The most anticipated remarks, however, came from a former military-intelligence officer named David Grusch, who went public with his account
just last month. Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on
national security that the American government has spent decades
secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground,
and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The
government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology,
according to Grusch. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without
proper supervision by Congress.
In
the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to
lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this
effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs.
A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S.
military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on
Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or by people within the government? Both.
After
not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress
has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count
today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had
no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions
about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and
there has been considerable hype—says
more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as
it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington
state and crash landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever
today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more
than it’s letting on.
Read: Why everyone is suddenly talking about aliens
That sentiment is not new, nor is Americans’ belief in conspiracy theories. Though research suggests
that conspiracy thinking is not getting worse in the modern-day United
States, we are in a moment of acute public curiosity about—and
acceptance of—conspiracism. Compared with QAnon, vaccine microchips, and stolen elections,
a big UFO cover-up might seem almost reasonable—even if that cover-up
involves, as Grusch previously claimed in an interview, the military
discovering the “dead pilots” of alien craft. (In Congress today, Grusch
declined to give specifics about this and many other claims, saying
that there was only so much he could disclose to the public and that he
could elaborate in a closed setting.)
The
past several years have coincided with an unprecedented mainstreaming
of UFO culture. In 2017, when an interstellar object showed up in our
solar system, most scientists agreed that it was an asteroid or a comet,
but some said it could have been an alien spaceship. (The Harvard
professor leading the latter camp, Avi Loeb, recently led an expedition to the seafloor to recover material that he believes could be from alien spacecraft.) Later that year, The New York Times and other news outlets revealed that the Pentagon had a covert program dedicated to cataloging UFOs. Then NASA decided to weigh in on the topic after years of steering clear, and convened a team to consider UFOs in a “scientific perspective.” And who can forget the spy balloons that the military shot out of the sky this year?
These
events have unfolded against a shift in public knowledge about the
universe beyond Earth, which might help explain why people are
interested. In the 1940s, the only planets we knew of were the ones
around our sun, and scientists had only recently determined that there
were galaxies other than our own. Today, astronomers have discovered
more than 5,000 exoplanets, and telescopes can see nearly all the way
back to the Big Bang. In the face of so many wonders, the question of
whether we’re sharing them with anyone else becomes more urgent, and
might even seem more answerable. “I think people are just ready or at
least excited about the possibilities of alien contact, maybe more than
ever,” Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space
Institute of Science, told me.
Read: NASA learns the ugly truth about UFOs
Congress
has contributed to this mainstreaming too. Under the instruction of
lawmakers, the Pentagon last year established a special office dedicated
to investigating reports of unexplainable phenomena in the sky, at sea,
and on land. The effort has been unusually bipartisan, with both
far-right Republicans and progressive Democrats calling on the military
to be more transparent. This month, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced
legislation that would create a commission with the authority to
declassify government documents about UFOs. “The American public has a
right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human
intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said in a statement.
Yes, we do. But some undisclosed documents about UFOs is not synonymous with incontrovertible evidence that aliens have visited Earth.
UFOs are just that—objects that are flying, and that we cannot yet
identify. If the military is misusing taxpayer money to investigate
mysterious debris it doesn’t recognize, that’s bad, whether it’s the
remnants of drones from another nation or a non-human craft. “If that’s
the case, and auditors have not been allowed into these programs and
there’s illegal layers of secrecy,” Haqq Misra said, “then that’s really
important to disclose, independent of any connection to anything
else”—anything otherworldly. But even as lawmakers assert that UFOs are
primarily a national-security concern, by invoking aliens in their
discussions, they lend credence to the idea that a connection between
the two exists.
Read: What the UFO discussion really needs
Grusch
was careful to tell lawmakers that he was only “speaking to the facts
as I have been told them”—that is, he has not seen any evidence of alien
wreckage or its inhabitants himself. And in general, though his claims
are steeped in the language of authority, he simply has not been able to
offer any concrete proof. The news website that first published
Grusch’s claims reported that the Pentagon had cleared him to speak
publicly, but that means only that his remarks don’t contain classified
information, not that they’re true. Testifying under oath before
Congress is not a measure of truth, either. Outside the hearing, some
lawmakers seemed like they didn’t know what to make of the claims.
The
prospect of extraterrestrial interlopers may be a national-security
question, but it’s also a scientific one. Science requires data, and
secondhand accounts just aren’t data. “When NASA brings back rocks on
the moon, those rocks are shared with qualified people,” David Spergel,
an astrophysicist at Princeton who chaired NASA’s committee on UFOs,
told me. “Imagine we had some samples of some craft, [and] we really
want to understand what it was. You would make materials from those
small samples available for labs anywhere in the world.” In other words,
meaningful testimony would show evidence of alien ships and
pilots, not just tell the public about them. “That would be pretty
awesome,” he said, but it’s not what we’ve got. Today, we heard some
extraordinary claims, and, to quote Carl Sagan, they require
extraordinary evidence.
