If that's what it sounds like, then I suggest you haven't read very carefully. Your tenor has changed. Perhaps you were turned off by certain more poignant remarks that made you feel your intelligence was being insulted which, I can assure you, is not. As far as I'm concerned, you continue to contribute with penetrating thought and articulation which is warmly welcome and needed in MB. It's perfectly fine to disagree with the 'so-called' skeptics who, by the way, constantly disagree amongst themselves.
But back to the point.
There's no such thing as a centralized "intelligence community" within DoD. Reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence (ISR) are a decentralized military sub-discipline that cuts across DoD's core functions in almost every branch and at every level. Developing these functions to quicker and better identify potential airborne threats (amongst others) is a core area of constant improvement, and billions of dollars are yearly appropriated to maintain and improve these functions. These core military functions do not rely on a separate modestly funded and unclassified fringe "UAP" entity in the Pentagon or anywhere else, established under congressional pressure which was generated by a ufologist lobby group. That some now-notable ufologists were former DoD intelligence officers and UAP investigators under said entity, relying on all manner of anonymous testimonies and LIZ records from within the DoD, tells more about DoD intelligence function's quality control than the quality of the generality of its intelligence officers.
People can believe in anything as long as they don't let it undermine their trustworthiness with classified material or the quality of their work as impartial investigators. Grusch and Elizondo did. And maybe many others we don't know about.
My tenor has changed not out of a feeling that my intelligence has been insulted, which it hasn't, it has more to do with a frustration about the way we choose to talk about some of the people being discussed, particularly Grusch, but other folks in the UFO circle with terms like "true believers". That term just isn't particularly helpful. People come to believe in things like God and UFOS for all sorts of different reasons. I personally don't have the kind of evidence I'd need in order to believe that aliens are real, they're visiting the Earth, and the government knows about it. There's no rationally compelling reason for me to accept that given the little amount of publicly available evidence for such claims. But that's the state of the evidence that
I have available for that topic.
I have no idea what kind of evidence Grusch has seen, or Elizondo. The fact that I'm not epistemically justified in believing their claims doesn't mean
they aren't considering the very real possibility that they have had access to far more documentation, videos, and photos than I ever have or likely ever will. So to call them "true believers" is to assign a label to them whose function is to put them into the same category we tend to put religious fundamentalists in, a group of folks who are generally considered to be people who believe
despite having no evidence for their beliefs. But religious believers don't have special access to any evidence for God that isn't available to me as well. I
know what the evidence for God is because my area of specialization when I did my graduate program in philosophy was Philosophy of Religion. I find the evidence unpersuasive, so I'm more confident about making claims about religious fundamentalists' beliefs being epistemically unwarranted because I have access to exactly the same kind of information they do.
The same cannot be said for folks like Grusch. For instance, I assume a person who'd fall into the category of "true believer" would be Christopher Mellon. And yet, as recently as 2016, Christopher Mellon publicly was still
saying things like this:
External Quote:
I highly doubt DoD or any other government agency is concealing UFO information. I participated in a comprehensive review of DoD's black programs and spent over a decade conducting oversight of the national foreign intelligence program, an almost totally separate world of secrets. I visited Area 51 and other military, intelligence and research facilities. During all those years, I never detected the faintest hint of government interest or involvement in UFOs. ... While a few new, previously overlooked documents might turn up (the bureaucracy is never perfect), I do not believe they would resolve the UFO issue or provide significant new insights. I can think of one lengthy UFO report that is classified only due to concerns over sources and methods. In fact, it identified a convincing conventional explanation for the pilot sightings in this particular case. There are lots of classified documents related to activities at Area 51, where high security is needed. But this is all legitimate stuff the American people would support. They have nothing to do with UFOs, to the best of my knowledge
What changed? I have no idea. Is he a "true believer"? I find it difficult to believe that after saying things like the above, someone like Eric Davis and Hal Puthoff sat down with him and told him stories that were persuasive enough for him to completely change his tune. That's a just-so story that explains very little and illuminates nothing. If these people are true believers,
why are they true believers? On the basis of
what do they ground their beliefs about this subject? Assuming that their belief is based on pre-existing convictions and pre-existing adherence to UFO folklore that predates their official work is as much of a speculative assumption as is the assumption that they believe
because they've been exposed to information in their line of work by individuals they have good reason to trust that was compelling enough to ground their belief in what they're saying.
Skeptics can and do disagree about all sorts of things amongst themselves, that's something that's been clear to me in the 15 years or so that I've been engaged with the skeptic community. What is irritating though is when admittedly speculative skeptical hypotheses are asserted with a tone of certainty that is unwarranted. It's a kind of underlying arrogant debunker attitude that has been pointed out for decades and attributed to people like Randi, Brian Dunning, and countless other non-famous skeptics that hang out in these types of places. We have an "assume good-faith" rule in this site, but don't seem to have much of a problem denying that assumption of good-faith to people like Grusch, someone
who's only ever made two public appearances and whom we know absolutely nothing about.
Here's a perfect example:
People can believe in anything as long as they don't let it undermine their trustworthiness with classified material or the quality of their work as impartial investigators. Grusch and Elizondo did.
This assumes Grusch's pre-existing beliefs undermined his trustworthiness with classified material and/or the quality of his work as an impartial investigator.
You are not justified in assuming that with how little information we have available
. For all we know it is
because of his work and investigations that he came to these beliefs in the first place. We just assume, without argument, that there's nothing
really going on behind the scenes, so any beliefs Grusch has
must have existed before his job or due to some incompetence in his ability as an investigator. But it is just as possible that in the course of his investigations he found evidence that led him to form these beliefs in the first place. And now he's branded a "true-believer" for holding these beliefs. We make so many wild speculations and inferences on the basis of very little evidence every bit as much as Ufologists do, and it's extremely frustrating that we have a massive blind-spot when
we do it.
Elizondo leaked LIZ videos. Because Grusch's anecdotes directly imply a deep-state conspiracy against whistleblowers and the general public, as well as mind-boggling facts about decades of USG's contacts with aliens, it's far more scoopworthy and politically usable. Despite being essentially 'UFO greatest hits' to borrow from 
