The whistle blower side show around the recent revelations of David Grusch is telling.
Some, agog, have swallowed his tale whole, on the basis of his credentials. Those who’ve been around the ufological block sigh and roll their eyes at his threadbare yarns, including one well-known hoax about a UFO crash and retrieval avant le lettre in Lombardy in the 1930s, a story peddled by Luis Elizondo, as well…
An index of the power of the UFO mythology is not only the stir Grusch’s words have caused among those interested in the topic, but that they have found credibility in the U.S. government, resulting in new legislation and funding for new initiatives. An example of the credulous is Congressman Tim Burchett, for example, who only recently having come around to admitting the reality of global warming has nimbly jumped on the Roswell bandwagon.
This ignorant credulity reminds me of a story, perhaps apocryphal (but let’s not let the facts get in the way of the truth…) that the collapse of the Soviet Union took some elements of the American defense establishment by surprise, because, being fundamentalist Christians, they believed Russia to have been the Gog and Magog in The Book of Revelations…
Complementing (if not opposed to) Jacques Vallée’s conjectures about how the UFO phenomenon might be an engineered drama performed to guide human culture is the sad, undeniable reality of how the mythology is at times weaponized for penny ante con games…
Addendum: Careful readers will discern I make no claim regarding Grusch’s honesty; he may sincerely believe what he claims he was told and shown, or he may not. In the former case, at least, the function of the stories he conveys and the conditions of possibility for that functioning is what’s significant, which is my concern…
Skunkworks 
Within the reports there lurked a back story about an intense competition between world-class governments to recover alien artifacts. In years gone by, one might have expected an optimistic message of international co-operation against the alien threat. Cynically, I took the new message to be the purpose of the excitement, competition between world-class governments being all the rage.
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I’m unsure just “what years gone by” those might have been! A more realistic scenario is that depicted in 2016’s _Arrival_. But the story–whatever its purpose–does entrench international paranoia, at just the moment when global unified action is increasingly important…
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In 1968, the New York Times ran the headline Scientists Consider World Cooperation on U.F.O.’s. This is the dewy-eyed era I had in mind.
The Council on Foreign Relations’ Five Movies Worth Watching About UFOs is instructive. It cites The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) as advocating for ‘a “stronger United Nations” as the nuclear arms race heated up.’ It also mentions Independence Day (1996), in which “the United States rallies the world for a counterattack on that begins on, you guessed it, the Fourth of July” (the question of international cooperation often intersects with the trope “America Saves the Day”), as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1997), where “researchers across the globe investigate a sudden surge in UFO sightings and mysterious incidents.” Stephen Spielberg himself “lent a helping hand in a 1970s effort to get the United Nations to investigate UFOs,” according to the Huffington Post.
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Dewey-eyed, indeed. And let’s not forget Ronald Reagan’s famous musings on the matter, and the attendant wide-eyed paranoid mythology around Project Bluebeam. Funny how One World Government is both goal and anethema, Star Trek and New World Order, let alone the very real need for international cooperation at present (no wonder I’m digging into the history/nature of the nation state…)
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Besides forgetting to close the italics tag, I forgot to mention Mikhail Gorbachev telling the Christian Science Monitor how, at a 1985 summit,
“From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’
“I said, ‘No doubt about it.'”
“He said, ‘We too.'”
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To follow up on this ongoing story, the Washington Post, which I regard as an organ of official U.S. propaganda, has written of “the most bipartisan discussion [a freshman Democrat] had seen in his seven months on Capitol Hill.” If the nations of the world can’t get together on this one, at least it might unite the two rival parties that dominate U.S.politics.
The Post goes on to spell out the message behind all this sudden publicity. “The sightings, including some that are believed to be drones or unmanned craft — like the Chinese surveillance airship shot down in U.S. airspace earlier this year — have fueled concerns that American adversaries could have developed new technologies that pose a threat to U.S. security. ”
This seems to be the subtext of the Grusch affair, in which he plays the role of “useful idiot.” But it does capitalize on a whole world of unexamined associations with the UFO phenomenon, which I believe is your area of interest.
My quotes are taken from a slashdot.org submission that quotes the paper ( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/07/27/1437204/ufo-reports-demand-greater-transparency-lawmakers-say).
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AJ,
Thanks for the intervention. I will have to return, I think, to this matter of the topic uniting the Dems and Reps (I’ve touched on it once; thanks for bringing it again to my attention).
I’m unsure of just what’s what with Grusch. An innocent? A “useful idiot” for those intent on capitalizing on UAP since 2017 (the names are well known)? Defence contractors intent on stirring up a new Cold War (don’t they have enough business?!)…
What is pertinent to my reflections is how much Grusch is believed (though not by those who’ve been around the ufological block, e.g., Kevin Randle…). I’ll by attempting to essay some thoughts on the matter for Friday’s “Sightings” post…
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