Maybe our brains just aren't up to it

Can neurodiversity break the UFO logjam?

In other news, last week was planet Earth’s hottest in the history of meteorological records keeping, maybe the hottest in 100,000 years.

Given the mixed congressional reaction last month to intelligence agent David Grusch’s explosive allegations about the retrieval and coverup of crashed UFOs, it’s clear that too many “public servants” haven’t the dimmest appreciation of the stakes at play here.

But it’s this simple: Either the legislative branch, under its constitutional mandate, is accountable for federal spending, or it’s not. If it shrinks from a protracted impasse on national security grounds, Congress emasculates itself. In that event, please do us a favor and erase yourselves from the Constitution.

Just think about how little it took to bring us to this standoff: Simply by asking legitimate and long overdue constituent questions about UFOs – What are they? Why are they here? Are they dangerous? – elected officials have unwittingly put themselves on a collision course with the “military-industrial complex” red-flagged by President Eisenhower in 1961. Recent dramatic actions by congressional committee leaders suggest that Ike’s prophecy of a moment when a “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” has been fully realized.

On the third week in June, a handful of bipartisan lawmakers who’ve been paying attention and jamming on closed-door evidence so sick they can’t talk about it made a bid to reclaim their authority. The play was so bold, it’ll be interesting to read, years hence, how the paternalistic money-sucking self-appointed SCIF-cloaked secret-UFO policy bangers remember this moment. The Farrelly brothers could probably pound the reaction scene into a screwball romp.

Senate Intelligence Committee member Kirsten Gillibrand secured “full funding” for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office on June 23. AARO is the limp handshake of America’s political aspirations for discovering what’s really going on upstairs and who’s running that show. It’s been a constipated production so far, barely rating a swipe or two from the old 1-ply roll. The definition of “full funding” remains classified, and maybe it just means blithe AARO boss Sean Kirkpatrick won’t seem quite so eager to make UFOs “somebody else’s business” anymore. He might even be tempted to do his job and throw us a bone, like letting us see those UFO-shootdown videos that have been censored since February.

In order to “avoid technology and security stovepipes,” Senate language is now proposing to choke off funding for god-knows-how-many secret and potentially illegal government or contractor-related UFO ops. If the upper chamber gets its way with its 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act bill, any expenses or activity involving the “reverse engineering of recovered unidentified anomalous phenomena craft or materials” would come to a screeching halt unless selected members of Congress and the AARO chief are brought in on it.

A nod to whistleblower protections

Furthermore, “formerly or currently protected” personnel with access to or information about rumored non-human tech would be required to notify AARO within 60 days of the legislation’s enactment. AARO would then have to inform designated members of Congress, within 30 days of receiving said evidence, about what the spooks have been sitting on.

In the House Rules Committee, Rep. Mike Gallagher pushed similar language threatening to smash those secret piggy banks for non-compliance:

“None of the (2024 budget) may be obligated or expended, directly or indirectly, in part or in whole, to conduct or support any activity relating to unidentified anomalous phenomena that is controlled under a classified program that has not been formally, officially, explicitly, and specifically described, explained, and justified to appropriate congressional committees, congressional leadership and the (AARO) director . . .”

Capitol Hill’s aggressive new language is a direct result of the UAP whistleblower protections it codified in 2022. On June 5, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency operator David Grusch became the first to accept the offer and go public with insider knowledge of an American UFO crash-retrieval program. Additional witnesses are standing by, claimed Sen. Marco Rubio, and are waiting to see how Grusch’s reception shakes down.

“It’s a tough thing to dig into, there’s a stigma associated with it, right? Nobody wants to be the UFO guy,” Rubio said in a remarkable interview with NewsNation last month. “. . .There’s still a lotta people who are starting to edge coming forward and we hear may be coming forward, but are still trying to see how it plays out for the people that come forward first.”

Oh. Yeah, about that . . .

But he mispronounces nuclear

Following Grusch’s extended televised Q&A with Australian investigative reporter Ross Coulthart on June 11, a popular and often entertaining podcast that subjects video interviews to the tedious scrutiny of four body-language experts weighed in. No strangers to the UFO issue, Scott Rouse, Greg Hartley, Chase Hughes, and Mark Bowden – The Behavior Panel – had a field day with a whistleblower who, by his own admission, is withholding details pending a proper congressional briefings.

Focusing on tics like “eye blocking” and “lip compression,” The Behavior Panelists stated the obvious when they declared Grusch “vague” and “evasive.” Frequently emerging from nearly three hours of nitpickery were riffs on “stagecraft” and a “repeatedly rehearsed” low-info “performance,” much of which bore “the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”

For Hughes, Grusch’s allegations were so generic they felt like “a Reddit message run through ChatGPT.” Grusch’s pronunciation of words like “nucular” and “excetera” sounded suspicious to Rouse. Rouse also couldn’t buy into speculation that the evidence being withheld, including crashed-pilot corpses, might be interdimensional instead of extraterrestrial. “(He’s) starting to bug me. Sounds like this guy’s been doing a lot of mushrooms or something.”

But things got especially vicious in their apparent efforts to infantilize the 36-year-USAF veteran’s overall presentation. Rouse said Grusch exhibited the “overconfidence of a four-year old.” Bowden extracted a whistle, blew it silently, and announced, “This is the extent of his whistleblowing.”

They pounced on Grusch’s stated motivations for coming forward (“I did not want to live a life of regret”) as “virtue signaling,” where “he wants to live this life where he’s more moral than anyone else,” probably with “grief or shame” simmering just below the surface.

Grusch is “just an utter, utter waste of time from moment one,” Bowden went on. “He’s just this slippery squid, like one of those little alien things” and “an incredibly annoying individual” peddling “idiot pedantry.”

The autism factor

The Panel’s most meaningful takeaway? Grusch projected an “odd baseline” of “super-strange” body language, potentially suggestive, said Hughes, of “(autism) spectrum involved in here.” Yes, added Bowden, it “could be due to neurotype – there could be something there in his neurology.”

In fact, that’s the one thing The Behavior Panel unambiguously got right.

Responding to their critique, Coulthart said Grusch told him in the unedited interview that he had Asperger syndrome; moreover, Grusch gave Coulthart permission to spread the word. “The Intelligence Community values people with his sort of Asperger syndrome,” Coulthart said in a podcast. “They can see patterns and often find it difficult to live comfortably unless they can resolve dissonance in those patterns. They like to get to the bottom of a mystery. He’s exactly the sort of guy you want chasing this story.”

But the autism angle was irresistible for Steven Greenstreet, who played it for a lazy cheap shot. The digital traffic-generator for the New York Post linked to a 2018 study at the University of Kent titled “People with (autism spectrum disorder) risk being manipulated because they can't tell when they're being lied to.”

“Honestly, I feel bad for David Grusch,” Greenstreet tweeted to his 21.2K followers. “I believe HE believes in the people who told him stories about aliens. But we know for a fact that some of these people are deceitful, selfish and manipulative. I just feel really bad for him. He seems like a nice guy.”

Actually, as Grusch was engaging the UAP Task Force on behalf of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, his employer sponsored a Neurodiverse Federal Workforce pilot program in 2021 to uncover more “neurodiverse talent,” or people like Grusch. A summary of that NGA initiative said those skill sets “add significant value to the geospatial-intelligence tradecraft.”

48 percent faster, 92 percent more productive

Also in 2021, a job-market site put intelligence agencies on notice: If you’re hobbled by brain drain flowing into the private sector, consider an overlooked and more efficient demographic. It cited a JP Morgan Chase study indicating that “neurodiverse team members worked 48 percent faster and were up to 92 percent more productive than their neurotypical counterparts.”

It was a rave endorsement. “Neurodiverse individuals’ skills are particularly well suited to intelligence work,” the site added. “Individuals on the autism spectrum often display exceptional talent in pattern recognition, processing visual-spatial tasks and the ability to sustain focus for long periods of time – skills that are highly valued among intelligence analysts. Neurodiverse employees make rational decisions more consistently than neurotypical people and are less prone to cognitive bias.”

Just this year, the RAND Corp released a study supporting those claims. “In public and private discussions, officials and experts addressed the need for neurodiversity in the national security community,” wrote the nonpartisan global think tank. “They described missions that are too important and too difficult to be left to those who use their brains only in a typical way.”

For those (like me) who use their brains only in a typical way, this almost sounds insulting. I’m the one feeling disadvantaged now because my digitally numbed or click-fried neurons can’t sustain a single thought for more than 17 seconds and doesn’t that cloud look like West Virginia?

Still, this isn’t nearly as insulting or disgraceful as some of the pushback in store for the former NGA man after he went public. But maybe David Grusch, and those like him, are better positioned to chase UFO data when 1+1=3. Because, unlike too many neurotypicals, they see bullshit for what it is and go looking for the missing 2.

Maybe David Grusch is the first of what’s to come, and taking bullets now so the next won’t have to.