Why Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About Aliens

If ever a headline has demanded a wide-eyed, scrambling-to-click reaction, it might be this one: “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-human Origin.”

A website called The Debrief—which says it specializes in “frontier science” and describes itself as self-funded—reported this week that a former intelligence official named David Grusch said that the U.S. government has spent decades secretly recovering “intact vehicles” and “partial fragments” that weren’t made by humans. (A section of The Debrief is dedicated to coverage of UFOs.) Officials, Grusch said, sought to avoid congressional oversight while reverse-engineering these materials for the government’s own purposes. In a separate interview with NewsNation, which has advertised itself as an alternative to major cable networks, Grusch said the military had even discovered the “dead pilots” of these craft. “Believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true,” he said.

Grusch’s account has spread quickly across social media and been repeated by news outlets including The Guardian, Fox News, and New York magazine, as well as plenty of local network affiliates. And why wouldn’t it be? This story has everything: a seemingly authoritative source spilling secrets about a government operation designed to keep the American public in the dark. Oh, and aliens. The only problem is, there’s nothing backing it up.

Ever since UFOs—now also known as UAPs, for “unidentified anomalous phenomena”—first became a cultural sensation, in the technology-fueled postwar era, people have latched onto stories like this one. The cycle has usually moved this way: Someone with military or government experience comes forward with a strange experience or encounter. They have no hard evidence but, given their background, are perceived by some to be a reliable observer anyway. Tabloids amplify the story, fanning public interest and demanding that the government reveal whatever it must be hiding. Officials deny that they’ve found evidence of extraterrestrial activity, which only fuels conspiracy thinking. “This is familiar territory,” Greg Eghigian, a historian at Pennsylvania State University who has studied UFO culture, told me. And it never leads anywhere concrete.

The UFO playbook dates back to one of the first major sightings, in 1947, when the pilot Kenneth Arnold said he saw nine flashing objects in the sky over Washington State, maneuvering in strange ways and flying at tremendous speeds. Coverage of Arnold’s account popularized the term flying saucer, and everyone ran with it, including Donald Keyhoe, a Marine Corps major turned writer. Keyhoe claimed that, although he hadn’t seen any of it himself, military officials had studied some flying saucers and concluded that the craft were of alien origin, but they were told to never disclose the facts, Eghigian said. Keyhoe’s writings, which were widely published, cemented two narratives that have become “part and parcel of the UFO world for decades,” Eghigian said: First, that “we have conclusive proof that aliens are visiting Earth,” and second, that “it’s being covered up by the government in some way.”

Grusch’s story is already hitting the same beats. Like Keyhoe, Grusch does not appear to have seen the alleged alien craft himself. He says he has seen documents detailing the retrieval of mysterious hardware, but we, the readers, are privy only to his testimony about what they contain. Although the authors of the article say that Grusch’s comments were “cleared for open publication” by the Department of Defense, all that means is that the remarks do not contain classified information, not that they have been verified to be true.

Also, as in Keyhoe’s case, the military denied a cover-up. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, a Defense Department entity established last year and charged with reviewing UFO reports, said in a statement on Monday that it “has 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.”

The problem is, in every instance so far of the UFO-mania cycle, the government, too, is effectively asking Americans to take it at its word. Anything juicier than “We don’t have evidence”—anything that would provide more clarity, even—is classified, and the government has little incentive to share it. Government officials also have a documented history of lying to the American people. “Even when they’ve tried to come clean in some ways over the years, whether it’s declassified materials about Roswell or the new AARO project—it just doesn’t convince people,” Eghigian said. (He’s referring to an incident from the same year as the Arnold affair, when a mysterious craft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Even though the military said it was just a high-altitude balloon, alien wreckage has since become a staple of UFO culture.) Grusch’s miraculous claims are unlikely to be proved or disproved; Eghigian describes either outcome as “virtually impossible.”

Before this week, the Keyhoe script played out most recently in 2017, when The New York Times and other outlets revealed the existence of a covert program at the Pentagon dedicated to cataloging UFOs, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The whistleblower at the center of that story was its former director, Luis Elizondo, who said he quit because of what the Times summarized as “excessive secrecy and internal opposition.” (The authors of the new Debrief story also worked on the 2017 Times piece.) The Times included in its coverage video footage from the Navy that showed unexplained objects moving through the sky. The cycle began to move at warp speed. The public was rapt and suspicious; the government made denials that seemed to only muddy the waters.

The Times coverage and the intense public reaction prompted Congress to hold hearings on UFOs, and to direct defense and intelligence agencies to provide reports on UAPs. That’s another part of the playbook. “Faced with citizens who expect their leaders to demystify the potentially dangerous mystery, the government has historically tried to (not always in good faith),” wrote Sarah Scoles, a science journalist, in They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. The first official government program dealing with UFOs emerged in the late 1940s, soon after Arnold’s account of mysterious flashes. Lawmakers have already begun calling for official meetings about Grusch’s claims of alien wreckage. Any resulting reports and hearings, however, are doomed to be anticlimactic, as lacking in big reveals as other such events have been throughout history. And so we remain stuck.

The Grusch cycle reminds me of a story that Scoles recounts in her book, told to her by Chris Rutkowski, a respected figure in the UFO community who has written about the topic since the 1970s. A woman once told Rutkowski all about how extraterrestrials had brought her on board their spaceship and shared their wisdom with her. When Rutkowski asked her if she had any proof, she showed him her arm. The aliens, she said, had operated on her, and their medical technology was so sophisticated that it didn’t leave a mark. The absence of a scar, she said, was proof.

Grusch told The Debrief that the government is sure that the alleged recovered debris is not terrestrial because of “the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures.” But does he have any proof? So far, the best evidence he’s come up with, besides his own word, is the government’s denial. What Grusch is doing now, along with anyone who takes him at his word, is presenting an outstretched arm and saying, See?