[srge]

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.

[AndrewKemendo]

>putting their reputation and career (and maybe safety) on the line

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.

[likeabbas]

> They were all regular joes with uneventful military careers

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.

[AndrewKemendo]

>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.

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

[likeabbas]

What was your rank? How many SAPs were you read into?

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?

[AndrewKemendo]

I answered all this elsewhere

My record is public so you can verify by yourself

[LargeTomato]

I don't know you. I don't know how to look up your "record". Why obfuscate? If you came onto HN to spread awareness then help us understand. Otherwise you've come here to brag and you are not helpful.

[likeabbas]

I’m not looking up some random online comment’s credentials to try to prove their own point. Your comment doesn’t stand on its own and if you’re not willing to clarify your credentials further then your argument is moot.

[hindsightbias]

> Most people are not read into more that a dozen SAPs.

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.

[DropInIn]

So.... argument from authority?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[voxic11]

What was your rank? How many SAPs were you read into?

[jschveibinz]

I knew a guy who made “flag badge” that sat at his desk, smoked cigarettes, read the newspaper and drank tea for at least half of his workday. So I agree with your assessment.

[mmcwilliams]

Does someone being a credentialed US intelligence official make their public statements more or less trustworthy than the average person?

[likeabbas]

Certainly to me, especially given he’s testified under oath to multiple congressional committees and the ICIG. He’s made some outrageous accusations that absolutely need to be investigated. Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain.

[wombatpm]

The existence of National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn would seem to support the thesis that we have crazy people who lie at the highest levels of government.

[likeabbas]

Don’t you think congress should investigate these crazy people then?

[mmcwilliams]

I understand the context, but what I'm asking is; do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice? Or is their expertise rather in acquiring, analyzing and compartmentalizing information.

[likeabbas]

> do US intelligence officers make completely truthful statements as a public as a practice?

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.

[blincoln]

> Either he’s lying and we have crazy people in very high levels of government, or he’s not and we need to get this information into the public domain.

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.

[likeabbas]

He’s testified under oath to the ICIG who found his claims “urgent and credible” ( which are legal terms. Credible meaning he’s corroborated some claims, and urgent meaning the ICIG had to forward the claims to the intelligence committees in both chambers of congress.

So with your idea, the ICIG is in on it too?

[flarg]

We had a crazy President

[AndrewKemendo]

Neither in my experience - hence you should take my position with salt and do your own research

[likeabbas]

How many times have you or any other intelligence official you know lied under oath to the ICIG or congress?

[mmcwilliams]

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta seems to believe that his agency has done it several times[0].

[0] http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/08/cia.congress/

[alephnerd]

GS15 is not that impressive. Don't get me wrong - it's a good rank and the pay is decent by DMV standards, but like there are thousands of people with GS15 ranks. Now if he was an SES level that might be more intriguing...

[JohnBooty]

    They aren't because there is literally no new data, none

Grusch cannot legally divulge classified information publicly. Nobody can. Instant jail time- see Manning, etc. So no, obviously, we couldn't possibly have seen data or proof today.

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 think I see the disconnect here.

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.

[dmvdoug]

> Grusch cannot legally divulge classified information publicly. Nobody can.

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.

[JohnBooty]

How often is that done?

I'm overwhelmingly in favor of transparency and disclosure, but there are pretty big national current security concerns here.

[dlgeek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gravel#Vietnam_War,_the_d...

[beezlewax]

What are those concerns exactly?

[dmvdoug]

It's vanishingly rare, of course. Part of the problem is how does Congress get classified information from the Executive Branch? The latter has to turn it over. Cooperation between the two is necessary. If Congressfolk routinely read classified information into the record, cooperation would vanish. If Congressperson Blip made it a habit to run to the floor everytime s/he received anything with classification markings, Congressperson Blip would find that supply drying up faster than rain in a desert.

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.

[shepardrtc]

> > putting their reputation and career (and maybe safety) on the line

> They aren't...

> Totally irrational.

Ok you just proved why they're putting their reputation and career on the line... people calling it irrational.

[AndrewKemendo]

Sorry, to be clear my point is that

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.

[likeabbas]

1. Grusch gave up his career in the intelligence community to whistleblow on this. He had everything to lose.

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.

[thewildginger]

Thank you. Grusch was 4 years away from a full retirement and like 2 from early retirement when he resigned and became a whistleblower.

[amanaplanacanal]

Does anybody ever go to jail for lying to Congress?

[likeabbas]

He’s made accusations against specific people and corporations saying they’ve been involved in illegal activities and withholding information from congress. People do go to jail for false accusations of this order

[montagg]

If they aren’t bringing evidence, it’s a waste of people’s time. Taking a big risk that is most likely a very bad decision shouldn’t provide any credibility at all. Do that when you can show evidence, and then you have credibility.

[likeabbas]

Grusch gave program names, people involved, and locations of these special access programs purported to be reverse engineering non human technology to the ICIG and both intelligence committees in congress. Call your congressman and ask if he is credible.

[xnyan]

>...ask if he is credible

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.

[likeabbas]

You're right to be skeptical of his claims. At the very least, you should support Congress investigating this issue. Because either there are some crazy people with access to the most sensitive state secrets we own, or they are telling the truth and there's been a major coverup for the last 90 years hiding non-human intelligence visiting this planet from elsewhere, and there's technology far beyond what we have created.

[ChainOfFools]

Another possible motivation may be that he doesn't believe that any of this is actually alien technology at all, and that it is in fact a skunk works program he either has stumbled into via some side channel, (and therefore doesn't have direct access to materials that with substantiate his testimony), or he may even know exactly what all this stuff is but can't speak frankly about it because it is protected by top secret protocols that trigger his immediate sanction if abridged, cutting off his only means to publicize them further.

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.

[likeabbas]

I’ll just say, he’s testified under oath to the ICIG who found his claims “urgent and credible” (which are legal terms). So with your idea, the ICIG is in on it too?

[NoPicklez]

What can the average person do with program names, people involved and locations?

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.

[haswell]

> What can the average person do with program names, people involved and locations?

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.

[NoPicklez]

Watch it definitely not be investigated further and if it does, find nothing

[likeabbas]

You are so wrong. This thing is picking up major steam. https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sch...

[likeabbas]

Average person can’t do anything. Congress can investigate and subpoena any and all people involved and force them to disclose what they know. They can also use eminent domain to take the purported technology.

[icedchai]

Call me skeptical, but if this stuff exists, it's been moved to another location already. A congressman isn't going to show up to some base and be given access to the hanger with the UFO in it.

[likeabbas]

There’s a report that one of these craft are so large that it can’t be moved https://youtu.be/r-zjLas_WbM

[AtlasBarfed]

So there's been a half century of "reverse engineering", but there is no evidence of aerospace technology leaps in the half-century this has allegedly been going on. Rocket engines, materials engineering, etc, all pretty much have a well laid out public technological evolution, from theory to experimental engineering to productization, distributed across aerospace, materials engineering, etc in thousands of companies and universities and factories.

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.

[mrguyorama]

You're acting as if normal people in the military aren't normal, flawed human beings. Christ we literally had a member of the military inexplicably run into North Korea after a few bits of discipline for misbehavior.

[uhmyeh]

This stuff was popular in the Reagan era too. Odd to see it reappear right after Ronnie Junior left office

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.

[nonethewiser]

Im not ruling out these UFO hearings are a conspiracy. Some sort of intelligence misdirection. But I recognize this is pure speculation.

But cover for not banning congress from stock trading? Really? What is your basis?

[mrguyorama]

The tactic isn't about any one thing but rather just keeping a distractable and gullible voting bloc from paying attention to any one thing and forming a coherent ideology or reconsidering their faith in a politician for obvious nefarious things. The republicans are MUCH more effective at doing this than democrats, but they have no qualms about massaging how news gets disseminated in order to hush up bad things and emphasize stupid things.

[likeabbas]

But there are democrats joining republicans in investigating this. Senator Gillibrand and Chick Schumer have introduced legislation specifically targeting this.

[lamontcg]

Gives the Qanon crazies on the right wing something a bit safer to chew on.

[likeabbas]

Or this situation gives the dogmatic hacker news posters something to hit refresh for

[uhmyeh]

Colleagues in PR who have contrived one scenario after another in the media to make events go viral at the expense of others

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

[NoPicklez]

I cast doubt because these people never actually show any legitimate evidence, despite their supposed career appointments.

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.

[appplication]

Agree. I used to work with a lot of people who were not entirely there when I was in the military. When I was a Lt, I used to know (dated…) someone who told me she saw ghosts everywhere. As in, she would literally stop what she was doing and tell me a ghost was standing behind me, with complete seriousness. She’s now a Lt Col in the Space Force. I find it entirely believable that you could assemble a fairly large contingent of them to stake their credibility in just about anything.

[codezero]

Consider that they may be being asked to do so as part of their job. Frequently in the past UFO hysteria was encouraged by the government to cover up their own advanced technology testing, or that of an adversary they are trying to catch up to. This could also be a limited hangout, wherein the material that would be released to the public could be an unknown to the public alloy but not enough to reveal the technology that's being worked on in secret by the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

[PKop]

That's like saying lying about the Iraq war or any other policy of national security or deep state priorities "puts their reputation and career on the line".

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.

[ecf]

> on the line

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.

[ilaksh]

They are not putting their career on the line. They are doing their jobs.

[throwawaysleep]

In exchange for fame and large piles of cash.

I'll trade my good name for a few million bucks too.