What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: UFOs and the Government

This week, a lot of people are wrong about aliens and UFOs.

On June 5, The Debrief revealed that U.S. intelligence agent/whistleblower David Charles Grusch had provided evidence to Congress and the Intelligence Community’s inspector general’s office about the existence of a secret government program to reverse engineer technology recovered from crashed alien spacecraft. Grusch contends he was illegally retaliated against for disclosing this story, and that’s why he’s blowing the whistle.

This news inspired the Congressional Oversight Committee to plan a hearing on the allegations. All this, combined with another congressional hearing on the subject and recent high profile news reports detailing the Pentagon’s (real) UFO program, has convinced many that the government is finally ready to reveal that aliens are real and it has been jealously guarding knowledge of UFOs since at least the 1940s. Big if true.

Despite the sheen of authenticity provided by Grusch’s background and the seeming curiosity of lawmakers, the whistleblower’s story gets more shaky the further you look into it. It seems to follow a familiar pattern in the long history of UFO activists attempting to get the government to admit that aliens are real and the government responding, “we looked into it, and it’s not all that.”

The initial sign of bullshit

The first sign that points to this story being fake is that Grusch has provided no evidence of his claims—no photos, no videos, no documents. It’s just a man making claims, and the claims are extraordinary. Grusch says we’ve recovered many downed crafts, that there were often alien bodies in them, and that aliens have killed humans in recent history. According to Grusch, all of this is being covered up by a shady “them” consisting of private defense contractors, higher-ups in the U.S. intelligence community, a host of foreign states, and even Pope Pius IX.

Free speech means you can tell alien stories to congress, even if they aren’t true

In order for Grusch’s to deliver his testimony publicly, he was required to have it cleared by the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review at the Department of Defense. The agency reviews testimony to make sure it doesn’t reveal classified information, and they basically said, “You’re free to talk about all of this.” This might seem to indicate official approval of the story, but it actually strongly points to Grusch’s claims being pure fiction.

The DoD doesn’t check if something someone says is true, just that it isn’t classified. If aliens had killed Americans, and foreign governments really were reverse engineering UFOs, the Department of Defense would certainly have heard about it. Some aspect of it would be classified, and the DoD’s response would have been “Shut. Up.” But as it is, the DoD’s position is: “Go ahead and talk about aliens. It’s got nothing to do with us.”

Grusch also claims that other nations—among them, China, Italy, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—have been aware of these alien craft for decades, and have their own secret programs. It’s possible that all these governments have worked together for 80 years to keep any evidence of this from slipping out, but it seems highly unlikely. You can’t prove it, of course, but, like almost everything alien related, there’s not much evidence for it.

Occam’s razor and the long history of UFO myths

It’s impossible to prove a negative—to say for certain that there isn’t an alien craft retrieval program—so here’s an alternative theory to weigh against this story: It could be that Grusch is a well-meaning guy who believes in a bunch of weird stuff.

There are a lot of people who are dead sure that the U.S. has recovered UFOs, and that the government will eventually open the black files that will prove it is all true. Most of these people are kooks, but some hold important positions within the private and public sectors—physicists, billionaires, senators, and washed-up rock stars alike are UFO believers. Since the initial flying saucer craze of the 1950s, UFO zealots have built a shared mythology around aliens visiting Earth (Roswell, Area 51, abductions, and much more) out of bits and pieces—weird things that we don’t have enough evidence to explain, actual secret government programs being misinterpreted, etc.

This is why the UFO myth can seem really convincing, until you examine its individual claims with skepticism—it’s in the specifics that things fall apart. But if you surround yourself with people (especially “important” people) who believe in something hard enough (and Grusch’s resume includes a stint in the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force) it’s got to rub off on you, even to the point of going to congress and testifying under oath that we have recovered UFOs and fought battles with aliens.

I’d really like to be wrong—I want E.T. to take me to his home planet (and away from this one) as much as anyone—so I hope the upcoming congressional hearings finally reveal the truth. But I have a feeling the “truth” is something like, “maybe there are aliens, but we don’t have any solid evidence for it.”