Thursday's postcard, and a couple of postscripts

July 27 2023

“Parenthood” (2021)

Aliens and Acronyms

There’s little I can do to rush the process of absorption, digestion, and meaningful reflection but—for those of you interested in following this topic—I did want to share the video (below) of yesterday’s historic hearing on UFOs before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives. It’s not uncommon for hearings of this length (more than two hours) to oscillate between the fascinating and jejune posturing, but I wasn’t disappointed. This really was historic—a hearing on UFOs before Congress where the subject was actually taken seriously with the witnesses staying in their lanes, choosing their words carefully, but delivering a message (messages) that must have struck many as surreal.

One general reaction I had before and after is that it will be a test to see which way this process goes. As I’ve written, earlier, we’ve been so conditioned not to take UFOs seriously that our cultural reflex has been to assign the entire subject to the science fiction genre. We’re accustomed to finding it there and able to enjoy the fictional story-telling. And that’s been just fine with the folks deep in the military and intelligence communities who see no benefit, at all, in our taking UFO sightings and encounters seriously. Yet, the question squarely before the Congress yesterday was whether we should take the growing, tangible evidence of UFO encounters seriously, and the three witnesses (as well as several of their questioners) were forceful and effective. We just don’t really have a precedence for such a dramatic cultural shift—from the fantastic fictions to the dead weight of evidence, serious observation and analysis.

I’m just going to add a couple short notes and get out of the way.

The first is the hearing underscored what I tried to lay out in Monday’s piece about the effect of Leslie Kean’s journalism, coupled with Luiz Elizondo’s bold decision in 2017 to resign from his secretive Pentagon job and take his story to Kean and the New York Times. That was a tipping point. That’s what got us to the hearing yesterday. Secondly, for the first time in public, we got to meet David Grusch. The two retired Navy pilots who testified—Ryan Graves and Commander David Fravor—have been speaking out for years now, not just on their experiences but also how UFO sightings and interactions have affected their peers. No surprises there, but some fascinating details including how Fravor came to tell his story.

David Grusch is not a pilot and not even someone who claims to have seen a UFO. He was a military intelligence officer with high security clearance who (until his resignation last year) had access to highly classified information and deep sources via his work on a task force created basically as a result of the remarkable 2017 New York Times story that Leslie Kean co-authored. Grusch, like Elizondo before him, is bound NOT to disclose information that is still classified. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the hearing was two hours old that Grusch was asked, by Rep. Jamie Raskin, to explain where the line was between what he was sharing with the subcommittee in the open hearing, and what he frequently told the members that he couldn’t share in public hearings. It would have better for the public audience to have covered that right up front, at the beginning of his testimony. There is clear tension between what Grusch is saying about what he knows and the denials still emanating (as they did, again, yesterday after the hearing) from the new Department of Defense program—the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)—and its new director Sean Kirkpatrick. Unless I’m missing something there’s no way to reconcile what Grusch is asserting with regards to what the Pentagon knows, or should know, about physical UFO evidence and AARO/Kirkpatrick’s denials.

Also, I wanted to share this link to a new story in The Guardian that really hammers home a point I was trying to make in yesterday’s dispatch on climate change. There simply is no whiff of a hint that the Republican Party has any plan—at all—to reduce carbon emissions that are driving us toward a point of no return. What The Guardian reports is that the “Project 2025” plan the GOP is working on—in preparation for the next Trump Administration—is simply more deregulation that, of course, will only accelerate the disastrous heating of our planet.

I’ll have more on both these topics as times goes on.

—tjc