UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part One: Donald Keyhoe and John Lear

While we may think of the late forties and the 1950s as the heyday of American UFO sightings, some of the most interesting developments occurred in the 1960s. In that decade, we have the first claims of abduction made by Betty and Barney Hill, Lonny Zamora’s report of a close encounter in New Hampshire, and the Kecksburg incident in Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most notorious incident took place in March of 1966, when numerous residents of certain Michigan towns reported seeing unusual lights in the sky. As the incidents all occurred over swampland, the lead scientific investigator of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book suggested that the residents may have seen marsh gas, a real phenomenon I have mentioned before, in talking about will-o’-the-wisp and jack-o'-lantern folklore as well as some aspects of vampire legends. It was and remains a valid rational explanation of the event, but it did not go over well. The “swamp gas” explanation has since become the ultimate joke among UFOlogists to illustrate the lame cover stories that the government tries to pawn off on the public. That very same year, representatives of the Air Force and Blue Book were compelled to defend themselves to the public, going on television and doing damage control to try to reassure America that they were not engaged in a cover-up. One young congressman from Michigan, Gerald Ford, who would go on to serve as President for a time, wasn’t having it, though, and he called for congressional hearings on this UFO matter. Thus in April of 1966, the Committee on Armed Services did hold a hearing on the topic, the first of its kind, reviewing Blue Book and interviewing Hynek and others. During the hearing, the committee received an evaluation of Blue Book by a scientific advisory board, which determined that “the present Air Force program dealing with UFO sightings has been well organized, although the resources assigned to it have been quite limited.” Upon its recommendations, Blue Book was shuttered, its reports made public, and a more academic organization was contracted, tasking teams of scientists with continuing Blue Book’s work. This was the Condon Committee, a University of Colorado project funded by the Air Force, which before long was accused of bias and setting out to debunk the phenomenon. In fact, there was a variety of views among the committee’s membership regarding UFOs, and the idea that a scientific study might set out to disprove something does not mean it was biased or unscientific, since falsifiability is central to scientific testing, and much of the time that’s how science proves things to be true, by trying and failing to prove them false. But a memo had leaked that showed committee members were reassuring University of Colorado administrators that they would debunk UFO sightings. Really, all this revealed was the inner workings of academic politics, since no university would want itself associated with a study that might tarnish its reputation. Nevertheless, the memo soured UFO organizations, like NICAP, on the committee, so when the Condon Committee reported in 1969 that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” their report was rejected by many as part of a supposed government cover-up, a notion that had developed in those years and continues to develop today, when for the first time in 57 years, we recently had another congressional hearing, in which representatives interviewed whistleblowers who made some astonishing claims about UFOs, or UAP as they’re styled now, and government efforts to hide what we know about them. As I watched these latest hearings, I couldn’t help but think of the others in US history who have come forward to reveal what the government is supposedly hiding about UFOs, and how it always seems to amount to nothing.

Welcome to Historical Blindness. If you’ve been listening for a long time or have burned through my back catalog, you might have noticed a few different views I’ve taken on this subject. In my first episode to talk about UFOs, which I produced in the wake of the 2017 revelations about the Pentagon’s UAP program and the Defense Department’s release of three declassified UFO videos recorded by Naval aviators. I used Jacques Vallee’s survey of historical descriptions of phenomena that seem like UAP reports to explore the history of such sightings before the age of aviation. I included some skeptical viewpoints, but overall, I am not that proud of that piece. I’d like to revisit that topic sometime and talk more about Vallee’s credibility issues and how he takes some of his reports out of historical context. After that, I spoke about the phantom airship sightings of the late 19th century, which I was convinced were little more than a mass hysteria fueled by hoax newspaper articles. Since that time, I dug more deeply into UFO folklore and presented the alternative conspiracy narrative that much of UFO mythology can be attributed to U.S. government disinformation or psyops, a conspiracy claim that appears to be proven at least in part by the activity of Rick Doty and the campaign to feed false delusions to Paul Bennewitz. So as I watched this latest UAP drama unfold, I asked myself, is this real, a hoax, or some disinformation? Some of the recent hearings were devoted to interviewing witnesses about the UAP encounters caught on video and made public in 2017, but interestingly, some compelling alternative interpretations of even these recordings from cockpit instrumentation displays have since been provided by skeptics like Mick West, who has been a vocal and convincing proponent of mundane explanations, suggesting that the objects seen on such videos may be distant planes, birds, balloons or other airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, or simply optical illusions. But one whistleblower who spoke with Congress this summer, David Grusch, is making far more astonishing claims than having seen or recorded something unidentified. Grusch claims that the U.S. government has retrieved crashed “non-human spacecraft,” including “non-human biologics,” or alien bodies, and that they have taken lives in the course of their cover-up of this information. Besides the obvious reasons to be skeptical of such claims, I thought it important to highlight that nothing Grusch is saying is a new and unheard of claim. In fact, since the 1950s, there have been numerous other such “whistleblowers” who have made comparable claims, and looking back at all of them, I hope to give a clear sense of why we should all remain skeptical of Grusch’s testimony as well.

  The first predecessor of Grusch that comes to mind is Donald Keyhoe, who might be safely credited as the first person to popularize the idea of a U.S. government cover-up of UFOs. Like Grusch, Keyhoe served in the armed forces, specifically in the U.S. Marine Corps, resigning from active service after receiving an injury in 1922. Afterward, he helped organize Charles Lindbergh’s nationwide tour after crossing the Atlantic, and he wrote a book about it, which helped to launch his writing career. He regularly took freelance writing work for major publications like Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post, and in 1949, when thanks to Kenneth Arnold’s claims UFOs were becoming a topic of public interest, he was tasked by True magazine with writing on the subject. His article, which suggested that the military and the Pentagon were hiding the truth about flying saucers being extra-terrestrial, was a huge success and earned him a book deal. Within five or six years, he had written 3 books on the topic, The Flying Saucers Are Real, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, and The Flying Saucer Conspiracy. Although he may seem more like a conspiracist author than a military whistleblower, he was presented by the media in his numerous television appearances as a former military man with contacts in the upper echelons of the Pentagon. Indeed the Air Force’s own press secretary provided a blurb for his book, further legitimizing him, and as he relied on official reports and interviews, he seemed to be more of an official informant than a crackpot. But in reality, he was an entertainer. Before he found the UFO topic profitable, he wrote science fiction prolifically, publishing stories in Weird Tales. And indeed his tales about UFOs became weirder and weirder as he felt the need to ratchet up his revelations about the UFO conspiracy in his successive books, bringing in claims about the Bermuda Triangle and latching onto an astronomer’s mistaken claim, quickly disproven, that a land bridge could be seen on the moon to argue that this conspiracy involved secret lunar bases.

In order to demonstrate Donald Keyhoe’s clear lack of credibility, we need only examine his 1958 interview with Mike Wallace, which can be viewed in full on YouTube. In it, Keyhoe claims that the Air Technical Intelligence Center, or ATIC, had declared that UFOs were real. Really all the ATIC confirmed was that some sightings seemed to be actual aircraft, not spacecraft, and stressed that there was simply not enough data after the fact to determine the origin of whatever flights might have been seen. He also claimed that the ATIC confirmed in a secret report that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships. This appears to have been a simple overstatement of a claim made first made by Edward James Ruppelt, former head of Project Blue Book, in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt himself might be viewed as the first UFO whistleblower if it were not for the conservative view of UFOs that he maintained throughout his book. Indeed, later, Ruppelt would explicitly call UFOs a “space age myth” and would make it clear that he never cared for Donald Keyhoe, who Ruppelt thought sensationalized the topic and made unsupported claims about what military officers actually thought on the subject. Despite this, in his book, likely written to supplement his income during his retirement, Ruppelt had included enough sensational tidbits to enthuse UFOlogists, including this mention of a secret report that has never been proven to have existed and may have been an invention for the book. In reality, though, if one reads the book closely, Ruppelt only actually implies that this supposed secret report came to such a conclusion, stating that General Vandenberg rejected the report because he “wouldn’t buy interplanetary vehicles.” And further stating that “[t]he report lacked proof.” So on close examination, this is certainly not the smoking gun Keyhoe pretended it to be. If it even existed, it sounds more like a report that offered no evidence and may not have even come so certain a conclusion as Keyhoe suggests. As the interview goes on, Keyhoe offers a 1952 intelligence analysis of UFO maneuvers as if it were evidence of what he claims, but he fails to mention the findings made public in 1952, as Ruppelt reported, that “[t]he possibility of the existence of interplanetary craft has never been denied by the Air Force, but UFO reports offer absolutely no authentic evidence that such interplanetary spacecraft do exist.” This is common of Keyhoe’s rhetoric; he almost invariably misrepresents or takes material out of context in order to present it as supportive of his thesis.

To Mike Wallace’s credit, he pushes back and challenges a few of Keyhoe’s assertions, catching him when he gives some inconsistent and seemingly made-up statistics. But much of what Keyhoe states goes unchallenged by Wallace, which is often the case in an interview, as Wallace couldn’t have been expected to recognize and refute every misleading claim Keyhoe had prepared. After the fact, though, that is exactly what we can do. Besides reports that have never been proven to exist, he cited another that specifically stated there was no evidence of UFOs, and he then questions why they would continue to investigate them if there were no evidence. Then within almost the same breath he says they would be hiding information about UFOs in order to avoid a hysteria… but of course, preventing a panic would also seem to be a valid reason to investigate and disprove such claims even when they have no merit. And taking a tactic that later conspiracy theorists will also use, Keyhoe presents a quotation by General Douglas MacArthur that he seems to think proves the general is in on some hidden truth about aliens. In fact, Keyhoe is perpetuating a common misquotation of General Douglas MacArthur that our next war would be interplanetary, against people from other planets. This exact statement has been proven to have never been made by MacArthur, and especially not at West Point, as is the common claim. Rather, the Mayor of Naples reported once, secondhand, that MacArthur had said something to that effect, but that he was talking about “a thousand years from now” when “today’s civilization would appear as obsolete as the stone age.” MacArthur did talk about the idea of an “ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy,” but this was in a speech years after Keyhoe’s interview, and in it MacArthur is listing numerous astonishing places that the frontiers of science seem to be taking us, in energy and medicine. In short, he is musing on the future, calling all these thoughts “such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all times.” This interview alone serves to demonstrate the kind of cherry-picking and misrepresentation that Donald Keyhoe and other UFO conspiracists since then have relied on in order to spread their claims.

Like so many hoaxers and denialists and other purveyors of misinformation, Keyhoe makes disingenuous challenges to the Navy to reactivate him and court martial him if he is lying, challenges designed to make him seem sincere, which in reality are just patently ridiculous. Only Marines who have been retired less than 30 years, considered reservists, can be restored to active duty, and Keyhoe had been retired 35 years. And both reservists and retirees were long believed to be not subject to court-martial. That did not change until 2020, when a retiree was court-martialed in a landmark Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals decision, but that was for the crimes of attempted sexual assault and child sexual abuse. At the time Keyhoe issued this disingenuous challenge to court-martial him, he was a retiree, a civilian not subject to such a proceeding by any precedent, and by misleading the public about a government cover-up, he had committed no criminal offense warranting a court martial. In fact, as a professional writer, pretty much any outlandish claim he made was protected by the First Amendment as long as he was not inciting lawless action. The challenge was little more than a stunt. And that really sums up Donald Keyhoe’s career as a writer and media personality. Once he saw that writing about UFOs brought him money and attention, he dedicated himself to it, and he became a minor celebrity for it. Once he even appeared on a game show called To Tell the Truth, in which celebrity panelists had to pick out the real Donald Keyhoe among a group of actors pretending to be him. Some may see Keyhoe’s biggest contribution to UFOlogy as his founding of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP, an influential civilian UFO research group, the power of which he used to lobby for the congressional hearings of 1966 which I described earlier. Really, though, I would argue that his lasting contribution was the marriage of UFOlogy to conspiracy culture, inventing the idea of a massive government cover-up. But like most prominent conspiracy theorists, his heyday would come and go, and he would disappear into obscurity. His ouster from NICAP came as the result of the organization’s bankruptcy, and by the 1980s, his involvement in UFOlogy did not extend beyond an occasional appearance at a UFO conference. It is worth noting that he died at 91 after struggling with declining health for years. He was never silenced by the “silence group” he claimed was hushing up everything that he published books about and spoke about on national television.

By the time of Donald Keyhoe’s death, another godfather of UFO conspiracy theories had arrived on the scene, born of a rather famous and influential family. John Olsen Lear was born in 1942 to Bill and Moya Lear. His father was a self-taught inventor and industrialist who as a radio engineer would pioneer the trend in miniaturization and develop 8-track music cartridges. He was best known, however, for his mass production of business jets, the Learjet. Bill’s son John attended a boarding school in Switzerland, where he claimed to have been the youngest American to have ever climbed the Matterhorn. There is no evidence of the truth of this claim that I’ve found, but it is actually among the least far-fetched claims that John Lear would go on to make. While his father made a name for himself building planes, John would make his reputation flying them, and in 1966, the very same spring that UFO sightings were blamed on marsh gas in Michigan and Congress reviewed Project Blue Book, he piloted one of his father’s jets around the world in record time. Perhaps even more than the retired Marine Donald Keyhoe, John Lear might have had a better claim to whistleblower status when he came out with revelations about a government coverup, because he claimed to have actually worked for U.S. intelligence services during Vietnam. In fact, what he did, it seems, was pilot cargo planes for Air America, which was covertly owned and operated by the CIA, making him a de facto CIA operative between 1967 and 1983. However, what Air America pilots did was deliver supplies, like livestock and rice, and perhaps the occasional narcotic for allies who happened to be drug lords, and transport doctors and refugees, as well as the occasional commando, saboteur, or spy. But as a simple pilot, he would not have been someone privy to the kinds of secrets he would later claim to have discovered. Like Keyhoe before him, and like Grusch today, he pieced together his grand conspiracy claims from things other people told him, and from things he read, usually unreliable claims spread by other conspiracy theorists. In 1987, he circulated a press release that outlined his conspiracy claims in broad strokes, and soon after, an ambitious local newsman in Las Vegas Nevada, George Knapp, put him on the air in the studios of Channel 8, KLAS-TV, a CBS affiliate. He claimed that his interest in UFOs started because of the sightings of members of his family, though here it seems he may have been continuing his long practice of exploiting the name and reputation of his father, as there is no evidence beyond John’s assertion that Bill Lear ever claimed to have seen a UFO. Regardless, the mere fact that sometimes pilots and others see things in the sky that they can’t readily identify is nothing compared to the conspiracy claims that John would promote: that the U.S. government had retrieved crashed alien spacecraft and recovered extra-terrestrial astronauts. This should sound very familiar, as it’s quite like what David Grusch asserted before Congress earlier this summer, except here Lear claims far more craft retrievals, far more biological remains, and he would even say living aliens were in custody, adding the further layer that there are numerous alien races that have visited us, and as he would go on to claim, that the U.S. government has colluded with aliens for decades.

Like Keyhoe before him, in Lear’s interview with Knapp, he makes numerous assertions that the newsman lets pass unchallenged and that prove to be illogical or entirely misleading on further examination. So, for example, he explains that there is plenty of evidence for what he claims, but that the press is not interested in the story. The simple fact that UFO stories had been huge in the 1950s, and big again in the 1960s, as evidenced by Donald Keyhoe’s continued TV appearances and the Congressional hearing of ’66, and the simple fact that Lear was spouting his claims to a television audience in that very moment would seem to disprove this and suggest that when the press rejects such news stories, it may be because they have no merit. Using Keyhoe’s established playbook, Lear also took documents and statements entirely out of context in order to make it seem like he had uncovered proof of some grand government conspiracy to cover-up their alien dealings. So for example, when asked directly by Knapp for evidence, he shares a quote from a physics textbook used by the Air Force. Now, there are a few things to point out with this quote. First, it’s saying aliens are “commonly described” this way, not that they are real and really appear this way. Also, he is completely misquoting the textbook. Its text is available online, and where Lear quotes it as saying “This leads us to believe in the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors,” it actually says “This leaves us with the unpleasant possibility of alien visitors,” a small but crucial misquote that makes it appear the textbook makes an argument that it does not. In fact, the final conclusion in this chapter is that “The best thing to do is to keep an open and skeptical mind, and not take an extreme position on any side of the question.” Moreover, Lear claims that every President knows about this well-kept secret, and then he quotes from Ronald Reagan, who a couple times mused about how humanity might come together in the face of a global threat. In reality, such a thought was not original, having appeared in science fiction like Star Trek for decades. And even further, going back 50 years before the first modern UFO sighting, it seems likely Reagan was just paraphrasing a sentiment expressed by psychologist John Dewey, who in a 1917 speech said, “the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet…. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose.” And if we think logically about what Lear is claiming here, he is saying that Presidents like Reagan keep this secret, but then suggesting that Reagan was regularly hinting about the secret. Likewise, he quotes President Jimmy Carter, who claimed to have seen a UFO and who swore to disclose government info on UFOs to the public. To Lear, this is evidence of the pressure to keep even Presidents quiet, but conversely, it also seems to be evidence that these Presidents would have disclosed such information if there were any such information to disclose.

Almost all of what Lear claimed to have uncovered in his research was actually cribbed from the UFO conspiracy claims of other “researchers,” claims that have mostly been convincingly refuted. For example, he repeats a lot of claims about cattle mutilations, expressing a clear admiration for Linda Moulton Howe’s television documentary on the topic, A Strange Harvest.  I spoke about these claims regarding cattle mutilation previously, in my UFO Disinfo series. Coming as they did in the midst of the Satanic Panic, one early theory for some of these livestock deaths was cult activity, but before long it was attributed to extra-terrestrials. One far more supportable and rational though still conspiracist view, which I presented in my examination, is that the livestock had been experimented on and studied not by aliens but by covert government agencies who were concerned about the emergence of Mad Cow Disease. But most scientists have concluded that all observations point to the activity of predators, scavengers, and parasites, with the supposedly surgical incisions actually being explainable through the natural processes of dehydration, decomposition, and carrion feeding. In this way, this myth is much like vampire folklore, born of ignorance about the changes death brings. To get a sense of how misleading claims about cattle mutilation can be, and how little John Lear knew about the things he said, we can listen to his ridiculous statement about supposed incisions in dead livestock showing that a laser had been used to cut between cells. The fact is that anytime we cut anything, we are cutting between the cells. A simple papercut cuts between the cells, clumping them to either side. Even an extraordinarily sharp blade made of obsidian might at most damage some cells with blunt force but not split them. What he’s saying here is absolutely backward. If the tissue were really examined at the cellular level, as he’s saying, then it would be more surprising, more indicative of laser microdissection, if the cells HAD been cut, but even then it would not be evidence of extra-terrestrial technology.

And beyond his poor grasp of science and promotion of dubious claims like these, he also promoted outright hoaxes. For example, John Lear was a big promoter of the Majestic 12 hoax. To hear more about that, check out my episode The Great Los Angeles Air Raid and the Secret Memos of Majestic 12, and also my UFO Disinfo series. Essentially, it was the purported leaking of documents claiming to show the formation of a shadowy government group responsible for the UFO cover-up, dating all the way back to the supposed UFO retrieval at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Never mind that it was leaked to a pal of Bill Moore’s, the writer responsible for turning the Roswell incident into the foundational UFO myth that it is today, and never mind that there is evidence the documents were forged and then smuggled by Bill Moore into the National Archives in an attempt to authenticate them. Moore himself had serious credibility issues, having also popularized the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, which I also discussed and refuted in detail last year in my series Stranger Things Have Happened. It was later revealed that Bill Moore had been working on a fiction novel that featured a concept very close to the Majestic 12 claims, further indicating that it had been a hoax. In 1989, when Bill Moore revealed to a UFOlogy community at a Las Vegas MUFON conference that he had spread government disinformation given to him by intelligence operative Rick Doty, it should have finally discredited him and his claims about the Philadelphia Experiment, the Roswell Incident, and MJ-12 forever. Instead it only seemed to sour UFO enthusiasts on Moore personally and convince them only of the falsity of the claims about a massive underground alien base in Dulce, New Mexico, made by Paul Bennewitz, a UFO researcher driven to mental breakdown by Doty’s and Moore’s disinformation. John Lear was a purveyor of all of these claims, including the discredited claim about the Dulce base, which he claimed was a joint operation run by extra-terrestrials and the CIA, where he said they kept vats full of human body parts, and in which he claimed a battle between aliens and humans had occurred after the agreement between the two sides had failed. Who knows what his source was for some of these claims, but after Bill Moore’s disclosure that Dulce base was a psyop, he didn’t really promote it further. Still, though, even years later, as Lear’s reach and influence on the UFO community was further magnified by his regular appearance on the massively popular Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, the world heard him bending over backward in his insistence on continuing to believe Moore’s other claims, even the discredited Majestic 12 papers. 

As can be discerned from his claims about Dulce base, we see that John Lear seized on wild UFO conspiracy claims and then embellished them, making wilder and wilder assertions that seem to have sprung from his own imagination. For example, with the premise that Majestic 12 retrieved alien bodies, he speaks of autopsies, and using terminology that would later be found in other documents circulated among UFOlogists, likely forged to expand the MJ12 mythos and corroborate claims like the ones Lear had long made, he speaks about living Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, or EBE’s, and the interviews conducted with them, but you can hear in his interviews that he lacked any credible evidence, relying only on documents he says he has seen. Interestingly, he was among the first to suggest that Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, was a place where these alien prisoners were held and their bodies and craft studied, but like Grusch today with his claims about evidence being described to him by others, Lear always admitted that he had not seen any of this stuff himself. Yet despite having no real first-hand knowledge or evidence, he continued to make more and more unbelievable and specific claims about the EBEs he said Majestic 12 had captured, that they took sustenance through their skin instead of ingesting food in a more traditional manner, and that they moved by thought, which I guess means some kind of teleportation? It makes you wonder why they would need craft to pilot at all. And the logic of many claims he made is far faultier than this. Take his assertion to George Knapp that we had recovered 10 to15 craft and 30 to 50 alien bodies. In the very next interview with Knapp, he says there are 70 species of aliens visiting earth. Those numbers simply don’t add up! How do we know about the 20 other species if we have recovered fifty only? Were the rest living EBEs? And does this mean each spacecraft was manned by a multicultural crew representing around 7 different species aboard each vehicle? How very like a Starfleet vessel it would have to be, and since he said they came from five different civilizations, these must have been melting pot civilizations indeed!

Despite these outrageous claims, he would go on to appear on far more television programs than even Donald Keyhoe, including a lot of terrible History Channel trash like Brad Meltzer's Decoded, America's Book of Secrets, and Ancient Aliens. During his time in the spotlight, John Lear would make numerous predictions that would never come true. In talking about the UFO abduction phenomenon, he claimed without clear evidence that abductees were being programmed like the Boys from Brazil to go somewhere specific within the next five years and do something momentous…which of course none every seem to have done. Near the end of his life, he has been described even by sympathetic and credulous researchers like George Knapp as becoming even more lunatic in his claims, telling whoever would listen that there were more than 90 alien races that lived on the Sun. While at the time of his first appearance, Lear seemed like a credible figure blowing the whistle on incredible things, in the end, he would be revealed as an absolute crackpot. Today, some may try to assert that David Grusch’s claims about alien wreckage and pilot retrieval show John Lear was right, but Lear was only ever repeating those claims, just as Grusch is today. And we can’t forget about all the other completely daft claims he made, which will surely never be convincingly corroborated. Lear certainly liked to say that he would eventually be proven right, but the fact is, he’s already been proven wrong so many times that he’ll never be vindicated.

Looking back at similar claims made by others in the last hundred years of American history should provide some sense that Grusch’s claims must also be viewed skeptically. Very similar claims of a government coverup of UAP can be clearly traced back to Donald Keyhoe, and as we’ve seen, his evidence and argument were shaky and unconvincing. Now these same claims appear repackaged and made more palatable as a claim that certain agencies tasked with the analysis of UAP have not been transparent with Congress. Certainly the 2017 New York Times piece on the black money funding of the Pentagon’s former UAP program demonstrated that. That should not be news. This latest congressional hearing on UFOs, the first of its kind since 1966, was not focused on establishing that. Instead, it was a platform on which claims about UFOs and coverup could be trotted back out and paraded before the American public. Similar accusations of covert crash retrievals and alien body recovery go all the way back to the Roswell legend and the MJ12 hoax, both attributable to Bill Moore, who has been discredited as a disinformation agent—all of it popularized by John Lear, who ended up being far less trustworthy than he may have at first appeared in his Las Vegas news interview. And like Keyhoe and Lear, Grusch also just seems to be repeating things he has read or that others have told him. Yes, Grusch does appear to be a more legitimate whistleblower in that he followed the protocols to achieve lawful whistleblower status. And the context of his statements may seem to lend him further credibility, since he is speaking under oath in a public congressional hearing, rather than in a radio or television interview, in which the stakes are far lower. And it may appear that everything Grusch says must be true because his statements have been cleared by his employer. However, we must remember that, if nothing Grusch says turns out to be accurate, this wouldn’t be the first time that someone testified to something that wasn’t true. And remember that he is only saying what he says others told him, so it would not even necessarily be considered perjury, unless it could be proven that he was never told such things, which would be especially hard to prove given that he does not even testify as to who told him the things he is saying he’s heard. And last but perhaps most importantly, we must remember that his statements being cleared only means he’s not saying anything classified, not that anything he’s saying is true. Indeed, the fact that his claims about alien craft and body retrieval has been cleared seems to indicate that they’re not true, because if they were, wouldn’t they be classified and therefore not cleared for a public hearing? So we may ask, why is this being taken so seriously? How did this whistleblower’s unsupported statements about alien conspiracies get packaged as a major congressional hearing and thus draw so much press coverage?  If up on our conspiracy board we were to stretch out that red string from the pin pushed into Grusch’s photo, we may trace a direct line back to John Lear through other media figures that Lear would go on to introduce to the public, and to members of the press who brought their messages to the world—namely George Knapp, that Las Vegas talking head who first put Lear on the air, who has since made a career out of promoting other UFO whistleblowers and now has some connection to David Grusch…which I will explore further in Part Two of UFO Whistleblowers: An American Tradition.

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