The Latest And Possibly Last Capitol Hill UFO Flap Was Sparsely Attended
Seven-year saga comes to an end
This time, hardly anyone bothered to attend. Unlike the sensational committee hearing of 2023, in which David Grusch made great claims without evidence, there was little media hype before the House Oversight Committee met last Wednesday to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs). A Senate Armed Services Committee hearing took place in a nearly-empty room on Tuesday. Perhaps the media was exhausted by the election. Or perhaps the media has finally wised up to the antics of the disclosure cult and learned to be skeptical about their faith claims. If so, then the UFO flap that began with a sketchy 2017 New York Times article has offically ended.
“People pay attention to these puerile marvels mainly because they promise something like old-time religion, but especially life after death, even life eternal,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Indeed, Grusch has emerged as an explicitly spiritual leader of the so-called ‘disclosure movement,’ which is in fact a cult. As Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who led the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) at the Pentagon, has told journalist Steven Greenstreet, a UFO “religion” has used the United States government to fund paranormal “research” with taxpayer money. Here at Osborne Ink, I have now written a series of ten essays on the history of the UFO cults, so I recognize the disclosure cult as yet another example of this all-American phenomenon.
No government agency has ever found what the disclosure cult believes to exist, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) noted last week. “While these agencies have been helpful to us in understanding the challenges that come from UAP data, none of them have been able to substantiate the claims made at this hearing last year by David Grusch, despite our committee members endlessly questioning these agencies inside and outside of a SCIF.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) wanted to know where he could get a copy of the nondisclosure agreement that witness Luis Elizondo claims he signed, and which prevents him from discussing extraterrestrial spacecraft. Elizondo replied that he does not have a copy because it is classified. It is unlikely that any such NDA exists. As the New York Times reported in August when Elizondo’s book debuted, the mysterious government program he claims to have run, which gave him access to information about extraterrestrials, never existed. Elizondo is clearly a charlatan. Strangely, none of the House committee members asked Elizondo any questions about this matter, though. His fact-free narrative was instead taken at face value.
Perhaps the truest believer in Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) wanted to know why the Pentagon Public Affairs Office “employs a psychological operations officer as a single point of contact for UAP related inquiries. Why the heck would they do that?” Setting aside the obvious answers to this question — military personnel go through many roles in their careers, while a PSYOPS officer would hopefully screen out false reports aimed at whipping up hysteria — we should wonder why Burchett has not called former Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer Richard Doty to testify about his role in creating and propagating the most important UFO lore of the last 50 years. The reason, of course, is likely that Doty’s answers would never satisfy the disclosure cult while still making the government look terrible for having ever employed him.
Retired US Navy admiral Dr. Tim Gallaudet, a witness, wanted to stress “the socioeconomic opportunities that UAP research could unlock.” While this ostensibly suggests that a flying saucer industry could revive American manufacturing, the more practical and real outcome would be further federal spending on Skinwalker Ranch, the alleged home of supernatural creatures and aliens which has been featured on the History Channel.
Gallaudet is also sure that unidentified submersible objects (USOs) exist and who knows what they are? Pressed for details, he cannot tell us much about it, at least not in public. All he can say is that during the 1980s, some sort of object was observed on sonar during a storm. On this basis, Gallaudet suspects there are “hot spots” or “entry and exit points” on the sea floor that presumably lead to the alien bases in the earth’s crust, or the subterranean lair of the lizard people, or else to the 8th dimension.
Questioning Elizondo, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) asked whether UAPs were flying to earth from outer space or “interdimensional.” Elizondo replied that they “could be both.” Because why not? Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) also asked witness Michael Shellenberger about possible “ocean bases” and “hot spots,” wondering about things that are “not earthly tech.” Asked about his opinion on whether UAPs were extraterrestrial in origin, Shellenberger demurred: “I genuinely do not know.” He was however quite certain that an unacknowledged special access program is hiding evidence from Congress, because “sources” — Shellenberger will not be more specific — assure him that “hundreds, maybe thousands” of whistleblowers are just waiting to come forward, if only the government would let them.
“The truth is out there,” witness Michael Gold asssured the committee, using the famous X-Files motto. Like other UFO cults, the disclosure cult uses the language and imaginarium of science fiction at least as much as they use the language and imaginarium of science. Gold was the most scientific-sounding witness, identifying the problem of sensor bias — most of the things that can detect UAPs are on military bases, therefore most of the reports come from around military sites — and hedged on extraterrestrial responsibility. Indeed, the mystery objects might be an eathly adversary, and “we don’t want to be on the wrong end of technological surprise,” Gold argued, so “we must find out” what the UAPs are.
In his “baloney detection kit” chapter in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan called this the “argument from adverse consequences.” Key to this form of baloney is the free mixing of a small number of ‘potentially alien origin’ UAPs with thousands of ‘definitely earth origin’ UAPs as though they are a single, monolithic threat that must be countered. Chinese spy balloons and interstellar spacecraft are exactly equal possibilities until proven otherwise, because if even one UAP might be extraterrestrial, then the disclosure cult will feel confirmed in their beliefs.
History has seen UFO flaps before, and AARO was supposed to be the final step to disclosure of alien technology hidden in government labs. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) referenced the legacy of secrecy in “Cold War institutions” to ask Elizondo about AARO. “Under its previous leadership it failed,” Elizondo replied, referring to Dr. Kirkpatrick. Elizondo thus inferred that Kirkpatrick was protecting the “cabal” that he believes has hidden a program to “reverse engineer alien craft” for decades, recovered alien “biologics,” and so on.
Rep. Luna wondered whether strange aircraft loitering around America’s nuclear sites are a form of “nonverbal communication” by an adversary, or else aliens. Because these two potential explanations are equally possible.
Every element of this story is familiar material from the bricolage of UFO cult beliefs. From the moment Klaatu descended from the heavens in The Day the Earth Stood Still, extraterrestrials have warned us about our impending doom, with the “ontological shock” (Grusch’s term) of this “disclosure” shocking the world into nuclear peace. A year after the film premiered on the American screen, the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb, and then one month after that, a man named George Adamski supposedly met an alien from Venus with a message that was very like Klaatu’s, though it was explicitly spiritual. Adamski was the very first “alien contactee.”
As I have laid out in my essay series on the history of the belief in extraterrestrial beings who visit earth, this ancient spiritual idea was revived in the modern period by Emanuel Swedenborg. Nearly forgotten today, Swedenborg had a gigantic impact on American alternative religion during the 19th century, inspiring Joseph Smith, the founders of Spiritualism, and finally the founders of Theosophy. By the 1930s, Christian Theosophy was all the rage in America, and prophets like Adamski were a dime a dozen. Their bricolage, or body of spiritual and ritual practices, included most of what would be re-branded as New Age in the 1970s.
UFO cults today still carry the same baggage of belief, for the belief in aliens is actually much older than the first flying saucer sightings. The UFO disclosure cult must always return to belief eventually because that is where it began, while hard scientific evidence is never forthcoming.
Everyone at the House committee hearing wanted Dr. Jon Kosloski, the new AARO leader, to speak to the committee. However, Dr. Kosloski is a very busy man. Among his first job duties is to complete Volume 2 of AARO’s historical documentation of UAP phenomena (Volume 1 is here). Conveniently, the Senate held a small hearing of its own this Tuesday to hear from Kosloski, who was the sole witness.
The hearing started late, but it was quite mercifully short. Almost no one was present for the damp squibs that dropped as Dr. Kosloski testified. Only two Senators showed up with their staff. Here is what it looked like as the hearing adjourned:
The Senate Armed Services Committee has better access to classified information than the House Oversight Committee, and their questions reflected an unredacted understanding of the material facts.
National security was the primary focus. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) asked about UAPs in sensitive airspace. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) asked about unidentified drones flying over Langley, but did not ask about interdimensional versus interstellar explanations or ocean floor hot spots.
Dr. Kosloski, an actual scientist, was direct in his opening remarks. “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” he said. Then he offered three famous examples of UAPs that had been positively identified as routine objects in the sky, including two very hot spots.
The apparent “transmedium” object observed near Puerto Rico in 2013 was neither interdimensional nor interstellar. Emphasis added:
Transmedium means that it goes from one domain into another. In this case, it looks like it goes from the air into the water and then back into the air. We assess that it was actually flying over the airport the entire time. And what appears to be the transmedium part, where it goes into the water, is actually where the temperature of the water is equal to the temperature of the object and the camera can no longer distinguish between the two. It’s not that the object actually goes into the water. And so we assess that the object, likely a pair of balloons or sky lanterns, was floating at about seven knots over the airport and descending to about 200 meters.
The famous GOFAST video turns out to be a parallax view of an object moving much more slowly than it appears. Whereas this explanation makes mathematical sense, because geometry is real, former F/A-18 pilot Ryan Graves refuses to stop believing in other explanations for which he has zero evidence.
"I would argue that some of these cases aren't quote unquote debunked or no longer of interest, specifically the GOFAST video itself was never really interesting because it was going fast," Graves said. "The pilots certainly didn't say that, nor did they name the video. If anything, the Pentagon simply debunked their own naming for that video."
Graves also said there were more objects in the air at the time than the one depicted in the GOFAST video. The Pentagon is still investigating another video nicknamed GIMBAL that was taken around the time of the GOFAST video.
Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit organization of former military pilots. The very name of the organization is an argument from adverse consequences. While the sky is absolutely busier than ever, creating all sorts of safety issues to be sure, this is not advocacy for safety. It is apologetics. Sagan’s baloney detection kit includes the “argument from small numbers” — surely some of these many things in the sky must be aliens!
Dr. Kosloski also debunked the famous video of an object apparently passing through the smoke of an erupting Mt. Etna as a balloon passing in front of the volcanic cloud. This analysis required AARO to examine every pixel of the video and consult a civilian volcanologist. “We've hired a number of declassification experts” to make such consultations with university professors easier, “and we're going to be trying to get cases like the ones that I just discussed here, declassified, so that we can engage with the universities on a regular basis and provide them the data.”
He spoke of science instead of a cover up. “Talking to a scientist without data is going to be rather disappointing. So hopefully in 2025, we'll be increasing those efforts,” Kosloski said. Scientific inquiry requires a culture of non-secrecy about anomalous sightings. “I think that reducing the stigma, removing the stigma is the first step” in building public confidence, he said.
Kosloski acknowledged three cases that AARO is still working on. All three could have been chapters in UFO books that I read as a child. Consider the “orange orb,” which sounds like a Spielberg spooktacular by Kosloski’s telling.
The first one was brought to us by a law enforcement officer out west where he observed a large orange orb floating several hundred feet above the ground a couple miles away. He went to investigate what was going on with that orb. And as he was pulling up to the location where he thought would be below the orb, about 40 to 60 meters away from some object, the area was well lit, he saw a blacker than black object. He said it was about the size of a Prius, four to six feet wide. And as he got 40 to 60 meters away from the object, it tilted up about 45 degrees and then it shot up vertically, he says 10 to 100 times faster than any drone he's ever seen before. And it did that without making a sound as far as he could tell from inside of his vehicle. And just as it left his field of view through his windshield, then it emitted very bright red and blue lights that illuminated the inside of his vehicle as brightly as if someone had set off fireworks just outside of his vehicle or street flares. So that's anomalous because of the size of the vehicle with the great acceleration. And when he came back to investigate that area, he found no disturbance of the ground beneath it.
The Senators asked Dr. Kosloski about AARO’s pilot reporting system and their plans for a civilian reporting website. Soon, members of the public will be able to share their imagery of weird stuff in the sky with AARO by emailing the agency a PDF. “We did consider a number of other reporting mechanisms to include automated online forms as well as cell phone apps, and we ultimately decided that this would be the safest, cheapest, and easiest to maintain in the future while protecting the private information of the individuals who are reporting.”
Rather than spaceflight technology, AARO is focused on the technological complexities of radar coverage to deal with actual, real, not-imaginary threats from earthly adversaries. Chinese balloons will not appear on radars that are not looking for balloons. Dr. Kosloski in fact got the job because of his experience with military base sensor systems and networks.
He noted “a lot of overlap in the type of sensors that are going to be used for the counter UAS mission and the UAP mission, whether that's active detection like radars or passive like cameras.” This is not even supposed to be AARO’s mission, but “AARO is trying to push the bounds on detectability for UAP, we're hopefully going to have best practices that we can also provide to the counter UAS, and potentially we might have additional technologies that we can offer them to support.”
National security is boring. Prior to the House hearing, Kosloski’s predecessor, Dr. Kirkpatrick, gave an extensive quote to Steven Greenstreet in which he called out Tim Gallaudet by name for — get this — an attempted cover-up.
I had at least two interviewees who came to us and stated for the record that certain members and staffers on the Hill specifically told them NOT to come share their information with AARO, not because they didn’t trust us, but because they wanted to hide information. Information that we discovered through other means. In other words, there were elements on the Hill obstructing the very office that other elements on the Hill established to investigate these claims. Mr. Gallaudet was associated with that contingent of people.
Gallaudet says he only wants to ask questions, but he also hates to answer them, according to Kirkpatrick, both savage and Saganesque.
The fact that we questioned everything is exactly what an objective, evidentiary based investigation should do. The response from Mr. Gallaudet that suggests that we had no right to question, is a glaring red flag calling into question his judgement. Suggesting that AARO was employing disinformation is the expected response in the face of contrary evidence and science. As this is becoming the new norm, I sense a return to dark ages of mysticism and magic. I would have expected better from a Navy Officer, however, if I’ve learned anything in my time as AARO Director, it is that rational actors are becoming an endangered species.
“A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation, Sagan wrote in Demon Haunted World. “Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion — wonder, fear, greed, grief.” Like the hysteria over a Chinese balloon, for example. “Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that’s what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic — however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney.”
Every ‘flap’ of UFO sightings has its own accompanying wave of prophets, who are explicitly spiritual like Grusch, and mountebanks like Elizondo. The prophets have been quietly sidelined, as always, so that the mountebanks can cash in with books and 501c3 organizing. Greenstreet has done stellar work exposing the Skinwalker Ranch saga as political cronyism by the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). The key advantage that scientists have over the sciency-sounding language of the woo peddlers is that their technologies actually work. Kirkpatrick and Kosloski can deliver results, whereas the premises of the disclosure cult never, ever pan out. For they began as believers, so they must end as believers. Theirs is indeed an old time religion, much older than the AARO historical volumes will bother to explain.
Barnum actually never said that.