Boring UFO Hearing Featured UFO Advocates Saying Nothing of Substance

​Although overshadowed by President-Elect Trump’s cabinet announcements today, the House of Representatives held a hearing on UFOs featuring witnesses who bring to ufology the same quality and qualification that Trump’s cabinet picks bring to the executive branch. The hearing had no dramatic revelations and no disclosure of aliens, but it did feature people claiming not to have firsthand knowledge, lots of secondhand stories, and dissembling about being unable to speak publicly about secret things. A new “whistleblower” document about the so-called Immaculate Constellation program was revealed, but it was even less impressive than David Grusch’s testimony last year.

From left: Gallaudet, Elizondo, Shellenberger, and Gold swear to tell the truth, which is why they said nothing substantive.

​Speaking to a mostly empty committee room were some of the usual suspects: The first was Tim Gallaudet, the former Navy Admiral and NOAA administrator who believes he is haunted by evil spirits and who put his daughter on cable TV to claim she can speak to the dead. Gallaudet admits to having no direct experience with UFO sightings but claims to have been disturbed by emails about it. At one point in his ridiculous testimony, Gallaudet bitterly complained that AARO had asked him to consider alternative explanation for UFOs beyond interdimensional space monsters. That, of course, was proof of a cover-up since prosaic explanations, in his paranormal mindset, are ipso facto untrue.
 
The second was Lue Elizondo, who claims to have psychic powers and to be able to attack people as an astral projection. Elizondo recently passed off a reflection of a ceiling light fixture as a UFO mothership, and today he claimed that he couldn’t say anything important in open session and had signed a document preventing him from talking about the alleged crash retrievals he wrote about in his book. Elizondo did not repeat the many claims in his book under oath, even when asked about the same material. Elizondo dodged specific questions about aliens, demurring from stating directly that the U.S. possesses alien bodies.

Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO): Have we communicated with aliens?

Luis Elizondo: Yes, but only like how pilots communicate with other pilots by flying near them.

​In other words, no.

Mike Gold used to work with Robert Bigelow and offered nothing useful other than a pitch for more funding for NASA, where he consults.
 
Mike Shellenberger is a journalist whose paywalled UFO coverage demonstrates precious little critical analysis. He’s made bold claims about aliens that he has consistently failed to back up with evidence.  His whistleblower document was singularly unimpressive. His schtick was to demand an end to government secrecy, though he seemed oblivious to questions of whether the public (and our enemies) should be able to know about, for example, secret government technology. Is anything rightly classified? Not for Shellenberger.
 
Even taken at face value, his new whistleblower document, grandly titled the “Immaculate Constellation Document,” is only interesting for bureaucratic reasons. It is a secondhand account of an anonymous source who claimed to have seen still other documents. According to the document, the program was allegedly established in 2018, after the inaccurate New York Times 2017 UFO story, so it proves nothing about any historical effort to study UFOs or communicate with aliens. It supposedly collected records similar to what AARO also gathered and therefore is of little consequence since it did not have physical alien evidence. The whistleblower even misinterprets known paranormal research but claiming that prior programs, like the remote viewing program Project Stargate (which Elizondo and Hal Puthoff were part of and Chris Mellon oversaw in its final phase), and intelligence community records of Soviet and Chinese paranormal research, were related to an ongoing belief in a paranormal reality of which aliens are a part.
 
Those records are public and make very clear their purpose, which wasn’t about proving aliens real but was part of a bonkers midcentury New Age exploration of the paranormal as a weapon in the Cold War, a practice influenced by science fiction on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and one that failed on both sides.