Global Courant
Claims that the US government has secretly recovered crashed alien spacecraft and that their non-human occupants are hardly new. They are firmly entrenched in postwar American UFO lore and conspiracy theory, and inspired the most famous story in ufology: the “Roswell incident.”
Now, however, journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal have given new strength to these aging claims — apparently with the approval of the Pentagon.
In an article for the science and technology news site The Debrief, they report that the US government, its allies and defense contractors have recovered several craft of non-human origin, along with the bodies of the occupants.
In addition, they report that this information has been illegally withheld from the US Congress, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office established by the US Department of Defense in 2022 to investigate UFOs and the public.
What are the claims?
The main source for the new claims is former US intelligence official David Grusch.
Grusch’s credentials, verified by Kean and Blumenthal, are impressive. He is a veteran of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Bureau. He represented both organizations on the US government task force studying unidentified aerial phenomena (the official term for UFOs).
Unidentified aerial phenomena, such as this video shot by a US Navy pilot released in 2020, have become a source of renewed interest in recent years. Photo: US Navy / Wikimedia
Grusch say the materials collected are:
of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on vehicle morphologies and material science testing and possessing unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.
Grusch’s claims are supported by Jonathan Gray, who works for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, where he focuses on the analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena. Gray told Kean and Blumenthal:
The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone (…) This type of query is not limited to the United States.
How credible are the claims?
Kean and Blumenthal are credible and experienced UFO reporters.
In 2017, she wrote with Helene Cooper for the New York Times, they revealed a secret US$22 million Pentagon UFO research program. That article contributed much to a broader rethinking of UFOs, avoiding stereotypes, stigma and sensationalism.
Most of the subsequentUFO turnin US defense policy and public discourse have focused on images and eyewitness accounts of anomalous objects in the sky. Now, Kean and Blumenthal may have brought anomalous objects — and even their supposed non-human inhabitants — into the conversation themselves.
David Grusch’s claims have reached the public through a multifaceted media effort.
Shortly after the Debrief article, Australian journalist Ross Coulthart interview with Grusch appeared on the American news network News Nation. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, also published an article in Politics advocate for more transparency.
This sounds a lot like an orchestrated attempt to convince the public (and the US Congress) that something much more substantial is going on than “things in the sky we can’t explain”.
Approved by the Pentagon?
Grusch appears to have followed Pentagon protocol in publishing his information. Kean and Blumenthal write to Grusch:
provided the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review of the Department of Defense with the information it intended to release to us. His on-the-record statements were all “approved for open publication” on April 4 and 6, 2023, in documents provided to us.
What does that mean? a Prepublication and security review is how the Pentagon confirms that information proposed for public release is reviewed to ensure compliance with established national and Department of Defense policies, and to determine:
does not contain classified, controlled, unclassified, export controlled or operational security related information.
If Grusch’s information is true, it is certainly both “secret” and “related to operational security”. So why would the Pentagon approve its publication?
If Grusch’s information is false, it probably wouldn’t have been classified as related to operational security. But this raises another question: why would the Pentagon approve the publication of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about itself?
This would likely mislead the public, journalists and Congress. It would also undermine the Pentagon’s own effort to understand the problem of unidentified sky phenomena: the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.
An official denial
Indeed, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office told NewsNation It:
has found no verifiable information to substantiate claims that programs related to the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial material have existed in the past or currently exist.
Grusch has an explanation for this apparent ignorance. When it comes to investigating unidentified aerial phenomena, he says, the left hand of the US government doesn’t know what its right hand is doing, with:
multiple agencies are nesting (unidentified aerial phenomena) activities into conventional covert access programs without appropriate reporting to various oversight authorities.
Timothy Good’s classic 1987 exploration of UFO investigations, Above Top Secretdescribed similar bureaucracy.
Nested activities and separated knowledge
The idea of ”nested” unidentified activities in the air, where knowledge is segregated within sprawling bureaucracies, is in part what makes Grusch’s claims both intriguing and (for now) unverifiable.
If this is the case, organizations that focus on unidentified aerial phenomena, such as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, can get serious and report transparently on the best information available to them. Yet they can also be deprived of information essential to their operations.
This would make them little more than PR fronts, designed to give the impression of meaningful action.
In the absence of direct experience with unidentified sky phenomena, most of us rely on information about them to form our beliefs. Tracking how this information is produced and disseminated is essential.
The activities of the US government in this area will continue. Congressman James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has done so said he will hold a hearing on UFOs in response to Grusch’s accusations.
Adam Dodd is Tutor, School of Communication and the Arts, The University of Queensland
This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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