“Have you seen any alien bodies?”, “Who should we ask, to get answers about aliens and US programs?” In the room, nervous chuckles crack the solemn veneer of the moment. The questions posed Wednesday, July 26 in the US Congress – where the witnesses speak under oath and therefore expose themselves to serious prosecution if they fabricate – are surprising, they are not so very serious.
The stakes are high: eagerly awaited in the United States and in the world of ufology and conspiracy, the parliamentary hearing that some elected officials already qualify as “historic”, must determine whether the little green men have landed on Earth, and whether the U.S. government hid this information from the general public. On June 5, former US agent David Grush revived the debate, accusing the army of detaining vessels and non-human bodies.
Questioned in turn by elected Republicans and Democrats, the Air Force veteran reiterated his assertions without flinching. “I have been made aware in the course of my official duties of a decades-old Unidentified Object Crash Recovery and Reverse Engineering program to which I have been denied access.” he declared in particular, without ever being able to provide proof of his allegations.
No evidence, no documents, no witnesses
David Grush is said to have spoken with “40 witnesses” and knows where the US military has been studying extraterrestrial objects thus found since the 1930s. The veteran, however, refused to name the people and agencies involved in these accusations during the public hearing, promising to deliver them “later, in private”. He revealed no image, no sound, no document to support his words. No witness has come forward so far to corroborate his remarks. You should take him at his word.
Despite the remote likelihood that these claims will turn out to be true, and despite the Pentagon’s denial, Congress still chose to seriously consider the matter. One way to continue the strategy of transparency on UFOs and extraterrestrial reports initiated by the American administration in 2017, after the revelations of the New York Times about the existence of a Pentagon unidentified aerospace threat identification program.
Since that time, and in the face of great demand for information from the American public, the United States military has declassified multiple records showing unidentified flying objects, the Pentagon has announced the creation of a new task force, and NASA has let it be known that she could also look into these events. This Wednesday, Congress notably questioned, in addition to David Grush, David Fravor, a former navy commander who filmed an unidentified form in the Californian sky in 2004, during a mission. His video made the opening of the exchanges.
UFOs and aliens are no longer the prerogative of ufologists
Like these particularly media hearings, UFOs and aliens are more and more legitimate and respectable subjects in the United States. Gone are the days when these debates were reserved for ufologists, those people convinced that aliens have landed, very popular in post-truth America and conspiracy theories. Last week a representative of the White House even explained that the unidentified flying objects had an impact on the training of the military: real, or not, they stress the pilots, so you have to adapt.
More and more American elected officials, including all of those who organized the hearing on Wednesday, consider UFOs to be a national security problem. Failing to prove extraterrestrial life, certain testimonies could help flush out intrusions, like the Chinese spy balloon that Internet users had already noticed this winter in the American sky before the government destroyed it. The first UFOs recorded in the United States in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War were suspected of being the eyes of Moscow. Would they now be those of Beijing?
As these questions gain credence, more and more Americans say they believe real aliens have landed. According to a survey by the institute Gallup, conducted in 2021 on a representative sample of 1,007 American adults, 41% of Americans believe that UFOs are in fact extraterrestrial vessels. This is 8% more than in 2019. The study was however carried out less than a month after the publication of a report by theOffice of the Director of National Intelligence, which concludes that we have no clue justifying the alien hypothesis.
Investigate without sowing doubt?
A sign of the enthusiasm around these questions, the Pentagon has received several hundred testimonies about UFOs and extraterrestrials in the second half of 2022 alone. For the elected Democrat Jamie Raskin, the multiplication of launchers of alert around UFOs reflects a real need for “transparency and notification systems in order to obtain clarification on what is really happening”, he declared in particular during the exchanges in Congress. It is still necessary to know how to correctly translate the issues raised.
As the polls show, and the positions taken in favor of Dabid Grush’s story, the American general public is struggling to see clearly, between the real need for transparency and absurd, far-fetched theories. Especially since the intentions behind the hearings, commissions and inquiries of recent years are not always made explicit. Was it this Wednesday to check whether the powerful of this world have been hiding alien bodies since 1993, to carry out a serious investigation to rationalize the debate or to try to force the government to declassify more files?
Some statements by elected officials participating in the hearings throw a little more vagueness: “If objects have been found in the sky of our planet, which defy the laws of gravity and physics, what energy do they use? What technologies possess Do we have this technology?”, asked Republican Nancy Mace very seriously, on the sidelines of this Wednesday’s interviews, as if David Grush’s unsubstantiated claims could really give rise to this type of question.
Among the commentators who consider David Grush credible – there are many of them in the United States – all highlight the fact that he is not accustomed, a priori, to conspiracy theories, and also recall his important functions within the American state. The man worked for the “UAP task force”, a military office created in 2017 to investigate unexplained abnormal phenomena. Forgetting that believing a person on the sole basis of his social status is tantamount to swallowing arguments from authorities.
Being in the right place to make disclosures does not imply that they are true. “These are just words, nothing like solid evidence”, in particular had to recall Seth Shostak, astronomer at Seti, the most important scientific research program on extraterrestrial life, on American television. In Congress, a sentence from the elected Republican Nick Langworthy particularly made the audience laugh: “It seems to me that we have a problem that requires further investigation”. Enough to put ufologists and scientists in agreement on one point.