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After the Grusch testimony in Congress, I've asked a few people what they thought about it. Across the board, no one even comes close to considering this possib

After the Grusch testimony in Congress, I've asked a few people what they thought about it. Across the board, no one even comes close to considering this possible to be real. Even those who I thought would be open minded to the idea. It's kind of fascinating. It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. I've been surprised.

apsec112 3y ago
Testimony is often wrong. The testimony for the Mormon religion is just as compelling (arguably more compelling) than any UFO incident, yet the vast majority of people don't convert to Mormonism. https://archive.ph/RsStS https://archive.ph/RsStS
- nobleach 3y ago
  Major difference being, you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who would call David Grusch "not trustworthy". Smith had already been convicted of "glass looking" to find buried treasure by the time he claimed to find these golden plates. Further, how many of the witnesses were not related? Lastly, how many of the witnesses later explained that their "vision" of the plates was in the spiritual realm, not the physical? If David Grusch had showed up with a bunch of family members who claimed to have seen UAPs being dismantled with their "spiritual eyes", then perhaps I'd put his testimony on par with Joseph Smith (and Oliver Cowdrey and David Whitmer)
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    He's an intelligence official, so he is a priori untrustworthy, isn't he? There is 0 reason to take something an intelligence official tells you on trust.
    - david-gpu 3y ago
      People are not asking to "believe" his testimony. We are asking to investigate the very specific classified information he shared with the ICIG, such as locations, directors, first-hand witnesses and project names.
      - tsimionescu 3y ago
        The poster above was claiming that "no one is claiming Grusch is untrustworthy". As an intelligence official, he is the epitome of untrustworthy-ness. To start detailed public investigations, you'd first have to believe that his words mean something. Of course, I would expect some internal investigation into if and why he is claiming these things, if it's not already known. But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public.
        david-gpu 3y ago
        > But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public. If there is a conspiracy inside the DoD to hide reverse-engineering projects from congressional oversight, as Grusch claims, then there is a good chance that no investigations will actually be performed without significant pressure from the public. That is why public engagement is important. Public apathy enables corruption.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        And if there isn't, the investigation will be a massive waste of money and time, and it's only result would be to maybe send Grusch to jail. And given how vague and fact-free his public testimony was, even that is not guaranteed.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
Extraordinary claims require corresponding evidence - simple as that. There wasn't anything that isn't simpler to explain through some combination of grift and delusion. Edit: I am specifically talking about aliens, insinuation of aliens, hinting at aliens, waving one's hands vaguely at something that sounds like it might be aliens, and generally treating aliens as equally or nearly as probable as mundane explanations for various reports.
- mach1ne 3y ago
  I've always found that saying dumb. It's basically stating that this is the null hypothesis, and you have to have p = 0.001 to convince me otherwise. When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    > When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence". That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
    - mach1ne 3y ago
      Interstellar travel is possible even with the physics we know. A sub-light civilization could colonize the entirety of Milky Way in a million years or so. The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.
david-gpu 3y ago
My experience has been the same. While I find the publicly available evidence rather lacking, I don't feel comfortable dismissing the testimony of high-ranking intelligence officials and would like their claims to be investigated seriously. As for the general public, their thinking appears to largely boil down to "if something as big as this was true, we would already know about it", together with the circular "there has never been any solid evidence, therefore everybody knows this is bullshit, therefore anybody who talks about it is a kook or a fraud, therefore it is not worth investigating". I hope either Avi Loeb's Galileo project or the UAP Disclosure Act included in the NDAA 2024 bill will bring some clarity to the subject over the next couple of years. There are rumors of witnesses coming out later this year with first-hand knowledge of reverse-engineering programs, but I doubt the general public will be swayed by testimony alone.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  We have no credible evidence of aliens, and plenty of rock-solid evidence that high-level intelligence officials can lie to congress publicly with no repercussions (Iraq WMDs). The equation seems pretty simple.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    Then why not have Congress investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG (locations, people, companies, projects) and send him to prison if he was lying? Why the passive "it must be false do let's refuse to do anything about it, including bringing him to justice" attitude?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      Because his claims, at least the public ones, we're actually very vague, and an investigation is very likely to not find the things he's claiming, but also not be able to rule them out to a level where he could be indicted (beyond a reasonable doubt). So there is very little upside to the huge waste of money and time.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
robdar 3y ago
I also find peoples generatal non-response strange, though, I don't find Grusch's testimony that compelling: he didn't actually see anything, or really have any evidence. I find the US Navy pilot observations to be both more credible, and more interesting. Those I know who have looked into it, both IRl and online, both seem to take any debunking of the videos by Mick West to be the final word on the subject, but to me the videos are just short views into much longer encounters viewed by multiple people. The response of the public at large seems both muted, and a bit off. US Navy pilots claim to see UFOs? The response largely seems to be "They're just Chinese spy balloons or something, who cares, yawn". But then actual Chinese spy balloons show up and the public/media loses their minds over it.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Navy pilot David Fravor, who has the most compelling story of any of them, has also admitted to perpetrating UFO hoaxes on people for shits and giggles. UFOlogists have decided to lean into America's "troop worship", holding up military personnel as paragons of virtue and honesty because respect muh troops, to turn these pilot witnesses into unimpeachable evidence. But David Fravor admitted on camera that he thought it was funny to create false UFO sightings with his plane. When this same man then starts making claims about UFOs "but totally for real this time", it takes serious credulity to take his claims at face value.
  - seanw444 3y ago
    I'd find it more concerning if it came from someone else close to Fravor that he'd trolled people before, but not from Fravor himself. He spoke about it on a public interview. Obviously it's not something he's worried about being known, and he's not worried about it hurting his credibility. Sure, it seems unlikely that someone who has hoaxed UFOs in the past would be the one to have an actual encounter, but UFOs are pretty common in conversation and on peoples' minds, especially in the last couple decades. I'm sure many pilots have wondered what it might be like to encounter a UFO.
  - robdar 3y ago
    Fravors "Hoax" involved flying F/A-18E Super Hornets at low level, at night, over campfires they could see along their route and lighting their after burners. This was done in areas like Nellis where there are a lot of military jet activity. Anyone watching from the ground with any modicum of exposure to military jets would have immediately known from the site and sound exactly what it was. He was putting on a show. Did he otherwise publish videos, pictures, articles, or other media to try to otherwise "dupe" the public into believing that these were "UFOS"? No. The context of the discussion in Fravors interview he was more jokingly describing some of the cowboy stunts that military pilots do that might be mistakingly interpreted as UFOs.
nobleach 3y ago
I am one of those, "I have no idea how I feel" types. Sadly I'm a bit apathetic. Perhaps there's life out there, perhaps each of these incidents has a rational, "it's a secret government project" explanation. But, what I noticed about that whole exchange with congress, was how willing folks were to detail information in a SCIF and how that's where it ended. Similarly with the NASA stuff, I'm hearing they were only willing to discuss public info and nothing that's classified. I'm not sure of the usefulness there.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
the_only_law 3y ago
> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. Yes because intelligence officers would never lie to congress or to the public. They are established paragons of integrity and should trusted unquestionably.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  Nobody is asking you to take Grusch's testimony as gospel. We are asking Congress to investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG, including locations, people and projects.
- lakomen 3y ago
  What I wonder, why would someone go out of their way and trying to discredit Grusch because he had PTS? Is that all part of the game to make his testimony seem more plausible? Or just a bad attempt at smearing his reputation? Idk.
- blastro 3y ago
  You've misunderstood my point - I'm not saying he's trustworthy. I'm saying deciding whether or not he's trustworthy isn't such a black-and-white issue, and that I'm surprised at how black-and-white so many people are trying to make it. What if reality is more complicated and we're filtering out valuable information? What if he's not completely wrong, nor completely right? Just surprised at a lack of willingness to consider the grey areas.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. Really depends on what your priors are. For almost everyone, the existence of aliens has a much, much lower probability than the probability of someone lying about it or being mistaken about it. As a sanity check, imagine a person with a similar background testified to congress that elves are real and have been kidnapping children and replacing them with changelings. How would you rate the relative probabilities of that being the truth or him being a liar or mistaken? This isn't really arbitrary -- there are plenty of people in the world who deeply believe in the existence of elves and little people.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor. Your priors are that it is unlikely to be true, and I respect that. My priors on the existence of dark matter WIMPS is also fairly low yet I don't dismiss people who are trying to find them.
  - empath-nirvana 3y ago
    > When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor. Alien fans say stuff like this all the time, but where is the evidence that rigorous research on this is being blocked? We spent like a billion dollars on SETI. There are volumes and volumes of actual science looking for extraterrestrial life. _It's not out there_. It's not like the skepticism about aliens is based on a refusal to look at the evidence. If aliens were real and they were visiting earth, you'd expect all of the instruments we have scanning outer space constantly would find _some_ evidence of ships or communication or life or _anything_. There is _nothing_. People don't take the supposed evidence of UFOs seriously because in the context of _everything else we know about outer space_, it's extraordinarily unlikely that our _only_ evidence of extraterrestrial life would be some grainy video of a lozenge shape object taken from an airplane. (which isn't to say that there's no life anywhere else in the universe, maybe some level of microbial life is common, I don't know, but if there were civilizations capable of interstellar travel, it would be a lot more obvious) Any scientist would dearly love to find any extraterrestrial life. It would be world fame and an instant nobel prize. It'd be one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind. The idea that scientists aren't looking for alien life is just silly.
GhostWhisperer 3y ago
priests tell folks god exists, and folks don't believe them, does that surprise you too?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pmorici 3y ago
The timing of the testimony was pretty suspect with respect to other news about political scandals bubbling up around the same time.
- seanw444 3y ago
  True, but we can't let its strategic timing destroy its validity. We take in the information while still focusing on the scandals.

apsec112 3y ago

Testimony is often wrong. The testimony for the Mormon religion is just as compelling (arguably more compelling) than any UFO incident, yet the vast majority of people don't convert to Mormonism. https://archive.ph/RsStS https://archive.ph/RsStS

nobleach 3y ago
Major difference being, you'd be hard pressed to find many folks who would call David Grusch "not trustworthy". Smith had already been convicted of "glass looking" to find buried treasure by the time he claimed to find these golden plates. Further, how many of the witnesses were not related? Lastly, how many of the witnesses later explained that their "vision" of the plates was in the spiritual realm, not the physical? If David Grusch had showed up with a bunch of family members who claimed to have seen UAPs being dismantled with their "spiritual eyes", then perhaps I'd put his testimony on par with Joseph Smith (and Oliver Cowdrey and David Whitmer)
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  He's an intelligence official, so he is a priori untrustworthy, isn't he? There is 0 reason to take something an intelligence official tells you on trust.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    People are not asking to "believe" his testimony. We are asking to investigate the very specific classified information he shared with the ICIG, such as locations, directors, first-hand witnesses and project names.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      The poster above was claiming that "no one is claiming Grusch is untrustworthy". As an intelligence official, he is the epitome of untrustworthy-ness. To start detailed public investigations, you'd first have to believe that his words mean something. Of course, I would expect some internal investigation into if and why he is claiming these things, if it's not already known. But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public.
      - david-gpu 3y ago
        > But I don't see why anyone should spend any significant resources (let alone the public at large) going by the words of someone who is payed to hide things from the public. If there is a conspiracy inside the DoD to hide reverse-engineering projects from congressional oversight, as Grusch claims, then there is a good chance that no investigations will actually be performed without significant pressure from the public. That is why public engagement is important. Public apathy enables corruption.
        tsimionescu 3y ago
        And if there isn't, the investigation will be a massive waste of money and time, and it's only result would be to maybe send Grusch to jail. And given how vague and fact-free his public testimony was, even that is not guaranteed.

empyrrhicist 3y ago

Extraordinary claims require corresponding evidence - simple as that. There wasn't anything that isn't simpler to explain through some combination of grift and delusion. Edit: I am specifically talking about aliens, insinuation of aliens, hinting at aliens, waving one's hands vaguely at something that sounds like it might be aliens, and generally treating aliens as equally or nearly as probable as mundane explanations for various reports.

mach1ne 3y ago
I've always found that saying dumb. It's basically stating that this is the null hypothesis, and you have to have p = 0.001 to convince me otherwise. When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence". That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
  - mach1ne 3y ago
    Interstellar travel is possible even with the physics we know. A sub-light civilization could colonize the entirety of Milky Way in a million years or so. The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.

david-gpu 3y ago

My experience has been the same. While I find the publicly available evidence rather lacking, I don't feel comfortable dismissing the testimony of high-ranking intelligence officials and would like their claims to be investigated seriously. As for the general public, their thinking appears to largely boil down to "if something as big as this was true, we would already know about it", together with the circular "there has never been any solid evidence, therefore everybody knows this is bullshit, therefore anybody who talks about it is a kook or a fraud, therefore it is not worth investigating". I hope either Avi Loeb's Galileo project or the UAP Disclosure Act included in the NDAA 2024 bill will bring some clarity to the subject over the next couple of years. There are rumors of witnesses coming out later this year with first-hand knowledge of reverse-engineering programs, but I doubt the general public will be swayed by testimony alone.

tsimionescu 3y ago
We have no credible evidence of aliens, and plenty of rock-solid evidence that high-level intelligence officials can lie to congress publicly with no repercussions (Iraq WMDs). The equation seems pretty simple.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  Then why not have Congress investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG (locations, people, companies, projects) and send him to prison if he was lying? Why the passive "it must be false do let's refuse to do anything about it, including bringing him to justice" attitude?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Because his claims, at least the public ones, we're actually very vague, and an investigation is very likely to not find the things he's claiming, but also not be able to rule them out to a level where he could be indicted (beyond a reasonable doubt). So there is very little upside to the huge waste of money and time.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago

robdar 3y ago

I also find peoples generatal non-response strange, though, I don't find Grusch's testimony that compelling: he didn't actually see anything, or really have any evidence. I find the US Navy pilot observations to be both more credible, and more interesting. Those I know who have looked into it, both IRl and online, both seem to take any debunking of the videos by Mick West to be the final word on the subject, but to me the videos are just short views into much longer encounters viewed by multiple people. The response of the public at large seems both muted, and a bit off. US Navy pilots claim to see UFOs? The response largely seems to be "They're just Chinese spy balloons or something, who cares, yawn". But then actual Chinese spy balloons show up and the public/media loses their minds over it.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Navy pilot David Fravor, who has the most compelling story of any of them, has also admitted to perpetrating UFO hoaxes on people for shits and giggles. UFOlogists have decided to lean into America's "troop worship", holding up military personnel as paragons of virtue and honesty because respect muh troops, to turn these pilot witnesses into unimpeachable evidence. But David Fravor admitted on camera that he thought it was funny to create false UFO sightings with his plane. When this same man then starts making claims about UFOs "but totally for real this time", it takes serious credulity to take his claims at face value.
- seanw444 3y ago
  I'd find it more concerning if it came from someone else close to Fravor that he'd trolled people before, but not from Fravor himself. He spoke about it on a public interview. Obviously it's not something he's worried about being known, and he's not worried about it hurting his credibility. Sure, it seems unlikely that someone who has hoaxed UFOs in the past would be the one to have an actual encounter, but UFOs are pretty common in conversation and on peoples' minds, especially in the last couple decades. I'm sure many pilots have wondered what it might be like to encounter a UFO.
- robdar 3y ago
  Fravors "Hoax" involved flying F/A-18E Super Hornets at low level, at night, over campfires they could see along their route and lighting their after burners. This was done in areas like Nellis where there are a lot of military jet activity. Anyone watching from the ground with any modicum of exposure to military jets would have immediately known from the site and sound exactly what it was. He was putting on a show. Did he otherwise publish videos, pictures, articles, or other media to try to otherwise "dupe" the public into believing that these were "UFOS"? No. The context of the discussion in Fravors interview he was more jokingly describing some of the cowboy stunts that military pilots do that might be mistakingly interpreted as UFOs.

nobleach 3y ago

I am one of those, "I have no idea how I feel" types. Sadly I'm a bit apathetic. Perhaps there's life out there, perhaps each of these incidents has a rational, "it's a secret government project" explanation. But, what I noticed about that whole exchange with congress, was how willing folks were to detail information in a SCIF and how that's where it ended. Similarly with the NASA stuff, I'm hearing they were only willing to discuss public info and nothing that's classified. I'm not sure of the usefulness there.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

the_only_law 3y ago

> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. Yes because intelligence officers would never lie to congress or to the public. They are established paragons of integrity and should trusted unquestionably.

david-gpu 3y ago
Nobody is asking you to take Grusch's testimony as gospel. We are asking Congress to investigate the very specific claims he made to the ICIG, including locations, people and projects.
lakomen 3y ago
What I wonder, why would someone go out of their way and trying to discredit Grusch because he had PTS? Is that all part of the game to make his testimony seem more plausible? Or just a bad attempt at smearing his reputation? Idk.
blastro 3y ago
You've misunderstood my point - I'm not saying he's trustworthy. I'm saying deciding whether or not he's trustworthy isn't such a black-and-white issue, and that I'm surprised at how black-and-white so many people are trying to make it. What if reality is more complicated and we're filtering out valuable information? What if he's not completely wrong, nor completely right? Just surprised at a lack of willingness to consider the grey areas.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

> It's amazing how quickly they explain away seemingly credible testimony from a real intelligence officer. Really depends on what your priors are. For almost everyone, the existence of aliens has a much, much lower probability than the probability of someone lying about it or being mistaken about it. As a sanity check, imagine a person with a similar background testified to congress that elves are real and have been kidnapping children and replacing them with changelings. How would you rate the relative probabilities of that being the truth or him being a liar or mistaken? This isn't really arbitrary -- there are plenty of people in the world who deeply believe in the existence of elves and little people.

david-gpu 3y ago
When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor. Your priors are that it is unlikely to be true, and I respect that. My priors on the existence of dark matter WIMPS is also fairly low yet I don't dismiss people who are trying to find them.
- empath-nirvana 3y ago
  > When you refuse rigorous research to be conducted in a subject, you can't act surprised when the existing evidence is lacking in rigor. Alien fans say stuff like this all the time, but where is the evidence that rigorous research on this is being blocked? We spent like a billion dollars on SETI. There are volumes and volumes of actual science looking for extraterrestrial life. _It's not out there_. It's not like the skepticism about aliens is based on a refusal to look at the evidence. If aliens were real and they were visiting earth, you'd expect all of the instruments we have scanning outer space constantly would find _some_ evidence of ships or communication or life or _anything_. There is _nothing_. People don't take the supposed evidence of UFOs seriously because in the context of _everything else we know about outer space_, it's extraordinarily unlikely that our _only_ evidence of extraterrestrial life would be some grainy video of a lozenge shape object taken from an airplane. (which isn't to say that there's no life anywhere else in the universe, maybe some level of microbial life is common, I don't know, but if there were civilizations capable of interstellar travel, it would be a lot more obvious) Any scientist would dearly love to find any extraterrestrial life. It would be world fame and an instant nobel prize. It'd be one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind. The idea that scientists aren't looking for alien life is just silly.

GhostWhisperer 3y ago

priests tell folks god exists, and folks don't believe them, does that surprise you too?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pmorici 3y ago

The timing of the testimony was pretty suspect with respect to other news about political scandals bubbling up around the same time.

seanw444 3y ago
True, but we can't let its strategic timing destroy its validity. We take in the information while still focusing on the scandals.