Earlier this month, the Defense Department releaseda long-awaited reportdesigned to address renewed public interest in unidentified flying objects.
Grusch has appeared on countless talk shows to discuss his claims and appeared before Congress last summer.
Notably, the report denies that the government has ever encountered anything remotely resembling extraterrestrials.
But if the government isnt hiding aliens, then what, exactly, is it hiding?
This is the question that has haunted generations of truth-seekers.
you could understand its appeal.
The UFO phenomenon is inherently byzantine.
The true believers
One person who is a believer is longtime writer and journalist Leslie Kean.
Kean co-authored several influential news articles that brought David Gruschs claims into public view.
You get hookedthats what happened to me, she said.
I think that its possible that some of the sightings are definitely that, she concedes.
Unlike Kean, Pilkington has actually seen UFOs.
The sphere whizzed through the sky at unsettling speeds, then disappeared behind a grove of trees.
What in fucking hell was that?
Pilkingtons friend managed, as Mark struggled with the same question.
The friends never found out what the object was, and they never saw anything quite like it again.
For Pilkington, the bizarre experience would inspire a lifelong obsession with the UFO phenomenon.
He calls the bureaucratic officials tasked with carrying out this deception mirage men.
When it comes to Gruschs claims, Pilkington isnt impressed.
Its just trash, he tells me curtly.
Theres no revelations in anything that hes said.
Theres nothing that couldnt have come from watching crappy History Channel documentaries, he adds.
Radar systems are importantdefensive infrastructurefor governments, and are used by militaries across the globe.
One apparent example is NEMESIS, a U.S. Navy program that wasfirst publicly acknowledgedin 2019.
The theory that UFO sightings are actually evidence of advanced radar spoofing is not exactly a new one.
It would have been feasible even forty or fifty years ago.
Eventually,he served asthe Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
As such, youd think that Mellon would be the perfect person.
These things were hanging around in restricted airspace and these guys were seeing these things on a regular basis.
Mellon says he then decided to share the videos with the press.
This was not investigative journalism, Mellon tells me.
They ran the story, which appeared on December 16 of 2017 on the front page.
The truth is out therethats the problem
UFO sightings are still happeningpretty much all the time.
Undoubtedly another incident will happen soon.
The situation might be best encapsulated by a comment made by Christopher Mellon during my interview with him.
Mellon said that secretive government work has a way of changing the way you look at the world.
If you get deep in that world, you do see things differently afterward, he said.
Theres some truth to that, he says.
