Who is reverse engineering whose crashed flying saucers?
A US Congressman fears US aerospace contractors may be unable to recognize each other's products as being of Earthly origin.
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Steven Greenstreet of the New York Post is one of the very few skeptical reporters who has consistently been doing excellent work revealing the BS and grift of the personalities driving the pop culture UFO phenomenon (follow him on Twitter). Recently he had a brief Q&A with Congressman Eric Burlison (R-MO), one of the congresspeople on Tim Burchett’s UFO caucus. In it, Burlison suggested something that hadn’t occurred to me before — that should a US contractor be found to be reverse engineering a crashed alien spaceship, it would more likely be another US contractor’s secret craft:
In discussing these objects, I said very clearly, I think that the most obvious explanation, the Ockham's razor to me, is that what we're seeing is experimental aircraft that are being done by more likely the United States military industrial complex.
That's why I asked this question in the hearing And why I continue to ask this question. I can conceive of a scenario where one military project is working on one particular type of experiment and it crashes. And they're working with one contractor. And then another agency of the military is working with a different contractor. And then you can keep going and keep going. And now, if something crashes, they're all kind of wondering what are these objects. And so what concerns me, in my view, is a scenario where we're paying our military contractors to reverse engineer each other's programs. And so that is probably a very likely scenario.
Now, to be clear, he’s speaking of a hypothetical. There is no evidence any UFOs have ever crashed. There is no evidence any US aerospace contractor has retrieved any such debris or has been reverse engineering anything that crashed. But if they were, then he thinks such a UFO would most likely be a secret craft built by a different US aerospace contractor, and that they just didn’t recognize as Earth technology.
With respect to the Congressman, because “UFOs are probably secret military aircraft” is a very common perspective, here’s why the suggestion is absolutely absurd.