Reading Entrails and the UFO Whistleblower [Trenchant Edges]
Estimated reading time: 22 minutes, 41 seconds. Contains 4539 words
Welcome back to what’s So close to an “On Time” post. I’m guessing this will go out on Friday. Which is a day late, but that’s good enough for government work.
[Editors note: lol]
I’m your host Stephen and this is the Trenchant Edges. A newsletter about weird culture, popular delusions, and squeezing blood from stones.
Considering weird ideas is a very healthy and good thing to do. You can learn a lot, even if it’s not about what the idea claims to explain.
Sortilege is the casting of lots for use in divination, which is a way of seeking knowledge through nonordinary means. Basically, you do something that provides a lot of informational noise and then tell stories about what the patterns in it mean.
Setting aside the obvious whinging about this being superstition or a kind of practical apophenia (seeing patterns in places where there aren’t any), I think there’s a lot you can learn from how this works.
It’s a kind of story-making without an object. You project ideas onto abstractions. Take otherwise meaningless things and give them significance. If you aim it at someone else, it’s called “Cold reading” and it’s a handy skill for con artists and cops alike.
Pure cognition uninhibited by little things like reality.
There are countless ways to do it. From rolling dice, playing cards, yarrow stalks, coins, watching the movement of birds, tea leaves, picking random words from a book, and of course reading entrails of some dead animal.
This is the metaphor I want in our minds today.
Not just because it’s evocative of the failures of meaning-making, but because something has to die to do it. And those are the stakes we’re allegedly playing with here.
Earlier this week we talked about UFO Whistleblower David Grusch, his background in Air Force Intelligence and researching Special Access Projects (SAPs) and the bulk of the claims he makes about the secret world hidden from us by parts of the government.
This is very much a part 2 to that.
We left off with kind of a joke about some spies trying to do a comic book plot here using UFOs as a kind of unifying force.
I say kind of because we really don’t know anyone’s motivations in this and the world is often very silly.
The fundamental fact right now is all we have is his word that the allegedly 40 witnesses he talked with were honest and accurate about their claims, which means we can’t really say whether he’s right or not.
Which means we limited options to evaluate what he’s saying. Let’s start with the obvious issues:
Credibility Is Bullshit
Aristotle wrote one of the most practical guides on understanding and deploying effective arguments when he literally wrote the book on rhetoric.
He separated arguments into 3 parts: Logos/Logic, Pathos/Emotion, and Ethos/or character and standing.
Logos is the intellectual content and logical structure of your argument. If your conclusions follow from your premises if you’ve avoided logical fallacies, if you’re using data well. All that stuff.
Pathos/Emotion is about the heart of your argument, how it makes you feel, and how it makes your audience feel. Why should anyone care? What’s the fucking point?
Ethos
Aristotle reckoned that you wanted things about even between them. All logic and no pathos or ethos and nobody cares about the argument and probably resent you for making it. All pathos might be very engaging to listen to but they don’t say anything. It’s all noise if fun. And all Ethos is pretty much just bragging, so you’re a bore as well as saying nothing.
Think your cliched academic presenting tables of data for the first, President Obama for the second, and President Trump for the third.
Ethos is important and arguably has the most leverage over the other two, but it’s really only about proving you have grounds to speak with authority about whatever you’re speaking about.
We use credibility in media literacy to describe ethos today more or less. But the notion has some pretty, uh, obnoxious biases.
Now, I’m not a credible person. Hell, my official photo for this project is a literal tin foil face mask (A joke nobody but me seems to find hilarious).
So maybe I lack ethos when I say that credibility in media is kind of nonsense. It’s some made-up etiquette shit that media gatekeepers use to keep the weirdos, lower classes, and advertiser-unfriendly people from getting attention.
It’s just a vibe people give off and you can easily game it. Talk a certain way, act a certain way. I can give you a dozen guides on how to do it.
Credibility is a kind of shortcut for trustworthiness and it’s a bad shortcut.
Here are some of the ways it skews things in the US:
White people are more credible than other races.
Men are typically more credible than women.
Highly educated people are more credible than less educated people
Able-bodied people are more credible than disabled people
Official sources are more credible than unofficial ones
People with institutions backing them are more credible than independent people
There are many more, of course.
This isn’t just because of gatekeeping and corporate media ownership, it’s also because TV cameras distort their subjects. Partially by removing all information by what’s in the frame, partially by only being a limited amount of time, as well as how a shot is framed you get a skewed impression of what the camera is showing you.
An old but good example of this is the 2004 election Howard Dean scream. Dean was the Democratic front-runner and got ratfucked when he was too enthusiastic to be considered sane. The media reaction to it is wild and telling. Screaming, even weird screaming, is a pretty normal behavior when you’re on stage at an exciting event.
Granted, it’s kinda of a weird scream. But it’s like… not that weird. But it destroyed Dean’s campaign. That moment destroyed his credibility.
So it’s no surprise lots of people resent credibility and aiming yourself against it can be a powerful way to build an audience. It worked for Donald Trump, it worked for Alex Jones, and it’s a big part of my brand as well.
It’s an easy enemy to pick because “officials” have to own every bad decision or evil thing an institution has done and no amount of credibility can change that.
Like I said: It’s a vibe.
Useful for quickly establishing trust, but vibes don’t give you hard information about the world.
What does this have to do with UFOs or David Grusch?
Well, UFO news coverage has some cliches that have been used to spin a certain narrative, namely that only unsophisticated fools who live in the back hills see UFOs and we should all kinda laugh at how silly they are.
I HATE that shit.
Rural people aren’t stupid.
Now, there are some qualifiers here that I do think put regular people, educated or not, at a disadvantage for UFOs. The very fact of national security as a practice means that civilians simply do not know about many things the military is doing. What technologies it has and what they might look like on a dark night.
Many UFOlogists implicitly argue this is why military personnel are more credible than some random people from the sticks.
But the truth is very different, and you can ask Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner how breaking secrecy even when you have a good reason to work out. If military and intelligence people are going to lie, what they know is kind of irrelevant.
What matters is what they say. And they’re literally required by law and the oath they swear in service to lie about military secrets.
It’s right in the nature of keeping secrets and what it means to be cleared for confidential information.
What is counterintelligence?
We have to take another brief digression here because I think most people aren’t really aware of the scope of it.
If you ask the FBI, they’ll tell you that counterintelligence is about defense. From their website:
“The goals of the FBI’s counterintelligence work are to:
Protect the secrets of the U.S. Intelligence Community
Protect the nation’s critical assets, like our advanced technologies and sensitive information in the defense, intelligence, economic, financial, public health, and science and technology sectors
Counter the activities of foreign spies
Keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into the wrong hands”
And this isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.
Counterintelligence is a major part of a state’s immune system. It’s about using the tools of spying (tradecraft) to track, identify, disrupt, and neutralize threats to the state and its interests in and out of its borders.
I bring up the FBI because their fundamental role is not law enforcement, that’s more of a side gig, but counterintelligence. And this has been true since J. Edgar Hoover pitched in with the Palmer raids back in 1919.
We’re not going to dive deep into the history of the Bureau here because I could probably spend 10,000 or 20,000 words on that just from memory. The Bureau pioneered all manner of things including copaganda, selling themselves as supercops capable of catching the cleverest bad guy.
They had to do that, you see, because a lot of people in the 1930s and 40s were calling them what they were: An American Gestapo.
Much of their work was intensely political and done through “Black Bag Jobs”, IE breaking and entering to gain dirt on a subject or their activities.
There’s a lot I’m going to have to skip here but let’s hit some highlights: Spying on the OSS during WW2, on politicians who might oppose the FBI, collecting blackmail on everyone in Washington DC and elsewhere, telling Martin Luther King Jr to kill himself, infiltrating Black radical groups such as the Black Panthers and helping kill their leaders like Fred Hampton, infiltrating white supremacist organizations like the KKK and occasionally arresting someone, the whole Waco Texas fiasco with the Branch Davidians, radicalizing and framing Muslims into terrorism, and most recently having infiltrated most of the big white supremacist groups around Jan 6th.
Whew.
Again, I’ve glossed over a lot of details. The point is that these are people who lie, steal, and kill to serve state interests.
There have been attempts to reform the FBI since its earliest days in 1909, but the fact is its purpose and the freedom to do crime that comes with it lends itself to abuses of power.
Successful Counterintelligence combined with a few rounds of purging radicals in politics are a big part of why there’s no left wing in this country.
In general, the state feels considerably more threat from left-wing groups than right ones, more threat from Black or Indigenous groups than White ones. Which is why they tend to end with more leaders murdered than arrested.
(While we’re here, free Leonard Peltier)
The point of all this is that the intelligence community’s job is to fuck up people who are inconvenient for the state.
See, a lot of the people who the state has gone after haven’t been threats of any kind, but people whose political activity various people within the state find obnoxious or are concerned it might cut into their profits.
This seems insane but I assure you there are literal decades of reports and documents from all over the IC comparing animal rights activists and environmental activists to Al Qaeda.
It’s such obvious bullshit, but that’s government work for you.
Now, there’s one more thing that’s relevant here.
And that’s the difference between Humint and Sigint.
Translated out of Wonkspeak, they stand for Human Intelligence and Signals intelligence. Or, “people tell us stuff” and “nerd shit.”
David Grusch is a nerd. His entire background as we discussed last time is Signals Intelligence. Except maybe whatever he was doing in Afghanistan, it’s always hard to be sure.
Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
While I like David Fravor and don’t find Ryan Graves objectionable, they both fit neatly in my early claim about what was going on with all this UFO interest: Hitting Congress up for money.
The point of their testimony was that we need to destigmatize reporting and create a central repository to allow for accurate data collection and sharing between intelligence, defense, and commercial aviation.
Put another way: We want Congress to cut a check.
This is in opposition to Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, who stated in his testimony to Congress that there has been no credible evidence of alien craft.
He’s also stated a goal for AARO to dissolve itself: To, uh, resolve all the anomalies you might say.
So, not at all what Graves and Fravor are asking for.
When asked about Kirkpatrick’s claim, Grusch said in his testimony that he’d reached out but that Kirkpatrick hadn’t followed up.
Which leaves how much follow-up he did rather ambiguous. Like, if I was trying to tell someone I had information critical to their job that’s as important as Grusch thinks I might try a little harder to get their attention.
Maybe even a second phone call.
(That’s an easter egg for the poor people who have tried to get me on the phone, quite a task)
So, what are we seeing here?
We’ve got two intelligence insiders, Kirkpatrick has a Ph.D. in physics and has worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency since 2012, saying opposing things.
Now when you have a contradiction like this you have a few options:
Misunderstanding
One party is lying
Both parties are lying
I’d like to suggest the last one as the most likely.
That’s our baseline.
So, do we have a conflict within the deep state?
Like, Grusch doesn’t represent himself: He’s the guy taking point for allegedly 40 people who allege direct experience with UFOs, recovered nonhuman technology, and actual living things.
But what about Kirkpatrick? Is he a repeat of ghosts of UFO study committees past? Or does he simply have a higher bar for evidence?
I don’t really know for sure. My sense is he shares my bemusement with most UFO evidence. Does that mean his intentions are good? Probably not.
I do think Kirkpatrick represents if not literally, the impulse that pushed UFO debunkers: There are enough UFO hoaxers and people making claims they have no way to verify what they’re saying that some debunking is warranted.
But also that’s exactly what the government would do and has done to discredit the concept of UFOs.
In the end, I think there’s not enough information to make a real decision about what happened there.
Nature of the beast.
But that brings us back to the core issue in today’s newsletter: Where I seem to be wrong about David Grusch’s angle.
A couple years ago I claimed that ODNI UFO report made the most sense in the context of hitting Congress up for money.
Grusch’s testimony breaks from that in key places.
First, he’s alleging a widescale conspiracy to mislead both elected officials and the American people about the nature of UFOs.
Regardless of their existence, that’s…. actually a real thing.
An easy proof of that comes from Bill Clinton who claims to have repeatedly tried to find out about UFOs as president. During his presidency, he claimed to have looked and been told he didn’t need to know, but I can’t find that quote quickly enough.
So here’s him last year claiming to have looked for what the government knew and found nothing.
With how frustrated UFO people can get about official denials, it’s worth noting that his first comment to Reggie’s ask is saying, “That’s a legitimate question.” And then he tries to answer it.
Anyway, there’s that, there’s the Paul Bennewitz affair which we’re going to get real into. *real* into. But I digress.
Second, and this is the bigger thing, Grusch talks about how the DoD and its contractors steal public money for black-budget projects.
That is, for projects whose budgets aren’t reported to Congress and run in secret.
There’s an old joke about how the government would spend $10,000 for a toilet seat or $5,000 for a hammer.
The usual story around those is simply government waste and corruption.
And no doubt there’s plenty of both. But it’s also how to pad your budget for arming secret wars against communism that perhaps Congress might not want to pay for.
See also: CIA Heroin Smuggling, but that’s a different story.
Anyway, this white-collar crime angle didn’t come up just once, but over and over again.
It didn’t take up a lot of time but it was definitely impressed as a point.
Now, if this was all mainly a plot to secure funding there are two things you probably wouldn’t want to do: 1. Talk about how your institutions have lied and occasionally killed to protect these secrets and 2. Talk about how you’ve been stealing from the public and Congress.
Like, if I slap you in the face and then say I’m putting together a community project to stop people from getting randomly slapped, you’d think I was extorting you.
You’d be right.
That’s called a protection racket. And they’re a fundamental building block of nation-states. You pick a gang and they’re the official gang.
So, how can I square this circle?
Grusch’s claims are extreme. Both the Government and UFOs have injured and killed people. The circumstances of which are still secret.
What’s the play here?
Well, perhaps Grusch himself might hold the key to finding out.
He’s repeatedly mentioned that he started off skeptical. that he thought the people who came to him might be trying to mislead him but that over years of investigating, he came to believe it was all true.
And I don’t doubt that he found much that was true in his search.
As I said: Even if there are no aliens and all UFOs are simply some mix of human delusion, natural phenomenon, and advanced human technology, the government certainly has spent a lot of time lying about them and spent a lot of money doing it.
I’m left wondering how skeptical he was.
Maybe this isn’t obvious to everyone, but pretending to be skeptical when you’re not is kind of a classic persuasion technique. You hold your intellect up and then lead your audience on an emotional journey from “that’s bullshit” to “I believe.”
He doesn’t seem to be doing that, though, as it’s more of an incidental detail. And because the Congress people there were mostly rubes, nobody thought to ask about his process to verify shit.
Like, investigation can mean a lot of things. He’s trying to portray himself as being really diligent and careful and the nuts and bolts of that could tell us a lot without revealing anything classified.
He appears to believe he knows exactly where crashed UFOs and nonhuman “biologics” are being stored, but hasn’t gone and seen them.
There’s a complex risk calculation I’m not willing to second guess here. Like, if you found so much evidence of wrongdoing and so much evidence at bad things happening to people who might not keep the secret you probably also are going to have a pretty clear idea what trying to see things yourself might get you.
Maybe there’s an alternative play: Be some politician who’s talked about UFOs deep throat and worked out a surprise fact-finding trip.
But that’s high-risk stuff and Grusch seems like a pretty by-the-book fella.
We’re over 3,000 words so let’s address a couple of elephants in the room quickly and close up today.
Abandon All Closure, Ye Who Enter Here
My working model for this whole situation is we’ll probably never learn anything definitive about any of this.
Anyone who wanted to make UFO stuff public knowledge could do so with a bit of creativity and grit. I’m not really sold by this very official attempt at UFO crime reform.
Will we learn anything Grusch has evidence-wise? Maybe not. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of his witnesses change their stories and the places he was told there were bodies or wreckage turn out to be, I don’t know, horse glue factories or whatever.
Our brains don’t like this sort of thing of course. But there it is.
If you want to know you have to be willing to stand in the uncomfortable ambiguity of honest ignorance until the facts make themselves clear.
And that includes considering some delicate subject matter.
In his Newsnation interview, at 34:20, Grusch is asked by Ross Coulthart if he has any kind of mental illness. Then, “Have you ever had a psychosis, a delusion?” and finally, “Is there anything in your medical history that might be capable of being interpreted as a reason why you might be confabulating or making things up?"
He says no definitively to each of them.
The Intercept later uncovered evidence that Grusch had two inpatient stays in psychiatric care. Through Ross Coulthart he’d confirm that he had treatment for PTSD-related episodes in 2014 and 2018.
He also has made some accusations that this history has been leaked by the intelligence community to discredit him.
And under most circumstances, it’s entirely understandable why he might not want to mention a history of psychiatric care in this context.
When I first noticed this question in the interview I was kind of surprised. Because he clearly doesn’t bring it up in the released interview and appears to categorically deny it.
Which would be a lie.
And his statements rub me the wrong way. Like, I don’t doubt the mental health of vets is an issue dear to him. But it seems a bit weird to only be bringing it up now and not when asked point-blank about it.
Maybe Newsnation just cut some footage mentioning it and he simply never got media training so he’s handling the accusation badly. I don’t really know.
On one hand, this is a clear example of possible deception. On the other, it’s an understandable choice even if it’s a bad one. How hard would it have been to say, “I had some struggles with PTSD after returning from my deployment in Afghanistan but I was never delusional, and that has no bearing here.”
Ultimately, I think I’m going to discount this either way because it’s a very human error to make and I certainly have no rocks to throw from my glass house mental health-wise.
I argued with myself about bringing it up more at all but decided that I probably should and trust you to make up your own mind.
So, where does that leave us?
Well, we still don’t know if aliens are real and probably won’t any time soon.
Sucks, I guess.
I ended the last issue with a silly accusation to what’s “really” going on here and I want to follow that up with my best guess for the same.
Everything about David Grusch screams sincerity to me. Almost everything he says is internally consistent, his choices make logical and emotional sense to me, and while I think his approach is foolish, it’s the kind of choice someone who gets a master’s degree in Intelligence Studies might do.
There are two failure points between that statement and me saying Extraterrestrials are real.
He could simply be a very convincing liar. It’s the nature of liars to feel like they’re not lying. And he’s certainly been in the right milieu to get expert training on the subject. Has he? There’s no real way to know is there?
He could simply have been lied to. He has no direct knowledge of anything he claims beyond the fraud and coverup.
It’s a classic paranoid move to go, “HE’S TOO CREDIBLE!” but that’s kind of how I feel. Not really. But kind of.
You figure it’d be easy enough to have a psych program on the guy after a decade in service so maybe someone just figured out what to say to seem credible to him.
But again, that’s just speculation.
Here’s some more: Imagine you’re in charge of the UFO coverup and you know that the old guard is passing more and more into retirement. You know there are more people with power who want to know the secrets you hide, whatever they are.
And you know that it’s going to be an absolute PR nightmare.
The Chuch committees in the 70s were pretty bad, but most of those got excused for various reasons. This will include lying to every US president since it started and stealing huge piles of money from Congress to do it.
So, you have two choices basically: you can try to keep the secrets as long as possible or you can try what’s called a limited hangout.
A limited hangout is an intelligence operation to release some incriminating stuff and claim the problem is solved. It’s very common. Think some mob guy getting pinched while the organization and boss are untouched. Doesn’t really matter, does it?
How might you do that? Because every secret you’ve got connects to a bunch of others. So how do you make that work?
One way you might is by finding some really earnest guy and telling them to look where they’d find some of your crimes and then drip-feed them more information nudging them in the direction you want to go.
Maybe you fabricate stuff, maybe you don’t.
In either case, you push that person towards becoming a whistleblower.
Maybe you have, to pick an example at random, you have a former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community be his lawyer.
Maybe you set him up so that he has airtight credentials so he’ll break through the noise of UFO BS online.
Set him up with Congress.
Let him tell whatever story he likes, after all, you set much of the terms of his investigation.
Let him get the word out. Get everyone really interested in crashed UFOs and ET bodies.
Then you pull the rug away from him.
Not entirely, his claims are kinda true but don’t fully check out.
When Congress asks his witnesses in closed session, they say they only told him part of the story.
The details are wrong, but the broad strokes are right. Maybe some of the reports he saw were part of a simulation or exercise. Whatever.
The point is when verification needs to happen, it’s not there.
Then even if all the white-collar stuff proves accurate, the story becomes UFO Whistleblower Lied.
Grusch gets hosed by the press, loses all credibility, and everyone forgets the big pile of money and crime he was pointing to because he promised aliens.
The whole thing becomes like the trillions of dollars the Pentagon can’t account for: A bit of trivia for wannabe wonks like me.
Note how it doesn’t even matter if UFOs exist or not here.
The move works just as well either way.
All it takes is 40 people sworn to secrecy to uphold that oath and one guy to be unable to tell he’s being played.
Or maybe he’s in on it, though that would seem to be a bad move.
More risk of exposure.
Better to load someone up with convincing evidence and let them shoot themselves in the foot.
Wrapping Up (I'm editing this with my phone and can't edit formatting lol)
So if that happens, maybe you'll know why.
Will it? Hard to say.
There's so much against UFOs being ETs it imo it's tricky to say what's going on.
Easy to just assume bullshit until proven otherwise.
Can't fault anyone for disbelieving at this point.
Anyway, we're not out of this shit yet.
I'm gonna have a couple fun shorter ideas before going to our next big topic: we're going to actually do the Paul Bennewitz/ Richard Doty shit from the 80s.
It leads so much stuff we've touched on with aliens. And it's crazier than most of weird ideas we've talked about.
But I've got to read like 4 books to do it right.
It's right in the intersection between fringe culture and counterintelligence.
See you soon.
Thanks for this! I have really enjoyed all your dives into the contemporary UFO topics.