The UFO/UAP phenomenon represents a mystery in science unlike any other. From one side,
the search for potentially alien life has been limited in the overall scientific community to
everywhere except earth. There are reasons for that, but they ultimately boil down to bias.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence was and is in the form of SETI, looking for distant
technosignatures, particularly radio waves, which in itself faced much early blowback in
the scientific and political community as a group crackpot scientists looking for little green men,
and they had to fight for acceptance, which they’ve ultimately largely achieved and we
now know them as people like Frank Drake. But within SETI, there has always been a
half whispered idea that technosignatures could also be located very close and ideas for things
like searching the surface of the moon for artifacts, or even the concept of searching
oort cloud objects for artificial lighting can be found in the scientific literature.
Left off however has been the subject of UFOs. Despite there being virtually no difference
between a von Neumann probe and a UFO. The idea of a self-replicating probe propagating
into the galaxy at sub-light speeds in order to leave a station of sorts in every interesting
star system within it and a UFO 3d printed out by such an object bear very little difference. Yet,
there remained a taboo in place due to the stigma and baggage associated with the UFO phenomenon at
large. There was a very big difference indeed between distant little green men broadcasting
radio, and a pop culture craze full of many different claims, including many dubious ones.
This effect also prevented a serious look on the part of the politicians into the matter,
even though when you boil it down there may be a kernel of something within the question.
This is changing, and in a remarkable show of bipartisanship the US House of Representatives
held open hearings yesterday on the subject of UFOs, along with proposed legislation
in the senate introduced by majority leader Chuck Schumer, again supported bipartisanly,
to be very likely passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act,
which may happen as soon as next month putting sweeping laws and deadlines on the
government and the contractors to inform congress of what they know, if anything.
The house hearings involved three witnesses, David Fravor, David Grusch and Ryan Graves.
The first of these is well known, David Fravor was an FA-18 Pilot that was one of the witnesses
of the 2004 Nimitz tic tac event. This event is well known, and today is one of the more
compelling UFO encounters, due to the amount of witnesses and reported instrument data.
But it’s also one of the most poorly understood, in that the sole piece of footage of this event
is very much in contention, with a prominent debunker, who isn’t qualified on the instrument,
in a debate with the pilot that took the footage and was qualified.
Take your pick who is right, the footage remains controversial, some claim it’s a distant plane,
others claim it’s anomalous but there is some evidence that whatever it was it was
actively jamming the radar of a US Navy FA-18, which is very much a hostile act or war that’s
not to be done in peacetime. To this day, this incident remains unidentified by the US Navy,
and also remains interesting because not just one ship picked these objects up on radar,
but both the USS Nimitz and the phased array of the USS Princeton, along with
the pilots and aircraft instrumentation. Still, as Fravor noted, they don’t know what it was,
and he warned against drawing too many conclusions other than saying what they witnessed.
The second witness was Ryan Graves, another FA-18 pilot assigned to a
different carrier that also saw objects of unknown origin in a completely different area,
and heard accounts from his fellow servicemen that also had encounters, one apparently dangerously
close to a collision. Graves has since headed an effort, including through the prestigious AIAA,
the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to determine if there is an
aviation hazard present in this. The argument is often made that if there was, we’d have seen it by
now. But this argument seems to actually stem from an assumption that there have been no incidents
of aircraft crashes that involved in some way a UFO. This is an error. There are at least two.
One happened in 1948 in Kentucky. Law enforcement reported a circular object, about 300 feet in
diameter, moving westbound that appeared white with a reddish border at the bottom. It then took
a stationary position for over an hour, appearing as a red object in flame with a green mist behind
it. It then approached the ground closely before shooting upward at high speed to about
10,000 feet. The Kentucky air national guard sent four fighter aircraft to investigate. One pilot,
Captain Thomas Mantell, approached the object accompanied by two of the other aircraft. What
they actually saw at that point is in dispute, but two of the pilots broke off the pursuit,
but Mantell did not, and seems to have blacked out going too high causing his aircraft to fatally
crash. While it wasn’t directly downed by a UFO, it was downed in the pursuit of one, something
that could happen again, especially in our world of unidentified and clandestine balloons.
The point is, there are aviation accidents linked to UFOs.
And if Ryan Graves’ account to congress is correct, they still do pose this
threat. You can see a recent interview I conducted with Graves on Event Horizon,
link in the description below. His description of UAP are a transparent sphere, with a dark
or gray square inside, which is not consistent with a tic tac. As weird as it sounds however,
there actually are very old patents from the 1940’s regarding radar reflectors
inside balloons that might look something like this, and might be something launchable from a
submarine that might be classified still. Or it may not have a mundane explanation.
Graves also recounted an incident in 2003 where an apparently very large group of contractors
with Boeing observed a very large red square, now being called the Red Cube of Vandenburg,
though it’s unclear if it was a cube, about the size of a football field approached from
the ocean and hovered over one of vandenburg’s launch facilities before darting off over the
mountains after 45 seconds. This was followed by objects later in the day
apparently darting towards security guards at high speed. Make of it what you will.
The third witness was David Grusch, who claims, under oath, that the US government maintains
highly secretive special access programs intended to back engineer recovered crashed or otherwise
abandoned UFOs. Here it becomes difficult to discern exactly what we’re looking at,
due to the nature of the claim being so extraordinary. At the same time, stories of
crashed UFOs have been around longer than most of us have been alive, the dates of these now
pushed back to 1933, but also include the infamous Roswell incident. One common argument made is that
if the government had these kinds of objects, they wouldn’t have been able to keep it secret. Well,
that’s not a great argument in that if Roswell happened, we know about it and there are countless
documentaries and books on that incident, so obviously they weren’t able to keep it secret.
And, the US government can keep a secret if it wants to, and it can do it in several
different ways. I would cite here something that the US government kept so secret,
that it forgot its own secret. This gets into perhaps the most secretive agency within the US
government. And it’s not the Pentagon by far, it’s the Department of Energy. As an aside,
If you want to keep crashed UFOs secret, don’t let the pentagon keep it. You take it to the labs,
such as Los Alamos, which is under the Department of Energy, keep it secret
according to their own classification system, and then at some point have them
transfer it into the contractor system. That way, the Pentagon mostly has plausible deniability.
But this case deals with a material the DoE still keeps highly secret, and in the words of a former
general manager of Oak Ridge national labs, the material is classified, it’s composition
is classified, its use in nuclear weapons is classified, and the process for creating it
is classified. It’s a material known as FOGBANK, and is used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons
in the US arsenal, such as the W76, W78 and W88 nuclear warheads. It’s likely an aerogel of some
type functioning as an interstage material, but the fact is, the DoE once forgot how to make it.
The final batch of this material was made in 1989, and the plant used to produce it closed. By 1996,
the US government wanted to refurbish some of its weapons to extend their service lifetimes.
By that time however, too many people had retired out or died from the original production run,
and so few documents made, that they literally had to back engineer the material.
It took until 2007 to do this, and even then, it didn’t work. It turned out that there needed
to be a specific impurity in the material that no one knew about. So the point is,
if the Department of Energy wants to keep a secret, they can do so long term,
since FOGBANK has remained classified and uncompromised since 1975 to the present day.
As to downed UFOs, there have been many other claims of this sort, such as Cape Girardeau,
Missouri in 1941. Grusch claims between 12 and 15 craft, including remains of biological beings,
or some abomination of a merging between biology and machine. Claims as they are, very big ones,
they were made openly under oath. Of course, without actual evidence, this simply means
that Grush may have been told of things that don’t actually exist. Governments do engage
in disinformation campaigns and it remains to be seen whether that’s what this is. But I can say,
there are no shortage of astrobiologists that would love to see a sample of alien tissue.
One issue brought up prominently in the hearings is the problem of over classification. The
Pentagon classifies everything it can, which is a known problem in the US government. Even cellphone
footage taken from the cockpit of an FA-18 was classified until it was released by AARO,
which tends to go against the claim that classification of footage is done based on
the capabilities of the Pentagon’s instrumentation, which an Iphone’s
capabilities are a really hard sell there since everything about it is public. It’s an Iphone.
But the greatest, and very valid criticism in all of this remains. Where is the evidence?
Not forthcoming, especially in the case of David Grusch. Back engineering programs certainly exist,
but there actually does seem to be evidence of at least one program intended to back
engineer technology of unknown, potentially alien origin. And the story is not good,
since it derives from injuries purportedly sustained by people coming into contact with UFOs.
There have been several claims of this, to the point that it seems to be one of
the more readily emergent sources of evidence in this entire issue. There have been reports,
such as the Cash-Landrum case, where people sustained radiation injuries from an unknown
source, an apparent UFO. Other examples include the infamous Rendlesham forest incident, and the
work of Dr. Garry Nolan at Stanford with patients that seem to have sustained very specific types of
brain damage due to encounters with whatever this phenomenon is. Yet another is a rather disturbing
document compiled by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, link in the description below.
I cannot speak to the purpose of this document, nor its veracity as it could also
be disinformation in its own right, or may even be incorrect in its claims and conclusions. But
it is a US government document and it details and classifies injuries sustained in various cases,
including a series of strange injuries sustained by three engineers working
on a television broadcast tower years ago consistent with broadband radiation injuries
centered around a frequency of 775 megahertz, which is UHF. Now here I become skeptical,
that’s the sort of frequency you might find emanating at high power from a television
transmitter, so take it as it, I merely put it out there as a document of interest.
This document may be one part of why the representatives in the hearing
asked specifically about human injuries and even deaths associated with either UAP directly or the
secrecy surrounding them. Whenever you're dealing with tangible studyable injuries linked with a
specific source, it is beholden to science to look into why. Injuries are evidence in
medical science. Because of the possibility of this alone, this is now a scientific,
and even an ethical problem above and beyond direct evidence of the existence of UAP,
which as of the Navy’s report to congress that openly states that Unidentified objects do exist
in the atmosphere means that there actually is something for science to study here.
The report continues on to float the idea of back engineering,
based on the evidence of the injuries, the means of causing those injuries,
perhaps in the form of directed energy weapons, making for a somewhat disturbing read.
But the fact remains, even after the hearings, visual evidence is poor for the phenomenon and
actual physical evidence supporting Grusch’s claims is lacking, though there are samples
associated with UFOs in private hands, some of which are again being studied by Garry Nolan at
Stanford, with one specific piece of metal being isotopically off in a way that might
be consistent with a manufactured piece of metal not likely to have been done by humans
due to the sheer expense required to hoax it. Whatever that thing is, it required upwards of
hundreds of thousands of dollars to create in the 1970’s. Not impossible to hoax, but pricey.
But throughout this is perhaps the biggest question of them all. Why would an alien
civilization cross such vast amounts of time only to crash into the earth? This is where things get
spooky. There are several possibilities here. One is very simple, the von Neumann probe printing out
probes perhaps manned by biological components intended as its guidance systems simply doesn’t
recycle and when they’ve achieved their intended goal, they simply get abandoned or discarded,
which is something we do with almost all of our defunct spacecraft. They crash,
or are discarded when their energy supplies run out, and are even subject to controlled crashes.
But it could be worse than that. Another idea is that the von Neumann probe isn’t what it
used to be. Perhaps it’s so old that it’s taken a few too many cosmic ray hits that
it;s programming is only partially functional now, but no longer rationally operating giving
the appearance of a phenomenon that could be highly technological, orders of magnitude
further than we are, but showing no sanity, only random acts and irrational behavior.
It may even be more broad in that the intent of von Neumann probes in general might be to gather
up the collective data of any civilizations it runs across, seeding technology to move them
towards the development of generalized artificial intelligence and data collection and at the moment
that arises, the probe intervenes and rescues to budding AI from its creators to avoid the
loneliness of deep space, but also the monotony of making copies, or clones, of oneself and if
that process becomes corrupted over time, then it’s anyone’s guess what that would look like.
The hearings today were simply a beginning. The US House of Representatives is looking towards more
in-depth hearings, and meetings with Grusch in protected environments where he can provide what
evidence he has, and congress can act on it. Also happening this time is the Senate legislation,
which seems to be fast tracked to pass before the Senate’s August recess. If so, strong new
laws will be enacted that essentially require disclosure of whatever the US government knows.
That may be more than we expect, or less, only time will tell. But throughout, the independent
NASA probe continues on and a preliminary report is expected within about a month from the panel.
Interesting times indeed, and developing very rapidly. But one interesting take
away of this was the invocation in the hearings of the Holman rule,
which has teeth. This allows the House of Representatives to defund programs, and fire
non-elected officials, should anyone get in the way of their investigations,
and should something exist behind it all. All we can do is watch and wait.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier
currently still exhausted after watching the hearings, conducting two interviews, and making
this video. I’m so ready for bed … except it has a sleeping opossum taking up my pillow,
drat, sleeping in the LeBaron it is and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.