WASHINGTON — The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.
Retired Maj. David Grusch’s highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress’ latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.
Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.
“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access,” he said.
Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims of a coverup. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said investigators have not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects.
Grusch says he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward. He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.
“It was very brutal and very unfortunate, some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally,” he said.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., chaired the panel’s hearing and joked to a packed audience, “Welcome to the most exciting subcommittee in Congress this week.” But members of both parties asked Grusch about his study of UFOs and the consequences he faced.
“I take it that you’re arguing what we need is real transparency and reporting systems so we can get some clarity on what’s going on out there,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
Some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not providing more details in a classified briefing or releasing images that could be shown to the public. In previous hearings, Pentagon officials showed a video taken from an F-18 military plane that showed an image of one balloon-like shape.
Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.
At that point, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”
can't believe there's still politicians suffering from weather-balloon hysteria. 
I'm unable to not see this as a psy-op. If aliens are technologically advanced enough to travel here, they're technologically advanced enough to not crash their ships and to decide whether or not we know about them.
These ufo “leaks” always and I mean always end up as a call for more MIC funding because maybe it’s the evil Chinese and Russians instead of UFOs.
It’s a sensationalist form of fear mongering. The UFOs are sensationalist bait and the prize is more feed in the trough because the piggies gotta eat.
You cannot attribute any motivation to something that is, by definition, alien.
For all we know such crashes - and awareness of their presence - could absolutely be the point of their presence, and something voluntary on their part to affect our species, for example
Highly suspicious of a psy op as well mind you (mainly because those new testimonies are so absolutely batshit insane; give actual proof already if there's something), just pointing out that's not a good argument
I think my only beef with your point is that it is nonfalsifiable. I don't think it's wrong necessarily, because sure, aliens are alien, but then we can speculate anything.
'Alien' simply means 'extraterrestrial life form'. We can debate what we mean by 'life-form' until a new pope comes over the moon but intentional, intelligent, interactive and to some degree autonomous behaviour, self-maintenance of its own structure, homeostasis, seem pretty essential. That it's evolved is not essential but seems very likely (unless its more likely that to reach such a level of technological advancement the species would normally be a superintelligent, designed type of entity).
It does not mean, as you're using it, sophistically, 'absolutely unknowable'. It would be an organism, likely evolved, and evolved functions likes intentions, desires and so on, or whatever you want to call the mechanisms that determine its behaviour, are going to reflect the fact that they are evolved. It must have basic survival mechanisms or instincts, eitherwise is would not have propagated and continued to exist. This of course changes once we consider culture, if they have something like culture (which they may not). Culture, especially if they have superintelligent control over their own biological and cultural evolution, is something which makes it more difficult to predict an alien's behaviour, I agree.
Nevertheless, saying that we 'by definition' can't know anything about something is effectively saying nothing at all about it. You might as well call it the noumenon and be done with it. Even if we just consider motivations, you seem either to be assuming that they do not have motivations, or that we cannot know if they have something like motivations, or that they perhaps do but even if they do we cannot know what any of those motivations are. Motivations are simply a way in which an organism causes behaviour in itself, in a relatively targeted and coherent way. To an extent you are correct, but if something is going to claim intelligent life exists, then we need evidence that it is life, that it is intelligent, and we need to have an idea of what that intelligence consists in, and we have no way of doing that but on the basis of our own intelligence. I haven't seen any explanation for why the claimed behaviour of these UFOs would indicate intelligence-wise, other than surveillance, but they don't need to be here to do that if they're that advanced. The only basis I have at the moment is this 'testimony'. Bar actual hard public evidence to the contrary, I'm not going to buy it, though I'd love to be proven wrong. The best explanation, if these are legit (big doubt) is that it's a kind of social experiment against us. But why would they do that?
This brings us back to Posadism: is it necessary for a space-faring civilization to be communist? A communist society implies a certain kind of morality or sense of ethics, a common basic set of agree rules for behaviour. If such a social formation is necessary for higher levels of technological advancement, then I do not think such a society would just fuck with us like this. Then again, perhaps very differently evolved intelligent species undergo completely different sets of stages of social development, and never pass through anything like feudalism, capitalism or socialism. Perhaps they have a hive-mind.
We keep on coming back to the same issue of what can we say about alien behaviour. The only behaviour we can go on empirically are earth's own. We can do that with very different species to ourselves. On that basis I do not understand their behaviour givent he testimony. Just saying they 'might, hypothetically, because we don't know' we so different that this testimony is coherent with some form of motivations is trivially true, but strikes me as bad reasoning. It makes for good science fiction and we have to think about it and be open to it, but I think there is likely in principle a way to read into behaviours what the intentions are over time when observing a social organism. Maybe we actually just have to wait to we actually encounter such life. If these testimonies are legit, then they are historically important evidence in beginning to describe and analyse the behaviour of other forms of life.
You're basing this conclusion on what exactly?
The amount of evidence these kind of 'whisteblowers' cite is often based on the idea that there have been alot of crashes and alot of acquisition of material from extremely technologically advanced extraterrestrial life forms.
I'm pointing out something very basic: consider how technologically advanced you have to be to travel from any other star system in the galaxy, let alone beyond it, to here. With current human tech, it would take around 73,000 years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.
It is literally beyond our capacity to understand how that is technically feasible. It is another or several levels of technological advancement beyond us. We might seem like dumb animals to such a species. I'm just personally not at all convinced that such a mind-bogglingly advanced species would allow itself that amount error on missions where it would crash or allow itself to be studied that often. Otherwise it seems to me that you're implying that their spy ships crash more often than our own planet's countries' spy-planes in enemy territories. I'd assume that they can travel at light-speed. If they cannot, they can still travel at such speeds that their level of technological and economic development has to be astouding. Like literally practically and technically inconceivable for us at our current level of development. I don't see how its reasonable to assume that such an intelligent species is going to be crashing all over the place, given the amount of precise planning and technical knowledge you need to get here in the first place.
Also: why is it only Americans who seem to be claiming all this shit?
Also, we are also an extremely violent species, hopefully still in the infancy of our civilizational development, so I don't see why another species, who have decided not to fuck us over when they could easily annihilate us, would think it desirable, wise, or whatever, to give us access to their tech.
Also: WTF would the US government announce that there were aliens? Why would a government, which has killed countless people over far less, allow a whisteblower, to reveal to the world, in front of Congress, information that would fundamentally alter our conception of ourselves and our place in the cosmos, of the same cultural importance as the Copernican Revolution or the theory of evolution by natural selection?
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I think you're correct that they might just be some relatively low tech for the alien species in question. Maybe they're lost. The issue here is that we're lost now in a world of pure possibility. Based on what we're being told now however their function seems unclear but they seem to have intelligence and seem to be doing reconnaissance? Maybe that still effect on how advanced this (relatively non-advanced) tech is, that for them its like cluster munitions are for us is like Neon Genesis Evangelion. An actually interesting philosophical problem is raises is what the criteria and conditions are for identifying the type of behaviour that other life forms are engaging in. Like we feel confident with other terrestrial animals (perhaps frequently incorrectly) when we judge the intentions or functions of their behaviour, even when they are very different to us. Once we are considering off-world beings with different biological histories (even assuming they likely evolved through natural selection) then the question becomes trickier. Maybe they achieved communism and once a society takes control of itself in this way and plans its own evolutionary trajectory, and natural selection is no longer the main driving factor, then perhaps the behaviour of the organism becomes less and less predictable, based on our knowledge of terrestrial life forms.
Perhaps their level of development means that their behaviour is so different we do not really have a reasoable way to do this. This seems to me the main argument against my point that it seems unlikely that all these reports and crashes would be genuine, but again that seems to involve more unfounded speculation.
And maybe they don't care if we know they are here, but that strikes me as strange. Maybe their sense of ethics (or lack thereof) means that a notion like the moral quandary of intervening in the history and development of another species doesn't strike them as a problem. Who knows.
Again I'd like to be a Posadist and believe that the Vulcans are coming to save us and bring us fully automated luxury space communism. Or maybe it's an experiment. Maybe it's a test. Maybe they are treating us as a social experiment the way we treat rats and insect and microorganisms in petri dishes.
So which one is it then? You're saying it's pointless to speculate and then you go ahead and speculate.
It's not, there have been cases all over the world.
I'm not 100% convinced of anything but just outright dismissing it all doesn't seem wise to me. I guess we'll see soon enough if this keeps on rolling. I don't get why people feel the need to have strong rigid opinions on this, it's fine to just not know and be intrigued.
It's not speculation. I think its just empirical reasoning. I'm also intrigued. Alien life intrigues me beyond anything also, except maybe superintelligent AI and communism. But my conclusions have to be based on all the empirical info I have available, including about the general nature of technology and the social context in which this is happening. It's not like this is Arrival and we're seeing the ships arrive. It's literally just the US government allowing (for God-knows-what-reason) an (never really ex) spook to go before the world and say aliens exist and that they're crashed here multiple times with tech. Also, while UFOs are 'spotted' all over the world, its overwhelmingly westerns, and especially Americans, who claim the vast majority of sightings (which is very suspicious already). If someone says that this is because other people report it less, that might be true, but not only do I doubt it, but that is really arguing from a negative, so speculating.
You think I'm contradicting myself when I'm not. Read those two sentences again. Just because I encounter technology that is beyond my capacity (not in principle but concretely or practically, due to lack of theoretical understanding) to understand how it works, that doesn't in any way get in the way of the general reasoning I can make about technology in general; more particular, that the complexity of technology, which relies in an important way on theoretical understanding such as quantum theory in modern tech, should lead to higher levels of functioning. Also there's the social context: an alien species is sending pilots across the galaxy to...who knows? And then they are going to risk showing themselves? Why do this? If they could hide themselves getting here, they could observe us from a distance. Indeed if they're here, they can obviously do so if they can systematically come here at will. Why come near and crash? I'm really just making a basic point that the level of technological development has relations to how efficiently the tech functions on an average attempt. That's completely independent of whether or not we as a species can understand their tech. It's more advanced than ours, and that implies certain things about its functioning. This is not speculation because its based on a general observation about tech. The efficiency and high-level functioning with low-failure rates of more advanced technology, compared to more rudimentary technologies, is a function of the fact that we have more fine-tuned the tech. Consider how computaional and other tech is used to keep time far mor exactly than a mechanical clock.
Yeah I'm also not 100% convinced of anything either but that's just a straw man. I can still reflect on what it more likely or less likely given the hard evidence we have. Until public proof definitiveely shows that we're not alone, and that extremely advanced aliens travelled here, then I'm going to doubt that they are that intelligent yet stupid enough to repeatedly manage to crash with ways to stop us noticing or getting the tech. Of course, maybe their society, values and behaviour are radically different, maybe not. But if so, I have less evidence for that and, if I were to accept they were here, then I'd have to note that they are similar to us in that they may tech and explore stuff. Perhaps they are so radically different a form of life than they don't have the same kind of minds of intelligence as us, and have different ways of being curious, but that seems to me the only way to support your argument that we should be equally confident of each possibility is more speculative.
I far more strongly believe that if we encounter alien life then it will be a far more dramatic, history-altering moment in human history. I think it would be a far more revelatory and mind-bending experience that the US gov being like 'yeh we robbed flying saucers'. Call me cynical but I agree that this is probably a means to justify greater military expenditure. Don't get me wrong, no beef obvs, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I hope they are out their, maybe against my better judgement.