Last week a former intelligence officer testified to an explosive claim before Congress: that for decades the U.S. government has operated a secret program to retrieve and reverse-engineer unidentified flying objects. From some crashed UFOs, “biologics” that were “nonhuman” were recovered, the officer, David Grusch, said at a highly anticipated congressional hearing.
He used the term UAPs, which stands for “unidentified aerial phenomena” or the more recently adopted “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” That’s how government officials refer to detected objects that don’t fit a ready explanation.
Grusch, who said he previously worked with a Pentagon task force on UAPs, testified before a House oversight subcommittee that the task force’s director told him, in 2019, to identify all “special access” and “controlled access” programs related to the group’s mission. Through that work, Grusch said, he learned of this retrieval and reverse-engineering program but was “denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it.” He eventually became a whistle-blower and went public with his claims in June.
Asked by a lawmaker if he knew of people who’d been “harmed or injured” in an effort to cover up or conceal “extraterrestrial technology,” Grusch replied that he had. He also said that “multiple colleagues” had been physically injured by UAPs.
Grusch’s testimony sounds like the stuff of science fiction: Aliens have piloted spacecrafts that touched down on Earth. Some faction of the government is in possession of those spacecrafts and alien bodies and has kept the whole thing under wraps, including from Congress. Things have even gotten violent. While Grusch used the term “nonhuman” instead of “extraterrestrial” because it “keeps the aperture open … scientifically,” he gave credence to the alien hypothesis in a June interview with the cable network NewsNation. “We’re definitely not alone,” he said. “The data points, quite empirically, that we’re not alone.”
Does it though? The Pentagon denied finding “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials” exist now or existed in the past. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued a statement in June saying that it has “not found any credible evidence of extraterrestrial life and there is no evidence that UAPs are extraterrestrial.” (Government officials believe many UAP incidents can be explained by “surveillance operations by foreign powers and weather balloons or other airborne clutter,” The New York Times reported in 2022.)
Still, Grusch’s testimony provoked an avalanche of speculation about the existence of aliens and a government conspiracy to cover it up. The Chronicle asked two scientists and a historian who writes about UFO lore what they made of his assertions. In typical academic fashion, they were unconvinced.
“It’s an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, none of which we’re getting,” said Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester who wrote the forthcoming Little Book of Aliens. “Science works by brutal, absolutely brutal, standards of evidence that link a claim to evidence for that claim,” he said. “And in this case there’s just nothing there.”
“Show me the spaceship, as I like to say,” Frank said.
Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist who works at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, said that while he has no reason to believe Grusch is lying, the officer’s testimony is not firsthand. It’s based on what Grusch said he’d been told by other people he considers credible. “I’m not going to say, therefore, it must be false. But … as a scientist, I have to look at data,” Haqq-Misra said. When it comes to UAPs, he said, the government possesses information that it keeps secret, perhaps for good reason. Regardless, “I can’t look at it. My colleagues can’t look at it. So as scientists, we can’t do anything with that.”
In the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing.
Joshua Semeter, a member of the NASA-selected team studying UAPs and professor at Boston University, told BU Today in June that Grusch’s claims were “two steps removed from being Earth-shattering: Not only has he not shared any verifiable evidence — photographs, artifacts, or any other manner of data — but he also has not personally seen or touched any of the objects he references. In the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing.”
(Semeter did not respond to a Chronicle interview request. While Grusch told Congress that those unnamed people whom he spoke to also shared “photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony” with him, those records were not made public on Wednesday.)
Grusch’s testimony “ups the ante,” but his claims are “very hard to take seriously unless we start getting some real evidence that’s of a forensic nature to prove these things,” said Greg Eghigian, a professor of history and bioethics at Pennsylvania State University whose book about the history of UFO sightings, After the Flying Saucers Came, will publish next year.
‘We’ve Been Here Before’
Ever since America’s first big wave of UFO sightings in the late 1940s captured the public’s imagination, hard data has been hard to come by. A recent Atlantic article depicted the past 75 years of cyclical obsession and simultaneous lack of information this way: “Someone with military or government experience comes forward with a strange experience or encounter. They have no hard evidence but, given their background, are perceived by some to be a reliable observer anyway. Tabloids amplify the story, fanning public interest and demanding that the government reveal whatever it must be hiding. Officials deny that they’ve found evidence of extraterrestrial activity, which only fuels conspiracy thinking.”
“We’ve been here before, right?” said Frank, of Grusch’s testimony and the Pentagon’s refutation. He noted that in the 1950s, a former Air Force investigator who had directed a government study of UFOs published a book in which he claimed that a top-secret government document, referred to as an “Estimate of the Situation,” once endorsed UFOs as interplanetary. “But after 70 years of trying, no one has ever found that document,” Frank said. (The investigator wrote that the report, judged to lack “proof,” was “relegated to the incinerator.”)
More recent public interest in UFOs was fueled by a 2017 New York Times story that broke news of a secretive Defense Department program that investigated reports of the objects. The Times also reported on a retired Navy pilot who said that while on a flight in 2004, he saw an object accelerate “like nothing I’ve ever seen.” (That pilot, David Fravor, and another former Navy pilot, who has spoken about encounters with unknown objects, testified alongside Grusch.)
“I think that it is time for academics, for independent scientists and scholars, to be looking into this phenomenon from all sorts of angles,” Eghigian said.
Some of that work is already happening. In May, Eghigian spoke at a Rice University conference meant to explore “paranormal phenomena across different cultures and generations.” A goal of the Galileo Project at Harvard University is to “examine the possibility of extraterrestrial origin” for UAPs.
For too long, Eghigian said, the conversation has been dominated by the intelligence community, on one hand, and by enthusiasts on the other. Scholarship is built on healthy skepticism, he said, which is “the kind of thing that we need in this environment.” He noted that right now, modern society is overrun by disinformation, rumors, lying, and “post-truthisms.” A “new kind of sobriety needs to be interjected here.”
Frank said Grusch’s bold and unproved claims should not detract from the scientific advances that researchers who are searching for life on other planets are poised to make in the coming decades. NASA has announced incipient plans for a telescope with a goal of looking for such signs of life on Earth-like planets. He also pointed to the astronomy and astrophysics “decadal survey,” which details what projects and areas the research community thinks should be prioritized.
A passage from the most recent report, which identified “Pathways to Habitable Worlds” as a “priority science area,” strikes an optimistic, expansive tone: “We now have the foundation to begin the search for habitable planets and life beyond the solar system in earnest — to address a question that humankind has been asking itself for millennia: Are we alone in the universe?”
It’s a question scholars are eager to explore, in public.
