For more than a week, a claim by an intelligence-community insider about a secret government program to recover crashed alien spacecraft has been hyped up by many people, including some prominent individuals on the political right. This claim bears a striking resemblance to previous government misinformation campaigns to discredit “problematic” individuals. Popular right-wing media figures and self-identified UFO enthusiasts such as Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson promptly embraced the claim. Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) claimed the whistleblower was “very believable” and said “this thing is a huge cover-up, for whatever reason.” Burchett, who will lead the oversight hearings into the whistleblower, has made similar claims for years.
The whistleblower, David Grusch, is a decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force who transferred to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO — no relation) and eventually achieved a GS-15 pay grade, roughly the civilian equivalent of a colonel in the Army. 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. The only alleged “evidence” of this is a small drawing on a memo.
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.
What UFO believers say makes Grusch’s claims different from previous ones is the existence of a paper trail and his résumé. Grusch did not testify to Congress initially but instead used the Department of Defense’s whistleblower provisions, as allowed by the Whistleblower Protection Act of 2021. His claims were promptly leaked along with his name. Following that leak, he claims others in the intelligence community harassed and attempted to silence him (despite the new whistleblower protections), so Grusch filed a reprisal complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community (IC) after being represented by very prominent D.C. attorney Charles McCullough, who was formerly the inspector general of the IC. The current inspector general allegedly found Grusch’s complaint both “credible and urgent,” and the resulting investigation is still underway. Both the authors of the story and the outlet chosen are notably receptive to the existence of UFOs as exotic, artificial entities: The journalists involved were the same individuals who authored the 2017 New York Times article that revealed that the Pentagon was investigating UFOs, and the story was revealed in the Debrief, an outlet with a clear history of interest in the topic. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico were all offered the story but declined to publish it, with the Post citing a need for more time to confirm the story. Most of the confirmation comes from sources who wished to remain anonymous or spoke under a pseudonym.
However, Grusch’s résumé may not be a reason to believe his claims; it may be a reason to be very skeptical of them. “If this is all bogus, then why would someone make this up?” Walsh rhetorically asked on the Ben Shapiro Show. “He comes out and says, look this is what I’ve been told, what would be his incentive to make this up? He’s setting his career and his life ablaze.” Shapiro countered that people regularly “do things to be famous and to get on TV.”
Assuming Grusch is being honest, it’s vastly more likely that a modern-day equivalent of Richard Doty is simply feeding him what he wants to hear with the goal of getting exactly the kind of reaction we have now seen. This could either be to harm his credibility, as in Bennewitz’s case, or simply to test his loyalties as described above.
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.
Rather than presaging some new era of extraterrestrial disclosures, it is vastly more likely that the Grusch leak has an earthly explanation. For example, it may have been precipitated by a desire to distract from actual, man-made classified projects. 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, as the craft’s original silver paint reflected sunlight and gave them an otherworldly appearance. Roughly half of all UFO reports were attributable to the U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy-plane project, according to a CIA official who worked on the project.
Before embracing belief in extraterrestrial visitors, figures on the political right should take a more conservative approach and await truly solid evidence.
