On June 5, journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal — who were responsible for the New York Times report published in 2017 regarding the Pentagon’s then-unacknowledged UFO investigation program — released a story at The Debrief on whistleblower David Grusch.

Grusch, a decorated military veteran and intelligence official, who served in Afghanistan and formerly worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), has alleged that there are black programs in the U.S. government dedicated to the retrieval and attempted reverse-engineering of vehicles of non-prosaic origin.

Grusch was also the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force beginning in 2019.

Kean and Blumenthal spoke with numerous intelligence officials who vouched for Grusch’s credibility and integrity, and who have backed up his claims. Journalist Michael Shellenberger has also spoken with intelligence officials who have made similar allegations to Grusch.

In May 2022, nearly a year after reporting to the Department of Defense Inspector General that certain information relating to UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) was not being provided to Congress, Grusch’s attorney filed a Disclosure of Urgent Concern(s); Complaint of Reprisal to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, under oath, which was later deemed “credible and urgent.”

In response to Grusch’s claims, a Congressional hearing will take place. I recently spoke with Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) — one of the members of the Oversight Committee who will head up the hearing — in order to gain insight into how it will be conducted and what he expects to find.

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Q: Do you plan to have David Grusch testify at the hearing? And do you plan to have other individuals with whom he’s spoken regarding the allegations he’s made — including the high-level officials who reportedly talked to him — testify?

Burchett: We would like to get him there. It’s premature to say who we will have there. We’ll release that when we get the okay from the committee chair of everybody that we’ve invited who’s been cleared to come speak.

Q: Are there plans to have people like former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s (NASIC) Jonathan Grey, or retired Army Colonel and current aerospace executive Karl Nell testify?

Burchett: We’re waiting on approval for several people — and then when we get that, we’ll move ahead with firming up a date. We have some ideas, but, you know, we’ve got security concerns and we just want to make sure we have our ducks in a row.

Q: In Michael Shellenberger’s recent piece, he said that a source told him: “We have non-disclosure agreements or secrecy agreements that we’re supposed to take to the grave.” Can Congress provide protections for those individuals? And how much has been done with the previous whistleblower protections from the last National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)?

Burchett: Well, that’s left up to interpretation. They’re gonna have to have a degree of bravery to come forward with anything because of the lack of trust. Frankly, I don’t trust our Justice Department or a lot of the higher-ups in our intelligence agencies because they have been the problem. And now, they’re coming forward saying that we need to find out what’s going on, when in fact, they know what’s going on. They have all the files. Just release the underacted files and quit with all the nonsense — because that’s all they’re doing now.

They’re smelling billions of dollars in research, and you’ll have every branch of the military and every agency wanting some of those dollars. That’s where we’re headed, I think. They’re smelling dollars, they know they’ve — they’ve covered this thing up, and the public just wants answers, and that’ll be their next move.

But I’m telling you, I’m not going to vote for any more dollars for them. The Pentagon loses over a billion dollars; the Department of Defense is bigger than our Navy. You’ve got more people pushing pencils than are pushing bullets, and that needs to stop.

Q: Do you support Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s amendment that would require that no money be spent on Special Access Programs (SAPs) without being reported to Congress?

Burchett: I haven’t read that, but that seems like something I could support. I’d have to read the details of it though.

Q: AARO (All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office), as it stands right now, doesn’t seem to have, from what I’ve read, the ability to actually investigate things like the allegations made by Grusch and others like him because they don’t have the necessary clearance to access certain projects. So, will clearances like Title 50 clearance be discussed at all in this hearing?

Burchett: I don’t know if we’re gonna get that much into the weeds. I want to talk to people who have seen something and can provide some proof of what’s going on. In fact, if we can disclose some things, some new facts — but just get the people before us that have seen it, who have great credentials, and just stop with all the nonsense. Nobody cares about these reports, these numbers of reports and all that; they just want to get to the proof. And that’s what I’m after. I’m just after the facts.

Q: Speaking of proof, I was talking to a colleague of mine and they were lamenting that the only way the ball is gonna be able to move on anything like this is if Congress “kicks down the doors of military bases” where they’re saying these alleged things are — without notice — so they can actually get the proof.

Burchett: Yeah — and that’s correct, because as soon as we have a hearing and 12 years later, Congress acts, it’ll already be moved, there won’t be anything there. So we have to — I’m not going to disclose everything, but we will be in contact with some folks on the proper procedure for handling that legally.

Q: That was my next question because I was wondering if Congress has the sort of authority and the mechanisms to be able to follow up with the information that’s being provided.

Burchett: They do, but they’re so much on the take for all this stuff. They don’t want to rock the big military industrial complex, the people writing the big checks. I mean, we tell Ukraine we’re gonna give them some of our missiles out of our missile defense system, and then we deplete our system, which we know we have to keep at a certain level of readiness. And low and behold, we’ve got to buy billions more dollars in missiles, and it just so happens congresspeople from both parties are heavily invested in these companies. It’s just corruption, and nobody will call it out.

Q: In the piece from The Debrief, it was said that Grusch “provided Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs.” Does Congress have classified information relating to alleged covert programs? And if so, will Congress push to make that public?

Burchett: I don’t know. I think that the Intelligence Committee is basically spoon-fed; they don’t really care about this issue. They’ve made statements to me, you know, “Burchett, we’ve got much more important things to worry about.” And you know, we’ve documented 11 or 12 near misses with our multi-million dollar aircraft and our fighting men and women that could lose their lives. To me, something flying in our military air zones that we do not control is something very important. But then again, they’re told not to worry about it by some unelected bureaucrat, and so they don’t worry about it.

Q: Former Senator Harry Reid talked about attempting to get classified approval from the Pentagon to look at certain things and that they wouldn’t allow him to do so. What can Congress effectively change when a small group of powerful people overseeing these alleged black budget projects don’t want their work to be outed?

Burchett: We’ve got to change the system — and you know, talk’s cheap. Everybody puffs themselves up and talks real tough, but the end result is going to have to be: Congress is the government’s checkbook, and we need to stop writing the checks to these departments because they are rouge, they’re unelected bureaucrats, and they are the tail that’s wagging the dog.

Q: There are allegations that black budget programs outsource some of their work on alleged technology to one or more private aerospace firms. What are your thoughts on that? And will that be something that you’re discussing?

Burchett: I believe that’s accurate, and I would hope we would get to the bottom of that — but that stuff’s so deep, it’s hard to get ahold of. Again, that’s under the corruption within government and it’s so compartmentalized. And, you know, you have these chairmen in both parties that are chairmen just because they can raise money, and to raise the amount of money they’ve raised, they have to be there for a long period of time. And sometimes, their cognitive skills have dwindled and they’re spoon-fed by their staff, who, in fact, might as well just work for the other side. So they just — it’s just an endless cycle, and we’ve gotta start calling it out.

Q: I saw you speaking on News Nation about how the previous UFO hearings weren’t all that they could be.

Burchett: They were a hoax, man. They were a hoax. You saw a committee spoon-fed. You saw people who were running this so-called investigative agency that couldn’t spell UFO, that had no idea about any of the basic history of the situation in this country. They read Project Blue Book probably, or saw the TV show from the ’70s, and they quote that as fact — and preplanned questions.

I was told I was going to be able to ask a question; I was not allowed to. And you had some, in my opinion, very weak-ass video. And Schiff was the only one to ask a question that made any — he said, “What exactly am I looking at?” And he asked, “Can you stop the tape?” And there you had a 20-second tape or something, the guys couldn’t even stop the tape. The most technologically advanced country in the world — my daughter could’ve stopped that tape if they’d allowed her access to that computer.

They were just checking a box, so they could say, “Oh, look what we’re doing, but we’re gonna go back in secret and do our thing.” And people like me don’t get on those committees because I don’t kiss their ass and I don’t raise the money.

Q: What’s your hope for how this hearing will play out?

Burchett: I hope we show the American public that we’re serious about this issue — a recent poll showed that over half the people believe in this — and that we’ll get a little closer to getting to the bottom of it. And we’ll expose to the American public that this is a cover-up, that we are not being forthcoming, and that there is a group of us that want to make that happen — and hopefully, we don’t get corrupted.

And our opposition always uses this against us, and they downplay us and put stuff out against us, you know. “Oh, they’re worried about little green men and people are starving.” It’s the committee of jurisdiction where this is supposed to happen. We don’t necessarily deal with some of those other issues.

Most of us won’t be on the jury of a forensics-based trial or be accused of a crime, but for those that are, and for those who regularly watch true crime documentaries, it should be known that many of the forensic techniques we grew up hearing about are not actually accurate.

Earlier this year, ProPublica published an article that included a list of things to look out for when determining whether forensic analysis is sound science or junk science. The list includes:

It has limited or no scientific evidence or research supporting it. It is presented as absolutely certain or conclusive, with no mention of error rates. It relies on subjective criteria or interpretation. It oversimplifies a complex science. It takes just a few days to become an “expert.”

With this information in mind, let’s take a look at some forensic techniques that have been featured in movies, television shows, and true crime documentaries but that are actually not sound science at all.

Bite Mark Analysis

Serial killer Ted Bundy was convicted in part on bite mark analysis, and the technique was used in the following decades. In recent years, however, the technique has been widely criticized as unreliable, though it is still used in courtrooms.

Bite mark analysis falls under the broad terms of forensics known as pattern matching, where an “expert” looks at evidence collected at a crime scene and evidence taken from a suspect, compares the two, and makes a subjective determination as to whether there’s a match.

At least 35 people have been wrongfully convicted based on bite mark analysis, The Intercept reported last year, including Steven Mark Chaney, who was convicted in 1987 for a murder he didn’t commit. Chaney had nine alibi witnesses and there was no actual evidence linking him to the murders of John and Sally Sweek, but two forensic dentists testified that an alleged bite mark found on John’s arm matched Chaney’s teeth.

Journalist Radley Balko has extensively documented the problems with bite mark analysis, questioning how accurate it could possibly be.

“For example, we don’t know what percentage of the human population’s teeth are capable of leaving a certain pattern of marks on human skin,” Balko wrote last month. “We don’t even know if such a calculation is even possible. And if it were possible, we don’t know that human skin is capable of recording and preserving bite marks in a way that’s useful (the studies that have examined this suggest it isn’t).”

“The characteristics of a bite mark could be affected by the angle of the biter’s teeth, whether the victim was pulling away at the time of the bite, the elasticity of the victim’s skin, the rate at which the victim’s body heals, and countless other factors,” he continued.

Cadaver Dogs

Many cases use dogs who are trained to detect the scent of dead bodies to determine whether a crime has occurred and to connect suspects to that crime. But their accuracy has been called into question in recent years. In some cases, dogs have found scents that couldn’t possibly have existed.

Take the missing girl Madeleine McCann. Her parents were labeled suspects in her disappearance four months after their daughter vanished, based largely on a cadaver dog indicating the scent of death on one of McCann’s baby toys and on her mother’s clothes.

The problem, however, is that it is unclear whether McCann was even killed, but speculating that she was killed the night she died, the cadaver dogs would have had to pick up minute traces of a scent four months after the murder. As Slate reported in 2007, it is unclear how long that scent could linger, with a former Scotland Yard dog handler suggesting the scent wouldn’t last longer than a month.

And to be clear, the dogs didn’t actually find any human remains.

Some attorneys have convinced a Wisconsin judge that some of these death-sniffing dogs were accurate just 22-38% of the time. Even prosecutors who denied those attorneys’ claims said the dogs had a success rate of just 60-69%, which is hardly accurate enough to convict someone.

A cadaver dog was also used as evidence against Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 of killing his wife, though many question whether he could have actually been the murderer.

In the Peterson case, a trailing dog (similar to a cadaver dog but trained to follow scents in the air) allegedly followed his wife’s scent from a parking lot at the Berkeley Marina, where Peterson kept a small fishing boat, to a nearby pier. The dog allegedly followed this scent four days after Peterson’s wife, Laci, was reported missing. The dog was given Laci’s sunglasses and hairbrush, both of which could have had cross-contamination from Scott Peterson, who had maintained his innocence and told police he went fishing on the day Laci went missing.

Contact or Trace DNA

When we hear the letters DNA, we immediately think science and indisputable fact, but there is a type of DNA evidence that is not reliable and has been used to wrongly imprison many – contact, or trace DNA.

We leave behind trace amounts of DNA on everything we touch. This is called contact DNA. It may only be a few skin cells, but it is there. That contact DNA can then be transferred to another surface without us touching it. For example, if you shake someone’s hand, they’ll have traces of your DNA left behind, and then if they touch something else, they could leave those traces of your DNA as well as their own DNA on that object.

There isn’t as much DNA left behind as there would be in blood, saliva, or semen, yet “experts” have used contact DNA to put people in prison. One example is the case of Mayer Herskovic, who was convicted in 2017 for allegedly taking part in a multi-person attack against a young, gay black man in Brooklyn in 2013. Experts testified that trace amounts of Herskovic’s DNA was found on one of the victim’s shoes. To come to this conclusion, the crime lab had to take a tiny sample of the DNA and replicate it to get a useable sample. This involved copying the DNA and then copying the copies thousands of times, and then running that data through the computer to get statistics claiming it was highly likely that the tiny amount of DNA on the shoe belonged to Herskovic.

The problem is that the technique, which is no longer used by the crime lab, didn’t find the victim’s DNA on his own shoe, but also found the DNA of someone else. And because the community where the crime occurred was largely homogenous, the DNA results could have matched someone other than Herskovic. Herskovic’s conviction was overturned in 2018.

911 Call Analysis

Police and prosecutors sometimes train in 911 call analysis, which claims to detect a murderer in a phone call by listening to their speech patterns, tone, word choice, and other factors when calling authorities, ProPublica reported.

The technique was designed by Tracy Harpster, a retired deputy police chief with limited homicide investigation experience and little scientific background. He used a small study to create the technique for his master’s thesis, and it was soon accepted by law enforcement nationwide. The technique includes a checklist of how many “errors” a person commits during a 911 call, which Harpster said gives away their true involvement. Asking “huh?” in response to a question from a dispatcher is one indication of guilt, as is saying “please” by itself. If a person doesn’t seem urgent enough, that is also an indication of guilt, Harpster concluded.

Studies from the FBI in 2020 and 2022, however, warned against the technique, saying its findings could not be corroborated and that it may simply create bias against the accused.

The technique was used to convict Jessica Logan of killing her baby in 2019. Logan’s baby had died during the night and she called 911 frantic. She was crying and screaming and could barely speak to the 911 operator. Detective Eric Matthews determined her agony was fake and that she had actually killed her own baby.

Matthews had taken a two-day course on 911 call analysis, and used what he learned to get Logan convicted. Many are questioning her conviction.

Firearm Analysis

We’ve all seen images of experts comparing the lines of one bullet, referred to as rifling marks, to the lines on another bullet. This is firearm analysis, the belief that every gun in the world contains minute imperfections that distinguish it from every other gun on the planet, just like DNA.

But there’s no evidence this is true. It is unknown whether marks in the gun’s barrel leave unique marks on bullets that no other gun can recreate, Radly Balko wrote last month. He also raised other questions regarding firearm analysis.

“We don’t know if a gun’s firing pin and ejection mechanism leave unique marks on a casing,” he wrote. “We don’t know the frequency with which specific marks may appear among the entire population of fired bullets. We also don’t know how to account for the likelihood that a gun will leave different sorts of marks on bullets over the course of its life as a functioning gun as the ridges and grooves inside the barrel wear down — an issue that would presumably affect older cold cases.”

Yet firearm analysis is used to convict thousands, even though it is a subjective technique.

Bloodstain Pattern Analysis

Everybody’s favorite TV serial killer, “Dexter,” was a blood spatter analyst by day, yet his “scientific” technique isn’t all that scientific. Experts in the field analyze blood drops, spatters, and trails at crime scenes to reconstruct what happened, yet ProPublica reported that it has never been definitively proven or quantified.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a landmark report casting doubt on bloodstain analysis and other types of forensics, including bitemark analysis and other so-called pattern matching forensics. The report stated that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ conclusions were subjective, rather than scientific.

Faulty bloodstain analysis was used to convict Joe Bryan in the 1980s, with an analyst that had been trained on the technique just four months before Mickey Bryan was found dead. That training was just 40 hours long. Nonetheless, the “expert” testified that small reddish-brown flecks found on a flashlight in the trunk of Joe’s car were blood consistent with Mickey’s blood type (and half the population). The expert went on to make claims that had no basis in bloodstain analysis, alleging the killer must have cleaned up in the bathroom before leaving the house, even though no blood was found in the bathroom.

Fingerprint/Shoeprint/Tire Tread Analysis

Connecting a suspect to a crime by using a fingerprint is one of the oldest investigation techniques in the book, since we’re constantly told that no two fingerprints are identical. Investigators, however, rarely find clear, full fingerprints at a crime scene. Instead, they usually find partial prints, which can be smudged or have been dragged along a surface.

Here is when law enforcement turn to fingerprint experts, who often make assumptions about the prints found at the crime scene.

Dustin Phillips, a defense attorney in Oklahoma, pointed out the issues with this kind of analysis, noting that fingerprint experts can’t even agree on how many points of comparison must be found in order for two prints to match.

“Furthermore, even if full, complete fingerprint was lifted from a crime scene, even if the print could be proven beyond all doubt to belong to a suspect, the print itself does not mean the suspect had anything to do with the crime. It only proves that he or she was in that location at some point in time, possibly days or even weeks before the crime occurred,” Phillips wrote.

The same can be said for shoeprints and tire treads. It cannot be determined when the shoeprints or tire tracks were made, and therefore experts can’t definitively say a suspect left those particular tracks during the crime.

Microscopic Hair/Fiber Analysis

In 2015, the FBI and Justice Department acknowledged that in more than 95% of trials they reviewed, agents used the flawed method of hair analysis.

Hair and fiber analysis involve experts comparing one hair or fiber to another, and claiming there is a match or not. Ed Pilkington at The Guardian reported that “consensus by real experts is more straightforward than ever: there is nothing that can credibly be said, by FBI-approved analysts or anyone else, about [ ] the frequency with which particular characteristics of hair are distributed in the human population.”

Fiber analysis is similar, with investigators unable to determine that a fiber found on a victim or at a crime scene could be definitively linked to a suspect, particularly given the rise of synthetic fibers, which can be found in many homes.

Handwriting Analysis

Handwriting analysis is used to determine if two documents were written by the same person. Like many of the entries on this list, an analyst’s report is entirely subjective, and different experts can come to different conclusions.

“The technique of comparing known writings with questioned documents appears to be entirely subjective and entirely lacking in controlling standards,” a federal court ruled in United States v. Saelee (2001). The court in that case noted that in one test, “the true positive accuracy rate of laypersons was the same as that of handwriting examiners; both groups were correct 52 percent of the time.” This means that a person without any training in handwriting analysis was able to correctly identify matching documents as often as trained experts.

BONUS: Legitimate Forensic Techniques Used Wrongly

Video Analysis

Video footage can be extremely helpful in a trial, showing jurors exactly what a suspect did, but in 2008, video evidence was used to send the wrong man to prison.

Back then a white, slender-built male was robbing convenience stores in Killeen and Copperas Cove, Texas. In video of one incident, the suspect can be seen leaving the store and the clerk quickly follows after to lock the door. One can see in the video that the clerk and the perpetrator were about the same height. The clerk was 5-foot-six, meaning the perpetrator was likely on the shorter side.

Someone called a tip line to accuse George Powell of the crime. The problem was that Powell is more than 6 feet tall. But at trial, prosecutors called in a man with crime reconstruction experience to claim that the suspect in the video was Powell and that he was just slouching. The man had never done any kind of height estimation prior to this case, and wasn’t even trained on the program he used to claim Powell was the man in the video. Powell was convicted and is still fighting for his exoneration.

Location Data

Location data can be used typically to give a range of where someone is at a given time. It’s created when a person’s cell phone “pings” off a nearby cellphone tower. If a person is traveling between towers, investigators can map their general direction.

In the case of Quinton Tellis, who was charged with murdering 19-year-old Jessica Chambers by burning her alive in 2014, location data was used incorrectly. An intelligence analyst testifying for the prosecution found one of Chambers’ cell phone pings to be off by a certain distance, so he then shifted all of the data for Chambers and Tellis by the same distance. He claimed this proved that Chambers’ and Tellis’ phones were together leading up to her death.

But another expert looked at this evidence and found that the last phone call Chambers made pinged off a cellphone tower that didn’t cover Tellis’ house, meaning she couldn’t have been there. Tellis was tried twice for Chambers’ murder due to a mistrial, and the charges were eventually dropped.