Today, Nixon Would Probably Have Gotten Away with Watergate | How UFO Sightings Became an American Obsession | The Right Is Still Pushing Election Denial—and Pillows, and more

How UFO Sightings Became an American Obsession  (Sarah Scoles, Wired)
In 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000?
Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he watched, rapt, nine objects flew through the air in formation.
That’s nothing crazy, really. You’d call it a fleet and go on with your day. But the craft appeared to be traveling much faster than the jets of the time. Arnold allegedly clocked them, as they flew between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, at significantly more than 1,000 miles per hour. When he landed back on the ground, he—he claimed later—told an East Oregonian reporter that the objects skipped like saucers on water, referring to their motion and not their shape. The reporter wrote, however, that the craft appeared “saucer-like.” That line soon rushed out on the AP wire. The term “flying saucer” showed up a day later—the first time of many times to come—when the Chicago Sun ran the headline “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” The actual path of the saucer description, from Arnold’s mouth to our modern ears, is more complicated: The reporter held fast to the transcription, and as a National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena analysis notes, Arnold had plenty of opportunities to correct the record earlier.

Sorry, Richard Nixon  (David Frum, The Atlantic)
Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon laid down the presidency of the United States, a casualty of the Watergate scandal.
The era of Watergate was one of sweeping political reform. In 1970, Congress reduced the once-awesome power of committee chairs and opened committee work—until then usually closed from public view—to greater public scrutiny. In 1971 and in 1974, Congress passed far-reaching campaign-finance laws. In 1975, Congress launched its first thorough investigation of intelligence agencies; in 1977, that oversight was made permanent in the form of the House and Senate intelligence committees. In 1978, Congress adopted ambitious conflict-of-interest rules for the whole federal government. Along the way, the Department of Justice launched hundreds of investigations into corruption within state and local government. One of those probes led to the downfall of Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, for acts committed when he was the governor of Maryland in the 1960s.
For a long time, those reforms seemed the most enduring consequence of Watergate. But at the 50-year mark, that view looks complacent and mistaken. The truth is, the reforms didn’t stick. Some of them are formally defunct; others were simply disregarded. The more open congressional committees have degenerated into buffoonish theater, exiling the real work of Congress to informal dealmaking that is nearly as secret as in the days of almighty committee chairmen such as Wilbur Mills, who almost single-handedly ruled the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, and James O. Eastland, who dominated the Senate Judiciary Committee for two decades until 1978.
Watergate-era campaign-finance laws remain on the books, but their main effect is merely to complicate the rules, because federal-election campaigns are, more than ever, funded by huge donations from secret donors. As president, Donald Trump defiantly ignored conflict-of-interest rules by allowing tens of millions of taxpayer and donor dollars to flow to his personal businesses. Nobody successfully made much of a legal or political issue out of it. The intelligence committees still exist, but their credibility and utility suffered serious damage when unscrupulous Trump partisans in the House abused their power to protect their party leader from embarrassing revelations.
Maybe most enduringly, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have made convicting state and local officials of public-integrity offenses all but impossible—even as some of the justices themselves accept gratuities worth millions of dollars from wealthy admirers. In many other ways, large and small, American politics in 2024 has shrugged off the reforming instincts of the 1970s and reverted to pre-Watergate norms of nontransparency.

Microsoft: Iran Accelerating Cyber Activity in Apparent Bid to Influence U.S. Eelection (AP / VOA News)
Iran is ramping up online activity that appears intended to influence the upcoming U.S. election, in one case targeting a presidential campaign with an email phishing attack, Microsoft said Friday.
Iranian actors also have spent recent months creating fake news sites and impersonating activists, laying the groundwork to stoke division and potentially sway American voters this fall, especially in swing states, the technology giant found.
The findings in Microsoft’s newest threat intelligence report show how Iran, which has been active in recent U.S. campaign cycles, is evolving its tactics for another election that’s likely to have global implications. The report goes a step beyond anything U.S. intelligence officials have disclosed, giving specific examples of Iranian groups and the actions they have taken so far. Iran’s United Nations mission denied it had plans to interfere or launch cyberattacks in the U.S. presidential election.