UFO Crashes Almost Certainly Aren’t Real. But the Government Itself Is Responsible for Public Distrust.
The hearings on unidentified aerial phenomena unearthed no public evidence that should make us take claims of crashed alien spacecrafts and recovered “nonhuman biologics” seriously. But the federal government has done plenty to earn public distrust.
David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Office representative on the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, testifies to the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, July 26, 2023. (Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Did the fascist government of Benito Mussolini recover a crashed alien spaceship in the 1930s? Did the ship then make its way into the custody of the Vatican, which in turn handed it to the United States at the end of World War II? Have “nonhuman biologics” been recovered from more recent crashes?
It all sounds like the premise of an amazing episode of the X-Files. In this case, though, it’s been presented as nonfiction by “whistleblower” David Grusch. Late last month, he was a star witness in Congress’s hearings on what were once called Unidentified Flying Objects and have since been dubbed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) — presumably because “UFO” has an embarrassing ring to it.
Even if you don’t believe that little green men (or X-Files-era gray aliens) were crash-landing in fascist Italy, the bipartisan interest in getting to the bottom of all this makes sense for far more mundane reasons. Should we really trust the military and intelligence communities to spend money “looking into UAPs” without the public getting to know exactly what they’re up to, and how this might relate to the rest of what they’re up to?
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