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Every time the government has one of these UFO hearings, I get gloated at on Twitter by true believers, who honestly seem to think that the hearing will include Full Disclosure, and they’ll be proven right in their conviction that the government maintains relations with aliens, and I’ll be proven wrong in my skepticism. And every time the hearing actually happens, nothing at all is revealed.
And that’s exactly what happened at the July 26, 2023 hearing. Three witnesses told us the same stories they’ve been telling us: former pilots Ryan Graves and David Fravor, the presumed providers of the Tic Tac, GOFAST, and Gimbal videos; and relative newcomer David Grusch, who repeated again that his friend once told him he’s certain the government has alien bodies, alien flying saucers, and even a treaty with aliens. Nothing new was presented we haven’t heard a thousand times before.
And that’s the concerning thing. Rep. Tim Burchett was the driving force behind this hearing, telling us in numerous interviews before the hearing that his three witnesses were going to really blow the roof off of this whole UFO thing with their explosive revelations. Was Burchett honestly unaware that these men have been telling these stories in public for many years? Did he really think he had something new?
I believe he did think that. At one point during the hearing, Burchett said that he learned about all this through Leslie Kean and George Knapp, both of whom have been central figures in the Alien Visitation community for many decades. They are lifelong UFO authors and promoters. Kean, Knapp, Graves and Fravor have all been staples in the UFO conference community for a long time. If Burchett is going to go way out on a limb to hold a congressional UFO hearing, wouldn’t you think he’d at least ask a staff member to look into these people? They may be darlings of the UFO community, but the UFO skeptics and the scientific community either never gave them any attention, or dropped them years ago — and with very good reason.
Namely, that they make ridiculous claims and have no evidence at all. Fravor and Graves have presented their videos as evidence, but they have always grossly misinterpreted what’s shown in those videos. The Tic Tac video shows an object appear to accelerate at incredible G-forces because the camera changed zoom levels; the GOFAST video shows something stationary while an optical illusion fools the pilots into thinking it’s supersonic; and the Gimbal video shows the normal operation of the FLIR camera’s gimbal. This information has been widely available on the Internet for years, and Burchett seemingly managed to miss it.
And the world was subjected to yet another tedious retelling in a UFO hearing, once again.
But, all that’s not what I wanted to focus on. Because there was something else on display throughout this hearing that deeply concerns me.