The US Congress Gets Serious About Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena

On 26 July, the US Congress House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security held a hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) — the latest acronym to describe what much of the world knows as UFOs.

It was significant, because it had three ranking military officials making claims that should, as the phrase goes, “blow your mind”.

These include claims made under oath, with falsification likely resulting in imprisonment, that one of them — Commander (Retd) David Fravor of the US Navy — had a personal encounter with an alien vehicle during an exercise; and the other two had extensive information about first hand encounters by other military personnel. 

The allegations included the existence of a UAP crash retrieval programme, the retention of non-human “biologics” (i.e. alien bodies), and a corrupted mechanism of threat and misinformation to keep it covered up under the guise of national security. 

These claims were made by David Grusch, a 14-year veteran of US intelligence and combat services, who worked with the UAP Task Force from 2019-21, and who was of a stature high enough to help prepared the US President’s daily brief. 

So, what is going on? Here is the big picture.

The American establishment is formally transitioning the subject of anomalous trans-medium phenomena with associated sentience — what is separately referred to as "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP) and "non-human intelligence" (NHI) — into both the mainstream discourse and the legislative ecosystem. 

Why are they doing this? Pressure from the public who have been pursuing this issue for decades is one factor. Perhaps more important is the preponderance of emerging circumstantial evidence that requires legislative power in order to retain legitimising authority over the information coming out. 

(A third possibility, which has been hinted at by various former serving US military and intelligence officials, is that a “controlled disclosure” is necessary to minimise what is known as Ontological Shock. This refers to the mental chaos that results in case an event occurs which shatters humanity’s perceptions about itself and its state of being). 

The subcommittee hearings of 26 July in that sense was an historic event. There were 100,000 online viewers of the entire hearing (standing room only) which lasted just under three hours. Some observations that come readily to mind:

1. The legislation that is associated with the mainstreaming the UAP issue, starting in 2022, and has been further fine-tuned specifically to hamstring the security establishment (the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community of 18 known agencies, and associated civilian bureaucracies) from subsuming the information on UAP/NHI under "need to know" rules, "clearances" and other constraints. 

   These constraints are associated with Secure Access Programmes (SAPS), Unacknowledged SAPs (USAPS), which are those that are not acknowledged to government except via budget line notations and Waived USAPS, which are not acknowledged even on the budget lines — the so-called "black programmes".

2. The problem is that human beings being what they are, information has trickled out through as a result of realities that cannot be constrained by the circumstances described in above.

   (a) age of the people involved — "I'm dying now, I don't care, I'll tell the world what I did and what I know".

   (b) secrecy has resulted in a forgetful bureaucracy - the only people who knew where the information/physical material was kept, under which project notation, etc. — are dead or incapacitated. No one else knows where anything is anymore - the security-bureaucracy’s equivalent of hiding emergency cash, and not remembering where you put it.

   (c) the circumstances of the world have changed since the 1930s - and the profile of the state and individuals working for the state has changed — "from, whew, we just about managed to end Nazism" to "America is No. 1, ruler of the world, and we can do whatever we like". 

   In this context, patriotic US citizens have become of a mind that individual principles are more important than state prerogatives - especially because of the change of the profile of the state, which is now regarded with wariness. Trust levels have declined both ways. 

   In short, both people and technology have come into an era of information incontinence.

3. There are a lot of kooks in the field of UAP investigation — and sifting the wheat from the chaff is an intense business. Literally everyone who can be considered an "expert" is bound to have some views that will eventually prove to be inaccurate. This does not mean that everything that the expert says should be dismissed as well. 

   It is an area in which there is no "scholarly training" to fall back upon. It has been riven with stigma, ridicule and a real problem of the "lack of utility". Meaning, there is real difficulty to answer the question: "So what if there is UAP/NHI"? 

   It is easy to say there is going to be a paradigmatic shift in the "human state of being" after verifiable disclosure. But you still have to go to work the next day. That quarterly target still needs to be met. So there's that.

4. Having said all that, and having sifted the wheat from the chaff — what the hearing means is the following. The US government is publicly acknowledging the possibility of a Non-Human Intelligence on the planet, and that they are manifesting through UAPs. 

   They are acknowledging that there could have been crashes, that these crashed vehicles may have been retrieved, and that there could have been "biologics" recovered from the crashes as well. 

   In short, they are saying that what we regard as "aliens" from a non-Earth space-time co-ordinate, or dimension, or from “within” Earth, might be true. There are 22 references to non-human intelligence in the defence bill passed on 27 July. That’s a big deal. 

This is just the start of the hearing process. It is certain that this discussion is going to get more interesting, much more. Having followed this subject for a long time, in as rational a framework of mind as possible, this writer’s own conviction on the matter was published in Swarajya in June.