What's up with the UFO's?
During the summer, the U.S. Congress held hearings on UFO’s: https://youtu.be/SNgoul4vyDM
They interviewed two former Navy pilots (Ryan Graves and David Fravor), both of whom saw UFO’s while flying, and one former Air Force Intelligence Officer (David Grusch), who was a member of the government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (an organization devoted to explaining UFOs) from 2019-2022.
The last of these was the most sensational. David Grusch claimed to have spoken to multiple people in the government who informed him about the government’s secret UFO crash retrieval program. He says the U.S. government has retrieved a dozen crashed alien spacecraft, some of which had dead pilots inside. He also says that some people have been killed by aliens, as well as by the government trying to cover up the aliens. He does not claim to have seen any of the spaceships or aliens first-hand, however.
Several times during the hearing, he said that he couldn’t answer some question in a public setting but could only answer in a Secure Compartmented Information Facility. E.g., he knows where the alien spacecraft are kept, but he couldn’t reveal that in a public setting, as it is classified.
The members of Congress all took this quite seriously. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who believes the government has recovered alien spaceships (https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1310464836143931), was there. Matt Gaetz, who also claims to have seen evidence of the spaceships (https://twitter.com/UAPJames/status/1634449226225659908), was there. The interest was bipartisan; even AOC participated seriously.
Now, what the heck is going on?
I can think of five theories.
1. Actual Aliens
This would be the coolest explanation. But it seems incredible on its face. But it isn’t obvious why it strikes us as incredible.
It is sometimes said that other planets are too far away, and according to the theory of relativity, it’s impossible to travel faster than light. However, as explained in another post (https://fakenous.substack.com/p/aliens), any extra-terrestrial civilizations would probably be millions of years more advanced than us. They would probably have cured aging millions of years ago. It’s not infeasible for such a civilization to have sent craft out hundreds or thousands of years ago.
I guess the main reason for the sense of incredibility is simply that aliens arriving on Earth would be very different from any other events that we’re familiar with, either in our own lives or in history. However, it’s not clear that this should really make it super-improbable.
Nevertheless, there are the following objections to the actual alien theory:
According to Grusch, Italy captured an alien ship in the 1930’s, so it goes back at least that far. Multiple governments have been keeping this amazing secret for the last 90+ years. Many people must have been involved in the spaceship retrieval programs over that time. It’s unlikely that the secret would have been successfully kept this long.
Everything that Grusch has publicly revealed was cleared for public release by the government, sc., the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review. When DOPSR clears information for public release, they are not certifying it as accurate; they are just saying it doesn’t reveal any classified information. But the stuff Grusch said, if true, would surely be classified. If the government was really running this secret program, surely DOPSR would not have approved Grusch’s revealing that fact.
Elon Musk’s argument:
Modern (human) commercial aircraft have a probability of around 1 in 11 million of crashing per flight (https://euflightcompensation.com/how-many-planes-crash-in-a-year/). If aliens traveled light years to get here, it’s safe to assume they are vastly more advanced than us, so their ships should be much safer than our airplanes. It is therefore unlikely that the U.S. government would have found a dozen crashed alien ships … unless the aliens were doing at least thousands of flights a day. If they were doing that, it seems likely that there would be more evidence of this.
It seems unlikely in general that the arrival of intelligent life from other planets would have still had so little overall impact on our society. The aliens showed up 90+ years ago, and I guess they’ve just been secretly flying around, periodically abducting someone in a field and probing them?
2. David Grusch Is Crazy
Perhaps, but he really doesn’t talk like a crazy person. If he is, it’s some new kind of craziness that doesn’t stop you from having a highly successful career and talking just like a normal person, all except for the fact that you believe in aliens.
3. David Grusch Is a Liar
This seems more likely than craziness.
Why would he lie? Hard to say; people have lots of inscrutable motives. Maybe he wants media attention. Maybe he plans to write a best-selling book. Or maybe someone else in the government told him to lie. Which brings us to the next explanation . . .
4. Government Psyop
Perhaps the government is for some reason trying to make people think we have alien spaceships — or at least to wonder whether we do. This isn’t totally off the wall, as the government does stuff like this (i.e., they run psychological operations to deceive populations for strategic reasons; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_operations_(United_States)).
David Grusch, then, needn’t be lying or crazy; he may be reporting what people in the government really told him. It’s just that those people were lying.
The videos of UFOs that we’ve recently seen in the media were released by the military, which confirmed that they were real military videos but neglected to mention that there are very plausible mundane explanations for them. I discuss these in my previous post, https://fakenous.substack.com/p/aliens.
Why would the government do this? I don’t know. Some suggest it may be to distract us from some other issue, or to intimidate foreign powers (https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/145s4e9/is_the_recent_ufo_news_actually_a_cia_psyop_to/). Or maybe they are trying to produce some political effect, like discrediting some of the crazier members of Congress (you know, like Matt Gaetz and AOC).
Human motives for deception are so various that it’s hard to say, and the inability to identify why someone would be lying isn’t strong evidence against their doing so.
5. Misunderstanding
Leading UFO debunker Mick West proposes that this may all be a result of misunderstanding. Perhaps the U.S. government has a secret crash retrieval program, not for alien ships but for foreign military craft. (Compare the time when we spent $5 billion retrieving a sunken Soviet submarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian.)
When the military retrieves these foreign aircraft, ships, or submarines, they take them apart, then send parts of them to scientists to try to reverse engineer them. The scientists are not read in on where these parts came from. Let’s say someone involved in the project comes up with the idea that they’re working on reverse engineering alien technology. A rumor spreads, which a bunch of people come to believe. Years later, one of those people winds up telling David Grusch that the government has retrieved alien spacecraft and is reverse engineering them.
. . .
What’s the most likely explanation? I want it to be #1, but #5 sounds the most likely so far. Anyone have any other ideas?
I think given how widespread these stories are from different people within the government, a psyop is more likely than rumors gone awry. I don't think convincing the Chinese or the Russians that the Pentagon has access to alien technology makes much sense either since those countries are not stupid and the U.S. already has superior technology that is known to them. I think, given the present moment, that the most likely scenario is a psyop on the general public in the U.S. by the Pentagon to measure how impressionable the general public is in believing implausible stories. That tracks with other recent developments like how DHS tried creating a Disinformation Governance Board last year
Having retired from the US military and later US Government service, I can say that the military and government are too disjointed and parochial to keep a secret long term or to run a sustained psyop of this scale. I'd say that explanation 5 makes the most sense.