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UFOs

Last updated on: August 11, 2023 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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UFOs 2023-08-07T13:30:35-04:00 Gene Veith

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

It’s time to talk about UFOs.

A former high-level intelligence official, David Grusch, told a congressional committee that the U.S. government has retrieved alien vessels and has been working to reverse engineer their technology. Not only that, he claims that the government has also recovered non-human “biologic” remains–that is to say, bodies or remnants of bodies of alien beings.

This sounds crazy on the face of it, but Grusch claims he has classified evidence that he will show only to authorized officials. He says that he has interviewed 40 reliable, high-clearance individuals who have first hand knowledge of the recovered UFOs and have presented evidence to the Inspector General of the intelligence community. Who happens to be Charles McCollough, now a private attorney, who is representing Grusch and was sitting behind him when he made these claims.

A bipartisan coalition of Congressmen and Senators (including Republican Marco Rubio [FL] and Democrat Chuck Schumer [NY]) are following up to confirm this testimony.

In the meantime, as Marik Von Rennenkampff says in his article for The Hill entitled A monumental UFO scandal is looming,

The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.

Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities, or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.

Either possibility would have profound implications for democracy, the role of government and perhaps also humanity’s place in the cosmos.

He observes that it is unlikely that an experienced official like Grusch would perjure himself since his claims are very specific and easily falsifiable. And that the 40 intelligence professionals he claims to have heard from would risk the serious penalties they would face for lying to the Inspector General.

This leaves two extraordinary possibilities — that Grusch is correct and elements within and outside of the U.S. government oversee a decades-old UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering effort – a profound, paradigm-shifting development — or, to quote Grusch, “multiple esteemed and credentialed current and former” government officials “with a long-standing track record of legitimacy and service to this country” are engaging in a brazen disinformation campaign.

So what are we to make of this?

When I was a boy, I had an older cousin, a teenager, who was way into UFOs. When we visited, he would regale us younger kids with eerie and highly-embellished accounts of mysterious sightings and alien abductions. I knew at the time that he was mainly just trying to scare us, but it got me fascinated.

As an English professor at Concordia-Wisconsin, I was teaching in an adult degree-completion program when one of my students, Donald R. Schmitt, came up to me and gave me a copy of the book that he had co-written: Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-Up. He certainly put together a compelling read. (I can’t take credit for that, since he wrote the book before he took my class.) That book, which first appeared in 2009, is in a new updated edition for the 75th anniversary last year of those mysterious goings-on, and Donald has since written a number of other books and has established himself as a major UFO investigator.

A few years ago, I was on an accreditation visit to a classical school in Roswell, New Mexico. After our duties were completed, we went on a UFO tour of Roswell to visit the sites. Our guide said that he had interviewed lots of locals who had seen the wreckage of the “flying saucer” that allegedly crashed there, including a nurse who had witnessed the autopsy conducted on the alien pilot.

As a teenager, I was walking home after closing at the Dairy Queen where I worked. It was about 1:00 a.m, and I cut through the town park. I looked up and saw three flickering orbs hovering low in the sky. I couldn’t what I was seeing. I shut my eyes, shook my head, and looked again, but they were still there. Finally, gazing more closely, I saw that they were the backs of the unlit lights of the baseball field reflecting the moon. But I had seen an Unidentified Flying Object. But after about a minute, I identified it, and it was a UFO no longer.

I suspect most, if not all, UFOs are of that nature. But still, there are puzzles that cannot easily be explained.

Do I believe that UFOs are alien spacecraft? NO! I just cannot bring myself to believe that. Despite all the evidence I have read about, I still don’t believe in them.

Now I know how atheists confronted with the best Christian apologetics feel. They cannot believe because their world view won’t let them. I guess I’m the same way. My world view could, I suppose, accept that there might be other inhabitable worlds–even Milton speculated that there might be–but right now, it doesn’t. Some Christians speculate that what people are seeing may be angels or demons. But my theological worldview sees such things as spiritual entities, not physical beings capable of being autopsied or leaving “biologic” remains.

My main interest in this sort of thing is simply that I like mysteries of all sorts and things that defy explanation.

The question remains what to make of this recent congressional testimony. As Senator Rubio says, “Either what [Grusch] is saying is partially true or entirely true, or we have some really smart, educated people with high clearances and very important positions in our government who are crazy and are leading us on a goose chase.”

Which do you think it is?

Photo: from video of U.S. aircraft tracking a UFO, via Defense Department

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