Recent claims by a whistleblower that the U.S. government has been aware of non-human activity since the 1930s, including retrieving an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon from Magneta, Italy, with the help of the Vatican, has put increasing pressure of the Holy See to disclose what it knows on the subject, Newsweek reported on Wednesday.
The whistleblower, David Grusch, a U.S. Air Force veteran who previously worked at the National Reconnaissance Office on UFOs, was among three people who recently testified to the House Oversight Committee on the allegations.
Grusch, who resigned from his position in April, said the government had retrieved several "non-human origin technical vehicles," some of which contained "dead pilots."
He also said the Italian government had recovered a UFO in the 1930s and moved it to a "secure airbase" until then-Pope Pius XII had "backchanneled" knowledge of the UFO to the U.S., which "ended up scooping it" from them, according to Newsweek.
Grusch said the Catholic Church "certainly" knew about the existence of alien life.
However, the Department of Defense and NASA have publicly stated that they have no evidence of alien life or of a government program to reverse-engineer alien materials.
Various attempts to get comments from the Vatican on the subject have so far been unsuccessful.
Ross Coulthart, one of the journalists who interviewed Grusch before the congressional hearing, said that other, unnamed sources had confirmed the story to him, and said the silence of the Vatican could be a sign that the claim is true.
He stressed that "390 years ago it was the Vatican that tried Galileo as a heretic for arguing that the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe — and in nearly four hundred years, I have to say the Vatican has actually shown quite creditable openness to science," pointing out that the Holy See hosted a conference on astrobiology in 2009.
Coulthart said he had spoken to someone who had been granted access to the Vatican's archives and suggested that documents providing evidence for Grusch's claims may be found there by the very few with permission to enter, Newsweek reported.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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