Walter Kirn is an American novelist, essayist, critic, and journalist. Educated at Princeton and Oxford, he wrote fiction and criticism for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, Time, and New York magazine. His novels Thumbsucker and Up in the Air were adapted into feature films, while Blood Will Out examined his relationship with a man later exposed as an impostor and murderer.

In 2023, Kirn and David Samuels launched County Highway, a print publication styled after a nineteenth-century American newspaper. As editor-at-large, Kirn has pursued stories about overlooked places, institutional distrust, technology, and contemporary belief. He also co-hosts America This Week with Matt Taibbi, bringing a skeptical attitude toward elite narratives and media consensus to current events.

Kirn entered the modern UAP story by traveling to Colorado to interview intelligence whistleblower David Grusch. His County Highway profile focused on Grusch as a person and on the moral effects of alleged secrecy rather than merely repeating technical claims. Kirn has since discussed information from unnamed aerospace and intelligence contacts, including claims of craft moving through space. Those reports remain source testimony without publicly available sensor data.

Kirn approaches media coverage of UAP as a literary investigation of credibility, power, and the costs of hidden knowledge. His own experience being deceived by “Clark Rockefeller” gives his interest in charismatic and institutionally credentialed sources an unusual edge, though it does not guarantee correct judgment. He treats whistleblower testimony as a human and political story while leaving the most extraordinary claims dependent on evidence that has yet to be released.