[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?

[smolder]

I wouldn't trust Congress to do a good job investigating practically anything. They have their share of crazies and chronic liars.

[likeabbas]

I used to think most politicians were cooks. Now I realize most of them are very smart and have very different private opinions from the ones they scream at their base. This topic is a good example of showing how intelligent some congressmen (who you thought were crazy) are. For example https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1684249806300905480?s=46&t=...

[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.

[tsimionescu]

I think there is a pretty good record of high-level intelligence officials lying to Congress under oath, and a similar history of no consequences whatsoever when the lie was later revealed. WMDs in Irak and the inexistence of the PRISM program were both testified about in Congress, and later turned out to be lies. Which high-level intelligence officials were ever even investigated for perjury?

[likeabbas]

Even still, you’ve completely ignored the other half of my comment. Grusch is alleging specific people and corporations are involved in illegal activities. The corporations should have no trouble suing Grusch for false accusations and defamation, which in this case would be equivalent to jail time. So even if congress didn’t refer him to the justice department for perjury, those corporations absolutely will sue Grusch if he’s lying.

[danenania]

It's also a very different thing to lie to Congress with the backing of the IC (as happened with Clapper, WMDs, etc.) compared to lying to Congress against the IC's wishes. You are astronomically more likely to be prosecuted for the latter.

[likeabbas]

Do you have any evidence of this? The IC can refer you to the justice department on his own if you've lied to him/her.

[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?

[blincoln]

In the scenario I'm suggesting, if I understand you correctly, the ICIG talked to the same people that Grusch had. Those people said something to the effect of "yes, I have seen intelligence documents and other evidence that described alien spacecraft and biological material." I.e. Grusch and the people he talked to believe what they're saying because of documents intentionally made to appear legitimate.

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.

[likeabbas]

You are 100% correct that this could be a giant psy-op constructed to convince people of something insane like aliens. From what I’ve heard, the ICIG has gotten testimony under oath from people purported to be apart of the reverse engineering programs, and they have provided locations and photo evidence. There’s also a report that one of these craft are [so large that it can’t be moved](0). Congress could send a special envoy to investigate this and find out right now if this is a ruse or not. Do you think they should?

[0] https://youtu.be/r-zjLas_WbM

[blincoln]

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not suggesting it's a giant psy-op. I'm suggesting that it could be sort of like putting unique watermarks on mp3s when customers download them, so that when those mp3s show up on file-sharing sites, the publisher can figure out who uploaded them and close their account or file a lawsuit. It wouldn't be enough to literally watermark the real secret material. One would want fake programmes as well, so that if someone were only feeding descriptipns to a foreign country, it would still be enough to see that hostile foreign country A was passed information including information about fake secret programmes 106, 782, and 18023, and only CIA analyst Jack Smith has access to all three.

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.

[likeabbas]

Whatever it may end up being, I think it’s imperative that congress investigate this because of what you’re saying is true then this is not good for the American people to be led on like this.

[flarg]

We had a crazy President