One of the refrains that often passes between friends of mine is that this is the craziest/stupidest/wildest/scariest timeline, the adjective changes depending on the events of the day that are inciting our remarks. The word timeline is used as a sort of nod to a speculated multi-dimensionality of time in which we all exists and where there are actually multiple concurrent timelines. Somehow, we’ve just managed to end up in the most wack-a-doodle one due to our good/bad fortune, personal hubris, or perhaps merely our firm belief that it was the Berenstein and not Berenstain Bears.
So when a major in the United States Air Force Intelligence Division turned whistleblower and testified before Congress about UFOs, “non human biologics,” and a program dating back before Roswell of capturing and reverse engineering crashed objects, and it barely even registered on the national level – well – that’s all part of the craziest/stupidest/wildest/scariest timeline, right?
U.S. Federal Government public domain
David Grusch giving testimony on 26 July 2023 before the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. A hearing on “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency” in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C.
As someone who has always had an interest in the crossover between the occult and “high strangeness” — a term that has been used to group together unidentified flying objects (UFOs), unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), cryptids, and other odd happenings that defy “rational” explanation — I’ve been both excited and skeptical about what could possibly come out of the hearings and testimony that are the result of internal investigations. But I’m getting ahead of myself because I also think that this could signal a culture shift that people are missing. The testimony about UFO activity before a congressional subcommittee signals a change in American culture that is more open to challenging ideas. A recent study by the Pew Research Group found that 65% of Americans now believe that there is intelligent life on other planets and only 12% view UFOs as a security threat.
And while our present can feel, at best, disheartening, what a shift like this could signal for many people, Pagans among them, is an opening to a more pluralistic future. After all, if the worldview of a largely fixed-binary culture can shift to allow for the existence of beings that confound deeply entrenched puritanism, reactionary Christianity, and even material science itself, why couldn’t there be room for Pagans then, right? I’m no Pollyanna, believe me, but I am trying to pull on some threads here.
Another take is from a semi-spiritual bend, that these beings, whatever they are, have always been here and that we’ve been interacting with them for millennia. In some circles the possibility that these same beings may account for angel, fairy, and potentially many other kinds of encounters as seen through different cultural lenses has been around for decades. One person’s flying saucer is another’s indescribably-horrific biblical emissary uttering the words “fear not,” and perhaps a third’s being who seduces a person to dance the fairy ring for a hundred years.
For the government, it could signal a loss of control of the narrative, where the UAPs have escaped the ability to be a managed element while entering the public discourse and consciousness. I’m skeptical of that line of thought, but hey – weird timelines, right?
Wait, I need some background…
In a prominent and now well-known article from the New York Times that ran in December of 2017, several veteran pilots of the US military went on record stating that they had repeated experiences with unidentified objects while on routine missions in United States airspace. At the time, a small amount of evidence, including cockpit infrared video from US military aircraft, became declassified and shared with the public.
Still from a US Navy UFO spotting.
That set off a rapid chain of events that lead to the establishment of a formal office within the Department of Defense to investigate the phenomena more closely. The office, at the time called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and later rebranded as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), was in part responsible for rebranding unidentified flying objects (UFOs) as unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAPs), because not all of the documented events included airborne phenomenon. Some actually appeared to be capable of rapidly leaving the atmosphere or submerging beneath the ocean as well.
These programs were the benefactors of an earlier 21st century investigation from a decade previous when then-Senator Harry Reid began funding a top-secret program to look into the question of UFOs in United States airspace. That program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), was officially funded from 2007 until it was allegedly dissolved in 2012, although an investigation in 2017 found that it may have continued operating beyond that time. Prior to AATIP, there were numerous other covert – or at least quiet – investigations that were later made public. Project Blue Book was an ongoing study of aerial phenomenon from 1952 to 1969 that was gutted after concerns that UFO spotting groups might be used by foreign adversaries to sway public opinion against the US government. Afterwards the findings that were released largely claimed to debunk or find little credible evidence for the UFO phenomenon.
So it becomes all the more astonishing that, some fifty-ish years after the shuttering of that program, Retired Maj. David Grusch was given the platform to discuss, albeit as a whistleblower, the findings that he claims were conveyed to him by people with alleged first-hand knowledge of AATIP/AARO investigations. The full video of his testimony from July 26 can be found here, but he discussed some compelling things, including that he was informed “in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access.”
Grusch went on to say that “non human biologics” had been part of those retrievals and that interaction with those biologics had led to injury for some who had studied them. Later Grusch went on to infer that from what he was told, these beings may be interacting with our world inter-dimensionally, saying “the framework that I’m familiar with, for example, is something called the holographic principle. It derives itself from general relativity and quantum mechanics.”
A Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough stated that the department had “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
Is Grusch a screwball? A patsy? Readers can come to their own conclusions, but if the intent was to create an Earth-shattering diversion for a political sleight-of-hand, it failed utterly because it barely made a blip on a national scale.
Have we stumbled upon an indigenous species?
As an animist, I want to know more about what’s going on because we may be on the verge of — if not first contact — at least first public contact with a species that on the face of it seems to be technologically advanced, at least hundreds of years if not more, beyond our own. As a Witch and Pagan, I’m curious if we’ve been interacting with these beings for longer than we know. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a long standing speculation that angel, fairy, djinn, and other anthropomorphic intelligent beings may in fact all be part of the UFO/UAP phenomenon, but different cultures and different eras of different cultures describe them based on what their specific cultural framework gives them the vocabulary to convey.
My interest is not in whether these are visitors from another world, but whether if they are in fact, indigenous to this world and cohabitating with us but mostly in a dimensionally different framework? The possibilities are pretty mind bending from a spiritual perspective, and even from a folkloric perspective. Think about all the cultures that talk about a race of beings that at some point went away, disappeared from the Earth or were defeated by newer gods that emerged. Even for open-minded folks, the interesting threads of speculation that one can follow get pretty wild. I can’t imagine how this might make monotheists go unhinged.
So are we in a new age of post-contact reality?
Ancient alien theorists say yes…
[History Channel]
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about parts of the testimony, but I’m more optimistic about what it says about the human capacity to change than I was before it, if it takes some inter-dimensional beings to get me there, I doff my tinfoil hat to our new visitors – or long-term friends.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.