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This week, a House Oversight subcommitte held a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs - or, in slightly more old-fashioned parlance, UFOs and aliens.
The star witness was David Grusch, former intelligence officer turned whistleblower who testified that the United States has been operating a decades-long crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, which has recovered both technology of non-human origin as well as "non-human biologics" from various crash sites. Allegedly, these programs have been avoiding Congressional oversight and standard disclosure procedures by illegally appropriating funds that were allocated for other purposes. He further testified that he could provide names of specific people involved in these programs, locations of where non-human spacecraft are stored, etc., in an appropriate classified setting.
The UAP issue has slowly been gaining mainstream traction for several years now - see for example The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 sponsored by Chuck Schumer which was previously discussed on TheMotte. It's difficult to dismiss the whole thing as being merely Grusch's personal fantasy when you have Rep. Matt Gaetz saying the following:
Rep. Tim Burchett, who has also seen classified evidence related to UAPs, had the following exchange in an interview prior to the hearing:
When you have reputable government officials - not "former" anything, not "I know a guy who knows a guy", but actual, sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It's always possible that everyone is just lying. There could be a large-scale psyop perpetuated by the military to convince not only Grusch but also multiple members of Congress that there are aliens when, in fact, there are not. But I don't see what the point of such an operation would be. I don't find it very plausible that this is a test run of the government's disinfo capabilities. Modern information warfare is fought with internet memes anyway. If they really wanted to test their ability to influence culture and discourse, they would start with a social media campaign, not Congressional hearings.
At the same time though, I think Yudkowsky's argument against the presence of aliens on Earth is very convincing. He gives a rundown of what I would call the "basic argument" for skepticism: if aliens are here and they want to be known, then why don't they just show themselves? And if they don't want to be known, then they're doing a rather poor job of hiding themselves. Basically, their behavior just doesn't make sense.
Surely any species that's capable of building aircraft that are this advanced should be able to just hang out somewhere in space and get live 8K Ultra HD video of any location on the planet. If all they want to do is observe and study us, there shouldn't be any need to actually fly down here where they can be seen. Hanson's suggestion that this is all part of a convoluted show of dominance on their part is not very convincing.
The best rebuttal that I can come up with to Yudkowsky's argument is that the aliens are simply indifferent to whether we know about them or not. Think about humans who go on expeditions to observe sharks. Obviously we're not going to go right into the midst of the sharks and "announce" ourselves, because that would be silly. But neither do we make any special effort to hide ourselves. If one of the sharks goes and tells his friends about the strange cylindrical object he saw floating just above the water's surface, that's really of no concern to us one way or the other. But even this argument is not particularly convincing. If the aliens were truly indifferent, then one would expect that they would have revealed themselves in some more overt way by now, a UFO going on a joyride one day through the streets of Manhattan for example, anything that's more reputable and verifiable than "my cousin Ed from Nebraska swears that he was abducted one night when he was all alone and he conveniently forgot to charge his phone that day".
Ultimately, I think all possible explanations have their own serious problems. I could believe that UAPs are part of an advanced, non-alien weapons program that's been kept secret by the US government - but that would be pretty crazy in its own right.
There was a time in my life when I would have been absolutely riveted by these hearings. It’s honestly incredibly depressing to reflect on just how profoundly my trust in the U.S. government has collapsed, to the point where I am unable to react to this is any way other than an exasperated eye-roll and a “So, what is this meant to distract me from this time?” I can imagine that even twenty years ago, the vast majority of Americans would have found this incredibly compelling and it would have been the number-one news story in the country, if not globally. The dissolution and atomization of American society to the point where pretty much nobody seems to even be paying much attention to this is such a catastrophic civilizational loss in so many ways, and I say this as someone who is obviously convinced that the lack of trust is completely justified.
Imagine if these hearing were taking place in, say, the Japanese government instead. I have no real insight into how functional Japanese political life is - it seems dysfunctional in its own weird ways, but kept essentially on-track by the fundamentally high human capital of the population involved - but I have to think that not only do the Japanese people trust their own government enough that they would take something like this far more seriously; but most people around the world would trust the Japanese enough to take such a thing seriously.
There are probably other governments around the world who are broadly seen as run by serious people such that if they produced at least some bare-minimum level of evidence that they’d encountered aliens, people around the would would take notice. Singapore? Maybe like… Iceland? Of course even then, you have to worry that it’s a ploy to boost interest in tourism or to get your country mentioned in international headlines. I wonder what it would take for something like this to be seen as deadly-serious, even with roughly the same level of evidence provided.
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Edit: What the fuck is this image link at the bottom of my post? I did not add this link and do not understand how it got there.
Did you post this on a phone and do you chat in WhatsApp?
I did write it on a phone, but have not used WhatsApp in years.
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Not much, apparently. Major news sources haven't given it much coverage. When Grusch first started grabbing headlines, people said it was a distraction from the Hunter Biden story, but ironically when we got to the actual day of the hearings, Hunter got much more coverage than the hearings.
It was aliens.
Yeah, it's also kind of funny how the conspiracy theorists (at this point the general "anti-NWO" conspiracy theory crowd seems to be mostly on the side of UFOs being a fake and a psyop, precisely because they feel the government is pushing them) have ben screaming about how this is a distraction from X or setting up the stage for Project Blue Beam and one-world government created on the basis of fake aliens. You'd think that if that's the reason they'd be pushing this far harder and making sure it actually sticks - and in the one-world government case actually making sure it's also pushed abroad (can't tell about other countries, of course, but this shit is receiving essentially zero attention in Finland outside of (small) dedicated local ufologist circles).
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