Do aliens exist?

As famous capital cities of world-straddling superpowers go, Washington, DC is somewhat disappointing. The grandiose urbanism is surely meant to resemble the boulevards of Paris, with the parks of London, but in reality the dreary post-modern/neoclassical bombast makes it looks like Tashkent married to Milton Keynes. A city that is planned to project power actually projects tedious, if reliable, stolidity. 

But that, for my purposes, is the thing. Washington, DC is nothing if not boring. And pompous. And self-consciously serious. And yet, over the last few years, months, even days, a story has been emerging, from this same ponderous city, which is mind-bustingly crazy, possibly world changing, yet often unnoticed or airily dismissed — perhaps because it is so “mad.”

I’m talking about UFOs — or, as the Pentagon in the Washington suburbs would refer to them, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena). The reason the Pentagon has renamed UFOs is because they feel the term “UFO” has been stigmatized as intrinsically suspicious, labeling anyone that talks about them as a lunatic.

And the Pentagon, and Washington in general, is really keen on talking about UFOs. Here’s a list of senior DC people who’ve been making strange remarks about UFOs/UAPs (in the sense, at the very least, that something inexplicable is haunting our planet).  

John Brennan, head of the CIA under Obama, in 2021: “Some of the phenomena we’re going to be seeing continues to be unexplained and might, in fact… something that we don’t yet understand, and could involve some type of activity that some might say constitute a different form of life.”

John Ratcliffe, Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, also in 2021: “There are a lot more sightings than have been made public. Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Former director of the CIA James Woolsey (asked in 2021 about UFOs): “People have reported very curious behavior by aircraft. And it may be something real that is an extraordinary change, for some unheralded reason. Or it may be a complex set of what is going on in the world of cyber and so forth. I just don’t know. I am not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly.”

Marco Rubio, Republican senator for Florida, speaking in 2021: “There’s stuff flying in our airspace and we don’t know who it is and it’s not ours. So we should know who it is, especially if it’s an adversary that’s made a technological leap.”

Astronaut (and sixth man on the moon) Edgar Mitchell told the Daily Mirror in 2015 that other military personnel had confided in him that alien spacecraft were responsible for disabling nuclear missiles and for shooting them down over the Pacific Coast.

The list goes on. Bill Nelson, current head of NASA (when directly asked about UFOs in late 2021: “Who am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?’ Avril Haines, the current director of national intelligence: “There’s always the question of ‘is there something else that we simply do not understand, that might come extraterrestrially?’” Chris Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton: “Based on what we know about UAPs, aliens are the BEST explanation.” The late Harry Reid, one-time leader of the Democrats in the Senate: Lockheed Martin has “UFO fragments.”

The list of eye-opening statements from important folk is much longer than this, but you get the drift. And it is not just defense bigwigs and senior politicians (in both parties) saying peculiar things. In the last few years the Pentagon has set up special teams to investigate UFOs, Congress has held official hearings on UFOs, the Pentagon has mysteriously and abruptly declassified “UFO videos” and high-profile American media, from the New York Times to the Washington Post to CBS’s 60 Minutes, have discussed the phenomena at length.  

US presidents have also gotten involved. Jimmy Carter is an avowed believer. Bill Clinton sent staff to investigate Area 51 in New Mexico (a supposed hotspot of UFO activity and an alleged site of retrieved “alien spacecraft” — of which more in a minute).

Perhaps the most striking intervention came from Barack Obama on The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2021. In the middle of the usual banter about “little green men,” Obama suddenly stopped smiling and said: “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that… there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”  

If you want an extra presidential oddity, think on this: the only recent president who has flat-out denied the possibility of alien UFOs is Donald Trump. 

And now, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen a wild new development: the whistleblower David Grusch. An experienced, clever, articulate and highly respected American intelligence officer, with a glittering résumé, at one point seconded to a new unit “studying UAPs,” Grusch recently resigned so he could come out (under the protection of new UFO whistleblower legislation) and make the most extraordinary claims. Claims that he has made under oath to Congress, with the support of colleagues. 

Here are just a few of them. The US military is in possession of crashed “alien” craft (notably Grusch does not use the term “extraterrestrial”; he says “non-human intelligence: NHI”). These NHI craft — or their “pilots” — have, in the past, injured and even killed humans. At least one craft is in private possession. The bodies of pilots have also been retrieved.   

And there’s more. The NHIs — the aliens — may not be from beyond the solar system, but existing in a parallel dimension to ours, right here. Their craft seem to have the ability to bend space and time: they appear bigger on the outside than inside (yes, like the Tardis). Investigators who go inside them have suffered bizarre ill-effects. Despite this, the US government is in a kind of agreement with some of the alien NHIs. 

To top it all off, Grusch has also claimed that one UFO crashed in fascist Italy, was hoarded by Mussolini, and was handed over to the US at the end of World War Two, under the supervision of the Vatican. Also, Grusch has no first-hand evidence for any of this, he just heard it from others working in Pentagon UFO-land. 

It sounds like the plot of a truly terrible Dan Brown novel, written when Dan Brown was nine years old. The Pope knows about UFOs? They exist in the fifth dimension? Any talking lizards? 

The obvious reaction to Grusch’s statement is that he is mad. And yet he does not seem mad. So then he must be lying. But if he is lying, why would he lie like this? If he wants to convince people that he is telling the truth, why make such foolishly outrageous claims, for example the involvement of the Vatican? Or the government truce with the Martians? 

Perhaps he is doing it all for money. But what money? He risks global ridicule, his career is surely over, many have questioned his sanity, and if he is doing it for cash he has jeopardized his entire professional reputation to maybe sell a book and earn a few bucks on tiny UFO websites. The only other explanations are that he has somehow been manipulated into believing this stuff (but how? With drugs? Brainwashing?) or that he is actually telling the truth, as he sees it — whether he is right or wrong.  

And this analysis, I submit, can be applied to the behavior of the entire DC establishment in the world of UFOs/UAPs in recent years.  

The actual evidence for UFOs is meager, even pathetic. The videos are so grainy. The pics so pitiful. If the whole world is carrying smartphone cameras — and we are — surely we should be seeing trillion-pixel snaps of flying saucers by now? Yet we are not; and yet the US establishment is behaving like we are: their comments are so extraordinary, their behavior so agitated, it is clear that something is up. Ergo: whether you “believe in UFOs” or not, the Outbreak of Strangeness around DC needs to be explained. 

To my mind, there are five main possible explanations, in descending order of probability. 

1. The US establishment — Pentagon to press — is engaged in a complex cross-party conspiracy of psyops to unnerve and mystify America’s adversaries, especially the Chinese. Perhaps they want to convince them America possesses advanced alien technology, and America has been reverse-engineering it for decades
2. The US establishment has some incredible new military tech — something truly astonishing, like anti-gravity aircraft — and they’ve had it for ages, and they want to hide it from everyone: Americans as much as the Chinese
3. The US establishment has gone collectively mad, or is suffering some mass hallucination, stemming from a few credulous individuals (a process known in psychology as ‘contagion’)
4. The US military/elite sincerely believes we are being visited by non human intelligence — but they’re wrong
5. The US military/elite sincerely believes we are being visited by non human intelligence — and they are right

Which is it? As I see it, they all come with major problems and caveats. Just think about any of them and you’ll understand why. Nonetheless, this entire peculiar phenomenon needs unraveling. And if the final answer turns out to be option five — and however distressingly outlandish, it cannot be entirely dismissed — well then we might need to do some praying, as well. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.