Tag: Toronto

Categories
Street Photography

Candid Photography: The Value of Chaos

Firemen climb down ladder on the northwest corner of the Sherbourne/Bloor intersection, Toronto

Sometimes getting there first is everything. I’d been sitting on the couch in front of my TV when the phone rang. A friend who lives in a building south of me was calling while he gazed out the window of his 33rd floor apartment. “Uh, Dave, is your building on fire?” I hadn’t heard any alarms. “There are these huge clouds of black smoke but I can’t tell from here if it’s your building.” I stepped to the window and, just as my friend had said, there were huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky, but to the east of us. I said, “I’ve gotta go.” And then I did what comes naturally. I threw on a coat, slipped on a pair of shoes, and grabbed my camera.

I live in an interesting neighbourhood. Interesting in the sense that there’s always something happening here. The Indian consulate across the road is subject to continual protests, as is the Israeli consulate down the road. Extinction Rebellion protests on my doorstep. Psychotic screams in the middle of the night. Smashed windows in the shops across the road. Last fall, we were in lockdown, not because of a virus, but because of a suspicious piece of luggage outside our front door. The bomb squad detonated it and the concussion rattled my ribcage. The downside of living here, especially during a global pandemic, is that a sense of unease wafts through the air at all hours. The upside is that, if you’re a photographer, the opportunities for interesting shots are limitless.

On this particular occasion, our illustrious mayor, John Tory, whose only distinction from his predecessor is that he doesn’t smoke crack, had ordered a sweep of the homeless from Rosedale Valley. A few days later, someone retaliated by dousing old tires in gasoline and setting the south end of the Sherbourne Street bridge on fire. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, it was immediately obvious to me that this was a gasoline fire. Arson. Firetrucks were still arriving and fire fighters were running hoses to hydrants. Police had just appeared on the scene and were sorting out how best to contain the situation. I took advantage of the chaos to get close to the scene for my best shots, and then the police pushed me back down the street. You can see me, camera in hand, in the second photo of this CBC article.

Chaos is my friend. Chaos stirs up the conditions of an essential creative foment. Without chaos, I’d stagnate.

Categories
Street Photography

Provocation #2: Photography as an Act of Curiosity

Loading the trunk, Temperance Street, Toronto

For me, perhaps the greatest motivation for engaging in street photography is curiosity. Not a salacious voyeuristic curiosity (at least not always). I would like to think that my curiosity is driven more by empathy than by a desire for some weird sense of gratification. I want to know what other people are doing. I want to know what makes them tick. Inevitably, I find myself imagining what my life would be like if I gave my world a quarter degree turn. Or woke up occupying a different body.

A black car pulls to the curb. A man gets out and runs around the corner. Five minutes later, he returns with a wheeled rack of garment bags. He pops open the trunk and begins laying out the garment bags one by one. I wonder what he’s doing. It’s Friday. Maybe he’s picking up clothes for a Saturday wedding. Is he the best man?

But there’s steam and steam gives the scene a vaguely sinister aspect. Maybe these clothes aren’t for a wedding. Maybe this man is a funeral director and he’s picking up clothes to dress his “clients.” Maybe he’s the leader of a cult and needs to dress up his followers before he doles out the Kool-Aid.

Or maybe he’s a co-conspirator in a planned heist. He and his friends are going to do a high-end casino and they need tuxedos so they can look like high rollers. A fine idea except for the fact that Toronto doesn’t have any high-end casinos.

I should apply Occam’s razor: the simplest explanation is most likely the true account of the situation. Obviously, each garment bag holds a dehydrated alien and the man has been summoned to dispose of the remains before conspiracy theories leak and run amok through the city. He’ll run the bodies to a nearby construction site and encase them in concrete before anyone notices.

Categories
Street Photography

Provocation #1: Photography as a Violent Act

A large woman talks on her cell phone while seated on a stone step.
On the phone at Yonge & Wellesley, Toronto

Since the Oscars aired last weekend, Twitter has been abuzz with one thing and one thing only. Never mind that another wave of the Sars-Cov-2 virus may be sweeping the globe. Never mind that a lunatic with his hands on a stockpile of nuclear weapons continues his mission to “liberate” the people of Ukraine. All anyone can talk about is how Will Smith slapped Chris Rock when Chris Rock cracked a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.

Some people defend Will Smith, saying Chris Rock crossed a line when he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, alopecia areata. Other people defend Chris Rock, saying he was the victim of an assault and Will Smith ought to be charged with the commission of a criminal offence. Some people analyse the incident from the perspective of race. Other people analyse the incident from the perspective of masculinity. Pretty soon, pundits throw so many opinions into the blender that nobody knows where to fall on the matter.

I choose to sidestep the matter altogether by using it to illustrate something about a marginally related concern. The infamous slap is an exchange between two men who are, by vocation, comedians and wildly successful comedians at that. What makes them so successful in their respective roles is that they are unafraid to explore that liminal space between the socially acceptable and the taboo. They do the heavy lifting for the rest of us.

There is no absolute line that defines for all time the limits of acceptable behaviour. It is a matter of perpetual negotiation and most of us rely on others to do that work for us. Like the court jester, Chris Rock’s role is to say things others think but are afraid to utter. He may not always be right, but there is a rightness in the need to drag certain conversations kicking and screaming from their murky corners, like the the conversation about the way the red carpet supports our collective habit of fetishizing women’s bodies.

Candid photography sometimes functions in the same way. The limits of the acceptable shift over time. What stood in the past sometimes deserves to be re-examined today. Take Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day Kiss in Times Square for example. Originally understood as capturing the jubilation of a particular historic moment, it has subsequently been reinterpreted as emblematic of rape culture. What we can say for certainty about Eisenstaedt’s photograph is that it thrusts us into a liminal space and nearly 80 years later continues to engage us in an important conversation.

New contexts demand new conversations. Sometimes it falls to street photographers to use the photographic equivalent of a slap in the face to get them started.

Categories
Street Photography

Taking Candid Photos

Asleep at the 2022 St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Toronto

My theme for April is taking candid photographs. Candid shots are a mainstay of street photography. What makes a photograph candid is the absence of reciprocity in the interaction between photographer and subject. Where, in the case of a street portrait, there is almost a contractual exchange, in the case of a candid shot, the encounter is emphatically one-sided. The photographer takes the shot without the subject’s permission because, most of the time, the subject is unaware that anything has happened.

Obviously, I am a practitioner of candid photography. However, I acknowledge that, for many, it is an ethical quagmire. For many, especially for those who catch me in the act, the candid photograph is an invasion of privacy.

The answer to the privacy objection is that it depends on the circumstances. The legally protected right to take photographs varies from one jurisdiction to the next, so there is nothing I can say that is universally applicable. For example, I once had a woman tell me I was in violation of the Canada Privacy Act to which I responded that the Canada Privacy Act has almost nothing to say about photography in any circumstance. However, she didn’t believe me, just as she didn’t believe me when I told her I used to practice law in the Province of Ontario so I might actually know what I’m talking about.

In general, Canada’s Anglo-speaking provinces (Québec is a different matter) treat photography as a right if it occurs in public space because nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public space. In fact, most Canadian jurisdictions go so far as to treat it as a constitutionally protected form of speech. Like all rights, it’s not absolute, but as long as you’re not a pervert or a terrorist, your photographic habit is probably protected. That means that, in law, if I am standing on a street corner, I don’t need your permission to take your photograph.

Law and ethics are two different beasts, and the fact that I may be legally entitled to take your photograph doesn’t mean it’s right for me to do so. This leads to the next objection: public photography is protected by Anglo-Canadian jurisprudence which means that, in effect, it is a creature of our colonial history. In keeping with our colonial history, a photograph can be construed as a form of exploitation. That exploitation can happen along any number of axes: age, gender, sexuality, race, religion, class. Some, like Susan Sontag, go further and suggest that taking a photograph is an act of violence.

A possible answer is that there are countervailing values at play, like the importance of representation and documentation, that offset concerns about exploitation. If we can’t provide our progenitors with a rich visual account of their past, then we impoverish the imaginative ground they tread as they move forward. The trick, from a photographer’s perspective, is to balance competing concerns in a way that preserves the subject’s dignity while keeping one eye on the context in which the photograph will appear.

Matters of photography and ethics are beyond the scope of a single tiny blog post. My inclination is to hold ethical concerns in abeyance, bringing them to bear on each fresh situation, but resisting the temptation to suppose that these matters will ever be resolved with finality. Even with the passage of a few short years, we see how our frame of reference, and the language we use to give it shape, reform themselves beneath the pressure of changing social expectations. If we supposed that we had finally resolved the matter now, we’d only look like fools 20 years from now.

So I proceed provisionally. The images I offer this month I offer as provocations with the hope that they prompt considered reflection on the purpose and value of photography.

Note: Nothing in the foregoing may be construed as legal advice. If you have concerns about photography-related privacy issues, retain the services of a legal professional.

Categories
City Life

Toronto Waterfront

Shot from Canada Malting Silos

Here is the penultimate image from my February photo series: winter scenes. The water of Lake Ontario has frozen into large chunks that, with a little more cold weather, will coalesce into a single solid sheet of ice. A light appears on the horizon to the right side of the image. No, it is not a UFO; it’s an airplane coming in for a landing at Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island.

Like the island, the entire Toronto waterfront is built on landfill. The original shoreline was immediately south of the obviously named Front Street. Had I tried to take this photo more than 100 years ago, I would have found myself standing in 10 metres of water. And had I tried to take this photo 10,000 years ago, I would have found myself standing in 40 metres of water with the shoreline well out of the frame on the left side. Those were the days of the Iroquois shoreline when Lake Ontario was considerably larger than it is now.

It goes without saying that had I tried to take a photograph of this scene 10,000 years I ago, I wouldn’t actually be standing in 40 metres of water. That’s absurd. I would be standing in a boat that I had brought with me in my time machine. Whenever you’re going out to shoot, always be prepared. For me, that means bringing an extra time machine in my pack, just in case.

Categories
City Life

An Ice Storm Transforms the Face of the World

Frozen Fruit

Unusual weather events can transform the familiar into the utterly alien. Winter stretches on and we grow accustomed to the same scene greeting us morning after morning from our window. The low light. The drab streets. Our world hardens into a frozen sameness. While this feeling is typical of Februaries, it is a feeling that has been compounded these last two years by the global pandemic, especially if we have been subject to lockdown or have felt anxious about going outdoors.

And then something happens that jolts us from our ossified view of the world. It grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us. That something can be a personal event: a near miss as we’re stepping off the curb, for example. Suddenly our heart races and it reminds us that we are alive after all. Or something that affects us all, like a major weather system that sweeps across the entire continent.

I remember how an ice storm struck the Toronto area in January of 2014. We haven’t had such a storm since then. Entire trees toppled under the sheer weight of the ice. Power lines came down. Nature inflicted on the city a terrible beauty.

On the morning after the storm had blown through, I stepped outside and was struck by how different the world looked. It occurred to me that I might live out the balance of my natural life and never again see the world in quite this way. And so I spent the whole day wandering, taking it all in, as if this might be the last day of my life.

Stop sign in ice storm with icicles dangling from the bottom.
Categories
City Life

Curved Roads in Winter

Yellow Creek Trail, Toronto

The ground is cold, but the asphalt path is still warm. The contrast in temperatures produces a corresponding contrast in the visual field. White remains at the edges of the path while the path reveals itself, snaking its dark line into the distance.

This is an apocalyptic scene. We tend to think of an apocalyptic scene as something dramatic, possibly associated with the end of the world, rivers of blood, lakes of fire, that sort of thing. But here I use the word in its original sense, the way ancient Greeks used it before early medieval religious nuts got their hands on the word and made a mess of it.

In classical Greek, the prefix ἀπό (apo) indicates a movement away from something, hence, its opposite. In this case, ᾰ̓ποκᾰ́λῠψῐς (apocalypsis) denotes the opposite of being covered. In other words, uncovered or revealed. In classical Greek, there was nothing magical or catastrophic about apocalypsis. Presumably, it could refer to something as benign as playing peek-a-boo with a child. Or, in the case of my photograph, the appearance of a path when the snow melts.

For reasons I don’t understand, we’ve never been able to rescue the word from the fanatics who seized it. I wish there was a twelve step program for words that have grown dependent upon religious lunatics to give them a sense of cachet they don’t deserve. What’s wrong with being a modest word with no particular designs on the human imagination? There is a sense in which apocalypsis would reveal far more to us if it had less to do with revelation.

A path curves off to the distance. Nothing is revealed but the path itself. And we need nothing more than that simple curve to give us satisfaction.

Glen Manor Drive East and Pine Crescent, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Cycling in Winter

Cycling Through Flurries, Bloor Street, Toronto

I gave up cycling in the city after three run-ins with vehicles. The third time, I was passing a bus that had stopped to pick up some passengers. A tow truck tried to pass me while I was passing the bus and it clipped me with its wide rear view mirror, striking me between the shoulder blades. The glass in the mirror exploded all around my head and the impact shot me forward out in front of the bus as it was starting up. Two things worked in my favour: first, I was able to stay upright until I reached the curb; second, the bus driver saw me and stopped the bus, otherwise he might have run me down. But that was enough for me.

My previous run-in had been more serious, resulting in an overnight stay in an emergency ward and a major concussion. I wanted to get back to riding my bike. After all, cycling is one of the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly forms of transportation. It has the further benefit of taking up little space, an important consideration in urban settings. However, a third hit coupled with an increasingly confrontational attitude from many drivers sent my levels of anxiety through the stratosphere. I hung up my wheels and started walking everywhere.

I haven’t given up on cycling entirely. Not long ago, my wife and I went on an extended cycling tour of County Cork in the Republic of Ireland. In preparation, I had purchased a sexy pair of skin-tight shorts with padding in all the right places, and not wishing my purchase to go unused after our tour, I started wearing the shorts to the gym where I regularly sit on a stationary bicycle (which is technically a unicycle) and pretend I’m fleeing a horde of rabid zombies. I pedal like the wind, not that there’s any wind in a gym, but it gives me a good cardio workout. Most importantly, I haven’t crashed the stationary bicycle, not even once.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Snow Fence on Balmy Beach Overlooking Lake Ontario

Balmy Beach, Toronto, ON

In making today’s featured image, I approached the scene from the far side of Kanso. In an earlier post, I mentioned the Japanese aesthetic of Kanso, which can be understood as simplicity or clarity. As a process, it demands that the photographer remove from an image everything that is unnecessary until only the essential remains.

However, in this case I started with a simple image—a snow-covered breakwater extending into Lake Ontario (shown below)—and decided it needed something more. I moved further down the beach and positioned myself with a snow fence in the foreground. To my way of seeing, this is more satisfactory for a couple reasons. First, it adds a sense of depth to the image by creating a crisp foreground. And second, the reddish brown of the fence slats complements the blue-green of the water; the resulting contrast is more dramatic.

I don’t know if the Japanese have a name for a simple, calming image produced by adding features until we arrive at a satisfying sense of balance. If not, let’s make one up. How about Osnak? The opposite of Kanso.

Ironically, although the point of the exercise is to produce a sense of calm through simplicity or clarity, I was anything but calm when I made these photographs. There was a biting wind blowing snow and ice pellets from the west. Ice had crusted on my eyebrows and my fingers were stiff with the cold. We see none of my personal discomfort reflected in the image. The problem with Kanso (or Osnak) is that it hides the personal sacrifices I made to produce the image. Yet there are times when I would prefer it if everyone knew how much I suffer for my art. 🙂

Balmy Beach in winter, Toronto, ON
Categories
City Life

R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant: Palace of Purification

Silver Birch Beach, Toronto

Located where the ends of Queen Street East and Victoria Park Avenue meet at the east end of The Beaches in Toronto, the R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant is without doubt one of the most remarkable buildings in the city. I first encountered this Art Deco monument to human effluence when I dove into the pages of Michael Ondaatje’s early novel, In the Skin of a Lion. The facility is named after Roland Caldwell Harris, Commissioner of Works for the City of Toronto from 1912 until his death in 1945. Harris was responsible for another of Toronto’s landmark constructions, the Prince Edward Viaduct, the bridge which spans the Don Valley. It, too, figures in the Ondaatje novel: a construction worker saves a nun from falling from the yet-to-be-completed bridge. Clearly, there is something about R. C. Harris’s massive engineering projects that Ondaatje found compelling.

The first time I saw the building, I was walking east along Balmy Beach at sunset. This is an unfamiliar neighbourhood, so I had no idea what was waiting for me as I rounded a bend in the shoreline. There, lit in orange and gold, I beheld a magnificent structure that I assumed was a cathedral or an abbey. Why had I never heard of this place before? It wasn’t until I stood on the grounds that I remembered reading about it in Ondaatje’s novel. I have to confess that the words I had read did not prepare me for the building’s scale and splendour.

I returned six months later to capture the building in the midst of a blustery snow storm, altogether different conditions, but no less striking. The irony of this place is that even after you understand its purpose, its grandeur still has a humbling effect. You feel that when you talk, you should do so in whispers. It makes you want to prostrate yourself on the ground and greet the rising sun in the east. You wonder if maybe this is holy ground.

Categories
City Life

Winter Scene: Demolition of a Building in a Snow Storm

Demolitions of building on Yorkville Ave between Yonge & Bay, Toronto

Nowadays, everything is disposable. Diapers are disposable. Phones are disposable. Cars are disposable. Buildings are disposable. Even thumbs are disposable.

Weather is no impediment to building demolition, as illustrated by the above photograph of a parking garage on Yorkville Avenue in mid-town Toronto. Developers will replace it with a pro-forma glass tower 60 or 70 stories high where people will huddle in 500 square foot units, 8 to a floor. To be honest, I’m not opposed to intensification in Toronto’s downtown. It produces a vibrant pedestrian life which is the opposite of ghettoization and promotes safer streets.

I’m more concerned about the fact that many of these building are, in effect, landfill-in-waiting. Development becomes a way to defer the transfer of raw materials from their sources (mines and factories) to dump sites. I’m further irked by the fact that many of these temporary waste transfer sites (otherwise known as condominiums) take their blueprints from the same boring-as-fuck cookie cutter design mill. Toronto has become a glass tower yawn.

To change the subject, here’s a joke. An architect points to a condominium in downtown Toronto and says to his friend: “There’s a building I designed. It has 59 floors. It used to have 60 floors, but that’s another story.”

Categories
City Life

French Word For Toilet

Cold Toilet, Parkdale, Toronto

My dad tells the story of how, when he was little, he thought his mother spoke French. Admittedly, she had a distinctive accent, but it was the sort of accent that came from Boston, not from Rimouski. My grandmother had that classic New England accent that does strange things to the letter “R”. It removes “R’s” from words where they belong (Hahvahd instead of Harvard), and adds “R’s” to words where they don’t belong (especially at the end of words that end in a vowel). To my grandmother, everything was a good idear. If you’ve ever listened to Major Charles Emerson Winchester, III from M*A*S*H (David Ogden Stiers) then you have a good idear how my grandmother spoke.

However, my grandmother developed some linguistic idiosyncrasies, maybe because she married a Canuck and moved north of the border. My grandfather was a minister and one of his early charges came with a manse that had no indoor plumbing. My dad doesn’t appear to have been traumatized by the experience. Nevertheless, he does recall one odd feature of his early toilet adventures. Whenever it looked like he might have to go to the bathroom, my grandmother would ask him if he had to go to the pouchaud and point to the outhouse.

This explains why my dad thought his mother spoke French. He had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded French, and he naturally assumed it had something to do with the outhouse. It wasn’t until later that he realized what she was saying: Do you have to go to the push hard? With her tendency to run words together coupled with her inability to say the letter “R,” she had effectively invented a new word, pouchaud. I don’t suppose it will ever find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it has an honoured place in our private family dictionary.

Categories
Street Photography

Snow Selfies

Person takes a selfie on Bloor Street East, Toronto

I’ve noted in a preview post that when people encounter one another during a snow storm, they tend to be happier, friendlier. Snow storms elicit another (possibly related) response. People love to take selfies against a snowy backdrop and then share them with friends and on social media accounts. Almost invariably, they don’t post the photos to complain about how miserable the snow makes them feel; they post to share their excitement.

Snow does that to people. For me, snow draws up feelings of nostalgia. It reminds me of my childhood, especially my winter visits to my grandparents. One set lived in Montreal and the other in London and both locales got far more snow than my hometown (Toronto). We built forts, and went tobogganing, and poured rinks in the back yard. One year, my parents even took us to Quebec City Carnival and we got to watch people drunk on Caribou fall unconscious into snow banks. Ah, memories!

Years later, whenever it snows, I find myself drifting back in time to childhood moments of sheer joy and, like everyone else around me, I want to capture that feeling. Spread it around. The world can always use more joy.

Selfie at Toronto's Icefest
Selfie at Toronto’s Icefest
Categories
Street Photography

Don’t stick your hand in a snow blower while it’s running

When I was little, I was fascinated by the fact that my uncle Bill had lost his ring finger. Over the years, I’ve heard a number of stories about how he lost his finger. That side of my family is full of storytellers, gossips, and bullshitters, so I have no idea which of the stories is true. Instead, I’ve opted to believe the best (i.e. most gruesome) of the stories and truth be damned. In the spirit of bullshit, Bill is not his real name.

The story goes that my uncle Bill served in Korea as part of the US medical corp. Yes, he was in a M*A*S*H unit or something like that. One day, they had to bug out because they were under fire from the commies. My uncle Bill leapt onto the back of a moving truck and caught his wedding ring on something. So there he was, dangling by his ring finger with his feet dragging along the ground and the commies in hot pursuit. One of his fellow medicos grabbed his free arm while another pulled out a pocket knife and cut off his finger. They hauled him into the truck and escaped to safety. I reiterate that I have no idea if this story is even remotely factual. All I know for certain is that my uncle served in Korea and came home minus one finger.

Not to be outdone, his older brother Jeff lost three fingers. Incidentally, Jeff told everyone he was in the Navy; it’s even there in print in my aunt’s obituary. Despite that, I remember Bill rolling his eyes and saying it was just the Coast Guard. Jeff never saw any real action, not like Bill who also did a tour in Vietnam. Ahh, what fond childhood memories I have of my uncles engaged in military service pissing contests!

Again, the story comes to me like a game of broken telephone played by pathological liars, so I have no idea what really happened. Not even his name is real. Still, there are certain things I know to be true. For one thing, Jeff lived in New Hamphire where there is lots of snow in the wintertime. For another thing, he really did lose some fingers. The story goes that he fired up the snowblower during a storm and it jammed. Just to look at it, he couldn’t say why the snowblower had jammed. You might say it was a problem that stumped him. Without turning it off, he reached in to clear whatever was jamming it and that, as they say, was the end of his career as a concert pianist.

I can’t help but speculate here. Given that my uncle Jeff ultimately succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease, I wonder if his tussle with the snowblower wasn’t one of its early symptoms. It’s the sort of thing I think about on a cold winter’s night as I wrap all eight of my fingers and my two intact thumbs around a mug of hot chocolate.

Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Snow Clearing on Ryerson Campus, Toronto, ON
Categories
Street Photography

Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: the case of the flying man

Man Runs to Union Station, Toronto

On a wet snowy afternoon, I went to the southwest corner of the Front/Bay intersection to catch people rushing down to Union Station to catch the train. I positioned myself a couple steps down where the stairs on the corner follow the slope of the street. That way, I could shoot lower to the ground which had turned wet with a light snowfall. I was after reflections of people walking across the reflective surface. That’s when I caught a man running so fast that he had enough lift to fly across the pavement. I have the proof. I captured a photo of it. A pox on your house if you try to refute the evidence of my unaltered photograph.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting photos of Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFO’s. Speaking of UFO’s (or UAP’s as the US “Intelligence” community calls them), I note that 2021 was a banner year for unexplained sightings. On June 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (US) released a report on 144 sightings of “unidentified aerial phenomenon” (sic) which it has assessed. Of the 144 sightings, the intelligence community has explained only one. It remains open to the possibility that these were sightings of airborne aliens. You can read more on CNN’s web site.

In November, defense officials announced that they would be establishing a new task force to investigate these and other related phenomena (wood faeries? bridge trolls?). Although this appears to have happened under the aegis of the Biden administration, in fact, it was the Trump administration that imposed the requirement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence submit a report to Congress. Is anyone surprised?

Gazing into my crystal ball, I see a period, after Trump shuffles off this mortal coil, of interminable Trump sightings (think Elvis) supplemented with seances licensed of course by Ivanka & Co., the hereditary grifters.

In the meantime, I offer this image to the new task force as its 145th UAP. A man hovers above the ground. How is this even possible? Unless … maybe this is an alien disguised as a man.