For over a week, claims of a secret government program to recover crashed alien spacecraft have been circulating. The claims were made by an intelligence-community insider, David Grusch, and have been embraced by popular right-wing media figures and self-identified UFO enthusiasts. However, some have pointed out that the claims bear an ominous similarity to previous well-documented misinformation campaigns by the government to discredit “problematic” individuals.
Grusch is a decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force who transferred to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. According to the Debrief’s report on Grusch, he was the “Senior Technical Advisor for unidentified aerial phenomenon 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.
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.
While some believe Grusch’s claims, others point out that they are similar to previous government misinformation campaigns. 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. Before embracing belief in extraterrestrial visitors, figures on the political right should await solid evidence.
