Ninety years, without anything filtering? In 1933, Mussolini’s men reportedly picked up an intact spaceship in great secrecy. The machine, about ten meters high, in the shape of a bell, would have run aground without anyone else noticing it, in Magenta, in the north of Italy. It would have been entrusted to the American intelligence eleven years later, which would never have spoken about it since, in spite of the importance of such a discovery.
This presumed plot, that Westerners would have hatched to monopolize the extraordinary technologies of the interplanetary ship, the world could never have heard of. It was without counting on David Grusch, a former American Air Force, who claims since June 5 to have evidence that “non-human” material, vessels, but also debris and artifacts in all kind, would be held by the United States and its allies, in the greatest secrecy.
David Grusch’s testimony was first published on the American site The Debrief. It was collected and relayed by two journalists who had revealed in 2017 the existence of a Pentagon program aimed at monitoring unidentified objects. Never mind the highly improbable nature of his story, which has never been accompanied by evidence, or even clues. Despite its conspiratorial appearance, the information was quickly widely taken up, almost everywhere on our planet. In France, the newspaper The Parisian even dedicated its front page to it, and a good number of French media took the plunge.
Each time, the Aliens are discovered in the United States
It must be said that in addition to being captivating, David Grush also proves to be a very well-placed source. Aviation knows him; UFOs too. After working for American intelligence, he joined the “UAP task force”, a military office created in 2017 to investigate unexplained abnormal phenomena. Also a graduate in physics, David Grusch could have had access to classified information of this nature, identify it, and transmit it to the American Congress, as he assures us. So why deprive yourself of its “revelations”?
Except that such a story is very unlikely to have existed. And conveys in passing the many stereotypes and absurdities that serve the very serious studies of UFOs, and extraterrestrial life. Starting with the secret: “If a whole bunch of countries got spaceships, too many people would be in the loop for silence to be kept”, criticizes Gabriel Chardin, astrophysicist at the CNRS and author of Where are they ? Aliens and the Fermi Paradoxpublished by the CNRS.
Why would the meeting of the third type look like a crash, on the territory of the United States moreover, like in the movies? That the discovery of another form of life is done in this way is actually one of the least likely scenarios. “This civilization, with a ship so reliable that it has allowed it to travel thousands of years through the cosmos unhindered, would have finally crashed stupidly on Earth, its number one objective among the billions of planets to invade? And obviously, in the end, it is the Americans who hold the debris? It’s delusional, “continues Gabriel Chardin.
A recurring hysteria around UFOs
The controversy around David Grusch recalls the hysteria caused by each declassification of UFO videos filmed by American aircraft, which have recurred in recent years. However, the existence of images of clouds or unexplained shapes in the sky does not mean that the aliens have landed: “At the present time, we have no explicit data suggesting that there is a connection between the unidentified anomalous phenomena and extraterrestrial life”, underlined the members of NASA’s unexplained phenomena study group on June 1.
Seeing anomalous events in no way proves the presence of another civilization. It is even, here again, the least probable explanation: “The reflection of the sun on an airplane or a satellite, the atmospheric re-entry of a comet or a satellite, celestial lanterns, drones or even the effect of air turbulence on the observation of a star very often proves to be the cause of these strange phenomena in the sky”, recalls Vincent Costes, head of the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena Study and Information Group at Cnes, the National Center for Space Studies.
The idea that an unidentified flying object would be proof of an alien landing is a recent confusion, born from the post-war period. “Since this period, we have become accustomed to the presence of means of air traffic. In the collective imagination, they necessarily meet certain criteria: a pointed shape, the presence of a noise. Seeing something in the sky that does not fully correspond to these characteristics opens the door to interpretation”, explains Arnaud Esquerrres, sociologist at EHESS.
The offensives of ufologists
Contrary to what one might think, direct witnesses to these phenomena are mostly very cautious. When they report them, they take care not to affirm anything, relates the researcher, author of Extraterrestrial event theoryEssay on the fantastic story, published by Fayard editions, in 2016. It is above all the community of “ufologists” in full swing since the 1970s, which seizes these stories, and directs them towards the extraterrestrial hypothesis, before these were picked up by various media.
According to these ufologists, the aliens have already landed, and we are hiding it. They would have discovered the deception before anyone else. A narrative taken up by David Grush who, at no time, expresses doubts about the nature of the objects he would have discovered in the secret American documents. “What is predominant in the story of this alleged whistleblower is that we are hiding things from the population, and that we must quickly find out what uses the West could make of these extraterrestrial tools”, decrypts Arnaud Esquerres.
Still, the idea of a meeting with ET is not crazy. But it would probably have nothing to do with the little green men who populate our imaginations today. Since the 1960s, with the emergence of the conquest of space, many scientific institutions have tried to specify what such a contact would look like, like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, or Sete, a department of NASA entirely devoted to this subject.
The real meeting of the third type?
If these specialists are convinced that aliens exist, they paint a completely different picture. “If we look at what happened on Earth, the most probable is that a form of life elsewhere in the universe is in majority the prerogative of extremely primitive organisms, of the order of the bacteria”, explains Frances Westall, exobiologist at the CNRS. And to remember that if life appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago, our civilization has only been able to leave the planet for seventy years. A fraction of a fraction of a second on the scale of the existence of the universe. And already, our existence is threatened because of the CO2 emissions at the base of this capacity.
Thus, if programs like the Sete try to intercept radio messages coming from the cosmos, most of the research on extraterrestrial life is based on the study of the composition of the nearest planets, among the ten billion considered as habitable in our galaxy – neither too close nor too far from their star, solid, and with water in a liquid state. Some researchers are also working to look for a form of atmospheric pollution – therefore created by a living form – on certain distant planets. “It is by this approach that a first ‘contact’ with extraterrestrial life could be made, and not by analyzing the light trails in the atmosphere”, defends the researcher Frances Westall.
With advances in measuring devices, some of the most influential scientists on the subject, such as the astronomer from Sete Seth Shostak, now dare to proclaim loud and clear that such a discovery is no longer science fiction, and could even be done in the coming years. Let David Grusch rest assured, the long-awaited face-to-face could thus happen very soon… And thanks to the United States, country at the forefront of these topics.