back to article Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

The US government has recovered alien spacecraft and bodies from crash landings on Earth, and is keeping the whole thing covered up, Congress was told on Wednesday. Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot who served in the US Navy for over a decade, retired US Navy commander David Fravor, and David Grusch, an intelligence officer who …

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          1. WolfFan

            Re: Alien UFOs

            Flesh Gordon lives! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_Gordon

      1. Ideasource

        Re: Alien UFOs

        It's actually very common for people witnessing something outside of expected context to have glitchy perceptions/memories regarding it.

        Memory is a reimagining every time something is remembered.

        And so every time something is remembered it gets a little more off like that and game of social telephone ready a bus we're taught to demonstrate the invalidation of the rumor mill as a source of information.

        The way visual processing and final interpreted rendering by the brain to the conscious person within that brain...

        Well you put it shortly it's not a camera.

        It's a heuristically interpretive rendering.

        1. steelpillow Silver badge

          Re: Alien UFOs

          This is very true, no idea why you got a downvote. Modern research suggests that when we recall a memory, we have to rewrite it back immediately afterwards, and there is no guarantee that the rewrite is identical to the original. Thus, memories drift over time. I have to agree, mine certainly do. There was even a song about it once - "Ah yes, I remember it well" or something.

          All of which kinda undermines claims that such sightings can "prove" the wild and wacky beliefs of the self-deluded.

    1. gandalfcn Silver badge

      Re: Alien UFOs

      Also, the so called whistleblower claims he was told these things, that is it. No proof, nada, just hearsay. Probably someone taking the piss out of a known wally / conspiracy theorist.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. steelpillow Silver badge
          Coffee/keyboard

          Re: Introducing:

          "The wally on the Clapham omnibus!"

          ROTFL

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Introducing:

            So *that* is where he has been hiding!

      2. Elongated Muskrat Silver badge

        Re: Alien UFOs

        I'd be inclined to take such things with less salt if the eyewitness reports were ever anything more than that. "We saw it on radar" is emphatically NOT the same as "here is the recording of some anomalous radar signals we picked up," and whenever you drill further into these things, the actual physical evidence becomes ever more nebulous. Literally anyone can say, "I saw a UFO and recorded solid evidence of it, and the MiBs came and took it away," which neatly explains why all sorts of people have said this sort of things in the past, their testimony always differs, and pretty much always has a strong social context to it.

        The same goes for all sorts of "paranormal" reports; in the US, people constantly seem to be experiencing "demons" all over the place, whilst reports of hauntings in the British Isles are always determined to be variants of ghosts or "little folk" (such as poltergeists, pookas, and so on). Even weird ones like Gef the Talking Mongoose don't get the immediate "it's a demon" response on the Isle of Man that they would get in Texas.

        The obvious explanation here, is of course, not that demons like to terrorise Americans, but that the fundamentalist Christian belief systems that are common in the US, with a strong belief in demons is projected onto anomalous experiences when people have them; and people have anomalous experiences all the time. People do, of course, forget that our senses are deeply unreliable, the visual cortex actually invents half the information that it integrates (what? you can't see those big blind spots in your field of vision? whodathunkit?), hallucinatory experiences are much more common than people think (stress, tiredness, illness, drugs, and so on are all causes), and the brain likes to try to interpret anything anomalous as something to be paid attention to, due to evolutionary threat responses.

    2. gandalfcn Silver badge

      Re: Alien UFOs

      "Land of Neurosis" and spiritual home of the Flat Earth cult, evolution deniers vaxx deners and so on. To be expected when schools are run by bible thumping science deniers. They also believe the Bible was written in English and JC was a WASP.

    3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Alien UFOs

      "Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?"

      And have you listened to the recorded commentary of pilots seeing "something strange"? They are almost invariably cool, calm and professional at all times. Then you get these two "surfer doods" flying multi-million dollar US fighter jets screaming about "UFOs" and sounding like university football jocks at a toga party from Animal House, ie the so-called "tic-tac" video :-)

    4. david 12 Silver badge

      Re: Alien UFOs

      Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?

      The connection is there in the lede:

      the government is concealing important knowledge from lawmakers and the public.

      Recent revelations like the Snowden affair confirm what Americans think is standard government practice, but the UFO conspiracy theories date from the time when, after accidental sightings, men in black would routinely meet aircraft passengers and tell them not to report seeing new/secret/research aircraft that had flown past.

  1. jake Silver badge

    Don't tell me, show me.

    Funny how not a single one of the (presumably hundreds, if not thousands) of US military grunts involved in the so-called recovery operations has actually managed to "collect" a small bit of the supposed material. They can mail home spoils of war (confiscated weapons, mainly), but can't pocket a small shaving from a crashed "UFO"?

    And then there is the impossibility of keeping it secret for any length of time. Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days? Especially the former idiot-in-chief, who as Commander of the Armed Forces would presumably have had to have been briefed (and don't quote some dumb-ass movie script at me, this is Real Life).

    1. Joe W Silver badge

      Re: Don't tell me, show me.

      This. So much.

      People are convinced that the gubmint is completely inept, and at the same time they are sure they can keep secrets indefinitely, even through parties in power constantly change.

      1. Kernel

        Re: Don't tell me, show me.

        "People are convinced that the gubmint is completely inept, and at the same time they are sure they can keep secrets indefinitely, even through parties in power constantly change."

        More importantly, what is the probability of any military organization keeping secret something that would otherwise be likely to open up massive funding opportunities to them?

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Don't tell me, show me.

          You could always ask the people or government of Mali or the Dutch guy currently running the .ml domain :-)

    2. sabroni Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: and don't quote some dumb-ass movie script at me, this is Real Life

      Why not? BECAUSE YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

      1. jake Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: and don't quote some dumb-ass movie script at me, this is Real Life

        Clever. I laughed enough to wake the velcro whippet. That's rare at this hour.

        This round's on me, sabroni.

    3. Spazturtle Silver badge

      Re: Don't tell me, show me.

      "Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days?"

      And who would believe them? I'm not saying the claims about aliens are true but we have seen multiple times in the past where self declared critical thinkers and sceptics have 'debunked' a leak about some government program which has later turned out to be true.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Don't tell me, show me.

        Citation Required...

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: Don't tell me, show me.

        A stopped clock is correct twice per day.

        1. JulieM Silver badge

          Re: Don't tell me, show me.

          Unless it's a flip-card digital clock showing the time in VCR notation .....

          1. Rich 11

            Re: Don't tell me, show me.

            VCR notation? Is that what the rest of us call the 24-hour clock?

          2. jake Silver badge

            Re: Don't tell me, show me.

            "Unless it's a flip-card digital clock showing the time in VCR notation ....."

            Not sure about VCR notation[0], but I have a flip-card digital clock radio (with stereo cassette player!) here in the office that hasn't been plugged in since we moved in. It has shown the correct time twice per day that entire time ...

            I set it to 4:04, as I do all my non-running analog clocks. That way one can tell at a glance that time was not found.

            [0] Blinking 88:88 wouldn't be a time ... but blinking 12:00 would. Except flip-cards don't blink ... )

            1. mcswell

              Re: Don't tell me, show me.

              4:04? Why not set it to 5:00, so it can be 5 o'clock somewhere?

              1. Jonathan Richards 1 Silver badge

                Re: Don't tell me, show me.

                14:50

                Stands the clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?

              2. jake Silver badge
                Pint

                Re: Don't tell me, show me.

                "4:04? Why not set it to 5:00, so it can be 5 o'clock somewhere?"

                Because this is not "somewhere", it's "here". Also, because it's always 5 o'clock somewhere there is no need to set a reminder.

                Oh, is that the time? Have a beer :-)

                That, and because explaining jokes takes the edge off them ... even when I can see that joke from where I type.

    4. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Re: Don't tell me, show me.

      And then there is the impossibility of keeping it secret for any length of time. Have you SEEN the shit that people babble about on antisocial media these days?

      Indeed. Any sufficiently advanced technology would have been posted to War Thunder or Star Citizen reddits by now.

      1. John PM Chappell
        Pint

        Re: Don't tell me, show me.

        Okay, I laughed. :)

        Pint as is tradition.

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: Don't tell me, show me.

        I wouldn't know. I barely have enough spare time to waste here on ElReg. The likes of Reddit are right out.

        1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

          Re: Don't tell me, show me.

          I wouldn't know. I barely have enough spare time to waste here on ElReg. The likes of Reddit are right out.

          Sensible. War Thunder is a popular game. Trolling on Reddit is also a popular game. This lead to situations like people arguing about whether the BV* on a Challenger 2 was welded or riveted. Then someone posting the workshop manuals in an "I win" kinda way... Which often meant winning a lengthy jail term because the manuals are, of course, classified. But that hasn't stopped idiots over the years posting a lot of classified performance data to win points.

          And thus it became something of a meme. Or forced poor intelligence types to have to trawl that swamp looking for stuff that shouldn't be on there.

          *BV= Boiling Vessel. Tea, for the making of. Tankies are likely to throw stuff at you if you metion brew up though.

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "it needs to have oversight"

    What makes hié think there isn't oversight ?

    So this bullshit has now reached Congress. The army has alien corpses recovered from crashed UFOs, yet, in this age of smartphones, there isn't a single picture of proof floating around.

    I wonder how many other governments are hiding UFO stuff, and why nobody else in the world is talking about it.

    Oh, by the way, apart from their good word, I don't suppose they've actually produced anything in the way of proof ?

    1. abend0c4 Silver badge

      Re: "it needs to have oversight"

      this bullshit has now reached Congress

      It's the logical culmination of all the other bullshit that's been accumulating there. US politics is now concerned with very little else than conspiracy theories. I suppose it's a convenient distraction from a burning world.

      1. Toni the terrible

        Re: "it needs to have oversight"

        True, 'Aliens' only exist to provide a backup excuse - someone to blame for the climate etc apocalypse and so on

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: "it needs to have oversight"

        "US politics is now concerned with very little else than conspiracy theories."

        To be fair, most of the nutjobs, wackos, outright loonies and complete idiots are confined to Congress. The Senate is still relatively sane, being composed mostly of professional shameless liars who actually know they are lying and can sometimes be convinced to change their minds, if it'll get them votes or money.

    2. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: "it needs to have oversight"

      Probably because, in the world where TV show logic applies, they buy into the secret US agency that has technology the rest of us could only dream of which is used to intercept all of the UFOs over every country and bring them back to the US, because if you have a secret organization that cannot get help from anyone else for fear of breaking your secrets, you would want all the potentially dangerous stuff in one place where it can all blow up simultaneously. They're entertaining shows sometimes, but not so much when you find people who think they actually happened.

    3. Brian 3

      Re: "it needs to have oversight"

      You're right, in this age of smartphones how can there be <secret laws we aren't allowed to know>? Someone would have photo'd and posted it on reddit, shurely! Your argument is stillborn. We have secret courts to go with the secret laws, and those accused can't even get a lawyer.

    4. Ideasource

      Re: "it needs to have oversight"

      They did not report aliens bodies.

      They reported nonhuman biologicals.

      Probably a test craft using animals as crash dummies and simple trained operators.

      We all remember the nasa spacecraft designed for and operated by chimps don't we?

      Is less than a hundred years ago so virtually yesterday.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: "it needs to have oversight"

        "They reported nonhuman biologicals."

        In other words, the drone crashed into a tree and got splinters.

        More likely, the "vehicle" was a drug smuggling submarine, any "alien pilots" were from one of the drug cartels, and the "non-human biologicals" were cocaine, fentanyl and/or pot. Throw in the military rumo(u)r mill (kind of like the kid's game of Telephone[0], but on steroids), and Bob's yer Auntie.

        Perhaps appropriately, my spall chucker wants me to change fentanyl to entangle.

        [0] That's "Chinese Whispers" to you Brits.

  3. tonique
    Boffin

    Sigh. That's stupid.

  4. DS999 Silver badge

    The big witness

    Turns out not to have witnessed anything, he just relayed secondhand accounts from others but never personally saw a captured UFO or alien. Kind of worthless testimony.

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

      Re: The big witness

      he just relayed secondhand accounts from others

      In that case I'm ready to testify about all sorts of things happening in the Borchester area.

      1. Paul Herber Silver badge
        Megaphone

        Re: The big witness

        Those sort of things never happened in Sunningdale, you know!

    2. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: The big witness

      The legal term is "hearsay" and it's normally not admissible.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The big witness

        the non-legal terms are "gullible fool"/"useful idiot"

  5. Doctor Tarr
    WTF?

    Nonsense

    If we can use reconnaissance drones why would intelligent aliens need to put meat sacks in theirs. Think about the infrastructure needed for it.

    1. Nick Ryan

      Re: Nonsense

      Shhhh. Stop talking sense.

      Don't even think about bringing up mind numbing distances to travel, almost certain biocontamination and that using drones is routine for humans now... for some reason aliens must visit in person but to largely only do so in country areas of the US where the only locals are stone drunk and it's just US military who can get there.

      Any alien technology that could make it to our solar system would have very good satellite technology so could watch for as long as they wanted. They'd only need to drop down for biological samples which just in the interests of variety wouldn't solely be in the US wilderness, but there's no way that any sane intelligence would risk actual meat sacks on such a task.

      1. Rich 11

        Re: Nonsense

        There's no guarantee that they're sane. Look at all the daft things we've done, especially when subject to some ideology or another.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Nonsense

          well we know that the "senators" (or whatever they are in USA parlence) are fucking idiots as they are all "god" believers, who at this point haven't realised if any of the shit the "idiot" is telling them is true totally negates their holy books, and god goes out the window with force.

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: Nonsense

        "must visit in person but to largely only do so in country areas of the US"

        People keep saying this. It's not true.

        Rather, apparently they only visit (and crash) in areas completely under the control of the US military, in sooper sekrit locations out of view of civilians and where the grunts picking up the pieces don't carry cell phone cameras.

        1. Nick Ryan

          Re: Nonsense

          True, also important to not have mobile cameras

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