Prominent individuals on the political right, including self-identified UFO enthusiasts such as Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson, have been hyping up the alleged disclosure of a secret government program to recover crashed alien spacecraft by an intelligence-community insider. However, this claim bears an ominous similarity to previous well-documented misinformation campaigns by the government to discredit “problematic” individuals. Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) has claimed the whistleblower is “very believable” and said “this thing is a huge cover-up, for whatever reason.” Whistleblower David Grusch, a decorated combat veteran of the U.S. Air Force, claims 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. However, 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.
While some UFO believers say Grusch’s claims are different from previous ones due to the existence of a paper trail and his résumé, it is a reason to be very skeptical of them. The U.S. government has a long history of explicitly manufacturing vast amounts of evidence to abuse individuals’ interest in UFOs to uncover potential leakers and moles. The tragic case of veteran, successful government contractor, and electrical physicist Paul Bennewitz is a notable and well-documented incident that bears a striking similarity to Grusch’s case. By the government’s own admission, Bennewitz was literally driven to insanity after U.S. agents made him the “object of a program of psychological destabilization” to convince him of an imminent alien invasion in order to distract him from evidence of secret programs he’d obtained.
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. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence — and so far, we’ve seen remarkably little of the latter. 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.
Conservatives who eagerly suggest that space aliens have visited our planet risk damaging their credibility. Before embracing belief in extraterrestrial visitors, figures on the political right should take a more conservative approach and await truly solid evidence.
