What to Know About Next Week's Congressional UFO Hearings
It's happening! Allegedly! Next Wednesday, July 26.
I’m still not holding my breath — at least until Tuesday — but it looks like there really will be a Congressional hearing on UAP [or UFO] disclosure next week, on Wednesday, July 26.
I remain displeased that the loudest organizing voice here belongs to Tim Burchett, a conservative wackjob who strikes me as objectively stupid, but here we are. To make the whole effort bipartisan, Sen. Chuck Schumer has proposed a related bill which would require anyone who’s currently hoarding alien spacecraft and/or alien bodies to turn them over to the Senate, and would require the government to immediately declassify UFO-related records. (I’m embarrassed. I believe in UFOs, but something about these proceedings feels so dweebish. The vibe is high school student council trying to get the school to stop selling soda. If they had any real power, surely they’d use it for something better?)
Notably, reporter Matt Laslo said David Grusch will be testifying, presumably about his cuckoo remarks from last month. I am, of course, hoping to watch the whole hearing on CSPAN, but it’s unclear to me yet whether or not it will be public. I have not found Grusch a particularly compelling figure thus far, but am curious to see if that changes in a Congressional context (vs. off-brand media interview).
I haven’t seen any other whistleblowers/public officials identified as witnesses, but I get the feeling there will be others; the emerging narrative among believers is that UAP-specific whistleblower protections passed last year made it safe for people to speak out, which is why this is happening now. Or, as Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher put it, “All sorts of [UFO whistleblowers] are coming out of the woodwork.”
I hope this is true, and I hope they’re all there on Wednesday, and I hope they have a little group chat together on Signal called “Whistleblower Gang.” I also hope at least one of them is more convincing than David Grusch. I am not sure exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I hear it. (Gravitas, is maybe all it is.)
If Grusch IS transparently full of shit, and/or is caught lying to Congress, that might even be more exciting to me? As Sen. Marco Rubio has said of Grusch: “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.” (Emphasis mine, ha.)
In narrative terms, I am maybe more interested in a passionately deluded moron than a self-important but not-all-that-well-informed former bureaucrat. That’s the movie I would prefer to watch (or write), even if I want at least part of what Grusch said to be true. It’s just too anticlimactic, and unromantic, to go down like this — for such a monumental mystery to become unreadable jargon on the Congressional Committee Hearing Transcripts website. I am not hoping for Independence Day, but I am hoping for something closer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I don’t want everyone to see it because I don’t want everyone to believe (less fun, makes me feel less special), but I want to see it, with a small but varied group of others, and then I want us to have a group text, too.
See you all next Wednesday?
Odds & Ends
This woman divorced her ghost husband after just one year of marriage. (She implied he had an affair with Marilyn Monroe.)
Green meteor, or UFO? Either way, I am scared.
I just started reading Children of Time, and I REALLY like it so far. Good, classic, all-encompassing sci-fi.
Deadline predicts a boom in UFO cable series and streaming documentaries, to which I say: Yay!!!!!!
xo
Katie