Substance-Free UFO News Conference Recycles Old Claims, Adds "Sentient Plasma"

​A much-hyped news conference at the foot of the Capitol meant to call attention to lawmakers’ UFO Disclosure demands offered no new evidence, no compelling witnesses, and the laugh-inducing sight of self-proclaimed “whistleblower” David Grusch asserting that the U.S. government knows about multiple species of space alien, one of which is sentient goo. 

​​The 35-minute gathering, sponsored by the House Oversight Committee’s Taskforce on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, featured Grusch, UFO advocate and journalist Leslie Kean, and several members of Congress, including Republicans Anna Paulina Luna, Eric Burlison, and Tim Burchett, along with one Democrat, Jared Moskowitz.

​The majority of the news conference was devoted to complaints that the Trump Administration and the Department of Defense have not released enough records. Lawmakers called on Trump to grant immunity from the Espionage Act to anyone who can provide information on the location of an alien or its ship, presumably due to unproved allegations that such information is classified.
 
The members of Congress demanded the U.S. government release files related to the 1996 Varginha UFO sighting in Brazil, a country which is not the United States, despite the convincing evidence presented on Brazilian television earlier this year that the alleged alien encounter was a hoax. The FBI investigated at some point, and Congress reviewed the files. A former Brazilian official who has no power to declassify anything allegedly said that Brazil would not release its Varginha files until the U.S. did. (Why?) Believers allege that the Varginha alien traveled to the U.S. after visiting Brazil, but none of the lawmakers made any move to subpoena testimony from Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time and would have overseen the alien’s transportation.
 
In addition to the de rigueur praise from several GOP representatives of Donald Trump as the greatest human alive (“a leader that the American people can trust to challenge institutions that have grown far too comfortable operating without accountability”), the mostly Republican lawmakers added, weirdly, that the real purpose of demanding to see the aliens was to investigate how the Pentagon spends money and whether it is meeting its obligations to report to Congress.
 
Kean advocated for the “public release of any evidence concerning recovered advanced nonhuman biological entities.” As a journalist, she ought not to be standing with lawmakers to advocate for specific government policies, and it will be interesting to see how quickly The New York Times violates its own policies on political advocacy to have her write another UFO feature. (Kean previously advocated for UFO disclosure actions as part of a lobbying organization with political operative John Podesta in the early 2000s before pretending to have always been a disinterested journalist when writing her UFO book and reporting for the Times.)
 
Grusch closed the show with an impassioned call for an end to UFO secrecy and government conspiracies. He claimed that Donald Trump and his team are being blocked and lied to by “high-ego, politically appointed actors,” so Trump is blameless in the conspiracy. He blew more smoke up Trump’s ass in begging Trump to disclose the truth about aliens, finishing with “God Bless America!”
 
Then the choreographed presentation of supposedly serious claims about UFOs and national security all fell apart when right-wing network Real America’s Voice got the first question and asked Grusch how many types of aliens there are on Earth.
 
“I certainly don’t have the compendium,” Grusch said. “It’s a continuum from a corporeal bipedal type life to, you know, what I would consider is like sentient plasma life, but there are several that the US government is aware of.” (He might have said sentient plasmoid instead of plasma; it was a bit difficult for me to make out the word.)
 
There isn’t really any coming back from that, and when the questions devolved into speakers recommending the public watch UFO documentaries to learn the “truth,” that pretty much said it all.
 
Unfortunately, the sentient plasma declined to attend the news conference, citing a prior engagement.