MAYBE IGNORE GUYS WHO MEDICATE WITH BLEACH?:

Among these findings: two of the leading ex-DOD officials, Christopher Mellon and Luis Elizondo, who successfully promoted UFO "disclosure" legislation, face a potential SEC investigation for alleged investor fraud in a UFO-hyping company they helped lead; and none of the military witnesses at the hearing have ever offered verifiable evidence to back their claims.

Equally important, many of the key findings in the ground-breaking 2017 New York Times article on the Pentagon's $22 million secret UFO "research" program that helped launch today's alien mania in Washington have been discredited.

(The three Navy "UFO" videos published by Times starting in 2017 that augmented the UFO frenzy have also been thoroughly debunked by visual expert Mick West, and in large part recently by the Pentagon and a NASA panel for having prosaic explanations, including camera artifacts.)

As documented by several critics, including Greenstreet, that original bombshell Times article notably hid the program's real paranormal agenda from the public. Most of the Pentagon research was actually devoted to chasing down werewolf-type creatures, poltergeists and ghosts on the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, owned by the Pentagon contractor Robert Bigelow. I spoke in confidence with a congressional aide before the recent hearings who indicated that all this eminently available information was unknown to members of the committee. (Pro tip: add "skeptic" to your google search).

The new hearings were sparked by David Grusch, the former military intelligence officer who came forward in June with startling and increasingly bizarre new claims. He was widely and uncritically publicized after his claims -including stashed alien bodies and their retrieved crafts -- were aired in an obscure pro-UFO publication The Debrief and a third-tier cable news network, NewsNation.

NewsNation, in turn, has been riding UFOs hard since snaring exclusive interviews with Grusch. The ratings boost for NewsNation has been so great it even beat CNN during its special on Grusch, as noted recently by The Washington Post. The broadcast stories on Grusch have been led by Ross Coulthart, a disgraced Australian journalist. Along with hyping other repudiated stories, Coulthart once relied on discredited witnesses to make bogus pedophile accusations against members of the UK parliament, leading to a fruitless $4 million police investigation. So, despite that questionable background, he remains a leading UFO conspiracist.

Still, in the weeks since the hearings, Grusch's credibility has eroded on several fronts -- even as most media outlets and members of Congress have paid little attention to the details undermining his shocking tales. As The Washington Spectator recapped last month, he has asserted that the government has been hiding a secret alien crash retrieval program; the Pope tipped off the United States to a UFO retrieved by Mussolini (a long discredited hoax); alien corpses have been recovered by U.S. officials; and humans have been killed by aliens.

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