Renowned Physicist's Response to UFO Hearing Goes Viral

After Congress' hearing on UFOs and whistleblower David Grusch's claims that the U.S. government has covered up the existence of aliens on Earth, a popular physics professor and science communicator weighed in on Twitter.

Brian Cox, a TV presenter and professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester in the U.K., tweeted on Wednesday: "I keep being asked what I make of the UFO thing in Congress yesterday, so here it is: I watched a few clips and saw some people who seemed to believe stuff saying extraordinary things without presenting extraordinary evidence," he said.

"Therefore I have nothing more to say, other than: It would be great if true - it would take a bit of the pressure off our civilization if we weren't the only means within the Milky Way by which the Universe understands itself. Sadly, as of today, I still feel that pressure, so can we perhaps focus on not messing our world up rather than hoping that, to paraphrase Sagan, someone will float down to save us from ourselves."

His tweet was liked more than 17,000 times, garnering 1.5 million views.

During Wednesday's hearing, titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency," conducted by the House Oversight subcommittee, former U.S. intelligence official David Grusch, who is an Air Force veteran and member of a Pentagon task force that investigated UFOs, told the panel that he was absolutely certain that the federal government is in possession of UFOs. UFOs are now also known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).

He also said that nonhuman biologics had been found at crash sites, and that the presence of these findings have been covered up by the government for decades. Grusch said the same thing to NewsNation in June.

"These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed," Grusch said at the time. "Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true."

At the hearing, Grusch also said that alien technology reverse-engineering programs could serve as "a catalyst for a global reassessment of our priorities," and that covering up of these off-world craft was bankrolled by "misappropriation of funds."

"These whistleblowers have dealt directly with UAPs both manmade and of extraterrestrial origin," Steven Greer, an American ufologist and founder of the Disclosure Project, which aims to get allegedly classified UFO information disclosed, previously told Newsweek. "We are also requesting an amnesty period for very high-value people involved in illegal operations related to UAPs and federal witness protection, as well as explicit protections against retaliations in relation to pensions and personal assets."

UAPs are often sighted by members of the public. In 2022, there were 510 UAP sightings, 171 of which "appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis," while the remainder were balloon-like entities, according to a January report from the Office for the Director of National Intelligence.

"The majority of UAPs can be accounted for as balloons, drones or drifting aerial junk," Joshua Semeter, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University, and member of NASA's independent panel to study UAPs, previously told Newsweek. "In some cases, the visual impression is impacted by 'perspective bias,' where a slow nearby object looks like a large, rapid, distant object.

"That said, there is a small percentage of observations that remain unexplained. These cases generally involve an object that exhibits unusual flight characteristics—for instance, rapid acceleration, rapid velocity or extreme maneuverability—characteristics that cannot readily be accounted for through known technologies."

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