New Delhi: Former US intelligence officer David Grusch has claimed that the American government was in possession of “non-human beings” and attempted to reconstruct crashed UFOs (officially known as unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs).
Grush, who made these allegations under oath at a US congressional hearing Wednesday, had co-led the UAP portfolio within a US Department of Defense agency until April.
The hearing was prompted by Grusch’s allegations in June that the US government was harbouring alien spacecraft.
The Pentagon, which is the headquarters of the US Department of Defence, has however denied his claims. Sue Gough, spokesperson of the US Department of Defense, said that the investigators had not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently”.
During the hearing Wednesday, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) had asked Grusch on how such a Pentagon programme was being funded. To this, the intelligence officer said it was supported by a “misappropriation of funds“.
Alien conspiracy theories
Area 51, the US military’s secret base in Nevada, has for decades spawned conspiracy theories about the existence of aliens. The base, which is approximately 2.3 miles long, is not accessible to civilians. It is illegal to even fly over it, though satellite images of the base are now available.
The US government formally acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time in 2013 when the CIA declassified documents about the development of the U-2 and A-12 aircraft. In 2017, the Pentagon also officially confirmed that there was, in fact, a $22 million government programme to collect and analyse “anomalous aerospace threats”.
A 2019 interview with conspiracy theorist Bob Lazar had inspired a social media event named ‘Storm Area 51‘. About 6,000 people had gathered in the Nevada desert, where Area 51 is located, to look for evidence of aliens. This had led to the US Air Force issuing an official warning against visiting the ‘secret’ place.
Grusch, however, made no particular mention of Area 51. While he confirmed that he has never observed an alien sighting, Grusch said he knew of “multiple colleagues” who were injured by UAPs.
Other witnesses
Other witnesses at the hearing were two other former military officials, David Fravor and Ryan Graves. While Fravor said that he saw a strange object in the sky while on a training mission in 2004, Graves, who is a retired Navy pilot, claimed to have seen UAPs off the Atlantic coast every day for a couple of years while on duty.
Also read: The UFO buzz is passe—NASA has a new term for it. Here’s why we’re still fascinated