America’s Very Normal Month Continues with a Wild UAP Hearing in Congress

It can seem trivial, in the grander scheme of things, to care about the legend of UFOs (now rebranded as UAPs to try to reduce the stigma). The United States just elected an autocrat, as the lone supposed opposition force to capital in this country proved once and for all that they are out of touch defenders of an unpopular status quo. America has a lot to fix right now. We are genuinely living through a collapsing empire.

But this subject isn’t trivial, nor unrelated to our broader decline. Let’s just start with accepting at face value what the United States Navy and other parts of the Department of Defense have said in public: there are unknown…things…violating our airspace at will and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. The Wall Street Journal published a report last month titled “Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. The Pentagon Is Stumped.”

I also obtained some information about this very real mystery while writing my two-part “What Does Chuck Schumer Know About UFOs” piece in August (Part 1 and Part 2), as I developed a genuine UAP source, and when we talked broadly about the government’s interest in this subject, they told me to “pay attention to where this happens.” I responded, “nuclear installations?” and they said yes. There are decades of documentation of these incursions and our inability to stop them, coming from both the Soviet Union and the United States.

Congress is digging into UAPs, and they brought four witnesses under oath today to testify to what they know. You can watch the hearing in full here.

According to Luis Elizondo, a former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the Pentagon’s UAP study office, UAPs are “making it clear they can interfere with our nuclear equities.” Dr. Tim Gallaudet, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (RET.) and the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, testified that UAP’s are “risking pilots’ safety—military and civilian—today.” This isn’t about chasing ghosts of a past era swept up in UFO mania. The next flight you’re on could be disrupted by an encounter with a UAP according to a former Rear Admiral, and the government has basically admitted that it doesn’t know how to defend you should it become hostile.

If this is another country, as Elizondo said, this is an intelligence failure on an order of magnitudes larger than 9/11. If this is terrestrial, someone(s) has eclipsed American military might despite the gargantuan budget we provide to it. Or maybe perhaps UAPs are from the vast and opaque American military complex (Elizondo says he is near-certain that is not true), and someone has kept this incredible technology that seems to violate the laws of physics from the public for over 80 years. Or maybe it’s all somehow fake and we’re being played by intelligence agencies all while Congress shovels money to fake UAP programs siloed in defense contractors.

That is all…beyond scandalous. There’s no angle to this where there are not major implications for America, writ large.

Now if it’s not terrestrial…that opens up a wealth of existential questions a lot of people are quick to dismiss. There is something new to be discovered here, and Gallaudet and Elizondo joined Michael Gold, former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships and a Member of the NASA UAP Independent Study Team to testify under oath to what they know. They were joined by much less illustrious Substacker of Elon’s Twitter Files fame, Michael Shellenberger, who published an article last month centering on an alleged U.S. government crash retrieval program, and these military and scientific minds assert it has truth to it. It seems likely that his sources overlap with Elizondo and others, who was the primary source behind the infamous 2017 New York Times article that pushed us into this new world where UAPs are taken a lot more seriously. Here are the big (and one small) takeaways from the second UAP hearing held by Congress in the last two years.

Nancy Mace Plays a Stupid Person on TV

Nancy Mace, Republican Congresswoman from South Carolina who a lot of people know from joking about her husband trying to have sex with her before a prayer breakfast in front of the prayer breakfast, has succeeded in Republican politics by being the lizard-brained cable news rage character GOP politics runs on. Many of the GOPers who ran the hearing detracted from its credibility with their presence, but everyone except for one special person from my home state behaved themselves and asked the productive questions their staff wrote for them. Mace was particularly effective, as one of the fears about these hearings is whether these witnesses will be challenged to establish their credibility under oath or whether they will be given a tongue bath as saviors to the cause.

While there was certainly more of the latter as the hearing went on, it only came after Mace opened by grilling each of the witnesses with challenging questions, prodding them every time they hid behind the “I could tell you more in a classified setting” answer, and forcing them to drill down on why they know what they are about to tell us. This did wonders for the rest of the proceedings, particularly when her less talented GOP colleagues were unable to hide their fanboy and fangirlism for the witnesses later, particularly one of their favorite conservative Substack writers.

I don’t highlight Nancy Mace’s excellent querying as some sort of resistance lib-brained invocation of bipartisan comity or an appeal to our better selves—that’s long gone by this point. The stuff that is confined to the narrow view of American politics has long been decided for us by the powers that be, and Trump and his cronies will only accelerate the collapse of this system. I point Mace’s usefulness out to both demonstrate that politics is a show, and professional wrestling will forever remain the best comparison to it, and how because UAPs fall outside of our rigid partisan framework, a lot of these folks can drop the act to varying degrees. It’s still fake because they’re all going to go right back to the depravity that defines this century, but it does demonstrate that a healthier politics is possible outside of our narrow idea of what American governance looks like in the 21st century.

People Are Intentionally Being Kept Out of the UAP Loop

While Elizondo has long alleged that he has documentation of how UAP information has been wrongly shielded from the public, and also how people trying to reveal it have been smeared by the interests protecting this subject, it hits a lot different when a Rear Admiral is saying that he observed a UAP event and he and others received an e-mail afterwards briefing them on the intelligence collection around it, and “after I received it…along with others including one- and two-star Admirals…the e-mail was somehow wiped or deleted from our accounts, and no one talked about it afterwards.”

Elizondo said he cannot talk about his knowledge of “crash retrieval programs” due to an agreement he signed with the government, and when Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz pressed him on whether he had a lawyer present when he signed it, Elizondo hemmed and hawed and obfuscated while acknowledging that fundamental democratic right would be looked down upon by the forces he signed the agreement with.

Rep. Tim Burchett, another GOP goober who has demonstrated a genuine interest in getting to the bottom of UAPs, asked Elizondo something that answers the question of why Congress would be digging into this. Burchett queried “are there UAP programs operating without proper Congressional oversight?”

Elizondo responded, “one hundred percent.”

Again, this is an important subject because it is directly related to the question of our time about American governance and who owns it. There is a growing group of whistleblowers with higher and higher rankings telling us that there are programs that Congress has allocated money to that they are not being informed about, and in some cases, even being lied to, about what that money is actually going towards. Are allegations of defense contractors shaking down the government really that crazy?

The Admiral’s story about his e-mail being deleted adds to the growing list of stories from military members where incidents with unidentified phenomena occur, and the information about that event is taken by government agents of unknown origin. Michael Gold alleged that this subject seemed to be compartmentalized in his civilian agency at NASA that studied UAPs too, as he said, “I flagged AAWSAP’s [UAP studies] to our chair and we did not get briefed on it.”

AAWSAP is a program that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allocated money to specifically for scientific study of UAPs and other weird stuff, and that data was seemingly ignored by NASA. Democracy is backsliding everywhere you look.

UFO Folks Have Their Neil deGrasse Tyson Now

Michael Gold was the star of the hearing in my book, as he exuded the classic upbeat and optimistic scientist archetype who is passionate about knowledge, asserting that “all breakthroughs have been heretical.” His testimony primarily centered around the need to collect more data on UAPs and how the central problem around the “unidentified” moniker is our lack of data that could help identify it. He stressed the need for the Federal Aviation Administration to set up a way for civilian pilots to report interactions with unidentified aerial phenomena using NASA’s ASRS system as a model.

Gold also pointed out that the extreme compartmentalization of scientific knowledge in the government’s highly classified Special Access Programs hampers all scientific discovery, alleging that “the overclassification of [scientific] material is no way limited to UAPs.”

UAPs themselves aside, the UAP issue is a military industrial complex issue, and an existential question with a concrete answer as to who really controls the most powerful part of the United States government.

Gold is a great scientific spokesman for UAPs, as one of the largest issues outside the U.S. government is the stigma that has an active hand in reducing funding for scientific study of something everyone studying it says we don’t understand. Fully embracing my “I want to believe” bias in this subject, let me just plead with whoever is responsible for putting serious UAP people in front of serious journalists and other respected thinkers: make this man the face of this stuff! We don’t know! We should be humbled by that! Science is exciting! This should be fun!

Lauren Bobert Is Too Crazy for UFOs

Despite there being a lot of GOP maniacs asking questions in this hearing, everyone acted like an adult and read questions that clearly were informed by their staffers interviewing UAP witnesses behind closed doors over the past year, save for my home state’s court jester, Lauren Bobert. The only thing standing between Colorado being the clear best voting public in this election is this psycho who eschewed the decorum of the day to ask about “alien-human hybrids” and other History Channel-brained shit. Almost every question from every Representative, Democrat and Republican, was pointed in a specific direction trying to navigate around these people’s security clearances which evoked detailed answers.

But Bobert decided that she wanted to justify every worst cynic’s belief about this hearing, opening with a one-minute self-flagellating grandstand that was more shameless than her last flagellating production during Beetlejuice, and she opened her time sarcastically(?) endorsing the idea that the Earth is flat and birds aren’t real. The answer from all four witnesses to almost every single insane and incoherent question she posed was “I don’t know,” proving that she is so far out there that people telling us under oath that the government has recovered “biological evidence of non-human intelligence” are like ‘what the fuck are you talking about lady?’

The Answer to UAPs Is Likely a Lot Weirder than We Think

I won’t rewrite my 3,500 word piece expanding on this point, and you can read my extended thoughts on what I think UAPs are here. The common conception of UAPs is that they are piloted by other human-like beings from somewhere in the universe traveling here in what amounts to interstellar SUVs. While experts who have studied this their entire life like Jacques Vallee say that could be partially the case, almost none of them believe that the nature of these unidentified objects is that simple. Some of the questions in the Congressional hearing centered around whether UAPs themselves were alive, and they were not dismissed, but generally met with more questions. Luis Elizondo expanded on the difficulty of defining what is “life” in a universe that only gets more awe inspiring the more you look into it. At one point we thought “life” was defined by oxygen, but discoveries of creatures we still don’t quite understand proved otherwise.

If you want to join those of us who have broken our brains digging into what little we understand about this subject and know where all this UAP stuff is headed, look into the scientific studies taking place into the very bizarre nature of consciousness right now. I do believe that there is a grander existential question being raised by genuine scientific discovery here, and perhaps in these painful political moments, it’s one worth pondering.

Nancy Mace closed the hearing with a good, direct question putting all four witnesses on the spot to give their opinion on how they would define the phrases “non-human biologics, non-human intelligence,” that appear in so much government documentation like Chuck Schumer’s bill. Elizondo was very cagey and said he would take the scientific track and define it by “the ability to react to a stimulus that requires an intellectual thought process.”

Admiral Gallaudet went a step further, asserting that “I don’t think it’s a stretch if you look at the diversity of life on this planet and the size of this universe to think that there would be more diverse, higher-order, non-human intelligences throughout the universe, and that’s probably what’s visiting us.”

While Michael Gold ended by appealing to the spirit of scientific discovery, and said “I think we must be modest in our assumptions that we’re looking for intelligence that could be biological. It might not.” Mace then prodded him by what he means saying that non-human intelligence could be non-biological, and he used artificial intelligence or machines as examples, saying “we assume that all intelligence would be like us, and every time we look out into the universe, we are humbled relative to what we don’t know in terms of the forms of intelligence and what it may take…I think the ultimate answer is going to surprise us all.”