Holy fuhhhh ...!

UFO whistleblower story goes to the rot at the heart of our democracy

Yesterday’s UFO whistleblower thunderclap from The Debrief raises so many questions, it’s hard to even know how to process the inferences.

Umm, still using towels to try to clean up after the accident I had during Monday’s explosive brainstroke from The Debrief:

An inside man with cred out the wazoo finally spills the beans about the recovery of technology apparently manufactured by nonhuman intelligence? Nope, never saw this one coming. And if the story pans out, I’m already flashing back to that fateful decision made by leaders of The Greatest Generation years before I was born. And I wonder: Did the original framers of the Cold War information lockdown, the founding fathers of the perhaps unintended war on democracy – all long dead by now – have any idea just how long the secret could be hoarded? Could they have even imagined?

In January 1948, just six months after the military quickly retracted its press release about having confiscated a crashed “flying disk” outside Roswell, the Air Force quietly commissioned the first official assessment of the global UFO phenomenon. By autumn of ’48, scientists working under the code name Project Sign completed what was reportedly titled “Estimate of the Situation.” According to historians, the consensus was that the encounters involved “interplanetary” technology, and the report was forwarded to USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg. But Vandenberg allegedly ordered the document destroyed in a move that would demoralize and stigmatize generations of researchers working within and outside the system.

Monday’s Debrief report – filed by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, who broke the story of the Pentagon’s secret UFO/UAP program for the New York Times in 2017 – puts a potential full stop to the 20^th-century’s collapsing status quo. That is, if incendiary allegations from one David Charles Grusch manage to hold up against what’s sure to be white-hot scrutiny.

Crash-retrieval confirmation?

Protected by recently enacted congressional whistleblower legislation, the 36-year-old USAF combat veteran, whose stops include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office, evidently gained insights into state UFO secrets as the NGA’s liaison to the former UAP Task Force from 2019-21. Grusch subsequently furnished lawmakers with “hours of recorded classified information transcribed into hundreds of pages which included specific data about the materials recovery program.” And that operation involved “recoveries of partial fragments and up to intact vehicles,” which were “illegally shielded from proper Congressional oversight.”

Intact vehicles. Plural.

Boasting sterling service credentials and represented legally by a former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Grusch’s documentation is also alleged to have been cleared by the Defense Department’s Office of Prepublication and Security Review. Getting a green light to share presumably classified information sounds like a major contradiction. If Grusch cut corners, his evidence for “illegal contracting against the Federal Acquisition Regulations and other criminality and the suppression of information across a qualified industrial base and academia” could subject him to hefty fines and 10 years in prison.

In 2022, Grusch filed a formal complaint alleging internal harassment and reprisals, grievances determined to be “credible and urgent” last summer by the Intelligence Community IG. DNI Avril Haines and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were subsequently put on notice, according to the Debrief. On April 7 this year, Grusch resigned “in order to advance government accountability through public awareness.”

The piece includes character vouchers from a number of colleagues, most prominently from another insider whose current job with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center includes studying the UAP data. “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real,” the pseudonymous Jonathan Grey told The Debrief. “We are not alone.”

Is AARO playing for time?

If that’s true, if Jonathan Grey and David Grusch really do know more about UAP/UFOs than Sean Kirkpatrick, the guy who runs the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office? This is a blow not just to AARO’s credibility, it makes a joke of last week’s four-hour NASA hearing, convened to take suggestions on how best to acquire uniform and open-source UAP data. If the Debrief’s reporting holds up, what happened last week with that independent study team sounds like an unwitting exercise in public relations, secretly designed to buy time.

In his opening remarks on May 31, Kirkpatrick’s assurances sounded right out of the CIA’s Robertson Panel 1953 playbook, which urged that “national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired.”

As the AARO boss told the NASA panel, “While a large number of cases in AARO’s holdings remain technically unresolved, this is primarily due to a lack of data associated with these cases.” More data, fewer UFOs, trust me. Just one month earlier, Kirkpatrick informed a Senate Armed Services subcommittee he’d just as soon kick the garbage under a neighbor’s doormat. “AARO’s mission,” he told his small audience, “is to turn UAPs into SEP – somebody else’s problem.”

If the Debrief reporting is accurate, one might even infer that the NASA advisory board was designed to dampen public enthusiasm. Joshua Semeter at Boston University’s Center for Space Physics said it wasn’t the panel’s charge to evaluate UAP evidence, but then he went ahead and evaluated the Navy’s GoFast UFO video anyway. In a diagrammed presentation that continues to provoke heated online debates, Semeter said the little white orb wasn’t going so fast after all, maybe 42 mph. Don’t know what it is, but it ain’t that fast.

A snapshot of public interest, from 2019’s zany ‘Storm Area 51’ desert party.

Like so many others on the panel, Simons Foundation president David Spergel extolled the virtues of NASA’s use of unclassified data going forward. “UAP are often classified,” he stated, “primarily because of how the data is collected, not because of what’s in the data.” Strange, then, how the Pentagon, without jeopardizing national security, managed to scrub classified data from its footage of a Russian jet fighter attacking a U.S. drone back in March, as well as from the sequence of a Chinese jet intercepting an American plane just last week. Guess it all depends on the agenda.

Once again, nobody asked about the possibly balloon-related UFO shootdowns footage in February, and Kirkpatrick opted to exhibit and explain away a piece of footage that nobody knew existed. Three horizontal dots moving in tandem and filmed by a Navy plane turned out to be a commercial aircraft. Yay zzzz. However, perhaps feeling the need to justify his presence, Kirkpatrick replayed the same old stale footage of the flying silverish metallic ball he unveiled for Senate Armed Services, and called it a “typical example of the thing that we see most of all over the world.”

“All over the world,” ay? Well, that’s news, sort of, if you discount the fact that pilots have been seeing these suckers ever since WWII, and in all theaters of that war. It would’ve been newsier if Kirkpatrick had shown one of these flying balls exhibiting transmedium properties, like the 2013 Aguadilla footage, which AARO ignores.

If what David Grusch says is true, would that render a NASA study, to say nothing of AARO, superfluous? If the Pentagon, or its contractors, are sitting on the goods that lawmakers are fishing for, why waste any more time and money hoping to get a redundant blip on tape before we conduct an honest and open appraisal of the hardware first?

Defense Department spokesperson Susan Gough reacted to the story with a statement that “AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Clearly, AARO hasn’t. So what?

This brings us to the central dilemma: If this story is accurate, and our UFO programs have indeed been conducted illegally, ever since the Cold War, without the oversight of those we elect to make laws and fund those laws, then we truly are at a crossroads. It’s called taxation without representation, and it means our democracy has been hijacked. And we have to figure out whether or not the system that got us here is worth saving. Assuming it can be saved.