Opinion: The hidden truth about UFOs

A former Pentagon official – motivated, he says, by his duty to the truth – goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a mob of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims the US government has been keeping crashed alien spacecraft secret for decades.

It looks like a proposal for a Hollywood film. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. Former Pentagon official David Grusch had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a Congressional committee that he had become aware of a decades-old Pentagon program focused on “crash recovery and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that the remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biological products.”

That's right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead aliens, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn't the craziest thing ever broadcast on C-SPAN, it must have been close. Someone should look into this, right?

Turns out someone already had it. In 2022, the Pentagon hired a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to create a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the Office of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution by the U.S. Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us that his team has investigated UFO cases and interviewed U.S. military personnel who said they had knowledge of UFO encounters.

Kirkpatrick recently retired from his job at the Pentagon and spoke with us on the “In the Room” podcast. Kirkpatrick and his team have investigated every U.S. government UFO sighting since Roswell in the 1940s, putting the findings into a report that will likely be made public this month.

In the most extensive media interview he has given, Kirkpatrick laid out a compelling case that stories that have been circulating for decades about alleged government cover-ups of alien-related UFOs may well have been fueled in large part by true believers within the U.S. government. or with close ties to that.

Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined, much of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs has been generated by people who glimpsed top-secret U.S. aircraft and wanted answers. And when the government doesn't provide answers, the public imagination takes over.

But in fact, Kirkpatrick says, his investigation has found that most UFO sightings are from advanced technology that the U.S. government needs to keep secret, from aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the U.S., or from drones and balloons. benign civilians.

“There are about two to five percent of all (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks the explanations for that small percentage will likely be found right here on Earth.

The Roswell incident

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That's because in 1947, a US military press release claimed that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico.

A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the fallen object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial headline, followed by the official unmasking, and interest in the case largely waned. That is, until 1980, when two UFO researchers published a book claiming that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the US government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office looked deeply into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a lot of things were happening near Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul that released long rows of strangely shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were top secret.

At the same time, the U.S. military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies equipped with sensors and enclosed in body-sized bags to protect against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby, with 11 deaths.

Echoing previous government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the downed Mogul balloons, recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies, and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft. .

Kirkpatrick also makes a compelling case that something similar is happening today. He says new technology on the rise now could help explain much of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s. It's not just secret government technology, either. Many observers are perplexed when they see state-of-the-art drones and even strange-looking balloons.

“What's more likely?” Kirkpatrick asked. “The fact that there is cutting-edge technology being commercialized in Florida that you didn’t know about, or that we have aliens?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show it; here is the company in Florida that builds exactly what you described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, they must be aliens, and you’re covering it up.”

However, UFOs remain a genuine national security concern, particularly because they pose dangers to flying. As Kirkpatrick said, “military pilots who fly at speeds in excess of Mach 1; If they hit a balloon with a string, it will rip off a wing.”

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, destigmatized, and increased the volume of UFO reporting by the U.S. military. Kirkpatrick says that's why the widely covered and widely ridiculed Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the US government's policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.

The true believers

So, given the real evidence, why do people in and around the government promote the unsupported idea of ​​alien invaders being covered up by the US government?

“True believers are not just outside of government; many of them are inside the government,” Kirkpatrick told us, including the late U.S. Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was Senate majority leader. Another key player was Robert Bigelow, Reid's longtime friend, Nevada billionaire and owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace, both of whom shared a long-standing interest in UFOs. Kirkpatrick says, “Senator Harry Reid was a true believer and thought, 'Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.'”

In 2007, Senator Reid obtained funding for a program from the US Defense Intelligence Agency that paid $22 million to his friend Bigelow's aerospace company – money the company spent investigating paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow's team analyzed UFO sightings by US military personnel and proposed creating laboratories to study the supposed physical remains of alien spacecraft. (On “60 Minutes” in May 2017, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.)

Reid told a reporter in Nevada in 2021 that although this was a secret program to investigate UFOs, Bigelow did not benefit from “some sweetheart deal…it was put out to bid.” Reid also told The New York Times, “I’m not ashamed or embarrassed or regretful that I made it work… I think it was one of the good things I did in my service in Congress.”

However, Kirkpatrick points out, “none of this has actually manifested itself in any evidence” of alien spacecraft. But stories about these secret programs spread within the Pentagon, were embellished and received an occasional boost from military personnel who heard rumors or glimpsed seemingly science-fiction technologies or aircraft.

And Kirkpatrick says his investigators traced this top-secret phone game back to fewer than a dozen people.

“It all goes back to the same basic set of people,” Kirkpatrick said. This is deeply strange and richly ironic. Because for decades, true UFO believers have been saying there is a U.S. government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But – if you believe Kirkpatrick – the more mundane truth is that these stories are being encouraged by a group of UFO true believers in and around the government.

Unfortunately, for all UFO lovers, this may be the biggest takeaway from Kirkpatrick's report to Congress, which is expected to be published later this month. Many foreigners have long speculated about whether the Pentagon's extraterrestrial-focused programs were backfiring and perhaps suspiciously self-perpetuating.

But now, highly credible people inside the Pentagon – with high-level security clearances – are finally saying that we have analyzed every piece of classified evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we know, they're human all the way.

Although Kirkpatrick admits that for those who truly believe there are alien visitations here on Earth, little will convince them otherwise: “There is absolutely nothing I will do, say, or produce evidence that will make true believers convert… It is a religious belief that it transcends critical thinking and rational thinking.”

PHOTOS – Supposed extraterrestrials displayed at the Mexican Congress