Is the Government Concealing UFO Craft and Dead Extraterrestrials?

This is an extraterrestrial creature captured as a prisoner of war.

BU’s Joshua Semeter on a former Pentagon employee’s eye-popping claims

The world of UFO watchers is abuzz over former intelligence officer David Grusch’s claim that he has been told of extraterrestrial craft and dead extraterrestrial pilots in the US government’s possession. Photo by ursatii/iStock

BU’s Joshua Semeter on a former Pentagon employee’s eye-popping claims

It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s head explode: an alleged deep-state cover-up of retrieved extraterrestrial craft—and corpses of their pilots. The allegation comes not from an outside crank, but a respected former intelligence officer who had occasion to work with the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), charged with identifying unidentified objects near military assets. And some of the usual media suspects (the Washington Post, Politico) passed on the initial story, which found a home instead on the science and defense site The Debrief. 

Yet Vox and a New York Times podcast have since covered the claims of whistleblower David Grusch, who admits he hasn’t seen the supposedly in-hand detritus of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the official rechristening of UFOs. Nor does he have any firsthand evidence of them; he says he is repeating what other, as-yet-unnamed, people told him. Still, he was willing to give about 11 hours of classified testimony to congressional investigators.

Joshua Semeter, a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering. Photo By Jackie Ricciardi

“Nobody at the level of a David Grusch, who has been to Congress, has ever talked about” the often-alleged ET cover-up by the feds, Leslie Kean, one of the Debrief cowriters, told Times podcaster Ezra Klein. Grusch’s defenders believe that his holding back more details is to be expected, Vox reports, as such information “would be classified, so it would be illegal to release specifics. They also argue that he handed over the classified details he knew to the inspector general and Congress, and point out it would be a crime to lie to either.” Skeptics like Klein question why the Pentagon would greenlight such an invaluable revelation—as it did with Grusch—if it were true. Klein also doubts the government’s competence at maintaining such a long-standing and vast cover-up.

Most UAP sightings have been found to be explicable by factors that are down-to-earth, as it were. But a tiny percentage remains unexplained. Is the truth really out there? BU Today asked Joshua Semeter (ENG’92,’97), a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering. He directs BU’s Center for Space Physics and is a member of a NASA team that is to report later this year on what we know, and don’t, about the evidence for UAPs.