Fuck it Let's Talk About UFOs
Leave your binary thinking at the door, because no one *knows* jack shit
For all intents and purposes, this schmuck is the public face of the UFO subject in America. They are a meme, a hysteric conspiracy to be made fun of and a handy way to identify those who are untethered from reality. Trying to discuss this topic with any kind of level-headedness is damn-near impossible both because of the incredible number of cranks proselytizing this subject and the skeptics who want to characterize every single UFO discussion as some wild haired freak trying to lecture you about how the Egyptians didn’t really build the pyramids.
But whether the skeptics like it or not, this is a serious topic worthy of investigation, according to the United States Navy, who has led the charge in mainstreaming the legitimacy of UAPs (the official word for UFO because that term is too charged). One major reason why this stuff has been in the news these past several years is because a lot of Navy pilots have reported regular interactions with UAPs. Ryan Graves, an ex-Navy pilot who testified to Congress two weeks ago, told 60 Minutes that his F-18 squadron saw unidentified objects “every day for at least a couple of years.”
The 2004 Nimitz incident, documented in the explosive 2017 New York Times report that functioned as the starting gun for this new era of UAP transparency, is probably the most well-documented public UFO case of all time. Multiple sensors on U.S. ships and airplanes along with multiple eyewitnesses spotted a “tic tac” shaped object with no obvious forms of propulsion making maneuvers that would turn its occupants into soup if we had used our current knowledge to build them for humans—which everyone who saw it up close swears we never could.
David Fravor, who was the commanding officer of the Navy’s world-famous Black Aces—not exactly a position they just hand out to any kook on the street—testified to Congress along with Ryan Graves. Fravor was at the center of the 2004 Nimitz incident, and he told Congress that this UAP he was chasing actively jammed his radar—which he said is something pilots are only allowed to do during times of war. He also said that he was told by his radar operators that they had been tracking similar objects in the area for weeks before the incident.
There is some serious stuff happening here. Unidentified objects are completely dominating our airspace and rendering the most expensive and powerful military in human history completely inept against their seemingly physics-defying powers while doing things that could be construed as acts of war. If this is terrestrial and it’s not ours, it means that an adversarial nation has leapfrogged us by several generations, and it is simply a matter of time before the United States experiences what it is like to be a victim of an imperial power. If it is not terrestrial, well, that opens up a lot of questions.
Which brings us to David Grusch, who if you only followed this on Twitter, you’d think was the only person who testified to Congress in that hearing—although it is fair to highlight his statements prominently since his were the most hyperbolic.
Grusch asserted in his testimony that his information “is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country – many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony,” setting the stage for a story straight out of the X-Files.
He served in the National Reconnaissance Operations Center, “on the director’s briefing staff, which included the coordination of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) and supporting contingency operations,” and was tasked to investigate all Special Access Programs and Controlled Access Programs.
It was through this assignment that he claims “I was informed…of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-on’s. I made the decision based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple Inspectors General, and in effect become a whistleblower. As you know, I have suffered retaliation for my decision. But I am hopeful that my actions will ultimately lead to a positive outcome of increased transparency.”
The knee-jerk reaction from many was to call this story bullshit and clearly the result of delusions from a crank, but the Intelligence Community Inspectors General found his complaint “credible and urgent” and is investigating it.
What If This Is Terrestrial?
Grusch’s claims aside, what Fravor and Graves testified to was nothing new. Their cases have served as the basis of most of the well-known reporting from major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, because their incidents contain enough data which make it clear that something is in the skies. If pilots are reporting interactions with physics-defying aircraft every day, either we have an entire fleet of Navy pilots who have completely lost touch with reality for nearly two decades and counting, or…some of our country’s most highly trained observers are accurately observing something strange.
All this smoke that’s billowed up since 2017 surely has some kind of fire at the base of it.
That doesn’t mean it has to be a fantastical fire, it could be a familiar one. The United States confirmed that China has had a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019, and Chris Simmons, a former chief of a counterintelligence research branch on the Western Hemisphere at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said “in 2001, we discovered that the Chinese had been there already for nine years. We were told at that time that when the Chinese arrived in 1992, they were embedded in a single building within Bejucal, and they were 50 officers in this facility.”
Chinese drones being launched from Cuba are a plausible explanation for the weird stuff pilots are seeing off the east coast “every day,” simply given the fact that we know the Chinese have a spy base nearby and we don’t know if non-human entities do.
But if this is the case, this is a really big deal! We were leapfrogged technologically at least 20 years ago, and we have absolutely no control over our own airspace when these things appear. We’re completely fucked folks! Let’s just pray to the petrogods that the impending worldwide Xi dynasty is kind to those of us not directly involved with the project of American empire.
Either we’re looking at the greatest intelligence failure in American history (and also the greatest cover-up of all time given that advanced human-made technology apparently met the globe’s meatspace but never its capital space), or these things are ours (ditto for the cover-up), or it’s something more profound than our society can manage at this point.
Roswell
So now that we’ve addressed the most credible witnesses in Fravor and Graves, let’s get to the fun stuff.
The subtext of David Grusch’s testimony is that either the Roswell story is true, or the general outline of it is. Grusch asserts the first UFO crash that the United States recovered was actually in Italy in 1933, and many have used this supposed “Vatican conspiracy theory” as unequivocal proof that he is a loon (which I found funny—if the Vatican had a UFO crash in their backyard, you think they wouldn’t know about it?)
But let’s first just examine the basic facts of the Roswell case, because that all started with the government, and it serves as the foundation for our modern UFO era. In July of 1947, the Roswell Army Airfield told the world that they recovered a crashed flying saucer.
The next day, they said it was actually a weather balloon.
In 1994, the Air Force published a report asserting the debris that was recovered came from a top-secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul. They claimed that this information could not be disclosed at the time because this project was surveilling the Soviets during the Cold War. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Additionally, all the pictures the government has of Roswell do support the balloon theory. The famous photo of Major Jessee Marcel holding the Roswell crash debris does look similar to other photos of weather balloons the government released in the wake of the Roswell incident.
What plants the seeds of doubt for me is that this all began with intelligence agents believing they found a UFO—and not just any intelligence agents. Roswell was a nuclear base, which was a unique designation in 1947. According to the Defense’s Nuclear Agency, in 1946, the U.S. nuclear stockpile was big enough to make only 9 weapons. They weren’t just letting just any schmuck work on these bases housing the few fruits borne from the most top-secret program in U.S. history.
For me, it just simply does not pass the sniff test that highly skilled intelligence agents were shown a spy balloon and were confident enough in their assessment to tell the press that they found a spaceship. Probabilistic thinking leads me to the conclusion that it likely wasn’t a top-secret surveillance balloon and it likely wasn’t a flying saucer, but the government covering up something else they really didn’t want getting out.
But if you asked David Grusch, he might say they got it right the first time.
Grusch Shouldn’t Be Treated Like This
This is generally how many have received Grusch’s testimony, especially on the left. They called his claims fantastical without evidence and used that as their evidence as to why everything he said should be outright dismissed without any investigation. His assertion that they are from another dimension rankled a lot of folks who don’t believe in aliens but apparently are steadfast in their belief that the only acceptable alien tale is one from another planet—but this notion fits within the amorphous guardrails of String Theory—which has plenty of adherents in the scientific community like Michio Kaku. What the credulous lefties don’t seem to understand is that plenty of science is trending towards more “woo-woo”-style outcomes as it delves deeper into the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics and the seemingly local and non-local nature of consciousness in the universe. These nascent discoveries and theories don’t prove Grusch’s claims, but asserting that there is no scientific notion which supports his description of reality is just false. What we’re learning is that the universe is a lot stranger than the know-it-all hyper-online lefties assert.
I’m not here to say that Grusch is definitely telling the truth—I wouldn’t even know how to tell either way at this point—just to point out that his incentives to lie here aren’t great.
Firstly, he’s under oath. In front of Congress, making claims about defense contractor and government crimes. He’s not James Clapper, he isn’t the head of some major intelligence agency and can just lie to Congress and go back to cocktails with billionaires and their SCOTUS lapdogs and pretend like nothing happened.
If Grusch is full of shit, the government will squish him like a bug. He filed a formal complaint to multiple Inspectors General accusing very powerful entities of serious crimes and at least one agency is saying they are using immediate resources to investigate it. If he is lying to them, he will go to prison. If he is lying to Congress, he will go to prison. He is not special, he’s just some guy at this point. He has no leg to stand on outside the litany of senior leaders who went on the record to The Debrief to support his credibility.
So why is he up here telling stories that are supposedly self-evidently bullshit all so he can make enemies of some of the most powerful people in the world, get laughed at and then go to prison?
Ken Klippenstein of The Intercept, a terrific reporter who contrary to the beliefs of UFO Twitter is most certainly not a DoD mouthpiece, published a report that detailed some of Grusch’s perturbed mental states in the past, but did nothing to provide credible evidence his judgement now is impaired. The implication made in this piece—that a man who suffered from PTSD episodes in 2014 and 2018 which necessitated him getting help is unqualified to be a whistleblower in 2023—is specious at best (especially since he reported that Grusch kept his security clearance after these incidents, which indicates his bosses still believed Grusch could be trusted with state secrets).
This piece reflected the sneering attitude among many on the left that UFO claims are very clearly self-evidently false and can only come from someone unhinged from reality. Because Klippenstein was unable to connect these PTSD incidents in the past to the present, the report depended entirely on the reader making unsubstantiated inferences to make the article’s conclusion for it. I like Klippenstein a lot, but this report was a lazy bank shot that was desperately and inadequately trying to justify his own admitted biases. It’s the worst piece of reporting I’ve read from him, and all he really needed to make his case was one anonymous quote saying something like “some of us who work with Grusch are still concerned about his mental state” and yet he couldn’t even get that in the article, reflecting how weak of an argument Klippenstein mounted in this hit piece (that UFO Twitter turned the story into a stupid conspiracy centered around how they don’t understand reporting and FOIA requests was a gift to The Intercept, as that is the only enduring story from this report, and its nothingburger contents were largely forgotten as soon as they published it).
It’s clear there is disclosure of some sort going on, but given that this is being driven by former government employees (save for Grusch), it does not seem to be the official and willing sort of government disclosure so many UFO buffs have envisioned. The Nimitz incident profiled in the famed 2017 NYT story occurred in 2004, so it’s clear this is an issue that has been building tensions inside the Navy for quite some time. Imagine having to fly by what many have described as a “cube inside a sphere” every single day off the coast of Virginia and not being allowed to talk about it for fear of reprisal against your career.
This is one thing the smug skeptics really miss when they credulously ask “wHy ArEn’T mOrE pEoPlE rEpOrTiNg ThIs” is that 1. tons of Navy pilots have been, you just are revealing that you don’t read reporting on this issue before claiming to know everything about it and 2. everyone who does report it says the main way they and their cohorts were treated was by having their careers threatened. The Navy recently created new forms specifically for reporting UAP because so many pilots wanted to file them. This is a thing that is happening whether skeptics’ brains can comprehend it or not.
If David Grusch is a loon who is full of shit, then so is the 6th man to ever walk on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, who made assertions that are practically identical to Grusch’s. After leaving NASA, he devoted the rest of his scientific career to studying UFOs and the branches of science that subject led him down, and he once said that:
“There have been ET visitation. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. And there is some group of people somewhere that may or may not be associated with government at this point, but certainly were at one time, that have this knowledge, and have been attempting to conceal this knowledge or not permit it to be widely disseminated.
All that said, there was one lefty poster who I think nailed the exact sentiment we need at this point. Trying to logic our way through this muck with probabilistic thinking is ultimately not persuasive enough to make it real, but you know what is?
The people around this disclosure since 2017 claim that there are pics and it did happen, and it is worth hearing them out given the information they have drawn out so far, but we are nearing a critical mass of claims where…I mean…c’mon man…show me the aliens.
Again, this all could have a prosaic explanation and Grusch’s claims could be fantastical nonsense, but this supposed fantastical nonsense was filed into a report that the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General deemed “credible and urgent” (which also makes Klippenstein look biased when he asserts that “no one is vetting Grusch”). They know more than we do about this, so maybe we shouldn’t pretend we’re experts on Grusch’s credibility and we should wait to see what conclusions they come to. The UFO die-hards are offsides here too, because we don’t know what parts of Grusch’s claims the IG found “credible and urgent.” Maybe it’s just a bureaucratic issue at the end of the day, who knows. All we know is that whatever they saw in that complaint from Grusch they felt it needed to be investigated immediately.
If there’s one thing I hate about this subject more than anything, it’s the certitude that both hardcore believers and skeptics have about what is supposedly going on in an arena surrounded by classified programs and an avalanche of bullshit and hyperbole. We don’t actually know anything for certain.
It’s clear from the tenor of this piece that I am much more of a Fox Mulder-style believer than a Dana Scully-style skeptic, so to end this blog I’ll provide my best guess at what exactly is going on here.
I Want to Believe
In 2013, NASA discovered that the universe was actually 13.8 billion years old, 100 million years older than previously believed.
The problem that arose with this estimate is that when NASA installed the new James Webb Telescope, they started finding galaxies that seemingly were older than 13.8 billion years. Someone’s math was wrong.
Earlier this year, scientists at the University of Ottawa tried to present an explanation for this conflict, reinterpreting something known as the redshift phenomenon to estimate that the universe could be as old as 26.7 billion years.
In October 2016, deep-field images from the Hubble Telescope suggested that there were 10 times more galaxies than previously thought.
The point here is that as our technology has improved over the last 15 years, we learned that what we “knew” before is hopelessly wrong. Plugging modest estimates into the Drake Equation reveals a universe teeming with life, resulting in the Fermi Paradox: where the hell is it?
This is where mankind needs to take a gigantic heaping of humble pie. All of recorded human history is about 5,000 years, or 0.00000000187% of the history of the universe if the far end of the Ottawa big brains’ estimation is correct. Every time we replace the lens in the Hubble Telescope, we learn that our previous estimates were off by multiple orders of magnitude. We’ve known about the existence of quantum mechanics for just 120 years. We are not even scratching the surface of what we know about the universe. We are nothing, we know nothing, we are galactic embryos.
If the math says there are lots of civilizations out there, but we can’t see them, that’s far likelier to be an us problem. It’s possible our math is wrong, but that would go against the trend of the universe being bigger and older and filled with more stars than we think every time we look up in the skies.
There must be more intelligent life out there. Our war-like, shortsighted and self-destructive civilization cannot be the best this universe has to offer. I simply refuse to believe it.
So if we accept that there are civilizations in the universe other than ours, and in 5,000 years we were able to travel to the moon, what does that mean for a civilization that’s 100,000 years old? 1 million years old? 1 billion years old? 20 billion years old?
You see where I’m going here? If we ever came into contact with a civilization that ancient, their stuff would likely be indistinguishable from witchcraft to our primitive monkey brains. Many claim that traversing the universe is not practically possible due to the inability to travel faster than the speed of light, despite the fact that Einstein proposed a solution for this in 1935 (an Einstein-Rosen bridge, AKA a wormhole). It doesn’t seem possible to us now to traverse the cosmos, but give us another million years and maybe we’ll figure out some stuff we didn’t know how to do.
Many people over the course of centuries said we have come into contact with other civilizations not of this world. For just one example, Native American tribes like the Cheyenne, Black Feet, Gros Ventres and Lakota have many stories of “star people.” The TV show Ancient Aliens may be mostly regurgitated 17th century white-nationalist bullshit wrapped around increasingly unbelievable theories from increasingly less credible individuals, but the notion that visitors from other worlds have come to ours in the past is a story you can find in cultures around the planet.
So if we assume that some sort of non-human entities are visiting Earth and interacting with us to varying degrees, why are they? Well, I think simply retracing the modern history of this subject provides us with a pretty compelling explanation.
The first nuclear bomb detonation was in 1945, and Kenneth Arnold’s famous “flying saucer” sighting that set off the modern UFO era happened in 1947, the same year as whatever happened at Roswell. Countless military veterans have said over the years that they had interactions with UAPs at nuclear bases, with some even reporting that these objects seemed to take control of the nukes.
UFOs and Nukes is one of the best books on the subject, because it details a clear pattern using tangible evidence of unidentified objects appearing and interacting with our nuclear weapons on a regular basis for decades, and it’s not just us. Journalist George Knapp of KLAS in Las Vegas went to the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990s to get documents on UFOs and found that they also recorded plenty of interactions at their nuclear bases throughout the Cold War. Probably the only definitive thing you can say about UAPs given what little we know about them is that they are connected to nuclear bases in some fashion.
Splitting the atom is a pretty good line in the sand between a somewhat advanced civilization and not one. Perhaps we have another, much older civilization in our cosmic neighborhood, and they took an interest in us as soon as we could make life problematic for them. A lot of skeptics like to take the “why the hell would they care about little old us” track to this line of argument—which I find amusing—why are you assuming you would know the motivations of entities you don’t believe exist? Something unidentified is regularly in our skies, and if it is from another world, then they have some reason to be here.
The 20th century was a period of intense UFO activity. In July of 1952, Washington D.C. was under siege for weeks by UFOs being tracked visually and on radar. In 1976, the Iranian Air Force dispatched a fighter jet to intercept a UFO they were seeing both with their eyes and on radar, and three pilots across two jets reported having their electronics systems shut down upon coming into close contact with the object.
There were 7,000 UFO sightings reported in the Hudson Valley between Connecticut and New York from 1982-1995. Belgium had a UFO wave reported across the country for nearly 6 months in 1989-90. Thousands of people saw and videotaped the Phoenix Lights flying over Arizona and Nevada in 1997. In 2006, witnesses all over Chicago O’Hare International Airport reported seeing a metallic disc hovering over the terminal. In 2010, witnesses reported seeing lantern-like objects over Hangzhou's Xiaoshan Airport in China, and the airport rerouted and shut down 18 flights in response.
The point is that these cases aren’t one-offs that you can debunk in a vacuum—just simply listing the most credible UFO cases plots them all over the world. It’s likelier that these sightings are connected than all being singular events with no relationship to one another.
Every government official who has come forward to talk about their experience with this subject has said at some point that they do not have a full picture of this issue, and that is the very nature of the problem. This has supposedly been compartmentalized in the U.S. to such an extreme degree that it’s easy to keep the lid on what’s happening because apparently almost no one actually knows what the hell is going on.
This is being investigated by Congress now because there is reportedly a lack of oversight of these Special Access Programs driven by a misappropriation of Congressional funds. There’s reason to believe this because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, that radical UFO nut, advanced some absolutely wild legislation through the Senate that is expected to pass into law by next year.
The legislation will create a UAP Records Review Board, an independent agency, which would consider if a UAP record would qualify for postponement of disclosure. Additionally, the federal government shall have eminent domain over any and all recovered technologies of unknown origin (TUO) and biological evidence of non-human intelligence (NHI) that may be controlled by private persons or entities in the interests of the public good.
To hear this group of disclosure advocates tell it (only Grusch is technically a whistleblower), UAPs have been outsourced to defense contractors (which answers the credulous question of “why haven’t tons of United States government officials seen this over the years?”) and are being hidden deep inside Special Access Programs. These defense contractors have supposedly kept these reverse engineering projects for years on small teams who don’t work together and may not even know exactly what they’re looking at, and they reportedly have not made much progress because that closed process is basically the opposite of how science works. It’s possible that one reason why this level of disclosure is happening now is that after nearly a century of unproductive work, some have acceded to the need to open this up to true scientific inquiry.
I think everyone should keep an open mind about this subject because it’s not new and there is a wealth of evidence spread out over decades (at least) to indicate that the government does have an interest in this subject and there is very clearly something appearing regularly in our skies that we cannot identify. What it is, we do not know, but if people are risking their own livelihoods to tell us stories they believe are profound, the least that we can do is listen without baselessly ridiculing them.