Many people are talking about a recent article on the web site The Debrief with the headline "INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS SAY U.S. HAS RETRIEVED CRAFT OF NON-HUMAN ORIGIN." Being touted as some major revelation, the article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal does not seem to qualify as good evidence for any paranormal claim. The problem is that the article does not give any eyewitness account of anyone seeing anything, nor goes it give any photos or documents.
The article claims that a former intelligence officer named David Grusch has claimed that the US government is in possession of "retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin." But the article fails to quote anyone saying he saw such a craft. Apparently Grusch has come to believe that such craft exist, not on the basis of something he saw himself, but on the basis of something he was told by other people. Who exactly were these people? We are not told. What exactly did they see? We are not told.
The evidence level here seems poor. It seems about the same evidence level as if someone told you that he believes in Bigfoot, based on what he has heard about other people claiming that they saw Bigfoot, without mentioning who those people are or what they saw. As we say here in New York City, that and $2.75 will get you a ride on the subway. All that we seem to have here is some intelligence officer passing around an unsubstantiated rumor. The article includes another vague quote from some other authority named Christopher Mellon, one saying, “A number of well-placed current and former officials have shared detailed information with me regarding this alleged program, including insights into the history, governing documents and the location where a craft was allegedly abandoned and recovered." But that's nothing specific, and sounds like more rumor spreading.
We should not at all assume that the claims of Grusch on this topic are believable merely because he has had a distinguished career in the military. In writing the posts of this blog, I have encountered innumerable cases in which authorities such as professors have confidently made untrue, unreasonable or poorly substantiated claims. There are 101 reasons why some authority may confidently make some claim that is not true or is not plausible. It is a huge mistake to think that some claim is true because it seems to believed by some distinguished authority.
At the link here we have a transcript of a recent interview with Grusch. After being asked "We have spacecraft from another species?" he answers "We do? Yeah." Grusch suggests the craft may be from other dimensions, saying "We know there’s extra dimensions due to higher high energy particle collisions, etc." No, humans do not know that there are extra dimensions, and high energy particle collisions do not do anything to establish them. There is a physics theory called string theory which requires extra dimensions, but there is no evidence that string theory is true. Later in the interview Grusch claims there is "a well established fact at least mathematically and based on empirical observation and analysis that there most likely are physical, additional spatial dimensions." No one has done anything to establish the likelihood of additional spatial dimensions. And if something is merely "likely" it is not a fact and certainly not a well-established fact. Facts are things that are certain, not just likely.
Asked about whether he has seen spacecraft, Grusch makes this vague and not-very-compelling claim: "I’ve seen some interesting photos. And I’ve read some very interesting reports." You could summarize the interview by saying Grusch has come to believe there have been crashed UFOs because of some-sort-of-something he was told and some-sort-of-something he saw, but he fails to give any specific account of a particular person seeing a specific thing, and when pressed to give details, he says I can't tell you because it's classified.
Claims like these recent claims have long been made. The biggest claimant was the late Phillip J. Corso, who wrote a book entitled The Day After Roswell. Corso was a military intelligence officer who claimed that the United States government had recovered a crashed vehicle of non-human origin. Early in the book, on page 2, Corso makes the doubtful claim he knew that "key aspects of American foreign policy were being dictated from inside the Kremlin." On page 4 he states that the "seeds for the development" of technologies such as integrated circuits and lasers were "found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell" in July, 1947. We then read from Corso a very detailed description that purports to tell us exactly what happened when the Roswell incident occurred. The narration we get is like the text of a novel. It's rather suspicious that we hear lots of dialog including many exact quotes of what people said. How could you know exactly what people said at such a time? Back then there were no portable tape recorders. And presumably there was no stenographer walking around and jotting down what everyone said as they said it.
By page 32 Corso is telling us that he unpacked a crate to find the coffin of what looked to him like a gray-skinned alien with four fingers, and a lightbulb-shaped head. He says he found a document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a vehicle that crashed earlier that week. This seems to be about all the relevant "what I personally saw" details we get from Corso, and what is described is something that possibly could have been a human body distorted from a crash and a fire. The clip here summarizes some of the claims in the book.
On page 122 Corso makes this statement about extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs):
"We didn't know what the EBEs wanted at first, but we knew that between the cattle mutilations, surveillance of our secret weapon installations, reports of abductions of human beings, and their consistent buzzing of our unmanned and manned space launches, the EBEs weren't just friendly visitors looking for a polite way to say, 'Hello, we meant you no harm.' They meant us harm, and we knew it."
This rather sounds like unhinged paranoia. Corso has linked together very diverse observational reports, none of which involve harm of humans or killing of humans, and has cited these as evidence not merely that extraterrestrials are visiting us, but that they are hostile to us. None of the items mentioned justify a claim of hostile visiting extraterrestrials, and claiming "we knew" of such hostility seems absurd. Corso sounds very much here like someone who does not know what he does not know, someone who mistakes scattered suspicions for knowledge.
On page 267 Corso gives us this little bit of speculation, which sounds rather "off the wall":
"These creatures weren't benevolent alien beings who had come to enlighten human beings. They were genetically altered humanoid automatons, cloned biological entities, actually, who were harvesting biological specimens on Earth for their own experimentation."
You got it? According to Corso, the ETs were "actually" kind of like cloned robotic gene-spliced half-human cow-mutilating zombies. Is it any wonder why not too many people believed Corso's story?
I will give some reasons below why I don't believe Corso's claims that some important US high technology was derived from technology recovered from a crashed vehicle from another planet. Before discussing such reasons, let me state two background assumptions:
Background assumption #1: An extraterrestrial civilization would probably be vastly older than ours. I can explain why scientists presume that if an extraterrestrial civilization existed, it would be very much older than humanity. The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old, and if intelligent life were to arise on some other planet, such a thing might have occurred at any time in the past billion years. Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old. So mathematically it seems far more likely that civilized life arising on some other planet would have arisen very many thousands or millions of years before civilized life first appeared on planet Earth. Since a billion years is a length of time 100,000 times longer than 10,000 years, it would seem to require about a 1 in 100,000 coincidence for Earth to be visited by some extraterrestrial civilization that was only a few thousand years more advanced than ours. It would seem to be vastly more likely that a visiting spacecraft would come come from a civilization very many thousands or millions of years older than ours.
Background assumption #2: Traveling from a civilized planet in one solar system to a civilized planet in another solar system would require technology vastly beyond anything humanity has. Any type of travel between stars would require technology vastly greater than anything humans have. While the distance to the planet Saturn is almost a billion miles, the distance to the nearest star is about 23 trillion miles, a distance 25,000 times farther than the distance to Saturn. Traveling such a distance would require some technology vastly beyond what humans have. Moreover, there is every reason to suspect that travel between two different solar systems that independently evolved intelligent life would require journeys far greater than the distance between our solar system and the nearest solar system. There are all kinds of reasons for thinking that the appearance of life and intelligent life should be rare blessings rather than something we would expect to find in every solar system. So a spaceship from another solar system would probably have to travel a distance many times greater than 23 trillion miles. This would be all the more reason for assuming that such a journey could only be made by some civilization vastly more advanced than ours.
Having given such background assumptions, I can explain two reasons for doubting that humans could get a technological boost by studying crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Reason #1: It Would Be Very Unlikely That a Technology Vastly Greater Than Ours Would Produce Spacecraft That Would Crash
Compared to the enormous technical difficulty of traveling between solar systems containing civilizations, it would seem to be "child's play" to develop crash-proof spacecraft that could explore a planet without any risk of crashing. We can presume that humans will invent crash-proof cars and crash-proof aircraft within a few centuries, and we can presume that some extraterrestrial civilization would have invented crash-proof craft for exploring a planet very long before it mastered the vastly harder feat of being able to successfully travel the vast distances between different solar systems containing civilizations. Therefore, claims that humans recovered bodies or technology from crashed extraterrestrial spaceships seem to be intrinsically implausible. (In the interview mentioned above, Grusch claims that earthly authorities have "quite a number" of alien spacecraft, and that "some are landed and some are crashed," giving the additional implausible idea that the government stole ET spacecraft which had not crashed.)
Reason #2: It Would Be Very Unlikely That Humans Could Use a Crashed Extraterrestrial Spacecraft as a Springboard to Technological Advances
In general it is hard for one group to benefit from accidentally getting or seeing an example of some technology beyond their technology, unless the gulf between the two technologies is relatively small. An example was the famous visits Steve Jobs and Apple engineers made to the XEROX Parc facility, where they saw a mouse-driven computer graphical user interface. The visits were beneficial because Apple had already developed a personal computer, and had some idea of what needed to be done to make the leap to a GUI computer like the one seen in the visits.
But if you had given an Apple iPad to, say, Thomas Edison, he would have been unable to use it as an inspiration for new inventions. Advanced ideas such as a computer operating system and software applications would have been utterly foreign to him, and he wouldn't know where to begin in reverse-engineering an Apple iPad. There is a chain of technological innovation lasting 80 years, stretching from World War II machines like those that cracked the Enigma code, to the big refrigerator-sized computers of the 1960's, to the first personal computers of the 1970's and early 1980's, to the first computers with graphical user interfaces (such as the Macintosh), and finally leading to a device like the iPad. Edison would not have been able to imagine that chain of innovation, and if he were given an iPad it would seem like mysterious black magic that he could never reproduce.
If humans were to discover some crashed vehicle created by visitors from some other solar system, it would in all likelihood be some technology we could make no use of, because it would be so far above our own technology that we could never figure out how it worked. Similarly Leonardo da Vinci would not have been able to make any progress in electronics or computer software if he had been given an iPad early in his career and if he had tried to pry it open and figure out how it worked.
Postscript: A general reason for doubting sensational claims from intelligence officers such as Corso and Grusch may be that government intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the KGB sometimes deliberately put out false information to confuse people, and send them in the wrong direction. This is sometimes done to minimize the chance that people will discover information that such agencies wish to keep secret. A famous historical example of this was Operation Bodyguard, which involved creating false impressions that the D-Day landing would occur using the shortest invasion route rather than the longer route leading to Normandy.
The post here speculates about a reason why the US government might want to put out false stories about technology obtained from recovered crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft: simply to make foreign adversaries more likely to fear the US military's technology, and be less likely to attack the US.
On July 26, 2023 Grusch testified before a congressional committee, with two other people. But he failed to give us any reasons for believing his previous claims. His testimony was the same kind of claims he previously made: statements that he believes the US has one or more recovered non-human vehicles, based on things he has been told by others. He failed to give any specifics on who it was who told him these things, and what it was he was told So thus far all we have is what could be mere rumor-mongering. Grusch made the very vague claim that "non-human biologics" have been recovered from crashed vehicles, but that term could apply to living matter from non-human earthly organisms. When Grusch is asked to supply specifics, he often says something like "I can only say so much to the general public," or some such evasive phrase suggesting classified information. I suppose secrets have to be kept, but so far Grusch's statements should convince no one, because of their lack of specificity.
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