Our congress is currently wasting time on hearings about UFOs, or UAPs as they’re calling them now. It mystifies me how anyone can believe the crap the UFO weirdos spew.

One of the witnesses is a guy named David Grusch, who sits there making amazing claims that he can’t back up.

David Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.

Grusch served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating UAPs until earlier this year. He told lawmakers that he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” during the course of his work examining classified programs. He said he was denied access to those programs when he requested it, and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He later said he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with “nonhuman” origins, and that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some craft.

Note: he has not seen any non-human biologics, he has heard second hand from unnamed officials that they had seen them.

Grusch said he hasn’t personally seen any alien vehicles or alien bodies, and that his opinions are based on the accounts of over 40 witnesses he interviewed over four years in his role with the UAP task force.

“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony,” Grusch said, adding that the trove of evidence has been intentionally kept secret from Congress.

It’s a secret, he claims. He constantly deflects when pressed by saying that he can only talk about this extremely confidential information in a SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility”. Right. Why is he there if he has only hearsay to report, and can’t give any details?

The fact is that when we do get details, they’re typically evidence of noisy technology, or reflections. When pilots report that non-aerodynamic objects are flitting at thousands of miles an hour at low altitude, while completely silent, that then abruptly disappear, I think it’s safe to say they’re not chasing physical objects — they are seeing optical artifacts, or technical glitches in their electronics. I don’t find these recordings at all convincing evidence of any kind of alien, or even material, phenomena.

This, for instance, is also not any kind of evidence, except evidence for credulity in some of the people reporting this nonsense.

A 22-year-old from New York City who asked to remain anonymous — “due to stigma that still persists around the subject” — told NPR he made plans to attend “knowing that it’s something that could be a historic moment.”

From an overflow room with about 100 other enthralled spectators, he watched as Grusch, Graves and Fravor — men with long careers in the military — shared their experiences.

Out of context, he said, their stories “sound fantastical” but given the credentials of all three witnesses, he said he’s a believer.

And he wasn’t the only one.

“There was definitely a gasp and everyone was definitely a little bit shocked,” he said, “when Grusch was talking about non-human biologics.” There was a similar response when Grusch later touched on the personal retaliation he suffered, according to the man.

A dubiously reported “gasp” from a meeting of congress means nothing. No history was made.

Grusch is not a credible source.

According to UFO researcher Joe Murgia, Grusch began peddling his UFO story when he attempted to convince Skinwalker Ranch aficionados and dubious UFO weaponizers George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell to help him take it public on their podcast while he was still employed by the government. The two declined, though not before taking him to a Star Trek convention to meet with ufologists, so he turned to the credulous team of reporters connected to his friend, Lue Elizondo.

He’s part of the usual assortment of “UFO researchers” and Star Trek convention attendees, unqualified fantasists with no credentials at all. The association with Skinwalker Ranch is a nail in the coffin. Skinwalker Ranch is an old property in Utah that was bought by con artists who then ginned up an imaginary history of cattle mutilations, Bigfoot, crop circles, and poltergeists, that got turned into books and a Netflix series. It’s bullshit.

Skeptical author Robert Sheaffer believes the phenomenon at Skinwalker to be “almost certainly illusory”, given that NIDsci found no proof after several years of monitoriing, and that the previous owners of the property, who had lived there for 60 years, say that no supernatural events of any kind had happened there. Sheaffer considers the “parsimonious explanation” to be that the Sherman family invented the story “prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow”, with many of the more extraordinary claims originating solely from Terry Sherman, who worked as a caretaker after the ranch was sold to Bigelow.

In 1996, skeptic James Randi awarded Bigelow a tongue-in-cheek Pigasus Award for funding the purchase of the ranch and for supporting John E. Mack’s and Budd Hopkins’ investigations. The award category designated Bigelow as “the funding organization that supported the most useless study of a supernatural, paranormal or occult [claim]”.

In 2023, ufologist Barry Greenwood, writing in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, criticized the $22 million research program led by James Lacatski. He emphasized the lack of any documentary evidence from the ranch after many decades of exploration and characterized Skinwalker as “always in the business of selling belief and hope”.

I tried watching the series. It’s ridiculous. Ten episodes of silly people making up stories about pixels, dead cows, and people in cowboy hats walking around in the sagebrush and complaining about bad cell phone reception. And this is the culture that is spawning these hearings? Nonsense. This is a clear example of the combination of grifting and cultural contagion.

You don’t believe me? Here’s a map of UFO sightings.

Notice anything unusual in the distribution? UFOs seem to be an odd confabulation fueled by English-language media. Yet Chuck Schumer and other congressional biologics found it necessary to stuff these hearing requirements into a defense budget bill. There’s nothing there.

But sure, wheel a gurney bearing the dead body of an alien into the hearing room, and I’ll pay attention…but that won’t happen.