While a small community of enthusiasts has been investigating unidentified flying objects for decades, in recent years, they largely flew under the radar.
Until a compelling 2017 report by the New York Times that paired cockpit videos of what looked like a darting Tic Tac mint with the firsthand account of the Navy pilots who saw them.
THE MIXED MESSAGES OF BIDENOMICS
“Those articles opened the door for the government and public that cannot be closed,” retired Cmdr. David Fravor, a former F-18 pilot, testified before a congressional committee on July 26. “It removed the stigma on the topic of UFOs, which is why we’re here today.”
Fravor recounted for the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee what he witnessed off the coast of San Diego in November 2004 while flying an F/A-18 Super Hornet off the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.
Four pilots in two F-18s looked down and saw what Fravor described for lawmakers as a “solid white Tic Tac object, moving very abruptly over the water like a ping-pong ball.”
“There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings,” he testified. “As we pulled nose on to the object, within about a half-mile of it, it rapidly accelerated in front of us and disappeared.”
“The controller [on the carrier] told us that these objects had been observed for over two weeks coming down from over 80,000 feet, rapidly descending to 20,000 feet, hanging out for hours, and then going straight back up,” he continued. “For those who don’t realize, above 80,000 feet is space.”
“I would like to say that the Tic Tac object we engaged in 2004 was far superior to anything that we had on time, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10 years,” Fravor said. “What is shocking to us is that the incident was never investigated, none of my crew were ever questioned, tapes were never taken, and after a couple of days, it turned into a great story with friends.”
In 2020 the Pentagon declassified three Navy “Tic Tac” videos, one from 2004 plus two more from 2015.
And last year, under direction from Congress, the Department of Defense established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to “detect, identify and attribute objects of interest.”
At the same time, the Pentagon renamed UFOs as UAPs, for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” to reflect the reality that we don’t know what they are, whether they are in fact flying or even if they are actually objects and not some optical illusion.
But if the New York Times opened the door to serious UFO investigation, last month’s three-hour hearing blew the door off its hinges.
The hearing featured three very credible witnesses all making incredible claims, the most fantastic of which is that the U.S. government is hiding recovered alien spacecraft and “nonhuman” remains.
The exchange between Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and retired Maj. David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, made all the cable TV news shows.
MACE: OK. You say that the government is in possession of potentially nonhuman spacecraft. Based on your experience and extensive conversations with experts, do you believe our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials?
GRUSCH: Something I can’t discuss in a public setting.
MACE: OK, I can’t ask when you think this occurred. If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?
GRUSCH: As I’ve stated publicly already in my NewsNation interview, biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah.
MACE: Were they, I guess, human or nonhuman biologics?
GRUSCH: Nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), one of the leaders of the House UFO investigation, quizzed Grusch about his testimony that he’s been subjected to “very brutal” tactics for coming forward about what he called “a multidecade campaign” by the government “to disenfranchise public interest.”
“Has anyone been murdered that you know of or have heard of?” Burchett asked.
“I have to be careful asking that question,” Grusch replied. “I directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities.”
Later Burchett suggested he knew more than he could say.
“I’ve heard good attorneys say don’t ask a question unless you know the answer,” he told Fox News, adding in an interview with C-SPAN, “I knew these answers, but I wanted them on sworn testimony.”
There were other intriguing, but unverified, reports given in sworn testimony, such as an account of a 2003 incident in which a massive square object purportedly appeared over a California intercontinental ballistic missile base.
“A large group of Boeing contractors were operating near one of the launch facilities at Vandenberg Air Force Base when they observed a very large hundred-yard-sided red square approach the base from the ocean and hover at low altitude over one of the launch facilities,” Ryan Graves, the executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, testified.
Graves cited “official documentation” and records retained by an eyewitness but admitted he didn’t see it, nor has he ever seen anything like it.
One of the most fantastic accounts was submitted in a written statement to the committee by George Knapp, chief investigative reporter for KLAS-TV, who had traveled to Russia in 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Among the people he interviewed was Col. Boris Sokolov, who had headed up a 10-year study of UFO incidents
“The incidents described to me … were alarming,” Knapp wrote. “Sokolov said there had been 45 incidents in which Russian warplanes engaged with UFOs, chased them, even shot at them,” including a chilling incident at a Russian ICBM base in Ukraine.
“UFOs appeared over the base, performed astonishing maneuvers in front of stunned eyewitnesses, and then somehow took control of the launch system,” Knapp continued. “The missiles aimed at the U.S. were suddenly fired up. Launch control codes were somehow entered, and the base was unable to stop what could have initiated World War III. Then, just as suddenly, the UFOs disappeared, and the launch control system shut down.”
With the exception of the F-18 pilot who saw the “Tic Tac” over the Pacific Ocean, most of the testimony was based on secondhand accounts, stories the witness had been told by supposedly credible sources.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH) was unimpressed by Grusch’s bombshell testimony.
“The most striking aspect of all of the testimony was repeatedly, over and over again, the whistleblowers had to say, ‘Actually, I don’t have any knowledge of this. Somebody else told me that,’” Turner said on Fox. “I certainly can’t tell you that there are no aliens here. I can tell you that, certainly, there’s no evidence of that what the gentleman is testifying about.”
The Pentagon also flatly denied Grusch’s most explosive claims.
“To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,” AARO said in a statement, adding, “The Department has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information to AARO.” There were many questions Grusch refused to answer.
“I’m required by law to do that as a former intelligence officer or I go to jail for revealing classified information,” he said at one point, but no closed-door classified session was scheduled to follow up.
“We ran out of time,” Mace told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “I had a lot more questions.”
So, what’s a rational person to think?
Popular astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson openly laughs at the idea Earth is under alien attack but says if there is evidence of nonhuman biologics, he’d like to see it.
“There are 6 billion smartphones in the world. If there was an alien invasion, I think it would be nicely crowdsourced with high-definition, high-resolution images and video,” he said in a recent YouTube interview.
If politicians and scientists share one desire, it’s to see hard evidence.
“I’d like to see some alien technology,” Tyson said. “That would be fun. Or aliens, that would be even better.”
“This is a cover-up. The American public understands it. And we’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” Burchett, who accuses the Pentagon of giving him and other members of Congress the runaround, said. “I am tired of looking at redacted files.”
“We are not alone,” Burchett said in a post-hearing interview on C-SPAN. “These are craft we do not have any idea how they function, basically. They have no heat signature; they can do speeds that are unheard of. If there is a human in there, they would be dead because of the G-forces. They would liquefy their bodies. They are just incredible.”
“Let’s get to the bottom of this, whatever the answer is,” says Harvard theoretical astrophysicist Avi Loeb. “David Grusch was a secondhand witness. He heard other people talk about it, 40 of them, and they told him about the programs. But we would like to see the actual evidence before we believe it.”
“It should be scientists, the best scientists in the world, thinking about it,” Loeb said on C-SPAN. “The challenge is great. Most likely, whatever arrives to our doorstep is far more advanced than the technologies that we possess.”
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The hearing sparked so much renewed interest in the subject that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, on a trip to Argentina, made a surprise announcement.
“I decided as the head of NASA, since there is so much suspicion about aliens, that I would appoint a committee of very distinguished scientists. That committee is deliberating, and they will make their report publicly next month,” Nelson told reporters. “So wait until next month and you will have an answer.”
