I grew up at the beginning of the space age. I remember, as a child, gathering in the school gym, huddled around a small black-and-white TV with rabbit ears and a snowy picture, watching America’s first steps into ‘the final frontier.’ I loved Star Trek, I loved science fiction, and I loved the idea that someday, we would travel to the stars. The librarians at the Thomas Crane Library in North Quincy would try to protect me from all these crazy ideas by preventing me from checking out adult science fiction books; Danny Dunn was OK, Tom Swift was fine, but reading something from radicals like Asimov or Clarke certainly was not. Their attempts did not work; instead of taking the books out, I would discreetly retreat to the back of the library and spend my day being corrupted by the radical ideas contained in them.
That was a long time ago, and now I’ve grown old. A lot of the things I read about as a child have happened in my lifetime. Not only do I have multiple computers, I also have conversations with them. When an event happens just about anywhere on Earth, I know about it in minutes and can often watch it unfolding. I’ve put up satellite dishes to receive video from space and have entered into virtual worlds to have experiences that no one ever would have dreamed possible. Machines, able to peer into my body like magic, have saved my life multiple times. I’ve written code to control robots, flown drones, and have a computer in my pocket way beyond anything that was ever imagined. All of these things are wonderful, but sadly, the space thing never really worked out.
After the initial promise, our space program stalled; actually, it was destroyed by liberals who once again used the politics of envy to keep the country from moving forward, and although we’ve had a space station in orbit for many years now, we really haven’t ventured far from our planet.
When I was young, I believed a permanent lunar colony was just a few years away. I also believed that people would be living on Mars in my lifetime, and perhaps I would even be one of them. I also hoped we would someday contact aliens.
Some of these things might still happen in my lifetime. Under the visionary leadership of Elon Musk, our ability to get into space is commonplace and relatively inexpensive. The NASA Artemis mission reignites the promise of a lunar colony that could serve as a stepping stone to the stars beyond. As for the alien thing, well, that’s still unlikely, but a story in today’s New York Post is kind of interesting.
The New York Post story is based on an interview with Rep. Tim Burchett on the Rob Finnerty Show. After reading the article, I went and watched the original video, and here’s what I learned:
Burchett (R-Tenn) says that we’ve already had contact with aliens and that the U.S. government has been covering it up for years.
He first gives a list of a number of higher-ups involved either directly or indirectly in the government’s UFO program that have recently disappeared or been killed. That list includes:
Retired US Air Force General William McCasland, who has been missing from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home since February 27. McCasland was once the commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson in Ohio, which is believed to be the site where alien bodies are held.
Monica Jacinto Reza, a NASA engineer who worked under McCasland on advanced propulsion engines. Reza disappeared in June while hiking with some friends, who claim she vanished and have no clue what happened.
Nuno Loureiro, an MIT scientist who was assassinated in Brookline, Mass, in December, supposedly by Claudio Valente, a former classmate from Portugal who apparently held a grudge against him from their college days. Loureiro was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, and he was working with technology that some say was obtained from aliens.
Finally, there’s Carl Grillmair, a renowned Caltech astrophysicist known for his work on the search for water on distant planets.
Rep Burchett claims that all the deaths are tied together because all the people involved are working on things related to outer space or nuclear secrets. He also said, “I’ve been briefed by just about every alphabet agency there is. And, I’ll just say this, if they were to release the things that I’ve seen, you’d be up at night, worrying about, thinking about this stuff.”
Not to be outdone, Matt Gaetz, a former United States Representative from Florida, said, ‘I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.’
Another interesting turn in the story is that People Magazine reports that the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has registered the domains aliens.gov and alien.gov.
Finally, there are rumors that the soon-to-be-released Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day, about alien contact, is actually part of a government plan to soften up the public before the big reveal.
While I’d like to believe all of the above, I’m skeptical.
First, the missing and dead people that are connected under the common umbrella of the search for extraterrestrial life are not all that closely related. Most worked in different facilities and different programs. If you looked on any given day, I suspect you would find many people who are missing or dead that are connected by some common bond. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a coincidence. This is similar to the birthday paradox, often presented in statistics classes, which shows that it only takes 23 people for the probability that two of them have the same birthday to exceed 50%. Intuitively, it doesn’t seem possible, but when you work the numbers, it is.
If there is a connection, it might be between McCasland and Reza, who worked together for many years in the same facility. Could they have run off together? Probably not, most likely just another coincidence.
As for Burchett and Gaetz, while I believe they’re telling the truth about their experiences, it would not surprise me in the least bit if they’re just being played as useful idiots. The establishment is not happy about what’s going on in Washington and views Trump and MAGA as their enemies. To protect their territory, they may have presented these men with false information, hoping they would go public and make themselves look foolish. If that was the plan, it worked.
Finally, the Spielberg movie story seems more like marketing hype than anything else. The studios want a big opening day, and a rumor that the movie was in some way connected to reality would certainly help their box office numbers. If you had some friends working for the government who spent $20 from petty cash to register a couple of UFO-related domains, it would certainly help make things sound legitimate.
Sadly, I don’t believe we’ve yet been in contact with aliens, and I doubt we will in my lifetime. I do think there’s a much greater chance we’ll find microscopic life under the surface of Mars, and although it wouldn’t be as cool as aliens, it would prove we’re not alone in the Universe, and that would make me happy.
