Ralph Blumenthal

Ralph Blumenthal joined the New York Times as a news clerk in June 1964 after editing the City College of New York newspaper The Campus and attending the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He served as metro and Westchester correspondent (1964 to 1968), foreign correspondent in West Germany, South Vietnam and Cambodia (1968 to 1971), investigative and crime reporter (1971 to 1994), arts and culture reporter (1994 to 2003) and Texas correspondent and Southwest bureau chief (2003 to 2008), returning to the metro staff in 2008. He retired as a staffer in 2009 and continued as a contributor.¹

His stated credits include leading the Times metro team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing, the 1987 team coverage of the Tawana Brawley case, reporting on Geraldine Ferraro and her husband John Zaccaro in 1984, and the first of his seven books, Last Days of the Sicilians (1988), on the FBI's Pizza Connection case. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, held a Distinguished Lecturer appointment at Baruch College from 2010 and taught summers at Phillips Exeter Academy.¹

UFO reporting

Blumenthal's website states that "as a Times contributor after retiring as a staffer in 2009, I reported on the secret Pentagon unit investigating UFOs." His seventh book, The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack, was published by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press on March 15, 2021; in 2023 he and his wife Deborah published UFOHS!: Mysteries in the Sky, a children's picture book.¹

Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote that when Leslie Kean, whom he described as an "old friend," called him in October 2017 he was "at work on a biography of the Harvard psychiatrist and alien-abduction researcher John Mack." Blumenthal e-mailed executive editor Dean Baquet to say they wanted to pitch "a sensational and highly confidential time-sensitive story" about a "senior U.S. intelligence official who abruptly quit last month" who had decided to expose "a deeply secret program, long mythologized but now confirmed." After a meeting with the Times's Washington bureau the paper agreed and assigned Helene Cooper.² Blumenthal and Kean later shared bylines on a July 2020 Times article that was corrected the next day on the question of Harry Reid's belief about retrieved materials, and on the 2023 reporting on David Grusch.²³ See December 2017 New York Times AATIP Report.