States' rights -- whoop it up!

Imagine 50 different versions of a UAP task force

The UFO crowd generally falls into two camps: a) those who stick to radar and other hardware profiling modes, and b) those who say that focusing on machinery while ignoring their occupants – for which there is little if any material evidence – is a fool’s errand. For whatever reason, the former are now being mildly tolerated by mainstream science, perhaps because mainstream science is so fucked up right now. Last year, 30,000 scientists left federal agencies targeted for $32 billion in funding cuts. Some of those “savings” are being pipelined to ICE, which stands to reap a $74 billion windfall over the next four years, or a nearly 300 percent increase over 2024.

So, how many hardware researchers want to risk blowing their toehold to smithereens by putting “biologics” on the table right now?

Few objective truths emerge from discussions of physical UFOnauts. Yet, what happened at the National Press Club on January 20 rates consideration. Critics can tag that three-hour presser with whatever labels they like – preposterous, delusional, P.T. Barnum, disinformation, the newest menu item in the hunger for Space Brothers. But the aftermath of what filmmaker James Fox pulled off that day was unambiguous. The witnesses he flew in from nearly 5,000 miles away not only saw something they believed to be real — whatever they did see left them, as well as rapt attendees in Washington, questioning what it means to be human.

Fox’s three guests were among a deep cast of sources inhabiting two of his documentaries, a 2022 introduction called “Moment of Contact,” and its 2025 followup, “New Revelations.” Their harrowing tales sounded so hardcore pulp fiction, Fox resisted investigating for years, and for good reason. Residents of South America’s largest country described coming face-to-face with stranded alien beings, in an anecdotal mosaic now referred to by researchers as “Brazil’s Roswell.” It goes like this:

Strangers in the village

Late one night in January 1996, a glowing, cigar-shaped UFO with observed stability problems cracked up in the rural countryside near the town of Varginha. A Brazilian military convoy promptly converged on the site to secure the wreckage. Within days, without explanation, troops were rolling into Varginha and sealing off several city blocks in broad daylight. Three schoolgirls near the quarantined area freaked out one afternoon when they encountered a small and apparently frightened humanoid with red eyes, huddled against a wall in an empty city lot.

That evening, two military police officers spotted the thing crossing a street; one of them, Marco Chereze, 23, took off after it. He subdued the oily, reeking bulb-headed stranger, which appeared to be injured, and dropped it off at a hospital. A second being was also collared and taken to a different hospital. Both soon perished in Brazilian custody. Chereze, who suffered a cut under his arm during the struggle, developed a rampaging bacterial infection and died a few weeks later. While briefly examining one of the dying aliens, neurosurgeon Italo Venturelli reported mutual telepathic and empathetic communication; he openly grieved that brief exchange before a hushed audience last month.

Enter a U.S. special operations team which, according to Brazilian eyewitnesses, confiscated the alien cadavers and whisked them away to points unknown. If true, that action would appear to support the congressional testimony of former Air Force intelligence agent David Grusch. Grusch claimed in 2023 the Pentagon supports crash-retrieval units which have recovered “biologics,” from overseas as well as American sites.

Still, where’s the actual evidence for what happened at Varginha?

Six feet under

While Trump was in the Capitol Rotunda delivering his inauguration monologue about how “I was saved by God to make America great again,” a Brazilian medical examiner a few miles away at the NPC suggested that the evidence might be buried in the ground.

The bug that claimed Marco Chereze, said Armando Fortunado through a Portuguese translator, “was beyond the limits of conventional infection, possibly presenting itself as a highly specialized mechanism of aggression and defense, which raises the hypothesis of its alien origin.” Even as we speak, Fortunado added, legal efforts are underway to exhume Chereze’s body. With any luck, investigators might be able to recover traces of the bacteriological killer and take a sharper look.

Retrieving those markers sounds like a longshot. But everything sounds like a longshot these days. Even if an autopsy revealed the presence of a new Andromeda Strain, raise your hand if you think what’s left of the White House is gonna cooperate with Brazil or anyone else about sharing the source material. There is no ideology steering the ship of state anymore, just blunt-force trauma and the sputtering neurons of a dissolving reality-show relic clinging to immortality by chiseling his name onto every iconic American institution that underscores his deficiencies. Worse, his unchallenged impulses are routinely enforced by the descendants of Kubrick’s prehistoric wasteland in “2001,” raring to pummel, detain, defame, or financially ruin anybody seeking relief from the desolation.

In the seven years since the NY Times’ expose on a secret Pentagon UFO research program raised tepid hopes for transparency, the results are in, and Captain Obvious says it’s one big wash. All those congressional hearings, all that sworn testimony from military/intel veterans, the grudging release of low-rez military-certified UAP footage, all that diluted legislation — none of it mattered. UAP research = science. When it comes to science, the feds aren’t simply non-responsive, they’re committed adversaries.

This means we in the states are on our own. So what happens if a state tries to launch its own UFO project?

Filling the vacuum

A few weeks ago, Vermont state Rep. Troy Headrick made headlines when he proposed setting up a state-level UAP Task Force, ostensibly to address flight safety in the Drone Age. The idea came from Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist focused primarily on public education. Her mild curiosity over the UFO thing got turbo-charged in late 2024 with the disruptive and still-unresolved “drone” incursions over New Jersey. Local officials in the Garden State didn’t buy it when, in January 2025, Trump said, without explanation, the mysterious activity was “authorized” by the FAA.

“That’s when I started thinking about how states might respond individually to something like this,” Lenz says. “As the federal government becomes more and more gridlocked, I think a lot of states are finding that, across many issues, the most reliable approach is to do things at the state level. And that sometimes, it might take other states to join in to make it more effective.”

Headrick’s proposed bill, H.654, would form an advisory team from the law enforcement, public safety, transportation, and scientific communities to collect, evaluate, and release locally harvested data. The initiative has drawn support from at least two military veterans who’ve testified before Congress – former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who founded the nonprofit Americans for Safe Aerospace, and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, former deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Both are science guys.

Gallaudet compressed the no-brainer into an email: “My aspirations for a state UAP response agency would be for it to run a whole-of-state-government open research effort to investigate UAP observations in partnership with universities, philanthropies, and the private sector, and to periodically summarize that work in reports to the public.”

Significantly, should H.654 pass, it also envisions a formal partnership with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. Calling on an eclectic range of member disciplines and backgrounds, SCU regularly investigates and publishes emerging UFO patterns filtered through multiple spectrums. In 2021, SCU was initially mentioned in the congressional National Defense Authorization Act as a possible independent consultant to review incident reports, but unseen hands put the kibosh on that idea.

Strength in numbers

SCU co-founder and author Robert Powell acknowledges state resources – from Vermont or anywhere else – are no match for federal radar, satellite, military and other surveillance platforms. Still, a coordinated, state-level rapid-response effort to secure rare but quantifiable trace evidence could produce surprises. Powell cites famous landing or near-landing UFO cases from France, which left evidence of environmental impacts.

“They took soil samples and looked at vegetation nearby and discovered the chlorophyll from the plants closest to the site showed damage similar to exposure to microwave radiation,” Powell says. “We wouldn’t need the federal government to do studies like that. What would be ideal is to get the evidence under state control before the feds get involved, because if they get involved, there’s no telling what would happen to it.”

Counting fewer than 650,000 residents, tiny Vermont is ideally placed to design beta-model testing for a state UAP task force. Largely rural with minimal light pollution, the Green Mountain State, according to one study, logs the second highest ratio of per-capita UFO sightings in the U.S. Granted, the Task Force idea might not even make it to a floor vote in the legislature. But given the leadership vacuum in Washington, a successful trial run in Burlington –e.g., competent data collection/sharing, interagency cooperation, and unredacted assessments – could be contagious.

“If enough states had task forces trying to get information, I think we could put more pressure on the federal government to get more information from, say, the FAA and the military,” Powell says. “We’d obviously like cooperation from the feds.”

What if Marco Chereze were buried in Vermont? Who might want access to the aggressive pathogen that ate him alive? Actually, given the reality-warping malevolence of the new normal, it’s not so far-fetched anymore to wonder if a state UFO task force could turn the tables and put federalism on trial.