Missouri rep is right to question UFO whistleblower’s shocking but familiar story | Opinion

Officials in Washington have been slowly, and somewhat strangely, beating a drum about UFOs for a while now. I say strangely because some of them — including Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley — seem awfully blithe about what would only be the most important event in the history of the world.

I had expected that drumbeat to reach more of a crescendo this week with the congressional testimony of a man named David Grusch. He’s a decorated combat officer who served in Afghanistan before going on to represent the National Reconnaissance Office in the Defense Department’s investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, the new government name for unidentified flying objects.

During the House committee hearing, Grusch spelled out what we’d been told to expect last month: Because of his decades of service in the military and intelligence communities, he wants us to buy the highly improbable claim that dozens of colleagues have all let him in on a covert “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” — not that he’s seen any of it firsthand, of course.

So now he’s blowing the whistle, he says. The government has recovered vehicles that didn’t originate on Earth. And “non-human” biological matter. Alien ships and bodies, in other words.

“I’m pretty skeptical about this,” Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison told The Star’s Daniel Desrochers. He’s right to be.

Gray aliens, abductions and experiments

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with UFOs, having cut my pop culture teeth on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and 1995’s clumsy “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” hoax on Fox. I funneled that interest into my master’s thesis, which looked at the many pieces of theater and film that draw inspiration from the dominant narrative in the genre that emerged in the late 20th century:

We’re being visited by wispy, gray aliens with big, black, almond-shaped eyes. They abduct earthlings from their cars or beds, perform medical experiments on them, then drop them in a field somewhere, where they awake to find chunks of time erased from their memories. And the government knows.

It’s pretty silly stuff. And, honestly, so are some of Grusch’s claims. He says intelligence officials told him about captured craft the size of football fields, and quite a number of recovered bodies. So these beings can zoom across galaxies, but keep slamming their ships into the ground once they get here, and apparently haven’t mastered seat belts and airbags?

UFO skeptic Mick West points out that parts of Grusch’s story follow common science fiction tropes: clandestine military programs, machines made from materials “that we don’t understand,” and extraterrestrial creatures malevolent toward humankind.

That last part is maybe the biggest red flag. The firearm industry’s favorite selling point encourages brave patriots to fantasize that their AR-15s would have a prayer holding off the full force of a rogue U.S. military’s modern weaponry. Are we really to believe we wouldn’t be vaporized in the blink of an eye by entities that want us dead and have the technology capable of crossing galaxies or extra dimensions?

Leaders preparing public for the truth?

My years of attending UFO conventions, and of reading online message boards and mimeographed newsletters from groups like the Mutual UFO Network, taught me an article of faith among the believers: Governments have spent decades encouraging the media to push the “menacing alien” idea to soften the beaches for when the truth finally can no longer be hidden — because it will be societally cataclysmic.

If we actually have made contact, and especially if the aliens are bad guys, trust in leaders who lied about what they knew will be shattered. (On the upside, it might just end our tribal squabbling for good, because the only race that will matter anymore will be the human one.)

Am I calling David Grusch a crank, dismissing his secondhand assertions out of hand? I’m not.

But honorable military service doesn’t assure credibility. The once-lauded Gen. Michael Flynn now spouts wild conspiracy theories as he takes QAnon road shows across the country.

And even the most knowledgeable experts can be fooled when they’re out of their wheelhouse.

The Pentagon popped eyeballs a couple years ago when it released footage of mysterious objects seemingly executing impossible maneuvers in midair, captured by experienced pilots. But the fact that you can fly a fighter jet doesn’t mean you can interpret video accurately.

The artists at Los Angeles visual effects studio Corridor Digital regularly debunk UFO footage from social media on their YouTube channel. Blobs that look like solid orbs or disks are often really reflections in cockpit windows, or camera artifacts instantly identifiable by movie makers. Some clips are straight-up phonies. Lots of the most viral UFO videos are easily disprovable fakes to people whose job is generating artificial images.

The late nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman was the most serious person I ever met who believed there is evidence of alien intelligence traveling to our planet. He devoted great time and energy to refuting the nonsense that proliferates rampantly in ufology, like the tales of Bob Lazar, a convicted felon and fixture on the flying saucer circuit who spouts wildly implausible accounts of supposedly working on recovered spacecraft for the military.

Eisenhower warned about Pentagon budgets

Of course, we also know the government is quite capable of keeping Big Secrets from the public. Kansas’ own Dwight Eisenhower was right about the dangers of defense contractors conspiring with Pentagon leaders to conceal dark projects in their budgets.

Also of course, the DoD almost certainly already has next-generation tech we can scarcely imagine. A sober minded friend of mine who used to live near an Arizona Air Force base once watched a nearly silent, slow moving object pass over him and his wife as they stargazed in the desert.

And I honestly do believe something real is happening to at least some of those with stories of being spirited away and examined in the night. Horror novelist Whitley Strieber — whom I’ve spoken with more than once — described the prototypal “abduction” in his 1987 bestseller “Communion: A True Story,” which was adapted into a lyrical, criminally underrated movie by director Philippe Mora.

Strieber acknowledges his sometimes tenuous relationship with reality (he falsely claimed for years to have witnessed the horrific 1966 mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin) and has theorized that his experiences might well be the result of an undiagnosed and unidentified form of temporal lobe epilepsy.

But real life doesn’t usually play out like a story. The military harboring warehouses full of spaceships and little gray bodies, while thousands of officers and scientists keep their lips zipped across decades? I’ve already seen that movie: 1980’s “Hangar 18.” It’s schlock (and the special effects are awful).

I’m with Congressman Burlison. It’s going to take a lot more than one whistleblower, regardless of his resume, to convince me.