This summer an old conspiracy theory rematerialized: extraterrestrials being concealed by the government. 

It has been a whopping four years since the Storm area 51 craze that spread around the internet back in 2019. Since then the community of UFOlogists and alien enthusiasts has been relatively quiet.

However, just recently, on July 26, 2023, David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer, testified before Congress that the government had for years been hiding a secret program to find, retrieve, and examine Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).

He brought two witnesses who had been part of UAP sightings, and who had not been contacted or received any explanation of what they saw. Both men testified that the objects they saw were moving in ways that were far beyond our current technological capabilities, and that whether they came from outer space or another country we stood no chance against a party with that level of technology.

Grusch’s Congressional hearing, which is the first hearing on UAPs in many decades, has, as per usual with events related to suspected extraterrestrials, generated a lot of conversation and very little actual conclusions.

Grusch said that this alleged UAP retrieval program has been a “multi-decade” endeavor, but provided very little other information, frequently saying that he could not publicly disclose information, either due to the confidential nature of the information, or his status as a whistleblower. 

The hearing, largely due to this lack of information, focused much more on the possibility that the government is hiding vital information from the public rather than the actual information that might be hidden. 

The most the actual UAP program was discussed was the witnesses repeatedly suggesting that there needs to be a better system for military personnel and regular civilians to report UAPs and get answers about them.

Just a few short months after this hearing, an entirely separate hearing popped up, this time in the Mexican Congress.

The Mexican government sponsored a hearing in which a man named Jaime Maussan showed off his two alien mummies. While there is no conclusive evidence on the origin of these mummies, it is worth noting that this is not the first time these mummies have shown up, and they have been debunked multiple times.

One answer that has been suggested is that these mummies were created for some kind of burial purpose in ancient Mexico, and the bones they are made up of are likely sourced from llamas, with their heads looking nearly identical to backwards llama skulls.

While inconclusive, both of these hearings have given the public a window into people’s continued fascination with extraterrestrials, and people’s desires to locate and learn more about these creatures, and whether the possible eventual finding of such aliens will be something good for science, or catastrophic for our species.