The Government Should Come Clean on Recovered Alien Craft and Bodies … For All of Our Sake
You might be forgiven for thinking that recent news about UFOs and Congress seems straight out of out of 1990s science fiction like Independence Day and The X-Files. We now have politicians accusing members of the intelligence/ defense communities of hiding the truth about UFO sightings, recovered alien craft and even alien bodies. The movie we should be thinking about, though, is Oppenheimer, which details how the government recruited the “best and brightest” scientists to the Manhattan project.
In a famous scene aboard Air Force One from Independence Day (1996), the quintessential sci fi alien invasion, a visibly embarrassed President (Bill Pullman) tells the civilian father of the star scientist (Jeff Goldblum) that the United States government has never had possessions of any such alien craft, despite what the tabloids have reported. To the surprise of the politician, scientist and even general on the plane (but not to anyone in the audience), the former CIA director (James Rebhorn) has to correct the President with the memorable line: “that’s not …entirely … accurate…”
A less dramatic version of this dynamic (minus the alien invasion) has been playing out this summer, only it’s members of Congress, not the President, demanding to get to the truth about UAP (the new, improved term for UFOs). Just last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed an amendment to the defense authorization act dubbed the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Disclosure Act of 2023 with an official press release that included extraordinary language, including declassifying top secret records of “…all recovered technologies of unknown origin (TUO)” and “biological evidence of non-human intelligence (NHI)”.
To translate, this basically means … recovered alien spacecraft and … yes, alien bodies. In what might seem more appropriate for a scene from The X-Files, by using hte term “eminent domain” in the Senate language, this means the government can take possession of any such objects, even if they are buried deep in some aerospace company’s labs.
“The American public,” declares the announcement from Senate Democrats, “has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena…”
If that wasn’t enough The House Oversight Committee held a hearing this week, overseen by Representatives Burchett and Luna, with witnesses that included several military pilots who claim to have seen UFOs. The hearing also included a whistleblower, David Grusch, who recently went public with explosive claims that we are in possession of not just one, but up to 12 exotic “non-human” craft and had encountered their “pilots”. Grusch, a former member of the Pentagon’s UAP task force, has complained that this information was being withheld illegally from Congressional oversight. His complaint was found to be “credible and urgent” by the Inspector General. To top off the parallels here withThe X-Files, a frustrated Rep. Burchett has claimed that both NASA and the DOD have been holding up congressional oversight, exhorting that “we are done with a cover-up.” During the hearing, Grusch testified to both the fact that there have been crashed craft of non-human origin and non-human biologics related to those craft.
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense, has, through its UAP office, AARO, acknowledged that while it has has heard up to 30 such reports, it has publicly stated that it doesn’t have any “…verifiable information to substantiate claims” of “reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials.”
So, to sum up: Congress is investigating because they believe there has been a conspiracy to cover up not only the existence of UFOs in the sky, but of the recovery of crashed alien craft, and bodies, and the DOD is denying this, at least publicly. It is now a matter of congressional record that a high level intelligence official that was on the UAP task force has testified, under oath, that we already have both … alien craft and bodies.
And yet, despite the seriousness of this issue, most of our scientists in academic institutions, still express embarrassment when the subject of UFOs/UAPs is brought up, with references to fairy tales and tabloids.
In my doctoral research, I interviewed many scientists from top institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford (among others) about UFO research. I uncovered concrete evidence of a stigma that was holding up open frank discussion and concrete research into the phenomenon. Some professors mentioned they were afraid to mention their interest in the UFO subject until they had tenure, while others indicated they actively discourage newly minted PhDs from studying UFOs because it might taint their careers.
Unfortunately, the level of seriousness with which this subject is now being treated in Congress and by some former DOD officials who have reported hearing similar stories, such as the former head of the Pentagon’s secret UAP program Lue Elizondo and former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Chris Mellon, raises the specter that our scientific institutions have not only been left in the dark, but may have been intentionally misled. Mellon recently said, “I’ve been told that we have recovered technology that did not originate on this earth by officials in the Department of Defense and by former intelligence officials.”
That the government has stigmatized UFOs and discouraged reporting of them is an open secret, starting with the Robertson Panel by the CIA in 1952, which was convened after a very public mass sightings of UFOs over Washington, D.C., and continuing with Project Blue Book, there has been a concerted effort to make the subject seem “fringe” and created the stigma that labels anyone who studies it seriously as “kooks”.
Even today, if you bring up UFOs, many scientists still react like Nobel prize winner Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the nucleus of the atom, did when he was presented the seemingly crazy idea of initiating a nuclear chain reaction to harness the power of atomic energy: he dismissed the whole idea as “moonshine”.
Yet it was good that Leo Szilard, who had fled Germany, was able to convince one prominent scientist, Albert Einstein, to get over this outdated impression, which led to President Roosevelt launching the Manhattan project, led by the titular figure of this summer’s latest blockbuster movie, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, with the government’s help, recruited the best and brightest scientists across academia, including future Nobel prize winners, gathering them in New Mexico in an all out press to beat the Nazi’s in the race to build the first atomic bomb.
How advanced is this UFO technology that Congress now believes to be hidden? According to Representative Burchett, the technology that the whistleblowers have made Congress aware of, could be well more advanced than our nuclear weapons, and could easily turn our defenses into a “charcoal briquette.” In other words, as far advanced from our technology as nuclear weapons were from pre-nuclear tech.
It is high time for the government to involve the “best and brightest” scientists from our top academic institutions, just as it did during World War 2 to figure out this technology. Unfortunately, that can’t be done while our top scientists are still ridiculing and laughing at the subject.
In the spirit of the scene in Independence Day, Congress is now telling us that the prevailing narrative, which is still held in many of the ivy lined halls which our scientists live in, needs to be changed. Just like in the scene, they need to raise their eyebrows and be told that the prevailing narrative, which they have bought into for the past 50 plus years isn’t “entirely accurate”. What this means is that serious adults, across the government and in our top academic institutions, need to start showing interest in what may be the most important scientific issue of the next century.
Our future may depend on it.
Rizwan Virk was founder of Play Labs @ MIT and author of The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game.” He is currently at Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures. Follow him @rizstanford and at zenentrepreneur.com.
