Last month, David Grusch, who studied “unexplained anomalous phenomena” for the DoD, blew the whistle on the U.S. government for hiding partially intact flying saucers and dead alien pilots. He didn’t see the spacecraft. He didn’t see the aliens. But people assure him that they are there, and that there’s been a conspiracy afoot since at least 1933, when one crashed in Italy. The Mussolini government kept it covered up, and somehow the Pope and Allied Forces managed to get it to the United States.
The U.S. government has recovered more such alien hardware. Top men tell Grusch this. Indeed, some have seen “very large, very large, like a football field kind of size” spacecraft. Why would the government hide the existence of alien life? “Feudalistic dominance,” said Grusch.
What more convincing do you need?
WHISTLEBLOWING SOMETHING GOOD
Congress, as you might expect, is on it. Meanwhile, NASA and the Defense Department have denied everything (of course they would). But let’s assume for a moment that Grusch is telling the truth about the people who allegedly told him the truth and that what they saw were indeed space aliens. If it were all true, it would be the most extraordinary event in millennia, with seismic implications for science, philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, technology—everything! Nothing would ever be the same again. It would be a unifying force unlike anything since Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Try as I might, I cannot think of a single drawback to the U.S. government revealing the existence of space aliens (feudalistic dominance notwithstanding). Which means if Grusch is sane, he has blown the whistle on an objectively positive thing in all respects. Hiding flying saucers isn’t government wrongdoing, exactly, or fraud, waste, or abuse. At most, it’s just a little weird. Blowing the whistle on aliens, in other words, is a complete and total positive for all involved, except potentially for the whistleblower.
WHAT THE LAW HAS TO SAY
“The statutes that pertain to whistleblowing all speak to things like violation of the law, gross mismanagement, gross waste of public funds, threats to life or public health—those types of things,” said Sean Bigley, an attorney and ClearanceJobs legal correspondent. He told me that for a whistleblower to be protected, he or she has to reasonably believe that whatever he or she is disclosing falls in one of those protected categories. Moreover, he said, a would-be whistleblower must follow the established mechanisms for how and what they report, which generally involves documenting the issue, following internal procedures, and going unsuccessfully to proper authorities.
Grusch claims he did all those things. The catch is that reporting the existence of aliens doesn’t arguably itself fall under the protected categories, which means whistleblowing statutes might not protect him, if he experienced any internal government or security clearance repercussions. However, any other claims that fall under the protected categories are a different story.
“This would fall under what I would call a ‘public good category.’ But under current law, there isn’t one,” said Bigley. Keep in mind that whistleblower protection laws only cover those who follow the established legal process; it’s not for those who go public.
IF LIZARD PEOPLE ARE NOT INVOLVED
Let’s leave the aliens out of it for a moment. Suppose you are a scientist for the Department of Energy helping to develop some revolutionary carbon capture technology. It uses minimal energy, works in seconds, and turns carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere into a stable, harmless solid.
But the government classified it for some reason (as it does for too many things). Maybe there’s a proprietary process involved, or a fear that terrorists might reverse-engineer the tech for malevolent purposes. But you are convinced that the benefits of revealing the technology greatly outweigh the risks. The planet is getting hotter, and you could save the world.
You document your concerns and go through the chain trying desperately to get someone to listen, but no one does. The classification remains. So you leak it to the journal Nature (though are careful to protect the parts that can be reverse-engineered by bad guys). The revelation causes an uproar for obvious reasons.
Legally, you are on the hook for this, even if you just saved the planet Earth. Among the consequences you might face include being charged for violating the Espionage Act for leaking classified information that could benefit a foreign nation. You could be sued by the government. You could lose your security clearance, obviously. You could also lose your job and be barred from other government or contractor jobs.
WHAT DEFENSE DO YOU HAVE?
Bigley says that such a “positive” hypothetical whistleblower would have a hard time in a court of law.
“It is all subjective,” he explained. “Who is to say what is and isn’t for the public good? The government might have a compelling reason to keep such a secret, so the ‘public good’ defense wouldn’t really fly from a legal standpoint—at least not under existing law.”
Whether it moves the needle in the court of public opinion is another matter entirely, however. If the public response to such a revelation were strong enough, from a pragmatic or political standpoint, the government might shy away from prosecution. “But I would not advise anyone to be the test case for that.”
Another possible outcome is something called jury nullification. “The government might prosecute the whistleblower, and the 12 people on a jury might agree that it met the legal requirements for a conviction, but still refused to convict the person.” Again, he emphasized, he would not advise anyone to roll the dice on such an outcome.
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED
And so it goes. Whether you work in the UFO warehouse at Area 52, are the surgeon who handles the alien autopsies, or are the designer of the amazing climate cleaning machine, if your work is classified, you can’t blow the whistle on it for the public good and expect the law to work in your favor. “It’s just not a category of protection,” said Bigley, “but it’s one of those things that, arguably, a case could be made that there should be. There just isn’t right now, and I’m not sure how you could create a standard that somebody could even follow.”
Though your career is over and you are sitting in a jail cell, you are still, ethically, at least, on solid footing. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, your act did the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a matter of deontology, you had a duty to do something so intrinsically good and right. And ultimately, good government should be as transparent as possible and accountable to its citizens. And you can reflect on all this as you decay in a federal penitentiary. Don’t worry, though. You’ve got a heck of a book deal waiting for you on the other side.
