The boy who cried wolf

I'm all for keeping an open mind, but there comes a point where my attitude is, "Produce some hard evidence or shut the hell up."

I've reached that point with David Grusch, who two years ago made headlines as a whistleblower, saying there was a systematic X Files-style coverup of alien spaceships, technology, and even "biological materials" (i.e. bodies) by the United States military.  Much was made of Grusch's antecedents, with one person he worked with calling him "beyond reproach" and another saying he is "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."

Well, that may well be, be at this stage of things, my patience (and the patience of many of us with skeptical natures) is wearing a little thin.  In the two years since he launched himself into center stage, he's done whatever he can to remain in the limelight, including claiming he was being persecuted for coming forward, and had even had his life threatened.  Just this week, he proved yet again that he's not ready to let the whole thing rest by appearing on Fox News, followed up by an article in The Daily Mail Fail, thus linking together two of the least reliable media sources on the entire planet.

Grusch is now claiming that Donald Trump has been fully briefed on the alien situation, and that Trump is poised to become "the most consequential leader in Earth's history" by doing a full disclosure of everything we know about extraterrestrial species and their visits to our planet.  "Members of this current administration are very well aware of this reality," Grusch said.  "Certainly, the current president is very knowledgeable on this subject."

If that weren't enough, we're also told that Trump and his senior advisors have been briefed on the "alien-human hybrids" walking amongst us.  These are apparently the product of a level of human/ET spicy encounters that Captain James T. Kirk could only dream of, and has produced the "Nordics" -- fair-haired, light-skinned, dazzlingly handsome hybrids that now have infiltrated human society.  

Kind of Alexander Skarsgård in space, is how I think of them.

Of course, even Grusch admits that if the hybrids look just like humans, there'd be no way to tell them apart.  So barring skewering their heads with one of those spring-loaded stiletto things and seeing if they dissolve into a puddle of goo, it seems like there's not much we can do with this allegation.

Then there's the piece in The Liberation Times saying that we're "headed toward massive disclosure," but that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been coy about pinning down when that'll happen or what exactly will be revealed.  The whistleblowers, Rubio said, "are either lying, crazy, or telling the truth," which certainly seem like the only options I can think of.  They also suggest that Rubio may be shying away from dealing with this right now because he's got other things on his plate, and making a big statement about UFOs would diminish his credibility.

Once again, can't argue with that.  Of course, Rubio's credibility is already so low that maybe he should just throw caution to the wind and go for it.

If I'm sounding a little snippy about this whole thing, well... I think I'm justified.  How many times have we heard from people like Grusch and Luis Elizondo that we're on the threshold of having hard evidence made public?  And every damn time, it's the same old grainy photos, blurred video, and first-hand "but I really saw it!" accounts.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Bring me something of alien manufacture that I can analyze in my lab, and then we can talk...  What I've seen thus far doesn't meet the minimum standard for what we consider reliable evidence in science."

Oh, but the government is covering it up, for security reasons!  Really?  If so, they're doing a piss-poor job of it, with leaks and whistleblowers being interviewed by Sean Hannity and broadcast worldwide every couple of weeks.  And conveniently, there's still not one single piece of hard evidence.  Nada.

So that's why my attitude now is: until you can show us the goods -- Just.  Stop.  Talking.

Hank Green said, "It's never aliens until it is," which is true -- and entirely appropriate.  Our default should be "it's something explainable using known science," because thus far it always has been.  We shouldn't close ourselves off to the possibility of alien visitation, but -- given the technological hurdles that an alien spacecraft would have to overcome to get here (repeatedly) -- to accept that explanation requires more than just "I saw it."  It requires evidence that leaves no room for alternate interpretations.

At least if you're adhering to the methods of rational, skeptical science.

So anyway, that's my rather ill-tempered take on the current situation.  More talk about how "disclosure is coming soon," that almost certainly will come to absolutely nothing -- until the glow fades, and the main players break back into the news cycle saying "disclosure is coming soon, no really we mean it this time," rinse and repeat.  I'm getting tired of seeing people falling for the Boy Who Cried Wolf over and over, and increasingly that's what Grusch is looking like.

Are there really alien spacecraft that have visited the Earth?  Maybe.  Unlikely, I think, but... maybe.  But until someone brings one out into the public view, and allows an independent team of scientists to examine it, I'm kind of done with the hype.

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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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