UFO skeptic hits out at congressional hearings into extraterrestrial life and slams military…

A documentarian has blasted military whistleblowers, claiming sensationalism is converting the public to believe that UFOs have visited Earth more than science. 

Brian Dunning hit out at the three high-ranking officials who testified about their first-hand knowledge about UFOs in a first-of-its-kind hearing in DC during a podcast interview with Fox News Digital.  

Dunning, who hosts a nonprofit podcast titled ‘Skeptoid’ said it was very easy to find UFO believers who are veterans. 

He tells the interviewer: ‘You’ve got people in Congress who are not scientifically minded, who are not well-versed in subjects like astrobiology and astrophysics. 

‘And when they are told that, «hey, here’s some military pilots who have some UFO reports,» they tend to take it very seriously, as I think most people would.

‘Once you start from that foundation, it’s very easy to take the next step and say, «we’d better interview these people and take it pretty seriously». 

‘That doesn’t mean that it has any factual or scientific foundation.’

He also went on to claim that all of the New York Times’s coverage of aliens and Congressional hearings ‘have been driven by the same core group of UFO believers since they had their first big PR success getting their article published in The New York Times in 2017.

‘It’s really quite astonishing how easy it’s been for the UFO people to sort of steer the public’s belief in this subject.’

According to Dunning, the publication’s coverage has led to a 50 percent increase in the public’s belief in aliens. 

Later in the interview, he criticizes Harvard University professor Dr Avi Loeb for making the existence of aliens ‘interesting’ to the public and not revealing that ‘he is alone in his belief’. 

He claims that while there is an ‘overwhelming consensus in the astronomy community’ of ‘probably life being elsewhere in the universe’, it is not a common belief that extraterrestrial life has made it to Earth. 

‘You have guys like Avi Loeb showing up in the newspapers and on TV all over the place. Harvard physicist. And it sounds very impressive. What they don’t mention is he is completely alone in his belief system. 

‘Virtually nobody else in the entire astrophysics field agrees with the things he’s been saying. They never present that perspective on TV because it’s not fascinating. It’s not sensational’

But his claim about Dr Loeb is refuted by the Professor himself. 

He told the channel that hundreds of scientists are working on the Galileo Project and that he is not alone in his belief. 

‘The Galileo Project that I lead includes about a hundred scientists, so I am hardly alone in studying whether any of the objects near Earth might be of extraterrestrial technological origin. 

‘Allowing for the possibility that an anomalous interstellar object is technological in origin is not a wild speculation given that we launched Voyager 1 & 2, Pioneer 10 & 11 and New Horizons to interstellar space over the past five decades, which are a fraction of one in a hundred million of the age of the sun. 

‘There are hundreds of billions of stars like the sun in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and most of them formed billions of years before the sun. 

‘It takes less than a billion years for a Voyager-like probe to cross the entire Milky Way disk from side to side. It is, therefore arrogant and unwise to suggest that we are alone,’ Dr Loeb said. 

The Galileo Project aims to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research. 

Denning goes on to then question if there has ever been any empirical evidence of aliens visiting Earth or UFO sightings. 

‘Has Earth been visited by aliens?,’ he asked. ‘All of the mathematics that we know, all of the physics that we know, all of the evidence that we have suggests that, no, that’s probably not ever going to be possible and certainly hasn’t happened before.

‘So when we’re talking about things like alien visitation, a skeptical perspective would be things are probably as the laws of physics tell us they are, unless we find evidence that aliens have visited the Earth. So far, we haven’t. And so we stick with the default assumption, which is that no, things are as the laws of physics tell us they probably are, and we haven’t been visited.’

In July 2023, Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot with over a decade of service in the U.S. Navy, testified that his squadron regularly detected unidentified craft while stationed off Virginia’s coast in 2014. 

Pentagon whistleblower David Grusch, who served 14 years in the Air Force claimed in June 2023 that the US had run a top-secret UFO retrieval program for decades and said that some of the ‘non-human intelligences’ discovered are malevolent and have even killed humans. 

He claimed that the US has had UFOs since ‘the 1930s’ and has been secretly back-engineering them and carrying out a public disinformation campaign to prevent the details from leaking publicly. Grusch also suggested that the US government has murdered people as part of the conspiracy to keep UFOs a secret. 

Brian Denning is a writer and producer who focuses on science and skepticism. he has published multiple books on scientific skepticism and two educational films titled: ‘Here Be Dragons’ in 2008 and ‘Principles of Curiosity’ in 2017