In July, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, stepped out of the

shadows to announce that the U.S. military Establishment currently possesses

a small fleet of nonhuman pre-owned flying saucers. He didn’t call them
saucers; he called them UAPs, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” which
used to be called UFOs. But basically, we’re talking saucers.

Grusch’s story first reached the public via a journalist named Leslie Kean
(pronounced Kane), who had co-written a hugely influential article about
UFOs that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2017. She and
Helene Cooper, a Pentagon correspondent for the paper, along with a writer
named Ralph Blumenthal, revealed that Senator Harry Reid had gotten the
Pentagon to create a secret, “mysterious” $22 million program to study UFOs.
A few years later, Kean was the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker by
staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus with the web title “How the Pentagon Started
Taking U.F.O.s Seriously.”

Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New

Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever
closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was
being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed
sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras
and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken
from far away. There was just this guy Grusch telling the world that the
government had a “crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program” for
flying saucers that was totally supersecret and that only people in the program
knew about the program. Grusch said he had learned about it while serving on
a UAP task force at the Pentagon. He interviewed more than 40 people, and
they told him wild things. He said he couldn’t reveal the names of the people
he interviewed. He shared no firsthand information and showed no photos.
He said the program went back decades, back to the saucer crash that
happened in Roswell, New Mexico.