UFO hearing: why is Washington suddenly embracing aliens?

A UFO “whistleblower” told Congress this week that the US government has uncovered extraterrestrial bodies and spaceships from crash sites.

David Grusch, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, told politicians that the White House has secretly been retrieving unidentified flying objects for decades, and claimed that “non-human biologics” have been found.

His testimony has been seen as a turning point in the question of extraterrestrial life. “Focusing on possible alien visitors has been the pursuit of a conspiracy-minded fringe,” said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. “But this week’s congressional hearing is a sign of its increased respectability.”

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What did the papers say?

Grusch’s testimony “marks a significant turning point”, wrote Dani Di Placido for Forbes, as “decades of lore cultivated by the UFO community has spread from conspiratorial podcasts and UFO forums to Congress”.

Some viewers watched “slack-jawed” during the testimonies, wrote Tim Stanley for The Telegraph, but others were unconvinced. It was a “truly extraordinary claim, begging for extraordinary evidence”, wrote Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, for MSNBC. “But where is the evidence?”

“Admitting that aliens could be here is a far cry from claiming that they are here,” added Shostak. He wondered why such aliens “somehow manage to arrange things so that they’re exclusively met by government employees anxious to hide them”.

Stanley noted that the issue “goes back to at least the 1960s”, and former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford “claimed to have seen spaceships”. But the US is becoming more focused on the topic.

“Modern UFOmania began with a series of New York Times articles published in 2017,” wrote Jacob Aron for New Scientist. The pieces “detailed a defunct US Department of Defense programme, backed by top US senators, dedicated to investigating flying objects with no explanation”, he recalled. This combination of “military bigwigs, senior politicians and a normally sober newspaper opened the door to taking UFO claims seriously”, he wrote.

This modern acceleration of speculation across the US has been reflected in its political neighbourhood. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna said this week that the US government had been “gas lighting” ordinary Americans, while her fellow Republican Tim Burchett described it as a “cover up”. “In the Baptist church we’d say the devil’s been in our way… well the devil’s been in our way in this thing,” he said.

Robert Garcia, a Democrat, was “more moderate”, said Stanley, urging people to “come to this hearing with an open mind” as America has already been torn apart by “partisanship and alternative facts”.

Many are wondering why US politicians are becoming so increasingly engaged with the UFO question. Some have attributed the Pentagon’s “sudden interest of UFOs” as a “cynical effort to expand military funding”.

Others believe politicians see the issue as an opportunity to shine a light into corners that remain murky. “From the outset, both Republicans and Democrats invoked one word to highlight what the hearing was all about: transparency,” wrote Greg Eghigian for the Los Angeles Times.

The representatives “insisted on greater transparency from the military, from the intelligence community and from private defense contractors”, he noted.

Or was it just another opportunity for partisan point-scoring, he wondered. Two Republicans, Glenn Grothman and Virginia Foxx, used the occasion to “castigate” the Biden administration for its handling of the Chinese balloon incident back in February. “The call for openness is sometimes just partisan politics by other means,” he said.

What next?

There is now pressure to look into what Grusch told Congress and even some sceptics are in favour of such a step. “There’s nothing wrong with investigating these claims,” said Forbes’ Di Placido, and “if enough people believe that this is a phenomenon worth looking into, then by all means, the US government should look into it”.

However, he said he remains unconvinced much will be found because Grusch’s full story is a “wild ride, featuring Mussolini and the Vatican conspiring to cover up evidence of alien life”, before “the US supposedly took over and took care of all those alien crash landing sites in secret”.

There is a suspicion that some believers will never be satisfied. Across the globe countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Italy, New Zealand and Spain have released “thousands of pages of declassified UFO-related documents”, wrote Eghigian, including around 60,000 pages released by the UK between 2008 and 2013.

Yet “despite this”, UFO enthusiasts and researchers “have not always agreed on how to interpret the released documents and have continued to accuse officials of holding back key records”.

If the Pentagon “starts wheeling out alien bodies and downed spacecraft”, wrote Aron, “New Scientist will enthusiastically report on the most incredible find in human history.

“When the evidence changes, it’s only right to change your mind,” he said, but “until then, we will stick to writing about science.”