Watters’ World UFO Convention - O’Reilly.

[link to vimeo.com (secure)] Last week, The O’Reilly Factor made room for a five-minute clip of something called “Watters World.” (See below) Relatively unfamiliar with the Fox News culture, De Void had never heard of Jesse Watters. His forte, as subsequent research suggests, involves sticking a microphone in strangers’ faces and letting them make idiots of themselves, which is almost as easy as squashing caterpillars.

This installment finds the Ed Helms wannabe shooting fish in a barrel in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the International UFO Congress went down last month. Up and running for 25 years and billing itself as “The Guinness World Record holding largest UFO convention,” the IUC is what you’d call a target-rich environment. Chock full o’ space alien booths, blowup dolls, Little Green Men sculptures, and visually conspicuous abductees eager to share their adventures, the lobby is jammed with sideshow cash cows that help pay the rent. Like, who else is going to help pay the rent at a UFO convention? Apple? General Dynamics? Taco Bell? The predictable result, of course, is that few journalists, particularly the standup blow-drys, can make it past the eye candy and into the lecture halls for the meat ‘n taters. One could argue that mainstream media coverage of the IUC serves as a template for America’s broader relationship with The Great Taboo, where clichés, sound bites, and sideways glances are plenty sufficient for diversionary weekend fare. Miss something that truly freaked out officialdom? Never mind, we got a 20-second seg from a dude who got butt-probed by Reptoids and has the illustrations to prove it. In fact, a Phoenix station’s treatment of the IUC gathering in 2014 so perfectly mirrored the current state of inquiry, De Void invented the Jessica Flores Disembodied Head Award for UFO Journalism in tribute. Unfortunately, Jesse Watters is ineligible because the equally clueless Jessica Flores actually thought she was doing real reporting.