Extraterrestrial foreign interference? We don’t even do anything about the terrestrial kind.

If our government knew aliens were among us, what would they do about it?

In the short time since former Pentagon intelligence official David Grush made stunning, bombshell claims about the American government's knowledge - and alleged coverup - of extraterrestrials in front of Congress, many hot takes have been written.

The upshot of most of those goes like this: Grush's claims are preposterous, and logic and reason dictate that Grush's claims be evaluated with a harsh, skeptical eye. 

It's easy to understand why. Grush has claimed not only that the Americans covered up the existence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth but had biological evidence to boot. Given the outlandish nature of these statements, the average person could reasonably conclude that this is a preposterous assertion, particularly since it is outside of humanity's current mainstream understanding of physics and the space-time continuum. 

Oddly, though, much dismissal of Grush's claims has been related to a more practical point. How could something of such magnitude and importance to the American people and the world be kept from its democratically elected leaders for such an extended period? And even if his claims are valid, where is that evidence?

Given the American defense and security apparatus's size, scope, and cost, this is a reasonable question to ask. But the glaring problem with that assumption is that nowhere in the history of democracy has the size and cost of government guaranteed efficacy, even on national security matters.

Take Canada, for example. 

The Canadian public recently had the doors blown off its Pollyanna-ish optimism in its government's ability to share and act on information critical to maintaining national security across departments. Earlier this year, the Globe and Mail published national security whistleblower claims of a more mundane, but no less shocking nature than Grush's. Those included claims that the Canadian government had both sat on knowledge that the government in Beijing had a massive influence operation in Canada and done nothing about it for years.

These claims were hard for many Canadians to believe, even after evidence that the government had sat on an intimidation campaign against a sitting Member of Parliament. Indeed, a significant criticism of the Canadian foreign interference crisis has been against the credibility of the whistleblowers and the journalists who published their claims, as opposed to the government. 

Part of this reaction could be ascribed to partisanship. Still, it's more likely attributable to a dangerously ingrained sense of Western exceptionalism that our elected leaders, senior public servants, and government processes are incapable of incompetence of this magnitude.

Grush's claims still have to overcome the test of humanity's current understanding of science, and physical evidence of his claims have yet to emerge. But Canada's foreign interference scandal shows that on many grounds Grush's testimony could be dismissed, the assumption that it would be impossible for the government to screw up on something this important to national security shouldn’t be one of them.

Doing so would negatively impact the security of our nations. For years, a preponderance of evidence from hundreds of highly credible sources suggests that humanity is encountering something beyond our current public knowledge of engineering and physics in the skies. The public doesn't know if these things are advanced technology from another country's military apparatus, how they work, or what their purpose is. And even in instances where we do know the answers to those questions, we’ve learned that we should have been monitoring the skies for this type of stuff long ago but weren’t, as was the case in recent high-profile spy balloon incidents.

The bottom line is that Western societies are often slow to acknowledge that, in many circumstances, we can be perilously slow to recognize that we don't know what we don't know. In those moments, our societal willingness to shoot down constructive inquiry through partisanship or some other psychological force can put our collective safety at risk and stifle breakthroughs on some of the world's biggest challenges.

On the matter of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, in Canada, Member of Parliament Larry Maguire has been trying to break down the enormous stigma on the subject by asking the government provocative, but constructive questions. On that front, Larry's ability to keep an open mind while keeping himself grounded in his practical, farmer's personality has allowed him to make progress. For example, Canada is now launching a structured inquiry into the matter.

On the numerous occasions when I've talked to Larry about why he's so passionate about this issue, beyond the obvious national security implications, it usually boils down to his belief in one thing; curiosity should never be quelled to the point where we become so blindly attached to the status quo that we fail to make progress on solving challenges, where people feel the only way to get answers is to engage in civil disobedience, or we’re left vulnerable to catastrophes caused by our blind spots.

To be sure, none of this proves Grush’s claims. However, Canada’s foreign interference scandal does prove that we should never have so much confidence in our governments to get everything right that we stop assuming they could ever get anything wrong. 

That we still do so suggests that more often than not, there’s still truth out there for us to discover.