The Case of the UAP Whistleblower
David Grusch is a former intelligence officer with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. He has had a meritorious career both in the military and civilian sides of intelligence. This year, he decided to become a whistleblower for Congress. Based on second-hand information — people have talked to him in his various roles directly investigating UAP (Unidentified Aerial, or Anomalous, Phenomena) – he believes that the government (DoD) knows more about the nature and origin of many of these UAP than they are revealing to either Congress or the public. Indeed, there exists in the U.S. government, a “conspiracy of silence” in Grusch’s view.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we have seen would-be whistleblowers in the media and books for decades telling similar stories. Somebody, but nobody can say precisely who, has wreckage of an alien spacecraft. Grusch even maintains that “biologics” have been recovered from crash sites. Area 51 anybody?
On July 26, the House Oversight and Government Accountability Committee’s National Security subcommittee held open hearings where Grusch and two Navy pilots, who also had previously come forward with their personal UAP encounters during training flights, were witnesses. Grusch originally told his story in early June to the Debrief, a second-tier online media source, and they went with it.
In Washington’s summer doldrums, this was enough to spur NYT Opinion writer Ezra Klein (admittedly, a UFO fan going way back) to interview a NYT investigative reporter, who specializes in UAP coverage, for his podcast. Additionally, Chuck Schumer with two Republican co-sponsors (Mike Rounds and Marco Rubio) proposed an amendment to the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) which would establish yet another independent board to consider declassification of DoD files on UAP. It may pass! Noteworthy here is that it only empowers this board to make final decisions about classification; it doesn’t automatically declassify everything. But, like much of the recent activity around this topic, and unlike most issues before Congress these days, it does appear to be bipartisan.
At those July 26 House hearings, Grusch deferred many questions from members to a closed meeting in a SCIF (secure, sound-proof room) — yet to be scheduled. He claimed that he knows of people who have been “harmed” for attempting to expose the Pentagon’s coverup of this data. To the question of whether anybody had been murdered, he wouldn’t answer.
For several years now, the Pentagon has responded that all these UAP reports going back nearly twenty years (not as far back as those early Area 51 stories, however) have been thoroughly investigated; and, yes, some remain unexplained. But the official DoD line is (to paraphrase): “No, there is not a discernible threat to national security from any of them – and no nation on earth, including the U.S., has technology that could explain the most bizarre incidents.”
Where does this response leave us? If there is no perceived national security threat, what are the reasons for continued secrecy about what we know? What prevents more transparency? The Pentagon’s answer, lately, has been that declassifying everything might reveal too much about our own sensors and defenses. David Grusch claims that DoD has been busy trying to reverse-engineer crash artifacts for decades, and people have been hurt in the process!
Then there is the question of public safety. We may not have room in this summer of climate crisis for yet another existential threat to the planet, but the Navy pilots warned in their testimony of possible dangers to civilian, as well as military, aviation.
Finally, some Members are concerned with government transparency as the primary motivation for these Oversight hearings. Why is that an issue regarding something as profound as evidence of a non-human technological civilization that has contacted us? Would it be too much for us to handle? Perhaps it would constitute a threat to powerful institutional forces like organized religion? Perhaps some in Congress are reluctant to tamper with the customary grounding in uncertainty that our society — and their jobs – depend. There is a “conspiracy industry,” it seems. DoD may have similar motivations. Kevin McCarthy quipped on Fox News that he believes the Pentagon would be against declassifying its records because it might threaten their spigot of research funding.
Of course, the scientific establishment would take the position that any strong evidence of extraterrestrial civilization would turn the spigot on for them! One could imagine the James Webb Space Telescope as the mere beginning of a race to learn more. Ezra Klein feels that the government is generally NOT very good about keeping secrets, anyway – look at all the leaks about matters far less profound! Avi Loeb has already had some success securing private funding for his Galileo Project to retrieve material samples of what he calls an “interstellar meteor” which crashed to earth in 2014, from the bottom of the Pacific. Despite being shunned by his colleagues in academia (he now can only publish in Medium), he persists in his speculation about extraterrestrial technology.
I fear that the real danger in declassification, if people believe it trustworthy, is that it would reveal the Pentagon has NOTHING! This would be a massive psychological letdown for much of the world’s population – as if we don’t have enough to worry about already regarding our planet. Surely, we think to ourselves, there must be somebody out there smarter than us – who survived! Carl Sagan wrote that we owe ourselves the cosmic perspective that would come from verified contact with an extraterrestrial civilization – the overview seen by astronauts in his “Pale Blue Dot” essay.
Negative evidence, after so much attention for so many years, would likely only further submerge the already “deep state” into truly subterranean conspiracy territory. Could avoiding this outcome be the real reason the Pentagon resists transparency? It’s important to remember that most UAP incidents are fully explained today – only a minority of reports remain in the unexplained category. Yet they are the ones that give us hope!
Another Carl Sagan quote is: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” David Grusch and the two Navy pilots testifying before Congress this summer have not provided it. It’s up to Congress now to facilitate further closed-door testimony. Will we hear more about it? That may depend on public appetite. If mainstream media resistance to the story continues to dominate, we may not (the New York Times has been notably skeptical). Holding House hearings – the Senate held theirs in May – is a constructive acknowledgment that there is some public appetite for learning more about these phenomena. We’ll see if it finds its way into legislation.
I’ll be waiting.
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 