What People Get Wrong This Week: UFOs and the Government
This week, a lot of people are wrong about aliens and UFOs.
On June 5, The Debrief reported that U.S. intelligence agent/whistleblower David Charles Grush provided evidence to Congress and the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General that there was a secret government program to reverse-engineer technology recovered from crashed alien spacecraft. Grush claims that he was subjected to illegal revenge for revealing this story, which is why he blows the whistle.
The news inspired the Congressional Oversight Committee to schedule a hearing on the allegations. All of this, combined with yet another congressional hearing on the matter and recent high-profile news detailing the (real) Pentagon UFO program , has convinced many that the government is finally ready to reveal that aliens are real and are jealously guarding UFO knowledge. at least since the 1940s. Big if true.
Despite the brilliance of credibility provided by Grush’s past and the apparent curiosity of legislators, the whistleblower’s story becomes more shaky the further you look into it. This seems to be following a familiar pattern in the long history of UFO activists trying to get the government to admit that aliens are real, and the government responded, ” We’ve looked into it, and there’s more to come. ”
The initial sign of shit
The first indication that this story is fake is that Grush did not provide any evidence of his claims – no photos, no videos, no documents. It’s just a person making claims, and claims are extraordinary. Grush says that we found a lot of crashed ships, that they often contained the bodies of aliens, and that aliens have killed people in recent history. All of this is being covered up by a dubious “them,” Grush says, made up of private defense contractors, senior figures in the U.S. intelligence community, a host of foreign nations, and even Pope Pius IX.
Free speech means you can tell Congress stories about aliens, even if they aren’t true.
In order for Grush to publicly present his testimony, he was required to have it approved by the Department of Defense’s Defense Office of Pre-Publishing and Security Review. The agency checks the testimony to make sure they don’t reveal classified information, and they basically said, “You’re free to talk about all of this.” This may appear to indicate an official endorsement of the story, but it actually strongly indicates that Grush’s claims are pure fiction.
The Department of Defense does not check whether something someone says is true, only that it is not classified. If aliens killed Americans and foreign governments were actually reverse engineering UFOs, the Department of Defense would surely know about it. Some aspects of this would have been classified, and the Department of Defense’s response would have been “Shut up. Up.” But be that as it may, the position of the Department of Defense is: “Let’s talk about aliens. It has nothing to do with us.”
Grush also claims that other countries, including China, Italy, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have known about these alien ships for decades and have their own secret programs. It is possible that all these governments have worked together for 80 years to prevent any evidence of this from being leaked, but this seems unlikely. You can’t prove it, of course, but like pretty much anything to do with aliens, there isn’t much evidence for it.
Occam’s Razor and the long history of UFO myths
It’s impossible to prove otherwise – it’s safe to say that there is no program to find alien ships – so here’s an alternative theory that contradicts this story: perhaps Grush is a well-meaning guy who believes in a bunch of strange things.
There are many people who are absolutely certain that the US has discovered UFOs and that the government will eventually open the black files that will prove it all true. Most of these people are eccentrics, but some of them hold important positions in the private and public sectors – physicists , billionaires , senators and former rock stars all believe in UFOs alike. Ever since the flying saucer craze in the 1950s, UFO fanatics have built a common mythology about aliens visiting Earth (Roswell, Area 51, abductions, and more) out of bits and pieces—strange things we don’t have enough evidence to back up. explain, actual secret government programs are misinterpreted, etc.
That’s why the UFO myth can seem really compelling until you examine its individual claims with skepticism – everything falls apart in detail. But if you surround yourself with people (especially “important ones”) who believe in something solid enough (and Grush has a job with the Pentagon Unidentified Air Phenomena Task Force on his resume), it should reflect on you, to the point that you to Congress and testifying under oath that we have discovered UFOs and fought aliens.
I really would like to be wrong – I want an alien to take me to my home planet (and away from it) just like everyone else – so I hope that the upcoming congressional hearings will finally reveal the truth. But I have a feeling that “truth” is something along the lines of “maybe aliens exist, but we don’t have hard evidence for that.”