Many people from the government and from the military are putting their reputation and career (and maybe safety) on the line to bring these informations to the public.
Let’s at least recognize that before automatically casting doubt.
Let’s at least recognize that before automatically casting doubt.
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none. This isn't like Manning etc... where there was a materiel leak of classified data. So what would they be charged/fired for? Nothing. It's so much lazier, the claim is that being prevented access is somehow a proof of a coverup. All of the claims of harm were long before any of the publicity here.
All of the "whistleblowers" in these cases were not on any kind of career trajectory that this would have put in danger or even still serving in those roles.
They were all regular joes with uneventful military careers. They didn't bring new data to light like other whistleblowers - it's all rumors and speculation in this case, and literally a handful of shitty FLIR videos in others.
I'm baffled at the lack of epistemic consistency across truth claims. Nobody would accept this level of speculation for anything actually related to reality yet here we are wasting time on this. I've hurt myself today by being involved here at all. Totally irrational.
> They aren't...
> Totally irrational.
Ok you just proved why they're putting their reputation and career on the line... people calling it irrational.
1. They have no reputations to put on the line
2. They didn't do anything risky
This isn't like we're talking about the AF Chief of Staff or some major leader in a field. So there's nothing to put on the line, they were nobodies before this and once it dies off they will be nobodies again.
Said differently, this whole debacle will make them MORE famous and employable than they were previously. So the overall impact on their life is that they get more fame and attention for effectively no risk. People seeking fame and attention don't generally care what kind.
2. Grusch has testified under oath to the ICIG, both intelligence committees, and now to the house oversight committee. If he’s locking, they could lock him away indefinitely.
Your entire argument is moot and you are looking for any excuse to discredit what’s being said. If you think he’s lying, ask your congressmen to investigate his claims and jail him if he’s lying.
Grusch was a GS15 NGA officer that was read into over 2000 special access programs and prepared/delivered the presidential daily briefing in 2021. He’s quite literally one of the most credentialed intelligence officers in the US.
Dave Fravor was second in command of the USS Nimitz and is recognized as one of the top fighter pilots to come out of Top Gun.
This is way more common than you think it is and again, not special.
I prepped multiple PDBs from 2012-2015 while at DIA and then again while on the JS/J2 staff. Delivering a segment of the PDB is indeed noteworthy, but again, not particularly rare or an indication that you're somehow especially great or special.
This is the reality of the IC ... things that SEEM special to you are boring regular everyday events for us. Few people in the DoD/IC are exceptional and I can promise you that this guy wasn't one of them
Having Top Secret SCI clearance does not give you immediate access to every SAP you request to be read into. Most people are not read into more that a dozen SAPs.
I’ll also point out that if Grusch was an unexceptional IC officer, the pentagon would easily be able to discredit him as such. To date, the pentagon has not attempted to say anything about Grusch’s credibility. Many reporters have stated on the record that Grusch is very well regarded as a high level intelligence official.
What evidence do you have that this guy was not an exceptional officer, other than maybe you yourself were not exceptional?
My record is public so you can verify by yourself
What’s your rank? How many did you have access to? Citations please.
> Many reporters
Given the fundamental disregard HN has towards the MSM, this would be an appeal to authority.
When I was a sophmore the CIA recruiter said he knew coops who had done pdbs. I guess he was disreputable.
No. Intel (especially counter intel) officers are, trained to give information to convince someone of a certain context. Whether that information is true depends on the situation.
But it’s certainly not common for anyone to lie under oath, especially when they are testifying that specific people and corporations are involved in illegal operations. He’s opened himself up to not only perjury, but also lawsuits of false accusations. I don’t think the billion dollar defense contractors would have any trouble suing David Grusch if he’s lying.
There are some other possibilities. My main theory for what Grusch specifically is talking about is that intelligence agencies probably deliberately sprinkle different fake programs into the lists that different people are given access to, so that when information leaks, they can track who is doing the leaking.
Someone probably had a little too much fun creating fake documentation of alien corpses and crashed spacecraft instead of something less world-changing, and some of the folks who ended up being assigned material from that set felt like that was getting into territory that the public really did deserve to know about, because it would change everything if it were true.
It would not only explain the entire Grusch side of this discussion, but the reactions it's gotten from different branches of government. Everyone who knew about the leak-detection mechanism would be tight-lipped because they wouldn't want to disclose its existence. So it would look like an attempted coverup, but it would be a coverup of a security mechanism, not space aliens.
I actually found the story more believable until some of the specific testimony today. A red cube with sides as long as a football field? Where would Boeing even hide such a thing from other countries' spy satellites? Three-dimensional shadows of hyperdimensional objects? That's a really neat idea, but I think it fails the test of Occam's Razor in this case.
Military pilots encountering strange phenomena is a separate bucket, IMO. The US military has some of the best pilots and equipment in the world. I trust that if a bunch of them say they saw something strange, especially with visual, radar, and thermal evidence, there was something strange out there. But OTOH, I think it's an enormous stretch to attribute it to space aliens. It's probably a mixture of rare natural phenomena, classified/experimental aircraft of one sort or another, and mundane objects behaving very oddly when they're far outside their normal context.
When I used to work in a skyscraper, I once looked out the window and saw what looked like some sort of tear in spacetime dancing around the sky. Absolutely black, but with a chaotic silhouette that would smoothly ripple, then suddenly jerk into a new shape. I watched it for several minutes, and it kept going. Eventually it got close enough for me to see that it was just a black garbage bag that had somehow ended up in the right air current to be whisked around almost endlessly. I never did see it land, or even get close to the ground.
I'd love for Grusch's story to be true, but at this point I'll believe it when I see it.
So with your idea, the ICIG is in on it too?
A well-designed hypothetical leak-detection mechanism would include literally everyone in the organization, except maybe the most senior leadership. So even if the ICIG knew of its existence, if the system were designed well, they would have no way of knowing which documents were false.
If the ICIG were aware of the existence of the system, they'd also have to keep it secret, which would mean that even if they suspected Grusch was referring to intentionally false documents, they'd have to handle it as though the documents were genuine and forward it on to Congress just like you're describing, right?
I suspect what will happen is that the intelligence committees will meet with the involved parties in a SCIF. Someone will explain that the documents were intentionally false information. The committees will verify this discreetly. After that, I could see three main approaches for handling the situation:
* The committees make a vague statement that they've investigated the claims and there's actually nothing to worry about after all. They'll have Grusch support that claim, but not discuss specifics.
* Same as previous, but with the inclusion of some sort of excuse for the misunderstanding, like the Project Azorian "mining manganese nodules on the ocean floor".
* They'll decide that the amount of detail Grusch has disclosed publicly is too great to convincingly sweep under the rug, and decide to come clean about the leak-detection mechanism.
If they go with either of the first two, it will fuel decades of conspiracy theories about how the government covered up their secret captured alien spacecraft once again, but that's nothing new.
If I'm right about this kind of mechanism, the people running it might even encourage such things to create a pool of far-fetched lore in the fringes of the public. That way, they could randomly sprinkle in false documents related to those things specifically to catch people likely to leak fringe-related material early in their careers, before they're given access to really sensitive information.
I do absolutely think that Congress should follow the trail and see if there's physical evidence. I'm just saying that I think that what they'll find is that there was never real evidence, just intentionally fake documents and maybe faked artifacts.
Potentially, it could also be a mix of true details, but wrapped in a false backstory. e.g. if an intelligence agency captured a Russian weapon prototype in some underhanded way that would cause a political incident, and wanted to have people reverse-engineer it, they could remove any identifying markings, then let three people examine it separately. Reverse-engineer A would be told "it's from a vehicle of unknown origin that crashed in Colorado". Reverse-engineer B would be told "it's from a North Korean military satellite". Reverse-engineer C would be told "it's from a crash site in Wyoming". All three might be provided with different, faked photo evidence that matched the story as part of their documentation. If any of those stories showed up in counterintelligence records, the intelligence agency would know which engineer couldn't be trusted. Everything else I described for the simpler scenario applies there too.
They aren't because there is literally no new data, none
He can, however, discuss it with Congress and the whistleblower program in a secure setting and has done so (as he mentioned many dozens of times under oath today) and is willing to do so further.
truth claims
I don't see (credible) people claiming that anything was proven to be the "truth" today. Yet that seems to be what you're railing about. Well, hey, I agree with you a hundred percent about that. Nothing proved.
However, for reasons reiterated dozens of times here, his claims are very significant. If they are not true then he has duped a lot of members of Congress. Considering some of the congresspeople I saw up there today, it's not exactly the intellectual A-Team. But still.
Congresspeople can. They can stand up and read classified information into the record. They can’t be prosecuted for it, because of the Speech and Debate Clause.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of transparency and disclosure, but there are pretty big national current security concerns here.
But it is an ultimate recourse Congresspeople have, should they come into possession of classified information they are afraid will be deposited into the memory hole, like Senator Gravel did with the Pentagon Papers.
It would not matter if the most credible source alive said it, I would still ask this question: if what they are saying is true, then it's possible to prove it without needing to take what they or anyone else says on faith alone. If you remove what he or people in general from the question, to date I have not found the evidence in support of extraterrestrial visitation of earth very convincing. Plenty of plane-recorded footage capturing strange visuals, but an absolute lack of anything that does not also have a plausible non-alien explanation.
In either of these cases if he has decided that these programs are an existential danger to the world and need to be discussed, one way to out maneuver both of the above constraints is to pose as someone who believes they have been convinced the government is concealing "alien" technology, and can use his credentials to push the story farther than any civilian could. He has found that this tactic has given him access to people he otherwise couldn't reach (outside the limited context of his position/rank etc.)
tl;dr talking candidly about actual top secret research because he suspects it may constitute an existential threat to humanity if it is developed much further (similar to some early physicists' speculation that testing the H bomb could trigger the earth's atmosphere to burn up as well), that could get him in serious trouble very quickly because he's clearly crossing a line that has been clearly drawn around that information. But revealing it in terms of alien tech, he'll either get dismissed as a crank after his 15 minutrs are up, or he'll have gained access to high ranking civilian legislators long enough (with whom he can discuss the actual details directly in private), until he can find enough sympathetic ears that he feels safe to dispense with the "omg alien tech" camouflage.
Program names mean nothing unless you can look up their details as they're usually fancy codenames that spark everyone's tin foil hats. Makes for a great news story and a conversation on HN about "what it might be" but apart from that its useless.
What the average person can do with this information is not the point as far as I can tell. This information is being shared with people who are not the average person, and who do have the ability to investigate further.
The technologies alleged would transform human existence, and would mean trillions or more commercially. Effortless exploitation of asteroid resources being the low hanging fruit. Even if it isn't an instantaneous interstellar drive, it would imply freedom from gravity wells and practical inter-system transportation.
And how is it that there is one pilot that sees UAPs on the regular? This is like the UFO abductee that has been abducted a dozen times. If a pilot is seeing regular UAPs, there will be a hundred pilots seeing this phenomena.
Put it to you this way. If we happened to have alien UFOs crashlanding on the planet, it would be of utterly paramount importance that the technological gap represented is closed as soon as possible, for the survival of the species. It would involve every engineer and scientist being read in to get as much reverse engineering probability as possible.
It would mean marshalling worldwide resources for exploitation and development of space resources and defenses.
I actually like the Robotech / Macross take on this, where the alien SDF-1 crashes on the Earth, and a world war is basically halted in shock. A world government is formed, and immediate worldwide financial reasources are poured into reverse engineering and immediate space-based capabilities developed. That is basically what would happen if the world was shocked by the arrival of technologically superior aliens and we got our hands on some of their technology.
As it turns out, the scale of defenses constructed in the ten years after the SDF-1 is a pittance compared to the 4.8 million space cruisers and likely 50+ billion alien soldiers available to the aliens when they arrive.
The only way there would be no usable technological reverse engineering is if the arriving UFOs specifically built landing craft with the technological base of the natives, or somehow the technology is black boxed in some way that it degrades/self-destructs if there is a crash.
They need performative theatre of such dramatic potential they can distract from the Senates bill about banning Congress owning stocks
Edit: I don’t mean just the stock bill. They need to keep Overton window where it is.
But cover for not banning congress from stock trading? Really? What is your basis?
Are you seeing aliens all over? Sure is convenient they can travel time and space and just happen to crash on Earth … just like in TV shows!
There are models to refer to; how much attention we process on average. Gaming that with noise is not hard for mega billion dollar corps and politicians comfortable with never working
If you're going to put your career and reputation on the line, actually show or leak something that makes people believe you.
Otherwise, themselves and their titles only seek to perpetuate an average news story or cover up for something else the government is doing.
It is trivial to see that pushing a potentially desired position of the state/intel agencies could very well raise one's reputation and career prospects with these institutions.
The primary critique of this whole issue is that it is lies. So, why would lying in the interest of the state be bad for one's status within those circles?
Framed in this manner these people are risking absolutely nothing.
That used to be the case, but not in our modern world where “all publicity is good publicity”. IMO, this is a stunt from otherwise no-name government officials looking to get some media time.
I'll trade my good name for a few million bucks too.