One Of These Witnesses Is Not Like The Others
One Of These Witnesses Is Not Like The Others
One of these stories is not quite the same
In the photo by Drew Angerer (Getty) above, we see Ryan Graves, executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, David Grusch, former National Reconnaissance Office Representative of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force at the U.S. Department of Defense, and Retired Navy Commander David Fravor, respectively, arranged from left to right in our view.
Two of these men, Graves and Fravor, are forthright when speaking about things that definitely exist. The one in the middle, David Grusch, is a dodgy communicator with lots of assertions about things that sound impossible, offering no proof or direct knowledge. Without the men seated on either side of him, the smile on Grusch’s face would seem very different. He is sourrounded by Seriousness, with an unserious story to peddle in Congress. He is having the day of his dreams, the center of attention.
Skeptic and UFO debunker Mick West has posted a new video about a specific report in Graves’s testimony. Turns out that with so many new Starlink satellites in the evening sky, pilots are seeing a whole lot of shiny things they cannot identify. With the benefit of open source tracking data and navigational information, it is possible to explain these mysteries in a way that was not possible before.
The first UFO craze followed on the first wave of weather ballooning, when wartime needs and the invention of radiosonde electronics made it possible to research the atmosphere remotely. No such public information system existed at the time. ‘Weather balloon’ became the standard explanation for unexplained things in the sky because there were in fact so many of them. Then UFO enthusiasts adopted the phrase as ironic resistance to the explanation (consult the lyrics of “Unmarked Helicopters” by Soul Coughing for an example of the rhetoric.)
On Twitter/X, Graves reacted to Mick West’s preliminary identification of the object by declaring that “Starlink is the new weather balloon.” Like so many ‘witnesses’ of unexplained aerial phenomena, Graves is clearly resistant to new information which contradicts his closely-held beliefs. His testimony is forthright because he really believes it.
We have no similar example with Fravor, the man at Grusch’s left elbow. Nor is anyone questioning his beliefs or experience, or Graves’s. On the contrary, these two men are forthright because they are not making it up, and they are resistant to evidence that might suggest they were wrong about what they did experience, which is entirely normal and human.
Neither of them actually say ‘it was aliens.’ They are too scientific for that. They refer to ‘UAPs’ instead of UFOs because they are not rubes. They say that about 5 percent of pilots have experienced such encounters and they are probably right, for the sky is full of more planes and balloons and satellites than ever before; the full armada is orders of magnitude larger than it was just 20 years ago.
These days, it would only be surprising if no pilots ever saw something weird.
Call it ‘flight pollution.’ For example, Mick Ryan has examined several recorded UAPs, including so-called ‘Tic-Tac’ objects, which turn out to be the product of our digital cameras recording the distant flare of passenger jet running lights. The ‘mysterious object’ recorded by a passenger is just another jet full of passengers.
Graves and Fravor are hardly unaware of this reality. They account for it in their testimony. And they never, ever say anything about aliens.
Hinting at aliens is Grusch’s job. He is the former ‘intelligence analyst,’ which is a job for serious-minded people that nevertheless attracts any number of crazies, cranks, egotists, and malcontents.
At one time, Grusch worked in a Pentagon office that examined UAP reports. He claims to have seen reports and photographs about alien spacecraft and “non-human biologics,” which could mean space monkeys, space dogs, space ants, space mice, or any other perfectly earthbound organism sent aloft in any sort of high-altitude research program by any nation, ever.
“We're not bringing little green men are flying saucers into the hearing. Sorry to disappoint about half y'all,” Tim Burchett (R-TN) ‘joked’ in the hearing. (He was not joking.) Grusch’s testimony was light as air, giving no specific facts about anything.
We are used to thinking of government classification as a problem because too many things are kept secret, when just as problematically, too often the secrecy itself is used as a shield against examination.
What, exactly, were these ‘non-human biologics’? We cannot know, because it is classified. You know: a cover-up. The belief is unfalsifiable, and therefore untestable.
Scott Rouse, Mark Bowden, Chase Hughes, and Greg Hartley are behavior and ‘body language’ experts. Together as ‘The Behavior Panel,’ they examine various public testimonies, interviews, and statements for evidence of deceit or efforts to distract, as well as other potential physical or psychological phenomena. They have already examined Grusch’s television interview.
Here, they react to Grusch, Graves, and Fravor giving their congressional testimony, and all agree that Grusch is not like the other two. Whatever is going on inside his mind is not the same what is going on in their minds.
Graves and Fravor worry about the national security implications of what they think they saw. If, in the words of Graves, “stigma and fear” get in the way of understanding the things they have witnessed, then America is in danger from some unknown hostile power. Spoken with military bearing, these things do not sound so crazy.
Grusch brings the crazy to the table, and “Grusch’s behavior is a little more bizarre” compared to the pilots, Hughes notes. To his eye, Grusch’s testimony appears to be a “performance.” His expressions are “artificial.” He uses the word ‘classified’ to “borrow credibility and authority,” Hughes notes. Whereas “they are acting like themselves,” Grusch is displaying fear as he performs, as if he is holding something back. Where the pilots are honest about what they do not know, Grusch is trying to make us believe he knows more than he does.
Rouse sees the same contrast. Grusch is “completely different” from the other two “from the way they talk, to how fast they talk, their tone of voice, to the words they use, to their sentence structure, to their paragraph structure — their complete approach is different than his.” Grusch is “alluding [to] and inflating” information, delivering “hearsay” to claim the experiences of other people by proxy. He has not seen the things he claims exist, only seen pictures and read reports and talked to people who claim to have seen them. “I’m not saying Grusch is lying,” Rouse declares, but then notes that overall, Grusch doesn’t have as much to say as the other two men. Whereas their speech is plain, he misuses words to seem smart.
Grusch claims to be neurodivergent, Hartley notes. That will make him quirky but it cannot explain everything. Whereas the military men seem “bored,” his body language is protective. Perhaps “he got reamed for something around” the topic of the question and unconsciously defends himself as he crosses his arms. “Alphas don’t strut,” Hartley says. People who know classified things simply don’t talk about them; they do not engage in extended caveats. “Is he telling the truth? We don’t know because he’s not saying anything. He’s not giving us anything that has content.”
Evasiveness. Shading. Approval-seeking. Compared to the other two, Bowden says, Grusch relies most on a connection with his questioner. “The better the questioning, the more he clams up,” Bowden notes, while “the worse the questioner, the more opportunity he has to put on a show that you might see on the History Channel very, very soon.” Grusch has lots of vocal clicks that annoy the panel but precious real information. His attestations are second-hand where theirs are first-hand.
The experts on Behavior Panel are not psychics. They cannot say what David Grusch is thinking, but they can see that he is thinking differently from Ryan Graves and David Fravor because he behaves differently. Of the three men, he is the weakest, with the weakest story to tell, and yet he is also the most eager to be heard.
