Are aliens that bad at parking? What we need to ask about recent UFO revelations

Another day, another story about the US government hiding the fact that it has retrieved alien spacecraft. You can hear similar claims all the time from conspiracy theorists in certain corners of the internet. Yet what made this particular account international news was that the person talking had apparently been in a position to know.

American David Grusch served 14 years in the US air force. He is a decorated veteran from the Afghanistan conflict, who went on to serve in the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. In these positions, he sat on the US Department of Defense’s unidentified aerial phenomena taskforce from 2020 to 2022.

UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena, as they are now officially known, are what used to be called UFOs. In 2021, a report from the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the taskforce was investigating 144 UAP reports. They had been made between 2004 and 2021, mostly by military personnel, but few conclusions could be drawn because the actual data was limited and difficult to analyse.

Now Grusch has turned whistleblower and told the Debrief website that the US has been retrieving intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin for decades. These retrievals happen all over the globe – anywhere that the craft have landed or crashed. In the article, Grusch is said to have given Congress “extensive classified information about [these] deeply covert programmes”.

But, according to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, until these documents are also made public, we should remain sceptical. “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,” says Loeb.

In the effort to collect scientific data about UAPs, Loeb co-founded the Galileo Project, which watches the sky around the clock, looking for anything that moves. Its prototype observatory is located at Harvard itself. It records the sky at infrared, optical and radio wavelengths, and listens for audio too. This continuous stream of data is then analysed by computers to work out whether a passing object is a bird or a drone, or something unidentifiable that needs deeper analysis. So far, everything has been explainable but Loeb has just received a donation to build five more observatories to extend the search to other parts of the US.

But there’s something much more down to earth that makes 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, sceptical of Grusch’s story. It all comes down to a how badly these supposed aliens drive their spacecraft.

“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.

Thinking of the small number of accidents that occur each day compared with the vast number of road journeys undertaken, the idea of aliens crash-landing on our planet for decades seems implausible. “It would imply that there must be hundreds of them coming every day, and astronomers simply don’t see them,” says Garrett.

Yet in the same Debrief article, Jonathan Grey, who allegedly works for the US National Air and Space Intelligence Center, backs up the story, adding that “exotic materials” have been retrieved and studied since the early 20th century. Grusch says 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.

Garrett is doubtful here too, seeing no real-world evidence of that activity bearing any fruit. “If they had an understanding of how these things worked, they would result in completely disruptive technologies,” he says. In other words, we should be seeing amazing products and materials bursting on the market out of nowhere. But we aren’t. “Either they’re just not very good at reverse engineering, or there’s nothing to be reverse-engineered,” says Garrett.

Perhaps they should call Prof Sara Russell, a planetary scientist from the Natural History Museum in London. She is skilled in the analysis of extraterrestrial materials, in the form of meteorites, and knows exactly what kind of chemical fingerprints to look for. The techniques have been honed over decades of studying the things that fall from space.

Take iron, for example, a fairly common element in meteorites. If she is handed a lump of iron and asked whether it came from space or Earth, she looks for the presence of nickel because the two are formed in similar astronomical conditions but not terrestrial ones. By a careful analysis of the naturally occurring isotopes of oxygen in a rock, she can easily tell whether it has formed in space; she can even tell where in the early solar system the meteorite was formed.

Standard laboratory techniques make analysing non-naturally occurring substances easy as well. “If you give me an alloy, it would take me less than half an hour to tell you what elements are in it. That’s easy-peasy for us,” she says.

The upshot is that it should be easy to understand whether something falling to Earth is man-made or extraterrestrial, and if it is the latter, whether it is naturally occurring or not.

This ability is spurring Loeb to chase after fragments of the first interstellar meteor, known as IM1, and catalogued by Nasa as CNEOS 2014-01-08, that landed in the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea on 8 January 2014. His interest was piqued when the calculated speed and trajectory of the object’s entry into Earth’s atmosphere showed that it came from outside our solar system.

More intriguing is that when Loeb and his students calculated the material strength of the meteor from the bright fireball it created, they found it was tougher than an iron meteorite – the strongest naturally occurring meteorites in our solar system.

“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.

While presupposing nothing, 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.

Loeb’s daily updates from the expedition can be read on the Medium platform. Meanwhile, the material Grusch handed to Congress will be investigated by the powerful House of Representatives oversight committee, chaired by Republican congressman James Comer.

Whether alien driving skills are on the agenda of the committee has yet to be disclosed.