The late Stanton Friedman, the engaging and entrepreneurial researcher who played such an important part in the evolution of the Roswell myth, used to refer to the supposed cover-up of a spacecraft crash not too far (in New Mexico miles) from Roswell as a “cosmic Watergate.” The label reflected the times — the late 1970s — when the long-forgotten story of the unfortunate UFO was first exhumed. It was later elaborated upon with the addition of the discovery of undersized alien corpses and, even, accounts of a second crash.
More recently, we have seen the release of reports and video imagery of curious objects that were first dubbed unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), in an attempt to distance these new phenomena from those disreputable old UFOs. Since then, the UAPs themselves have been renamed as unidentified anomalous phenomena, at least partly to reflect the fact that one (or more?) has allegedly been tracked going underwater. If I had to guess, the new broader definition also gives investigators more discretion as they pursue their enquiries. Meanwhile, politicians have been taking an increased interest, and on July 26, a House Oversight National Security Subcommittee held a hearing in which three witnesses, all with impressive backgrounds in the military, gave sworn testimony over what they had either heard or seen.
I watched the hearings on TV. Two of the witnesses gave fairly measured accounts about UAPs; the third, David Grusch, covered rather wider and wilder ground even if it would have been rather familiar territory to those who keep an eye on such stories: recovered “non-human” craft, recovered “non-human” body parts, reverse-engineering of “non-human” technology, and so on.
Writing for NRO about a month or so before the testimony, Andrew Follett looked at Grusch’s claims (which went further than those he was to give under oath) and commented that:
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.
That remains the case.
Follett warned of psyops and suggested that the conservative thing to do was to wait to see hard evidence. I agree.
Over at the Hill, however, Marik von Rennenkampff reckons that:
The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.
Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities, or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.
While I think (and have argued before) that the question of UAPs is worth closer examination, as is indeed happening, the idea of a decades-long, covert UFO-related recovery and reverse-engineering program seems highly unlikely to me. Disinformation seems rather less unlikely, but on such a scale?
Please do take a look at von Rennenkampff’s piece in full (it’s worth the read if you are interested in this sort of thing) and see what you think. I hope to have a few more thoughts on this later today.