Open Minds UFO News

FWIW, Oct. 23, 2026, @ProAviLoeb said: "There are some reports from people who used to work in government that perhaps there are even alien spacecraft that are being held by corporations like Lockheed Martin. I haven’t seen any evidence for that, and the officials I speak with have not seen any evidence for that." avi-loeb.medium.com/comments…

UFOs DON'T MATTER ON ELECTION DAY 1) So many UFO movies, books, podcasts, tales told in congressional hearings--and yet, UAP/UFOs/aliens are invisible in election campaigns & will have no discernible effect on Nov. 3 results. My new article on Mirador. douglasjohnson.ghost.io/ufos…

POLITICO'S UFO ARTICLE: INTERESTING QUOTES & MISSING CLAIMS Today's 5,000-word POLITICO article (9-26-26), "Trump Promised the Truth about UFOs; These Scientists Are Waiting," by freelance journalist Ilan Greenberg, is worth reading. The focus of the article is Prof. Avi Loeb's UAP Science Advisory Council (UAPSAC) and its role in the complicated emerging architecture of the Trump Administration's "UAP transparency" enterprise. The article contains substantial new material on those matters, including interesting quotes from spokespersons for the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA. However, I noticed that Greenberg avoided any mention of multiple high-profile claims that the government (or government-affiliated contractors) possess not only "raw data," "files," "records," or "evidence" regarding anomalous devices operating on this planet, but also actual nonhuman craft/devices, exotic debris, and/or bodies. At least five members of Prof. Loeb's 20-member UAPSAC have publicly promoted or lent credence to some such stories; two of those UAPSAC members were quoted in the article, but neither was quoted about their captive-alien-tech beliefs. Also absent from Greenberg's article are the names of any of the persons publicly claiming personal knowledge regarding government possession of alien technology, including David Grusch, who employed the statutory whistleblower process, and an array of self-styled whistleblowers who have surfaced since 2023. Moreover, a number of members of the House of Representatives have associated themselves with some of those captive-alien-tech claims, and prodding from that group of lawmakers has been a significant factor leading to the Trump Administration's current UAP-related initiatives. Given those connections, it does seem odd to me that Greenberg did not include at least a summary of the captive-alien-tech claims. (As my regular readers know, personally I am generally skeptical of captive-alien-tech claims; I regard a number of the best-known UFO-crash tales as thoroughly discredited hoaxes, and a number of the current crop of "whistleblowers" as credulous, deluded, or straight-up LAPRing phonies. But I also fully support the full exercise of lawful presidential authorities, which on national security matters are extensive, to get to the bottom of UFO-crash and "legacy program" stories, and disclose the results. Whether any such full exercise is underway now within the Trump Administration remains to be seen--but if it is not really happening, I think it is nonsense to blame it on entrenched bureaucrat-gatekeepers whom the President and his cabinet secretaries are mysteriously powerless to identify and fire or move out of the way.) A provocative alternative viewpoint is expressed in quotes that Greenberg obtained from Ohio State University Prof. Alexander Wendt, author of the forthcoming book The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty: "'The good news is they’re not going to get any data' [Wendt said, referring to the UAPSAC]... The bad news, however, is if the council does get its data and announces the presence of alien intelligence on earth, Wendt believes it’s almost certainly the end of civilization as we know it.... Wendt would like to see a 25-to-50-year news blackout to prepare the public." politico.com/news/magazine/2…

"I read Signal's analysis, and found it conclusive. I believe SOM1-01 to be a fake patterned after an official period document as Signal highlighted." -- John Michael Godier, September 26, 2026 (email to Douglas Dean Johnson). Context: In an appearance on John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon podcast on July 2, 2025, former AARO Acting Director Tim Phillips first revealed that AARO had once examined such a document, subsequently identified by former AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick as an "MJ-12" document "the same as what had been released on the internet and debunked some years prior."

"I read Signal's analysis, and found it conclusive. I believe SOM1-01 to be a fake patterned after an official period document as Signal highlighted." -- John Michael Godier, September 26, 2026 (email to Douglas Dean Johnson). Context: In an appearance on John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon podcast on July 2, 2025, former AARO Acting Director Tim Phillips first revealed that AARO had once examined such a document, subsequently identified by former AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick as an "MJ-12" document "the same as what had been released on the internet and debunked some years prior." signalsintelligence.substack…

UPDATE ON DAVID GRUSCH FOIA LAWSUIT The Department of Justice (DOJ), representing the Department of Defense (AKA Department of War) today (September 21, 2026) filed a motion for summary judgment in federal court, which if granted by the judge would end David Grusch's federal FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Defense. In his March 2026 lawsuit (Grusch v. Department of Defense, No. 1:26-cv-607), Grusch has claimed that the Department of Defense conducted an inadequate search in response to his October 2024 FOIA request for certain documents related to a purported "unauthorized disclosure complaint" about Grusch, or related to any "unauthorized disclosure complaint" involving UAP/UFO, both of these being limited to the time period April 1 through December 31, 2023. In a legal memo filed today in support of its motion for summary judgment, the DOD claimed its search followed the terms of Grusch's request, was very thorough, and found 22 POTENTIALLY responsive documents totaling 6,632 pages. After review, 40 pages were released to Grusch on May 18, 2026. The cover letter that accompanied the 40-page release (shown below) said that "some information has been withheld" under FOIA exemptions involving the decision-making process, attorney-client and attorney-work-product privileges, and personal privacy; the letter contained no reference to withholding based on classification or any other justification. The public filings do not make it clear (or at least, not clear to me) what happened to the remaining 6,592 pages identified by the searches as "potentially responsive"--that is, how many were ultimately deemed nonresponsive to Grusch’s request, and whether any records deemed responsive were nevertheless withheld in full under FOIA exemptions, and if that occurred, under which exemptions. To my knowledge, Grusch has made public none of the 40 pages that were released to him in May in response to his FOIA request and lawsuit. Through my own FOIA request I obtained the 40 pages, but in heavily redacted form; I published the redacted documents via X on June 25, 2026. Today's DOJ/DOD memo asserts that the adequacy of the DOD search is the only issue that remains to be resolved in this lawsuit. Today's memo contains no discussion of the justifications for any withholdings or redactions. The 40-page release that I obtained in June included a copy of a letter dated November 1, 2023, to Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN), from Mark D. Dupont, Principal Deputy and Senior Intelligence Oversight Official, Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Privacy, Civil Liberties, and Transparency, shown below. In that letter (sent in response to an inquiry from Burchett's office, also shown below), Dupont related that an unnamed Air Force Intelligence Oversight (IO) officer had "raised concerns" about Grusch, but also that the same officer "subsequently contacted IOD [Intelligence Oversight Directorate] and informed IOD that the information in question had been properly coordinated so there was no unauthorized disclosure, and no follow-on action was necessary. At no point did anyone from the Air Force file a complaint with IOD and IOD took no actions with respect to these conversations." Grusch described the Air Force review incident very differently in an interview on May 5, 2026, in which he claimed, "And the Air Force, I think, was very afraid when I went public....I have a FOIA lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia, because it's come to my attention that when I went public in June 2023, the Department of the Air Force filed an unauthorized disclosure Espionage Act complaint against me." To my knowledge neither Burchett nor Grusch had ever made the November 1, 2023 Dupont letter public, despite Grusch having made public claims about Air Force retaliation in various places over the last several years. The Dupont letter became public only after I obtained it via FOIA and published it in June. Grusch's lawyers have until October 12, 2026 to file an opposition brief to today's DOJ/DOD motion and memo. Most of the key documents in the Grusch FOIA lawsuit can be downloaded for free from Court Listener at courtlistener.com/docket/723…

THE INVISIBLE CONSTELLATION Another tranche (no. 6) of UAP videos and documents was released today by PURSUE, the Pentagon-led "UAP transparency" operation. Early reviews suggest it is underwhelming. It is now seven months since President Trump's Truth Social post instituting what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has termed "unprecedented transparency regarding our government’s understanding of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena." It has been about 16 months since former senator Marco Rubio became National Security Advisor and thus effective boss (under Trump) of the National Security Council staff, which is part of the Executive Office of the President. Rubio indicated recently that if they found alien stuff he was sure the President would announce and show it on TV. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, deemed by some veteran observers to be the most powerful White House staffer in many years, has been given the task of leaving no stone unturned in the UAP transparency search. Now, I clearly recall that multiple heroes of "disclosure" had said they'd "confirmed" from multiple sources that "Immaculate Constellation" was an unacknowledged Special Access Program run out of the White House and the National Security Council. Yet seven months and six tranches after the President's declaration, we have not seen even a single document validating even the existence of such a White House/NSC program. Nor have we seen even a single image or document corresponding to any of those described as associated with Immaculate Constellation in the original Matthew Brown memo of 2024. So, after a seven-month effort, are you supposed to believe that they cannot find a trace of the purported program holding a cornucopia of UAP images, assembled by a purported program run out of the White House and the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building (where senior National Security Council staff are based)? Are you to believe that this purported program, ostensibly holding a treasure trove of high-quality images of anomalous craft, is or was run there by personnel who are under the direct authority of these three men (Trump, Miller, Rubio) and their hand-picked subordinates--yet in seven months, they can unearth no trace of it? Simple logic would dictate that either "Immaculate Constellation" is an amalgam of wargame slides and add-ons, woven into yet another ever-expanding but imaginary tale, OR that the White House "search" is a complete and conscious fraud. One cannot seriously argue BOTH that the White House UAP transparency project is serious, or at least kind of sincere, AND also that "Immaculate Constellation" as described is or was real. Hypothetically, both the described program AND a transparency-based search might be bullshit, or one might be real and the other fiction--but if a serious transparency-driven search is really ongoing under Miller's direction (which I here neither dispute nor affirm), then "Immaculate Constellation" as described is not real, and the converse is also true. "Deep-state gatekeepers are keeping the truth from the President" really doesn't pass the straight-face test with respect to the "Immaculate Constellation" tale (if ever). @StephenM