Former NASA OIG special agent responds to UFO witnesses : "You are not all there"
Fox News interviewed Joseph Gutheinz, “a retired senior special agent with NASA’s Office of Inspector General".
Imagine a conversation between a shaman from a Pacific island, known for being cut off from the world, and a fisherman from his tribe. The fisherman tells the shaman that he saw a huge shape reflecting the sunlight, passing across the horizon, much faster than their boats, without sails and against the wind, disappearing into the distance without a trace. The fisherman could almost see silhouettes on the edges of the huge shape.
The shaman replied that he must have been dozing off and daydreaming. Nothing could move that fast on the ocean. Their best boats, the pinnacle of their engineering, could not move that fast, let alone against the wind and without sails, and didn’t reflect light. What the fisherman was saying was therefore impossible; the only possible explanation was a hallucination.
Moreover, the fisherman had no proof of what he had seen. Through careful calculations, the shaman showed him that it would take months at sea to circumnavigate the planet and have a chance of finding other lands. Nothing could survive that long in the ferocity of the ocean. He dismissed the fisherman, having no time to waste discussing daydreams; he was a serious shaman.
In an article published on June 15, Fox News interviewed Joseph Gutheinz, “a retired senior special agent with NASA’s Office of Inspector General and current criminal defense attorney”.
The title of the article has also been curiously changed from “Former NASA official challenges UFO believers to prove alien visitations” to the more intriguing “UFO cover used by government to ‘hide a lot of things,’ former NASA agent says”.
Joseph Gutheinz
In this article, Gutheinz said the following about UFOs:
What I used to tell my students was the possibility of anybody coming from another world to visit us was beyond unlikely.
Several issues arise. First, Mr. Gutheinz doesn’t seem to be a scientist. On his official website, we read:
Joseph R. Gutheinz, Jr. is a former Army Intelligence Officer
His CV is also noteworthy:
He is a former Commissioner on the Texas Commission on Fire Protection, a Former Commissioned Member of the Texas State Council on Sex Offender Treatment, and a Former Commissioned Member on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments. As a college instructor, he has taught over 200 graduate and undergraduate Criminal Justice, Risk Management, and Paralegal classes for three colleges. He is a former Adjunct Professor at Thurgood Marshall School of Law, where he taught Mediation.
It would be difficult to see what earned him his status as a UFO expert for Fox News. However, one mention may shed some light on the matter:
While I was with the NASA Office of the Inspector General, on a regular basis I would get calls from people saying that there were abducted, they had a chip in their brain and that there were saucers flying overhead and so forth, I generally tried to pass them off to the FBI, but from time to time I basically had to say : “you are not all there.
What I would tell the people that would call me up with these tales about being visited by aliens, see a psychiatrist.
Those familiar with close encounters will no doubt appreciate the advice.
NASA Office of the Inspector General
The NASA OIG is a body that:
conducts audits, reviews, and investigations of NASA programs and operations to prevent and detect fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement and to assist NASA management in promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness.
For example, during the last hearings in March 2024, the Acting Inspector General stated:
Given that the Agency is currently anticipated to operate with less than $8 billion annually for the Science Mission Directorate; absent complete, credible, and transparent cost and schedule commitments, it will be difficult for NASA, Congress, and external stakeholders to make informed decisions about the prioritization of these efforts and the Agency’s long-term funding needs.
Scientists will appreciate the measured tone of the criticism.
The NASAOIG is also known for its assistance in the proceedings against Xia Guang Pang, who photographed sensitive facilities using a drone.
In the interview, Gutheinz uses the following argument:
The bottom line is that it's 4.4 light years away, or 25 trillion miles away. And if somebody started flying to Proxima and Satori, or the other way around, it would take them over 70,000 years to get there
Nobody is visiting us from another world, likely.
Extraterrestrial Hypothesis
The figure of 70,000 years may raise questions. In fact, it is the hypothesis that the craft was sent in the same way as the Voyager probes in 1977. Returning to the metaphor at the beginning of the article, these craft are like native sailing ships, representing the pinnacle of technology at the time.
However, Gutheinz's hypothesis is actually quite strange. He believes that all species that could live in the galaxy would have had their technological development halted at the same level as that of humanity in 1977.
Although space research funding dwindled after the Cold War, humanity did not stop at the technologies of the 1970s. New modes of propulsion were invented, including ion propulsion, laser propulsion, and even the theoretical use of nuclear bombs. They have even been collected by a foundation close to NASA here.
For humans, the ideal would be a craft capable of accelerating to 1G, which would allow artificial gravity to be maintained on board. Assuming half the journey is spent accelerating and the other half decelerating, the travel time to Alpha Centauri would be reduced to six years on Earth and three and a half years for the crew. The real question is where to source the necessary energy. Or, estimates of the energy released by UFOs through light radiation suggest they possess vast amounts of energy. Not to mention their unconventional mode of propulsion, which also seems capable of overcoming inertia.
One might assume that many volunteers would be interested in participating in such a trip lasting so little time.
This question of travel time has become one of my favorite questions to ask astrophysicists who are skeptical about the presence of UFOs on Earth. Once the problem is framed in this way, it becomes very easy to consider that a civilization millions of years more advanced than ours would have technologies that we do not have.
The skeptical responses that follow always make me laugh, because they are always the same. Once the taboo of thinking about the existence of advanced extraterrestrial platforms has been lifted, the systematic objection is to say, “But why would they come to see us?” One can respond that there are many examples of curiosity in animal species. Science itself is interested in subjects that seem useless or abstruse to the general population, because the search for utility is not fundamental to science, but the increase of knowledge is.
Data
This is something that Mr. Gutheinz seems to have forgotten, even though NASA funded an independent study on UAPs that concluded that more investigation was needed on the subject. GEIPAN, the French UFO study group under the direction of the National Center for Space Studies, has dozens of cases involving highly reliable data and multiple witnesses that have not been explained despite scientific investigation. These cases can be viewed online at cnes-geipan.fr. Furthermore, the Department of Defense has officially classified 3 videos as showing UAP despite extensive inquiries. Regarding implants, former DOD AATIP director Lue Elizondo confirmed that some were recovered inside military personnel. Finally, the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Aerospace Science just published a special edition on UAP.
Mr Gutheinz's remark is all the more strange given that, last month, the Head of the European Space Agency confirmed to Harald Havas that they were exchanging information with NASA on the subject of UFOs. At the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies conference, a former NASA scientist stated that many staff members were interested in the subject, but their administration had forbidden them from conducting research on it due to Congressional pressure over spendings. NASA's administration had suddenly become reluctant to address the subject.
We could also suggest that Mr Gutheinz, a former special agent in NASA's Office of the Inspector General, read the report of the lawsuit between NASA and the journalist Leslie Kean. After refusing to release information, NASA was forced by the courts to provide documents relating to the Kecksburg case, in which an object was seen crashing by witnesses before being recovered by the authorities. NASA also had to pay $50,000 of Leslie Kean's legal fees. The documents revealed NASA's involvement in the Moondust project, which aimed to recover ‘foreign’ debris.
Probes
Those who argue that the cosmic environment would still be dangerous for humans could be responded to by pointing out that Homo sapiens have been sending robots in their place for a long time. This would enable even faster propulsion systems. A small object equipped with a 3D printer to duplicate and repair itself, a Von Neumann probe, could be propelled at high speed through the cosmos to then build more massive probes on site. Similarly, extrapolating the technological advances made in 'soft robots' and considering the use of robots disguised to infiltrate colonies of social animals by zoologists, the close encounters reported by numerous witnesses and the strangeness associated with them would make perfect sense.
Perhaps, one day, the shaman will see the ships of another civilization passing in the distance for himself. But will he admit his mistake to the fisherman? As NASA OIG is also responsible for handling whistleblowers, one could wonder what would have happened if somebody like David Grusch, wanting to report a UAP program inside NASA, would have found M. Gutheinz.
Suppose, then, that in an unknown land—let us say America, but an America not yet discovered by Europe—there had been developed a science identical with our actual science, with all its mechanical applications.
It might then have happened that from time to time some fishermen, venturing far out from the coast of Ireland or Brittany would have seen, far off on the horizon, an American ship moving at full speed against the wind,—a steamship, let us say.
They would have come and told what they had seen. Would they have been believed ? Probably not. They would have been mistrusted just in proportion as those to whom they told the tale were learned and imbued with a science which would have been psychological in direction, the reverse of physics and mechanics.
Pr Henri Bergson, 1913