On Wednesday, July 26th, U.S. Congress was home to one of the most sensational events in world political history. In a formal hearing open to the public, and broadcast by the Congress-focused C-Span TV channel, three expert witnesses gave two hours’ worth of stunning testimony:
- The United States government has a secret program to conceal its own knowledge of, and contact with, extra-terrestrial visitors to Earth;
- The program has been operating since the 1930s;
- A secret agency under the U.S. government is in possession of multiple extra-terrestrial vessels, commonly referred to as UFOs;
- When retrieving crashed UFOs, the military also recovered crew members; and
- These UFOs are of extra-terrestrial origin.
So there. The genie is out of the bottle. There is intelligent life on other planets, capable of leaping through space, across untold distances, and visiting our planet without the general public knowing about it.
The witnesses were no rookies to the subject:
- Ryan Graves is the executive director of UFO-investigating Americans for Safe Aerospace, a military-led organization that specializes in investigating UFO sightings by military and civilian pilots. Graves is also a former F/A-18 U.S. Navy pilot.
- David Fravor is the former squadron commander of the U.S. Navy who piloted the F/A-18F that came in close contact with the now world-famous ‘tic tac’ UFO off the California coast in 2004.
- David Grusch worked as a national reconnaissance officer with the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force under the Department of Defense.
This hearing was a shocking experience, even for those of us who have written about the UFO phenomenon in the past. Already in November of last year, I pointed to evidence that the U.S. government is working on a deliberate plan to disclose its UFO program. To this date, though, there has been no public forum, sanctioned by the U.S. government, that has given so much detail and in no uncertain terms established that UFOs exist—and that they are not from this Earth.
For two hours, the witnesses bombarded the legislators on the committee with sensational facts. About 32 minutes into the hearing, David Grusch explains that the rumors about crashed UFOs being retrieved and hidden away by the U.S. military are not just rumors:
I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program, to which I was denied access … when I requested it.
The world of ufology is full of rumors and more or less substantiated claims about UFO crashes. Understandably, those rumors have often been met with skepticism and ridicule: anyone older than this millennium was told in school that there was not even evidence of planets around any other star than our sun. We were also told that physics placed firm restrictions on the ability of any object to travel faster than light, which effectively ruled out interstellar travel.
We now know that not only are there planets around other stars, but some of them are capable of sustaining life as we know it. With the witness testimonies in this hearing, we have to assume that what we know of physics is far from all there is to know.
The most famous UFO crash is the so-called Roswell incident, which actually happened near the small town of Corona, NM. This incident was covered extensively by the late Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist, and his co-author, aviation writer Don Berliner, in the incredibly well-researched Crash at Corona.
With painstaking methodology, Berliner and Friedman piece together evidence of the crash. In chapter 7, they set the scene for the discovery of the wreckage:
It all began on the morning of Thursday, July 3, 1947, when two innocent people stumbled upon the remains of a crashed “flying disc” on a section of sheep ranch dotted with rocks, scrub bushes, and tough buffalo grass. William “Mac” Brazel, a foreman with the Foster Ranch, and his 7-year-old neighbor Dee Proctor were out checking for damage after the previous night’s violent thunderstorm.
The Proctor boy was an avid horse rider who often joined ranch hands on their work, just to be given a chance to ride.
People on the ranch had heard a loud noise sometime during the night, different from the storm thunder, which was one reason why the foreman went out to investigate. Out there in the field were “bits and pieces of shiny material unlike anything the veteran rancher had ever seen.” Interviewing numerous witnesses, Berliner and Friedman document the incredibly exotic nature of the debris.
Later on in chapter 7, they recount witness stories about the crash in San Agustin, where witnesses supposedly saw crew members of the UFO. One of them was allegedly alive and showed signs of being scared of the humans. The civilians who found the wreckage took measures to indicate that they had no hostile intentions.
Over the past 31 years since it was first published, Crash at Corona has been vulnerable to the same type of criticism as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. At the time when Solzhenitsyn’s book came out in the West, many on the left dismissed it as unsubstantiated speculation. At the time, namely, there was no independent corroboration that the prison camps he described actually existed.
History proved Solzhenitsyn right. Now history is doing the same favor to the ufologists.
As corroboration of the existence of government-run UFO retrieval programs, Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat on the committee interviewing the witnesses Graves, Fravor, and Grusch, asked David Grusch:
Do you believe that our government is in possession of UAPs?
Rep. Garcia used the acronym for ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ which is the term for UFOs preferred by the U.S. government.
David Grusch replied without hesitation:
Absolutely, based on interviewing over forty witnesses over four years. … I know the exact locations [of the retrieved UAPs], and those locations were provided to the Inspector General and some of which to the intelligence committees. I actually had people with first-hand knowledge, uhm, provide a protected disclosure to the Inspector General.
The term ‘Inspector General’ refers to a position and an office that exists at departments under the U.S. government. The role of the Inspector General is to independently investigate the integrity of the department. In the case of the Department of Defense, this role is particularly sensitive, given the nature of military activity. The IG’s role becomes outright delicate in the context of extremely secret activities as the ones discussed at this hearing.
Later on in the hearing, Rep. Burleson, a Republican from Missouri, asked Grusch to elaborate on his statements that the U.S. government is in possession of UFOs:
You’ve said that the U.S. has intact spacecraft. You said that the government has alien bodies or alien species … Have you seen the spacecraft?
To which Grusch replied:
I have to be careful to describe what I have seen first hand, and not in this environment, but I could answer that question behind, behind closed doors, yes.
He followed up with a denial of ever having seen “bodies.” When this denial is contrasted against his willingness to answer the “spacecraft” question in a closed meeting, it only means one thing: Grusch has indeed seen those vessels, and that he knows they are not from Earth.
The hearing was indeed an earth-shattering experience. At times, the members of Congress that sit on the committee can be seen reacting almost with incredulity at the information they are being given. At one point, Rep. Nancy Mace can be seen giggling nervously, and it is only logical that the congressmen wanted to express their skepticism, or at least give voice to how they believe their constituents react to the hearing.
To this point, Rep. Burleson offered an intriguing objection to the entire concept of the hearing. With reference to the retrieval of crashed vessels, he challenged the very idea that UFOs come from another planet:
My view has been that we are billions of lightyears away from any other [solar] system, and the concept that an alien species is technologically advanced to travel billions of lightyears gets here and somehow is incompetent enough to not survive Earth, or crashes, is something that I find a little bit far-fetched.
Burleson is incorrect about the distance between our sun and the nearest star systems. As one example, Alpha Centauri is only 4.4 lightyears from Earth. Our entire galaxy is estimated to be 100,000 lightyears from one end to the other.
In response to Burleson, David Grusch explained that even the most advanced technology sometimes fails. With a high number of “sorties”, i.e., craft taking off on a mission, a small number is going to fail one way or the other.
This is a good answer, for two reasons. First, it explains that the aliens visiting Earth are no super-beings, i.e., they are not the kind of almost-divine creatures that are often depicted in science-fiction movies. They are highly advanced but mortal and imperfect beings, whose engineering capabilities, while vastly beyond ours, are still limited.
When viewed this way, visiting aliens become more ‘human’ in a sense, which is presumably necessary if we are going to approach their existence based on realistic expectations. They are not here to ‘bring back Elvis’ or cure all our diseases for us. Their visits to Earth are politically, legally, and financially defined in much the same ways as our space programs are.
The second reason why Grusch’s answer is important is that it opens our minds to what motive aliens would have for visiting Earth. It is highly unlikely that they are here for hostile reasons—given how long they have apparently been coming here (since at least the 1930s according to this hearing), a hostile ambition would reasonably have been executed already. Far more likely is that these beings are explorers, politicians and diplomats, military, and scientists. They may be studying us to determine if we are ready to be included in a galactic community and integrated into the interstellar economy.
As if to reinforce the extra-terrestrial origin of UFOs, Rep. Langworthy, a Republican from New York, asked the witness David Fravor about his experience with the tic-tac UFO. Langworthy wanted to know if there was any chance that the technology behind this UFO could originate on Earth. Fravor replied, bluntly, that our current technology is “not even close” to the capabilities of this UFO. He also explained:
I think it defies current material science and the ability to develop that much propulsion, and I know there have been some physicists that have done calculations, which is beyond anything that we have.
With all this out in the open, the one question that remains is: has the U.S. government had direct contact with aliens? Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, asked David Grusch this question:
You’ve stated that the government is in possession of potentially non-human spacecraft. Based on your experience and extensive conversations with experts, do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extra-terrestrials?
Again, Grusch gave an answer that can only be interpreted one way:
Something I can’t discuss in public setting.
It is not far-fetched to assume that the next step toward full disclosure will be the revelation that the United States government indeed has ongoing diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials.
That is a fantastic perspective on the future, for all of us. For me and my fellow economists, it means a lot more work. At some point in the future, we are going to have to find out how to establish interstellar trade and investment programs with other planets. We are going to have to develop statistical systems for tracking trade between Earth and other planets.
And that is just what we economists can look forward to. The possibilities for mankind as a whole are boundless.
The America Report: UFOs in Congress
On Wednesday, July 26th, U.S. Congress was home to one of the most sensational events in world political history. In a formal hearing open to the public, and broadcast by the Congress-focused C-Span TV channel, three expert witnesses gave two hours’ worth of stunning testimony:
So there. The genie is out of the bottle. There is intelligent life on other planets, capable of leaping through space, across untold distances, and visiting our planet without the general public knowing about it.
The witnesses were no rookies to the subject:
This hearing was a shocking experience, even for those of us who have written about the UFO phenomenon in the past. Already in November of last year, I pointed to evidence that the U.S. government is working on a deliberate plan to disclose its UFO program. To this date, though, there has been no public forum, sanctioned by the U.S. government, that has given so much detail and in no uncertain terms established that UFOs exist—and that they are not from this Earth.
For two hours, the witnesses bombarded the legislators on the committee with sensational facts. About 32 minutes into the hearing, David Grusch explains that the rumors about crashed UFOs being retrieved and hidden away by the U.S. military are not just rumors:
The world of ufology is full of rumors and more or less substantiated claims about UFO crashes. Understandably, those rumors have often been met with skepticism and ridicule: anyone older than this millennium was told in school that there was not even evidence of planets around any other star than our sun. We were also told that physics placed firm restrictions on the ability of any object to travel faster than light, which effectively ruled out interstellar travel.
We now know that not only are there planets around other stars, but some of them are capable of sustaining life as we know it. With the witness testimonies in this hearing, we have to assume that what we know of physics is far from all there is to know.
The most famous UFO crash is the so-called Roswell incident, which actually happened near the small town of Corona, NM. This incident was covered extensively by the late Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist, and his co-author, aviation writer Don Berliner, in the incredibly well-researched Crash at Corona.
With painstaking methodology, Berliner and Friedman piece together evidence of the crash. In chapter 7, they set the scene for the discovery of the wreckage:
The Proctor boy was an avid horse rider who often joined ranch hands on their work, just to be given a chance to ride.
People on the ranch had heard a loud noise sometime during the night, different from the storm thunder, which was one reason why the foreman went out to investigate. Out there in the field were “bits and pieces of shiny material unlike anything the veteran rancher had ever seen.” Interviewing numerous witnesses, Berliner and Friedman document the incredibly exotic nature of the debris.
Later on in chapter 7, they recount witness stories about the crash in San Agustin, where witnesses supposedly saw crew members of the UFO. One of them was allegedly alive and showed signs of being scared of the humans. The civilians who found the wreckage took measures to indicate that they had no hostile intentions.
Over the past 31 years since it was first published, Crash at Corona has been vulnerable to the same type of criticism as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. At the time when Solzhenitsyn’s book came out in the West, many on the left dismissed it as unsubstantiated speculation. At the time, namely, there was no independent corroboration that the prison camps he described actually existed.
History proved Solzhenitsyn right. Now history is doing the same favor to the ufologists.
As corroboration of the existence of government-run UFO retrieval programs, Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat on the committee interviewing the witnesses Graves, Fravor, and Grusch, asked David Grusch:
Rep. Garcia used the acronym for ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ which is the term for UFOs preferred by the U.S. government.
David Grusch replied without hesitation:
The term ‘Inspector General’ refers to a position and an office that exists at departments under the U.S. government. The role of the Inspector General is to independently investigate the integrity of the department. In the case of the Department of Defense, this role is particularly sensitive, given the nature of military activity. The IG’s role becomes outright delicate in the context of extremely secret activities as the ones discussed at this hearing.
Later on in the hearing, Rep. Burleson, a Republican from Missouri, asked Grusch to elaborate on his statements that the U.S. government is in possession of UFOs:
To which Grusch replied:
He followed up with a denial of ever having seen “bodies.” When this denial is contrasted against his willingness to answer the “spacecraft” question in a closed meeting, it only means one thing: Grusch has indeed seen those vessels, and that he knows they are not from Earth.
The hearing was indeed an earth-shattering experience. At times, the members of Congress that sit on the committee can be seen reacting almost with incredulity at the information they are being given. At one point, Rep. Nancy Mace can be seen giggling nervously, and it is only logical that the congressmen wanted to express their skepticism, or at least give voice to how they believe their constituents react to the hearing.
To this point, Rep. Burleson offered an intriguing objection to the entire concept of the hearing. With reference to the retrieval of crashed vessels, he challenged the very idea that UFOs come from another planet:
Burleson is incorrect about the distance between our sun and the nearest star systems. As one example, Alpha Centauri is only 4.4 lightyears from Earth. Our entire galaxy is estimated to be 100,000 lightyears from one end to the other.
In response to Burleson, David Grusch explained that even the most advanced technology sometimes fails. With a high number of “sorties”, i.e., craft taking off on a mission, a small number is going to fail one way or the other.
This is a good answer, for two reasons. First, it explains that the aliens visiting Earth are no super-beings, i.e., they are not the kind of almost-divine creatures that are often depicted in science-fiction movies. They are highly advanced but mortal and imperfect beings, whose engineering capabilities, while vastly beyond ours, are still limited.
When viewed this way, visiting aliens become more ‘human’ in a sense, which is presumably necessary if we are going to approach their existence based on realistic expectations. They are not here to ‘bring back Elvis’ or cure all our diseases for us. Their visits to Earth are politically, legally, and financially defined in much the same ways as our space programs are.
The second reason why Grusch’s answer is important is that it opens our minds to what motive aliens would have for visiting Earth. It is highly unlikely that they are here for hostile reasons—given how long they have apparently been coming here (since at least the 1930s according to this hearing), a hostile ambition would reasonably have been executed already. Far more likely is that these beings are explorers, politicians and diplomats, military, and scientists. They may be studying us to determine if we are ready to be included in a galactic community and integrated into the interstellar economy.
As if to reinforce the extra-terrestrial origin of UFOs, Rep. Langworthy, a Republican from New York, asked the witness David Fravor about his experience with the tic-tac UFO. Langworthy wanted to know if there was any chance that the technology behind this UFO could originate on Earth. Fravor replied, bluntly, that our current technology is “not even close” to the capabilities of this UFO. He also explained:
With all this out in the open, the one question that remains is: has the U.S. government had direct contact with aliens? Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina, asked David Grusch this question:
Again, Grusch gave an answer that can only be interpreted one way:
It is not far-fetched to assume that the next step toward full disclosure will be the revelation that the United States government indeed has ongoing diplomatic relations with extraterrestrials.
That is a fantastic perspective on the future, for all of us. For me and my fellow economists, it means a lot more work. At some point in the future, we are going to have to find out how to establish interstellar trade and investment programs with other planets. We are going to have to develop statistical systems for tracking trade between Earth and other planets.
And that is just what we economists can look forward to. The possibilities for mankind as a whole are boundless.
READ NEXT
Jaguar: All Virtue, No Vehicle
Mazan Affair: A Trial of Moral Misery
Milei Disrupts the Cosy Consensus at the G20