Are aliens that bad at parking?

David Grusch who recently turned whistleblower is a decorated veteran from the Afghanistan conflict. He has served in the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and in these positions, he had access to the data of unidentified aerial phenomena taskforce of the US Department of Defense from 2020 to 2022.

Grusch told Debrief website that the US has been retrieving intact and partially intact unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) OR UFO of non-human origin for decades. Grusch said these retrievals happen all over the globe – anywhere that the craft have landed or crashed. He is said to have given Congress “extensive classified information about [these] deeply covert programmes”.

But Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said one shouldn’t believe Grusch’s stories until these documents are also made public. “We shouldn’t believe stories unless evidence supports them. So as intriguing as it is to hear Grusch’s testimony, he did not provide any physical evidence or any data,” the Guardian reported quoting Loeb as saying.          

Not only Loeb but Michael Garrett, a radio astronomer at Jodrell Bank, part of Manchester University, and chair of the International Academy of Astronautics’s Seti (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) permanent committee, is also sceptical of Grusch’s story.

“If there were all these alien spacecraft crashing on Earth – well, that seems a bit weird. You’d think that if they could travel between the stars, they could get the last 0.0001% of the journey right too,” he says.

“It would imply that there must be hundreds of them coming every day, and astronomers simply don’t see them,” Garrett further said.At one place Grusch said that the US has been in a race with other superpowers – presumably Russia and China – for decades to identify these crash and landing sites, in order to retrieve whatever remains and reverse engineer the materials.

And he also got support by Jonathan Grey, who allegedly works for the US National Air and Space Intelligence Center, who said “exotic materials” have been retrieved and studied since the early 20th century. 

Garrett is doubtful here too, he said “If they had an understanding of how these things worked, they would result in completely disruptive technologies”. “Either they’re just not very good at reverse engineering, or there’s nothing to be reverse-engineered,” Garrett added.

“To me, that’s intriguing enough to go to the Pacific Ocean for a few weeks, try to collect the fragments, bring them to a laboratory at Harvard University and figure out the composition,” says Loeb.

He points out that we have been sending space probes such as Voyager 1 and 2 off into the distant galaxy. So it is not impossible that a similar defunct space probe from another civilisation might just have accidentally collided with the Earth in 2014.

“My quest is to look for the evidence and make it open to the public. That is the way science is done. There is no secret here,” says Loeb.

Meanwhile, the material Grusch handed to Congress will be investigated by the powerful House of Representatives oversight committee, chaired by Republican congressman James Comer.

Updated: 19 Jun 2023, 06:00 AM IST