The whistleblower

From the make-of-this-what-you-will department, today we have: a well-respected and decorated military veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office who has stated under oath to Congress that the United States is in possession of "intact and partly intact craft of non-human origin."

His name is David Charles Grusch, and his shift from intelligence officer to alien whistleblower came as a shock to the people who know him.  An Army colonel who worked with him called him "beyond reproach;" another called him "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."  He went to Congress with the information, he said, to expose "a decades-long publicly unknown Cold War for recovered and exploited physical material – a competition with near-peer adversaries over the years to identify UAP [unidentified anomalous phenomena] crashes/landings and retrieve the material for exploitation/reverse engineering to garner asymmetric national defense advantages."

The recovered "material," he said, is clearly not of human manufacture.  It is "of exotic origin (non-human intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures."

Further -- although details were not forthcoming, as the transcript of the hearing was classified -- several current members of the recovery team testified under oath to the Inspector General, and corroborated Grusch's claims.

Grusch has stated that his actions have resulted in retaliation, although it is unclear by whom.

Now that Grusch has come forward, a surprising array of officials have voiced their support.  Jonathan Grey, an intelligence officer specializing in UAP analysis at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said, "The existence of complex historical programs involving the coordinated retrieval and study of exotic materials, dating back to the early twentieth century, should no longer remain a secret.  The majority of retrieved, foreign exotic materials have a prosaic terrestrial explanation and origin – but not all, and any number higher than zero in this category represents an undeniably significant statistical percentage...  A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space-based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out-of-this-world nature, performance, and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin."

The whole thing is curious, to say the least.  On the one hand, we have several highly-respected and high-ranking military officials putting their reputations on the line to come forward with this information, and -- thus far -- all of them pretty much corroborating each other's stories.  On the other hand, we still have zero hard evidence that has been made available to scientists.  I am especially curious about the "unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures" Grusch refers to.  How are we to tell the difference between an odd, but naturally-occurring, material and one of alien manufacture?  Take, for example, quasicrystals -- about which I wrote here at Skeptophilia a few months ago -- which were thought to be only produceable in the laboratory, until a sample was found in a Siberian meteorite.

If we had piece of a spaceship console with lettering in Klingon, I might pay more attention.

Now, I'm not saying I disbelieve Grusch et al., mind you.  I'm merely saying that, to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, "what I've seen so far does not meet the minimum standard of evidence required in science."

As I've said about a hundred times, nobody would be more delighted than me at having unequivocal proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.  But this -- as of right now -- is still in the category of "equivocal."  So I'm willing to defer forming a definite opinion, pending someone dragging out the "intact craft of non-human origin" and letting us all take a look at it. 

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