The National Geographic Channel's "Chasing UFOs" - How Credible Will It Be?

The National Geographic Channel is premiering a new "reality TV" series, Chasing UFOs, on June 29. 

"A team of trained investigators sets out to uncover the truth about UFOs. But they’re not just looking for more stories on extraterrestrial activity—they want answers. Risking it all, this team of scientists and UFO researchers investigate and dissect some of the most mysterious sightings on the planet to unearth stunning new evidence. The data they collect on these adventures paints an entirely new picture of what we know about these strange lights in the sky."

To judge from this teaser video,  it seems that investigating UFOs involves a lot of car chases and extraterrestrial spotlights. As best I can tell, this video has nothing to do with the real world.

There are three principal "investigators":

1. Ben McGee, Physical Scientist, THE SKEPTIC. The world of  skeptical UFO researchers is pretty small, but I've never heard of this guy. There isn't a lot about him on the web, either. " A space-minded geoscientist, Ben is engaged in the development of xenoarchaeology - a speculative form of archaeology exploring possible alien life and culture....A respected field researcher with experience in nuclear rocketry, planetary geology, hydrology and glaciology, Ben's job is to gather evidence at proposed sites of unexplained occurrences and scientifically determine its origin." Wikipedia says that Xenoarchaeology is "a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in science fiction works concerned with the physical remains of past (but not necessarily extinct) alien life and cultures. It is not practiced by mainstream archaeologists." It's not the same thing as "Ancient Astronauts," but the latter is included within it.
2. 
   Erin Ryder, Tech and Recon THE 'SKELIEVER'. "Lara Croft.  Amelia Earhart.  Dana Scully. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, there are few hard-hitting, tough-as-nails females as fearless as Erin Ryder... Ryder is a force to be reckoned with not only for her brains and brawn, but also for her industry-leading knowledge of all things tech.  Her years of experience investigating unsubstantiated claims make her an expert in the field of alien/ghost-hunting technology.  Ryder "geeks out" over thermal cameras, Geiger counters and night vision scopes and can't wait to use the latest technology to investigate new and old UFO cases alike."
   
   
   
   3. James Fox, UFOlogist THE BELIEVER. Well, here is somebody who has a track record in UFOlogy. He is a documentary filmmaker, an associate of UFO author Leslie Kean. He's the guy who claimed that Buzz Aldrin was followed to the moon by a fleet of UFOs, but was paid off by Paul Allen to not tell his story.
   
   
    

More worrisome still, the series website is filled with misinformation about UFOs. Here are a few examples, by no means a complete list:

• "Astronaut Buzz Aldrin has stated on multiple occasions that his crew saw a UFO outside their shuttle during the Apollo 11 mission." Not true. Wikipedia says of Aldrin, "In 2005, while being interviewed for a documentary titled First on the Moon: The Untold Story, Aldrin told an interviewer that they saw an unidentified flying object. Aldrin told David Morrison, a NASA Astrobiology Institute Senior Scientist, that the documentary cut the crew's conclusion that they were probably seeing one of four detached spacecraft adapter panels. Their S-IVB upper stage was 6,000 miles away, but the four panels were jettisoned before the S-IVB made its separation maneuver so they would closely follow the Apollo 11 spacecraft until its first midcourse correction.^"
• ^"Former president Jimmy Carter reported seeing an unidentified flying object while working as a peanut farmer in southwest Georgia." Highly misleading.Way back in the Humanist magazine, July/August, 1977, I wrote "President Carter's 'UFO' Is Identified as the Planet Venus." So this fact has been known for more than thirty years. Even UFO proponents like Jerome Clark accept that Carter's "UFO" is simply a misidentification of Venus. Disingenuous UFO proponents love to mention the Carter sighting, but conceal its explanation. For example, Leslie Kean. That's one easy way to tell which UFOlogists are trying to fool you: if they present the Carter UFO as "unexplained," they are either totally incompetent, or else they intend to misinform.

Of course, we haven't seen the first episode yet, so we don't know if the show will really be as unrealistic and misleading as its advance publicity suggests.