Don’t be fooled: This is likely another government psyop. We’ve seen it before.
Don’t be fooled: This is likely another government psyop. We’ve seen it before.
F or over a week now, many people, including some prominent individuals on the political right, have hyped up the alleged disclosure by an intelligence-community insider of a secret government program to recover crashed alien spacecraft — a claim that bears an ominous similarity to previous well-documented misinformation campaigns by the government to discredit “problematic” individuals.
Popular right-wing media figures and self-identified UFO enthusiasts such as Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson promptly embraced the claim. Soon, Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) was claiming the whistleblower was “very believable” and said “this thing is a huge cover-up, for whatever reason.” Burchett, who will lead the oversight hearings into the whistleblower, has made similar claims for years.
Whistleblower David Grusch is a decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force who transferred to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO — no relation) and eventually achieved a GS-15 pay grade, roughly the civilian equivalent of a colonel in the Army. According to the Debrief’s report on Grusch, he was the “Senior Technical Advisor for unidentified aerial phenomenon [UAP, what the government calls UFOs] and trans medium issues,” representing the NRO to the Pentagon’s UAP task force. Grusch claimed he was approached by unnamed insiders from a Pentagon program to retrieve crashed UFOs, a program so secretive it was withheld from the UAP task force, which was concerned by the illegality of their mission.
Grusch does not claim to have seen a UFO or been a part of a UFO-retrieval team, but merely that people who had approached him showed him photos and documents to confirm such things exist. Grusch has claimed to media outlets that there is a highly bizarre, decades-long conspiracy by the U.S. government to cover up crashed UFOs. His theory specifies that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini recovered a crashed UFO in 1933 and covered it up with the help of the Vatican before the craft was eventually seized by the U.S. The only alleged “evidence” of this is a small drawing on a memo.
Grusch claims that the U.S. has captured at least twelve UFOs, has dead bodies of the nonhuman-intelligence pilots, has made secret agreements with living aliens “that risk putting our future in jeopardy,” has used techniques to forcefully bring down UFOs, and has killed numerous people to suppress this information. Grusch also claims that other nations are aware of UFOs, and states that Russia and China are in a cold war over extraterrestrial technology.
What UFO believers say make Grusch’s claims different from previous ones is the existence of a paper trail and his résumé. Grusch did not testify to Congress initially but instead used the Department of Defense’s whistleblower provisions, as allowed by the Whistleblower Protection Act of 2021. His claims were promptly leaked along with his name. Following that leak, he claims others in the intelligence community harassed and attempted to silence him (despite the new whistleblower protections), so Grusch filed a reprisal complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community (IC) after being represented by very prominent D.C. attorney Charles McCullough, who was formerly the inspector general of the IC. The current inspector general allegedly found Grusch’s complaint both “credible and urgent,” and the resulting investigation is still underway. Both the authors of the story and the outlet chosen are notably receptive to the existence of UFOs as exotic, artificial entities: The journalists involved were the same individuals who authored the 2017 New York Times article that revealed that the Pentagon was investigating UFOs, and the story was revealed in the Debrief, an outlet with a clear history of interest in the topic. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico were all offered the story but declined to publish it, with the Post citing a need for more time to confirm the story. Most of the confirmation comes from sources who wished to remain anonymous or spoke under a pseudonym.
But perhaps Grusch’s résumé isn’t a reason to believe his claims; it’s a reason to be very skeptical of them. “If this is all bogus, then why would someone make this up?” Walsh rhetorically asked on the Ben Shapiro Show. “He comes out and says, look this is what I’ve been told, what would be his incentive to make this up? He’s setting his career and his life ablaze.” Shapiro countered that people regularly “do things to be famous and to get on TV.”
With all due respect to Shapiro, this misses the long history of U.S. government agencies explicitly manufacturing vast amounts of evidence to abuse individuals’ interest in UFOs to uncover potential leakers and moles. After all, a lot of people would love to go down in history as the person who uncovered a decades-long conspiracy of government wrongdoing — and intelligence agencies exploit that fact. It’s entirely possible that Grusch totally believes everything he’s said. It’s also entirely possible that he actually was handed evidence of it by government personnel. In fact, they’ve done just that before.
The most notable and well-documented such incident, which bears a striking similarity to Grusch’s case, is the tragic case of veteran, successful government contractor, and electrical physicist Paul Bennewitz. By the government’s own admission, Bennewitz was literally driven to insanity after U.S. agents made him the “object of a program of psychological destabilization” to convince him of an imminent alien invasion in order to distract him from evidence of secret programs he’d obtained.
Bennewitz lived next to the Kirtland Air Force Base. After seeing colored lights in the sky and picking up strange radio signals, he took his findings to the Air Force, where the U.S. government began an intricate campaign of deception against him.
Bennewitz had heavily documented everything he’d seen, so Air Force intelligence agent Richard Doty confirmed his suspicions rather than rebut them, even funding Bennewitz’s research on “the aliens” and ultimately convincing Bennewitz that aliens had constructed a series of underground bases on Earth to prepare for an imminent invasion.
Bennewitz, being a pilot, flew over the alleged bases and took pictures of what he thought was a battle between aliens and the U.S. military. Bennewitz ultimately ended up covering every window in his house with sandbags before he was committed to a psychiatric facility, and spent the last quarter century of his life a paranoid wreck, driven insane by the “evidence.”
Tragically, the story was manufactured and fed to Bennewitz by Doty and the U.S. government. The signals Bennewitz had been intercepting were sent from the National Security Agency with the explicit goal of convincing him of aliens’ existence, even going so far as to swap out Bennewitz’s computer to ensure he “properly” decoded the messages. The film actually showed secret experimental aircraft made by American earthlings, not extraterrestrials. Rather than tell Bennewitz the truth and risk exposing the secret assets, Doty was given an assignment to feed Bennewitz information to convince him of an alien invasion, going so far as to litter the area Bennewitz flew through with props. It was all faked, but Bennewitz ate it up and suffered greatly as a result.
After all, if you were the U.S. government, it’d be very low-cost and high-reward to probe for moles by distributing fictional evidence of how advanced alien technology was obtained. If the recipient didn’t disclose the information, that person could logically be trusted. If he illegally leaked it, he could be incarcerated. If they leaked it in the very explicitly legal manner Grusch has, adversaries of America may credibly believe that the DoD has access to alien technology orders of magnitude more powerful than the best your country can muster. It’s a win-win-win.
Assuming Grusch is being honest, it’s vastly more likely that a modern-day equivalent of Richard Doty is simply feeding him what he wants to hear with the goal of getting exactly the kind of reaction we have now seen. This could either be to harm his credibility, as in Bennewitz’s case, or simply to test his loyalties as described above.
It strains credulity to suggest that extraterrestrial vehicles capable of traveling light-years to Earth are just falling out of the sky so consistently that the government has numerous teams dedicated to recovering them. One wouldn’t expect advanced extraterrestrial vehicles to have such a tough time staying in the air! Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence — and so far, we’ve seen remarkably little of the latter. Grusch even claims he can’t reveal most of the evidence, as it is currently classified.
Rather than presaging some new era of extraterrestrial disclosures, it is vastly more likely that the Grusch leak has an earthly explanation. For example, it may have been precipitated by a desire to distract from actual, man-made classified projects. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Air Force and the CIA often intentionally called sightings of highly secret U-2 spy planes “UFOs” to hide the true nature of the aircraft, as the craft’s original silver paint reflected sunlight and gave them an otherworldly appearance. Roughly half of all UFO reports were attributable to the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy-plane project, according to a CIA official who worked on the project.
If space aliens haven’t visited our planet, then conservatives who eagerly suggest otherwise risk damaging their credibility. Before embracing belief in extraterrestrial visitors, figures on the political right should take a more conservative approach and await truly solid evidence.