The Biggest Aerospace Story Ever (Yawn)

While our gaze was momentarily distracted by the aviation party out in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago, we missed the biggest aerospace story in history. In fact, it was the biggest anything in history, short of the emergence of life on earth. It was, of course, a credible witness telling the U.S. Congress that the government is in possession of and has been reverse engineering alien spacecraft. Oh, and bodies. Well, if not bodies, at least so-called non-human biologics.

To our credit, AVweb reported in June that this hearing was planned, but when it actually happened, we gave it a pass. Other outlets covered it, but gave it subdued play. Think about this. Aliens have visited earth, according to the claim, and we’re putting Barbie above the fold?

What’s going on here? This is potentially bigger than the Second Coming, what with what must be lightspeed-capable spacecraft and, to use the latest vernacular, NHI or non-human intelligence. I think we all know what’s going on. The story is just so insanely unbelievable that to protect our own mental equilibrium from being pushed over the edge into mass hysteria, we tune it out as a survival reaction, news editors included. File it under hoax and stay on guard for the next viral claim to tax our ability to stay tethered to reality by the thinnest filament.

To summarize, David Grusch is a former Air Force officer and worked for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. Representing the NRO, he worked with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, whose job was to chase down leads and data related to UAP sightings. During that work, Grusch said in this interview, he discovered that the U.S. had retrieved crashed non-terrestrial spacecraft and non-human remains and that private companies were involved in this work in deep black programs.

Some of this came to light because Grusch had filed a whistleblower complaint that the government was attempting to suppress. His complaint was that funds were being misused by the companies involved and the programs—plural—needed congressional oversight to rein in the fraud. The gist of the complaint was the fraud, not strictly the suppression of information about alien technology. Also, Grusch didn’t claim hands on or eyes on with this alien tech, but claimed to have talked to people who had.

Indeed, that was the point of the hearing, to craft a congressional response to force the government to reveal more of what it knows about UAPs. That’s what happened, too. An amendment was added to the current defense bill that would require the administration to turn over what intelligence and data it has on UAP sightings, presumably to include actual spacecraft and non-human remains.

Grusch’s claims seemed so fantastical that even The New York Times demurred on the biggest story of human civilization. Instead, the story was broken by two independent journalists, Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, on a website called The Debrief. You can hear an interview with Kean here. Make your own judgment, but I don’t reckon her to be a UFO crazy or a conspiracy nut. The Times was evidently queasy enough to spike the story and they weren’t alone. (Just as an aside, my congressman sent out a poll asking if Congress should investigate these claims. Fifty one percent said it shouldn't.)

There’s a general aviation connection here, which is why I’m stepping to the edge of the Twilight Zone. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Ryan Graves, a former naval aviator who testified that UAP sightings were anything but rare for Navy pilots. He said in Navy units he served in, UAP sightings were routine. He has formed Americans for Safe Aerospace to encourage pilots to report UAP sightings without worrying about the stigma. I’ve been trying for weeks to contact and interview Graves, with no response other than half-hearted emails from his communications person. However good an idea ASA might or might not be, it’s difficult to judge its seriousness.

But I will put the question out there, which you can address in the comments or via email to me, if you prefer. Have you experienced a UAP sighting? The thousands of airline flights a day represent millions of eyeball hours a year of trained professionals looking out the window. If these sightings represent something real and perhaps routine, shouldn’t airline and civil pilots see a pattern of it? We haven’t heard a peep from our thousands of readers.  

We have reported on the military sightings which, despite lack of public supporting data, strike me as credible. If they are hoaxes, they are good hoaxes. I just accept that for the time being, they are unexplained. The push from Congress is to find out if the government is withholding things it knows about these sightings and UAP in general. I’m the reverse of a conspiracy theorist, so if there’s something there, show us and we’ll take it from there.

As for Grusch, I don’t think he’s a UFO crazy, either. I think as a trained intelligence operative, he did his job, asked questions and got answers that he is taking at face value. For a multitude of reasons, I don’t think the answers he was given are real. They could be disinformation for a government and involved companies naturally inclined toward secrecy or by companies intent on keeping the government money flowing for a black program. You can gaslight yourself to the edge of sanity by asking, well, if they want to keep it secret, why would they fabricate something as shocking as alien ships and bodies? Who would expect such a claim to remain secret? Turn up the gaslight to full bright by wondering if same is now no longer secret. Or that this is somehow part of a grand plan to pull back the curtain.

As this thing unfolds, I don’t think it’s going away. It’s binary. It’s either true, or it’s not. If it is true, it will soon be time for someone to march into a Senate hearing room with the engine control unit from a crashed Tic-Toc and ET’s head in a glass jar. Nothing less will do. And honestly, I'm not all that sure that will even be enough.

As for the UAP sightings so impressively recorded on military multi-sensor HUDs, I’m reminded of Isaac Newton, arguably the smartest man who ever lived. By age 24, he had invented calculus and explained the motion of the planets in incontrovertible mathematical elegance. Almost. There was some wobble in the data that Newton couldn’t quite explain and he settled for the notion that God created the whole thing and would have to intervene to smooth things out. A century of scientific advancement later, Joseph-Louis Lagrange explained that maybe God wasn’t involved at all.

Call me a cynical agnostic, but I’m gonna need a little more science and a lot less rumor before I jump the gap between unexplained HUD footage and the existence of aliens on earth. After all, Scully told Mulder that if the truth was out there, so were lies.