Earth v aliens: is the truth finally out there?

Curious citizens turn out by the hundreds to scan the night sky for unidentified objects near the scene of a reported sighting in Michigan in 1966. Picture: Getty Images

The last words spoken by 20-year-old Frederick Valentich were recorded on the evening of October 21, 1978. At 6.19pm Valentich took off alone from Moorabbin airfield in Victoria on what was logged as a return flight to King Island. The Cessna 182 four-seater carried a full load of fuel. There were light winds and visibility was described as excellent.

At 7.06pm, Valentich, flying at about 4500 feet, contacted Melbourne flight control to ask whether there was “any known traffic below 5000 (feet)”. The reply was negative.

Valentich then reported seeing a “large aircraft below 5000” approaching him from the east. The mystery aircraft was “sort of metallic … shiny (on) the outside” and had a green light.

“It seems to me that he’s playing some sort of game,” Valentich said. “He’s flying over me two, three times … at speeds I could not identify.”

The mystery object vanished, then reappeared. The official transcript of the conversation showed Valentich speaking to flight control for the last time at nine seconds past 7.12pm. “My intentions are, ah, to go to King Island, ah, Melbourne, that strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It is hovering and it’s not an aircraft!”

Reports of Valentich’s dramatic final words sparked a frenzy among UFO watchers but not among air safety investigators, who discovered that UFO experiences ran in the family: Valentich had seen one eight months earlier, and so had his mother. His father, too, was a firm believer and, according to the accident report, was “convinced … that his son was ‘captured’ by a UFO and that he would be returned when ‘they’ had finished investigating him”.

An intensive air, sea and land search could find no trace of Valentich or the Cessna. A would-be air force pilot, Valentich had been rejected by the RAAF and repeatedly failed his private pilot exams, including his navigation exam.

The aircraft accident investigation concluded that Valentich was probably suffering from “disorientation”, although the absence of wreckage was a puzzle. On the possibility of “UFO intervention” the investigator wrote “no further comment”.

Amazing reports of damaged UFOs lying in US government vaults have set alien hares running again.

A former spy turned whistleblower, David Grusch, has given congress classified information – information he claims has been “illegally withheld” until now – about “intact and partially intact” alien spacecraft recovered as part of a clandestine US government program.

Grusch, 36, a former combat officer in Afghanistan who spent 14 years working for US intelligence, told scientific website the Debrief that recoveries of “partial fragments” and even “intact vehicles” had been made “for decades” by the US government, its allies, and defence contractors.

In another interview Grusch went even further, telling subscription TV network NewsNation the secret government program had retrieved not only alien “vehicles” but actual aliens.

“Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed,” Grusch said, “sometimes you encounter dead pilots and … as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true.”

Grusch is hardly the first to convince himself that we are not alone. Declassified CIA files are bursting with reports of UFO sightings. Australia’s National Archives holds RAAF files dating back to the 1950s stuffed with reports of close encounters from every corner of Australia.

But unlike Mrs Longman, who reported seeing a ball of light emitting sparks near her house in Koojan, Western Australia, or Mr Newby and his wife, who spotted an object that “became elongated and underwent rapid acceleration” in the sky above Armidale, NSW, Grusch boasts some credible bona fides, having previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and been a member of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

Last year Grusch began supplying congress with information about the covert materials recovery program, although the Debrief noted that this did not include any “physical materials related to wreckage or other non-human objects”.

Grusch told congress about a “decades-long” contest with “near-peer adversaries” to identify the sites of UAP crashes and landings and collect extraterrestrial technology for “exploitation/reverse-engineering” to give the US “asymmetric national defence advantages” over its rivals.

Whether reverse-engineering a spaceship that crashed is a smart idea or not is unclear. Nevertheless, Grusch has found support for his assertions.

Karl Nell, a retired US Army colonel who worked with him on the UAP Task Force, described his former colleague as “beyond reproach” and backed his claims of a “terrestrial arms race” based on reverse-engineering technologies derived from “non-human intelligence”.

The US government seems unconcerned that Grusch may have let the cat out of the bag. The Debrief confirmed that before making his explosive revelations Grusch showed the material he intended to disclose to the Defence Department’s Office of Prepublication and Security Review, which cleared it for “open publication”.

Grusch’s revelations tap into a conundrum described by the Debrief as a “colossal enigma with national security implications that has bedevilled the military and tantalised the public going back to World War II and beyond”. At its heart, naturally, is the Central Intelligence Agency.

For decades the agency, while assiduously documenting reports of UFO sightings from all over the world, pretended to have no interest in “flying saucers”, worried that the “alarmist tendencies” of the American public would lead some people to interpret CIA interest in UFOs as proof that the US government was hiding information about aliens.

The CIA was deeply interested in UFOs, not because it believed in the existence of flying saucers but because it recognised their value as a tool of psychological warfare.

Americans were – and, it seems, still are – crazy for flying saucers and analysis of UFO publications raised concerns that the “flying saucer craze” was being covertly funded by the Soviets.

The CIA’s charade collapsed in January 2021 when nearly 2800 declassified documents on UFOs, extracted from the agency under US Freedom of Information legislation, were made available online.

By the time the CIA was forced to come clean, Americans in high places were showing worrying signs of being interested in UFOs.

In 2007 the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, squirrelled away $US22m from the defence budget for a covert military program to investigate UFOs.

The Australian Defence Force stopped investigating reports of UFOs in 1993, disappointingly having failed to solve the 45-year-old mystery of Valentich’s disappearance. In 1979 a New Zealand clairvoyant claimed to have made contact with the missing pilot, who revealed that he had been taken by a community in space and was working for people who were “not from Earth but from a place in the galaxy he could not locate”. The last bit at least sounded plausible.