In a planet increasingly fraught with uncertainty - will it survive global warming? - it feels like, instead of focusing on the nearest, a tendency is being strengthened to watch what is happening in the galaxy to unravel the existential dilemma of whether we are alone or accompanied in the universe.
The alien question has jumped to the front page. Until recently it was a matter of conspirators, who saw flying saucers in every corner, or B-movies, television productions with lizards disguised as humans or big Hollywood films, whether to explain the tragic Martian invasion of ' I ndependence Day (1996) or the earthly transit of the kind E.T . (1982), who is overcome by longing - "home" - to return to his family.
That things change was confirmed in the Congress of the United States, which on Wednesday transformed into unfathomable territory. Described as historic, an oversight subcommittee of the Lower House convened a hearing to investigate the matter of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – the official name for UFOs –, something that gained momentum from 2017, with statements of Navy fighter pilots about mysterious encounters with objects reaching impossible speeds. The aim of the session was to demand transparency from the government, which apparently hides dark secrets.
In the absence of screenwriters, who are still on strike, the Capitol session had a film story. David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who retired in 2023, confessed under oath that the US Executive has been keeping extraterrestrial vehicles since the 1930s – a bell-shaped one that recovered Mussolini – and even “non-human biological remains”, which presumably belonged to the pilots of these ships.
He has not personally certified any of this, but it was explained to him by service colleagues. Grusch opened the tap in June with an interview with NewsNation. Some left the Congress a little disappointed. Under oath, he was less forthcoming than in the media, refusing to provide details in a public hearing about classified matters that could lead to jail time, such as the names of the original sources or specifying whether colleagues were killed by the retaliation to silence them.
The Pentagon denied everything. They neither disposed in the past nor now treasure extraterrestrial material. The military leadership previously responded with a report in which it stated that UAPs could be many things (space junk, Chinese espionage artifacts, weather balloons). Although numerous cases could not be specified, they ruled out their alien origin.
This debate also intersects with an academic discussion on the same topic. A fireball from space passed through the Earth's atmosphere and crashed into the sea on January 8, 2014, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Its location, speed and brightness were recorded by US government sensors.
This data slept in a database with other similar phenomena. Avi Loev, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, led an expedition last month to the seafloor of the western Pacific and recovered remnants of that fireball. After studying it, he wrote that this was evidence of the 'existence of extraterrestrial life. Many colleagues had no objection to disqualify him. "People are fed up with Avi Loeb's wild claims," said Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, in the pages of The New York Times. Loev, a renowned cosmologist, has been captivated by the search for aliens since the appearance of a stellar object called Oumuamua in 2017. Scientists debated whether it was an asteroid or a comet from another solar system , Loev argued that it could be an artifact of intelligent life of galactic origin.
Against the academics, the aliens achieved the impossible in a society of confrontational politics. Republicans and Democrats tuned into the same wave.
Aliens matter.
