​Just days after Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) proudly announced that she had secured full funding for the Pentagon’s UFO office and was working on scheduling a hearing at which UFO whistleblower David Grusch would testify, Grusch spoke to a Dutch magazine in which he made additional bizarre claims beyond those he already offered.

​Only weeks after so-called UFO whistleblower David Grusch alleged that interdimensional alien beings crashed dozens of flying saucers that the United States has collected since 1944 while hiding a secret treaty between humanity and space aliens from Congress, the United States Senate’s Intelligence Committee passed unanimously legislative language sponsored by senatorial UFO hunter Kirsten Gillibrand and others required all Federal agencies and any contractors who obtained materials from Federal agencies to provide access to all of their space alien artifacts. 

​Ascension
Nicolas Binge | Riverhead | 2023 | 352 pages | ISBN: 9780593539583 | $27

​British novelist Nicholas Binge’s first American release, Ascension, garnered a large number of reviews because of its irresistible hook: In 1991, a mountain taller than Everest suddenly appears in the Pacific and a mysterious organization assembles a crack team of explorers to uncover a cosmic secret lurking upon its icy summit. Told in flashback as a series of increasingly bizarre letters from a possibly unreliable narrator, Ascension had all the elements to be an exciting, mind-blowing exploration of the uncanny and the unknown. However, the book ultimately proves itself to be a derivative remix of familiar tropes, married to paper-thin characters that alternate between unpleasant and unbelievable. When one character triumphantly notes that no one had noticed his frequent absences, I shrugged because the writing paid so little attention to the characters none of them was noteworthy a absence.
 
The frame story involves the discovery that scientist Harold Tunmore is not dead, as his brother had presumed, but has spent three decades locked in a mental hospital. When the brothers reunite, Tunmore promptly dies, leaving behind a series of letters written in the 1990s. The letters form the bulk of the novel, outlining how Tunmore came to be recruited to explore the new mountain alongside a team of forgettable, mostly military, associates, including his ex-wife. As the story progresses, tentacled Lovecraftian monsters pick off the crew one by one as a cosmic mystery involving the mystery of life unfolds and Tunmore reckons with the poor decisions he made in the run-up to and aftermath of the death of his adopted son years earlier and the collapse of his marriage. The story becomes, then, an effort to achieve emotional closure in the face of transmundane horror, paralleling the life of a family and fate of humanity—and it is no spoiler to recall that in the prologue set after these events, Tunmore’s mind is already shattered. The symbolism in the novel is, let’s say, not subtle.
 
A fair warning: The rest of this review will contain spoilers. If you plan to read Ascension, save the rest of this discussion until you’ve finished the novel.

So-called UFO whistleblower ​David Grusch appeared on NewsNation last night for an hour-long pre-taped interview with Ross Coulthart, excerpts of which had appeared on the network last week. The results were about what one might have expected even before he spoke: He had no direct evidence of space aliens and could offer no proof of his claims. Everything he alleged was either told to him by unnamed people or was the result of his own speculation, with “documents” that appeared to be hoaxes from UFO lore. And his claims were a rehash of Eric W. Davis’s alleged notes on his meeting with Admiral Wilson in 2002, a regular bit of UFO lore. (Davis says he used to work with Grusch.) Grusch alleged that the U.S. has had captured UFOs since 1944, when the military seized one from Mussolini, with allegations that the Vatican was involved in some sort of conspiracy. 

The lawyers representing alleged UFO "whistleblower" David Grusch abruptly parted ways with him yesterday, saying their representation of him had concluded. In a statement, two attorneys from Compass Rose claimed that they represented him only in regard to his complaint to the Intelligence Community Inspector General that he had been retaliated against for attempting to expose information withheld from Congress. The lawyers specifically refused to endorse Grusch's claims about space aliens and asked that the media "correct" misinformation about their involvement with his extraterrestrial claims. 

According to an article in The Guardian, the House Oversight Committee is in the early stages of planning a hearing into David Grusch's claim to have heard from other people in the intelligence community that the U.S. has captured alien spaceships. According to the newspaper, Rep. Tim Burchett, the far-right election denier who appeared on Ancient Aliens to claim that the Bible is full of flying saucers, will lead the House investigation into crashed UFOs ahead of the hearing, whose date will be set in a few weeks' time. “Congressman Burchett’s office is working through logistics, including a witness list of the most credible witnesses and sources who would be able to speak openly at an unclassified hearing,” a spokesperson said.

​NewsNation reported last night that the House Oversight Committee plans to investigate David Grusch’s claim that other people told him that the United States has both crashed flying saucers and dead aliens. Legislators said they had no knowledge of the claim and did not read the article or Grusch’s testimony to House lawyers, but they wanted to investigate anyway, based on what they heard on TV. NewsNation claimed this would involved a “hearing,” but their reporter appeared to have misunderstood what “looking into” and “investigating” means.

​This morning Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean published a story in the Debrief reporting on claims made by a former liaison to the UAP Task Force alleging knowledge of a secret UFO crash retrieval program and the recovery of complete space alien vehicles. The report, however, raised several important questions about the quality of UFO information circulating in the Pentagon and of the information being provided to the United States Congress by advocates for UFO “disclosure.”

​On the same day that butt-probed alien abductee Whitley Strieber waded into the right-wing anti-trans campaign by opining that a woman is only “a person with 2 X chromosomes” and that “what people are and what we feel like are two different things,” Politico magazine gave fellow UFO advocate Chris Mellon prime real estate in Politico Magazine to insinuate, without evidence, that the United States has retrieved crashed alien spaceships, in an apparent effort to encourage additional funding for the many defense contractors vying for UFO investigation money—and his fellow ufologists who now work for them. That this piece ran only days after NASA reconfirmed that there is no known evidence of space aliens visiting earth or operating flying saucers is surely no coincidence. NASA’s briefing also declared Mellon’s analysis of the so-called “Go Fast” UFO video, which Mellon provided to the New York Times after Lue Elizondo took the video from the Pentagon without official permission, wrong. It was not traveling anomalously fast but was moving at the speed of the wind, like a balloon in the breeze.