If you're looking for a good brief overview of the UAP (UFO) hearings, this CNN piece by Jason Colavito is an excellent choice. Colavito has been on this beat for years, doing grounded, well-researched, and appropriately skeptical work.
On Wednesday, former military intelligence officer and so-called UFO “whistleblower” David Grusch testified to a House Oversight subcommittee that he had heard from other unnamed officials that the US government has a secret program to recover and reverse engineer non-human spacecraft.
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In a statement after the hearing, the Pentagon disputed Grusch’s testimony and emphasized that it has found no evidence of crashed saucer programs or space aliens. We can’t entirely rule out the possibility that Grusch discovered something real. Certainly, pilots see things in the sky they don’t understand. It’s also very likely that the Pentagon isn’t completely transparent about all of its advanced aerospace programs. The trouble is that Grusch’s stories are, in all likelihood, not evidence of non-human activity.
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These stories have circulated in UFO circles since the 1940s. Declassified documents show that during the Cold War, the government repeatedly recovered items first reported as UFOs that in fact were meteors, industrial waste, hoaxed objects and human-made technology. So there were “crash retrievals” — just not of alien ships.
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For the past several years, Grusch has been working alongside a network of government-adjacent UFO believers (many now working for defense contractors or UFO think tanks) who have been sources in stories about flying saucers and dead aliens across the media and in the halls of Congress. You might have seen some of them on cable UFO shows like “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch,” in which a former Pentagon UFO analyst who served on the task force that helped write the government’s 2021 UFO report now leads a reality TV crew hunting harmful, disembodied quantum “hitchhiker” entities, one of which he claims attached itself to him. It would be funny, except that the Pentagon regularly employs believers in space ghosts and Congress listens to them.
Eric W. Davis, a physicist and longtime UFO researcher, briefed the Pentagon and Congress on the same supposed crash retrieval programs a couple years back. None of the evidence he or Grusch provided over the past few years, however, has been enough to convince Congress — as credulous as some members have been — that aliens are here. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who has helped lead the charge in Congress for UFO research, recently told The Los Angeles Times that she hadn’t seen definitive evidence of aliens.
One complaint: the quantum hitchhikers are nowhere near the craziest thing the Skinwalker crowd believes in.
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