An incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret

Picking up from where we left off with

Extraordinary claims (used to) require extraordinary evidence OR the gray lady and the little green men

and

There were lots of red flags with the NYT UFO story

Here's another hard to swallow aspect of the whole thing. 

The proposed conspiracy is, at the same time, both an incredibly well-kept and badly kept secret. We'll talk about the first part at length later in the post, but as you're reading this remember there are, according to both the primary sources and the team of reporters from New York Times, lots of people in the government who insist that they've gotten second hand-accounts of these programs. Officials not on a need to know basis are routinely getting access to  and sharing the most highly classified information and documents imaginable (though never the physical evidence they assure us is out there).

Despite these recent security lapses, for almost a century, numerous governments have supposedly been hiding extensive physical evidence of what is probably the biggest secret any government in history has tried to conceal, and they have managed to do so despite the secret frequently getting out in a limited way.

From Wikipedia:

[David] Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that Pope Pius XII had "back-channeled" the existence of a UFO crash in Magenta, Italy in 1933 to the United States, the remains of which were kept by Benito Mussolini's government until the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), coordinating with the Five Eyes, procured it in 1944 or 1945;^[20][21] that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on "football-field" sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was "malevolent activity" by UFOs.^[18]

As a quick side note, conspiracy theorist love to throw in the Vatican whenever possible, so that's a bit of a red flag but we'll put that aside for now.

You can keep dormant secrets almost indefinitely but keeping an active secret for a long time is extremely difficult. Any government that has access to such potentially world changing technology is not going to store it away in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse. Keep in mind, Grusch describes this as an ongoing race. 

Think about the sheer number of people who are read into this. We are talking about multiple countries around the world all maintaining large operations to detect possible crashes and recover their wreckage, then to transport, store, and maintain what was found. Other teams to analyze the partial and intact spaceships and to study the alien bodies, both of which requires big cross-functional groups of researchers. You also have the surrounding bureaucracy, not to mention the witnesses to these numerous crashes.

It gets worse. This isn't just one conspiracy, it is one conspiracy for each country and institution. If any one of these gets careless, the game is over. On top of that, remember that this collection implicitly includes the Soviet Union and explicitly includes Italy, two governments which have collapsed in the interval we're discussing. We should probably add Germany to that list. It's possible that Italy kept the secret to itself, but if you had access to technology that could turn the tide of the war in your favor, wouldn't you want Von Braun and Heisenberg seeing what they could do with it?

A bit more on the USSR. For starters, Soviet spies were devastatingly successful during the post-war era, particularly in the UK. Remember, Grusch claimed that the US got its first non-human spacecraft through the Vatican and the Five Eyes, an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so the Brits knew about this before we did and the Soviets would certainly have known shortly after. Add to that what they would have gotten from the German scientists who ended up in Russia.

While the USSR was big, the Soviet sphere of influence was huge. Add to that formidable naval presence and experience with deep sea salvage.  Remember, one of the key claims was that there were multiple crash sites where wreckage and bodies have been recovered. A lot of those crashes would have been in areas of Soviet control. If we accept the story, we pretty much have to assume Moscow got its share.

Think about the chaos at the end of WWII and at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and yet despite hundreds of people with direct knowledge and tons of evidence, no artifact or photograph or credible account made it to the public. And in the 60s and 70s, when books like Chariots of the Gods were selling millions and spin-off lucrative "documentaries" and TV shows, no underpaid government scientist ever managed to cash in. The biggest secret ever kept under the worst possible conditions.

It's almost hard to believe.