I am not sure if everyone still has the Apple News app still on their iPhone, or maybe you even have the notifications silenced, which is a far smarter idea. Every week, I get a notification on my phone from Apple News trying to persuade me to read one of their “picks,” and I can’t help but think about all the people who get this notification and want to go read these articles when they always seem like “clickbait.” So I thought, why not? Let’s go on the app and try to read one. Of course, I went to the “Trending Stories” to see what most readers would be consuming today. Take a look at the screenshot below.
I picked “This UFO on U.S. Intelligence Agency’s Logo Has Everyone Buzzing” from Popular Mechanics by Kyle Mizokami to do discourse analysis on. Don’t worry though! They’re all “clickbait!” Trust me, we all know how much of a bigot Trump is! I have no reference about what this article could be talking about because I am not tuned into aerospace news, so I felt like it was a good starting point where I would not have any context to begin with, just to see what the article shared and intentionally left out.
By navigating my way to their website, I wasn’t even able to find the article. Turns out, the article has a different title: “A UFO Somehow Ended Up on a U.S. Intelligence Agency Logo.” The article titles are very similar except for the Apple News one which includes
“Has Everyone Buzzing.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I am part of everyone, and I have never heard a word about this. It is not hard to determine this article title is written to persuade a reader to click on the article because “everyone” is “buzzing” about it and you aren’t. You wouldn’t want to be left out, would you?
By reading the article, you’ll find that the author writes about a UFO appearing on the logo for the National Intelligence Manager for Aviation’s website by mistake. The author claims this “went viral” on social media and the agency took down the logo within two days of being posted. Well, I went and looked at social media to see the accuracy of the author’s claims. To save anyone the trouble, there are only 20 Twitter posts about the UFO appearing on the logo, and the most-liked post only has around 200 hearts. What’s the definition of “going viral” these days? Even clearer than before, this article is another piece of “clickbait” trying to get people “buzzed” about a topic that few people have shown interest in.
I believe the author belongs to a group that has a great interest in military affairs, especially if you take a look at his previous articles as they relate to space shuttles delivering military supplies, hypersonic cruise missiles, or a Russian army expo. However, for this article, in particular, I believe the author is taking more of a conspiracy theory approach. He mentions “The agency says it was a mistake, but how did this flying saucer logo get uploaded in the first place,” trying to get the reader to speculate on a UFO appearing in an agency logo. He goes on to cite times the agency has released reports on UFOs and how the classic-looking UFO appeared even appeared in the background of the webpage, until the agency “scrubbed” (his words, not mine) from the site.
The language and citations the authors uses point to the existence of UFOs (and possibly aliens, but the author does not directly say this) and how the government may be trying to hide their existence from the general public. When I finished reading this article, I couldn’t help but think about Area-51. Does anyone remember Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us? Just in case you forgot, feel free to visit the Wikipedia page. I am not sure if this article fully connects, but it gives me the same vibes.
All in all, the author’s argument is not lackluster. You can tell he knows his aerospace mechanics from identifying numerous spacecraft in the logo simply from their outline. He cites government sources for UFO reports, and presents more of the conspiracy elements in a covert way. I believe it could persuade an uninformed reader to continue looking into the topic or even follow the author’s journey to learn more. I’ll admit; it was an exciting read. But, the story is not nearly as compelling if you know where to do your research and how to identify when you’re being subtly pushed in a direction.