like the X-Files, that is.

Doty was employed at the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Kirtland Air Force base in late 1980. A local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, who had just started his position as an OSI agent, claimed to be receiving images and signals from UFOs over the base shortly after taking over the position. Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had discovered, but they didn&#8217, notwithstanding the documents I and others have received via Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) requests.

Doty claims that shortly after meeting with Bennewitz, someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA ) approached him. Doty refers to the DIA agent under the moniker &#8220, Falcon&#8221, which he later used in the TV show mentioned earlier. Doty claimed that Falcon wanted to deceive Bennewitz by feeding him with false information to persuade him that what he saw were aliens. Falcon claimed that Bennewitz was capturing images and signals of top-secret activity at the base, and that the disinformation was intended to discredit him and any Russian spies who might be monitoring him.

There is no proof that Falcon exists or that Doty was given the order to carry out his disinformation campaign against Bennewitz, but it succeeded and put Bennewitz in a perilous mental state. Even worse, the X-Files ‘ propagandization of disinformation has led to mythos that could even fool government insiders.

The FBI questioned some of Doty &#8217, s documents and questioned the U.S. Air Force about what they knew. The words &#8220, BOGUS&#8221 were written on the returned documents in thick black marker. However, the issue is not whether they are false. Why did they come from an active OSI agent is the question that is still unanswered.

Former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year that “our efforts were ultimately overshadowed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence and drew the attention of policymakers and the public, leading to legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.” &#8221,

I concur with Kirkpatrick on the detrimental impact that sensational but unsupported claims like 8221 have on moving UAP research forward. The government must also be transparent and cooperative, conduct inquiries, and accept responsibility for UAP disinformation.

Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation first appeared on Den of Geek.

A recently retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations ( OSI) agent claimed on live television in 1988 that the government was working with aliens at a secret base in Area 51 of the Nevada desert and that “extraterrestrials have complete control of this base.” The producers blacked out the OSI agent’s ]…

The second article on Den of Geek: Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation

A recently retired U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations ( OSI) agent claimed on live television in 1988 that Area 51, a key foundation in the Nevada desert, was being run by foreigners under the strict control of the foundation. The manufacturers blacked out the OSI agent’s experience in the program” and he went by the name Falcon. &#8221,

Richard Doty, the agent’s real title, is what it is. It is listed on the show’s IMDb section as #8217. Doty has acknowledged that he had been spreading false information about foreigners and Creatures with the UFO area during his time working as an Ios agent, beginning in 1980. A person in Nevada named Bob Lazar allegedly claimed to have worked on alien aircraft at Area 51 within days of the playing of the life UFO system. Area 51, one of the most secret military installations in the United States, immediately gained notoriety due to Lazar&#8217’s statements, which were unsupported by the lack of proof.

Reports like this make me wonder how much of the UFO mythology was created by the US government, and why. Although it sounds like another UFO conspiracy theory, Congress is even interested in this one. They demand that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigation program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office ( AARO ), produce a report that includes &#8220, the key historical account of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena, including… any attempts to obfuscate, deceive public opinion, conceal, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities. &#8221,

Is there any reason to believe that the United States government misled the public about Sightings? Although Mr. Doty’s history is not well known, the CIA has admitted lying to the public about Creatures in a research published by the CIA&nbsp, book Research in Intelligence, titled &#8220, A Die-hard Problem: CIA&#8217, s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990. &#8221,

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, reliable UFO observations, in the opinion of the study, were a major focus for the internet. The CIA and the U.S. Air Force were under a lot of pressure from this, leading to the creation of UFO research programs. Both companies chose to lie about it because the CIA didn’t want people to know that it was monitoring UFO information and speaking with the U.S. Air Force about it. This hiding of CIA interests, according to the review, was significant in the development of further allegations of a CIA crime and cover-up. &#8221,

When checking of U-2 spy flights began in the late 1950s, the issue only got worse. The models were extremely reflective, which heightened the information to the USAF UFO analysis program at the time, Project Blue Book, and the plane flew much higher than any other aircraft at the time. The CIA after estimated that U-2 aircraft were to blame for half of the reported UFOs during this period. According to the report, this allegedly led the Air Force to make false and misleading statements to the general public in order to quell public concern and safeguard a highly hypersensitive national security project. &#8221,

The report also includes the CIA’s participation in a University of Colorado assessment of UFO information in the late 1960s, which resulted in the USAF final Project Blue Book and completely quitting people UFO research. Both organizations made the decision to keep the CIA’s role in the statement secret.

Also Roswell was a cover-up, though not of the interplanetary type. However, the AARO report‘s second volume whitewashes this occasion. According to the AARO record, in the 1990s, &#8220, USAF&#8217, s study did not find or create any information that indicated the &#8216, Roswell Incident&#8217, was a UFO event, nor was there any &#8216, cover-up&#8217, by the USG. &#8221,

It goes on to explain how the USAF discovered that Project Mogul, a classified project to monitor Russian nuclear testing, was a result of the debris collected in the desert in 1947. It does not mention the fact that the USAF&#8217 research also revealed that General Roger Ramey, the person in charge of researching the material, had taken it upon himself to conceal that the debris was a classified project. He instead stated to the press that they had discovered a typical weather balloon and had removed the actual debris before taking any press photos.

The Air Force may have chosen to use a weather balloon at his press conference because he was aware of Project MOGUL and was trying to deflect interest from it, or because he actually believed the material to be a weather balloon based on the identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton, according to the 1995 USAF Roswell report, &#8220. &#8221,

Colonel Thomas DuBose, Ramey’s Chief of Staff, can be seen in one of the photos, who claimed in an affidavit that the material contained in the photos taken at Gen. Ramey’s office was a weather balloon. The material’s explanation of the weather balloon served as a cover story to divert the press’s attention. &#8221,

DuBose does not make any claims regarding the information that the USAF discovered. Even so, Ramey’s removal from the source material and DuBose’s statement contribute to Roswell’s conspiracy theories to this day.

Doty, who is the first to claim that Area 51 was home to alien bodies, is the subject of this claim. He claimed in a document that a cabal of powerful individuals both inside and outside the government controls aliens and secrets. Because the show was allegedly based on Doty’s stories, it sounds like the X-Files.

Doty started his employment at the Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in late 1980. A local technical equipment vendor and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, who had just started his position as an OSI agent, claimed to be receiving images and signals from UFOs over the base shortly after taking over his position. Doty and another agent looked at what Bennewitz had discovered, but they didn&#8217, based on documents I and others have received through requests for the Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ) and didn’t find anything worthwhile to investigate.

Doty claims that shortly after meeting with Bennewitz, someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency ( DIA ) approached him. Doty refers to the DIA agent under the moniker &#8220, Falcon&#8221, which he later used in the TV show mentioned earlier. Doty claimed that Falcon wanted to deceive Bennewitz by feeding him with false information to persuade him that what he saw were aliens. Falcon claimed that Bennewitz was capturing images and signals of top-secret activity at the base, and that the disinformation was intended to discredit him and any Russian spies who might be monitoring him.

No proof that Falcon exists or that Doty was given the order to launch his disinformation operation against Bennewitz, but it succeeded and put him in a perilous mental state. Even worse, the X-Files ‘ propagandization of disinformation and its amplification have resulted in mythos that may even fool government insiders.

The FBI questioned some of Doty &#8217, s documents and questioned the U.S. Air Force about their knowledge. The words &#8220, BOGUS&#8221 were written on the returned documents in thick black marker. However, the issue is not whether they are false. Why did they come from an active OSI agent is the question that is still unanswered.

Former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote in an op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year that “our efforts were ultimately overshadowed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignored contradictory evidence but attracted the attention of policy makers and the public, causing legislative battles and dominating the public narrative.” &#8221,

I concur with Kirkpatrick on the detrimental impact that sensational but unsupported claims like 8221 have on moving UAP research forward. The government must be transparent and cooperative as well, and it needs to look into and accept responsibility for its role in UAP disinformation.

The second article on Den of Geek: Why The Pentagon Needs to Address UFO Disinformation