News first broke just over a week ago that a former career American intelligence officer is alleging the U.S. government is concealing a decades-long top-secret ‘crash retrieval’ program that has overseen the recovery of otherworldly flying machines and their pilots. There remains no hard evidence available to the public to substantiate these claims. Yet the U.S. military and intelligence community’s shadowy crash retrieval programs are a very real thing, although the ones we know about are focused on foreign, not alien, technology.
These secretive endeavors are part of a larger ecosystem focused on gathering intelligence — through examining, reverse engineering, and testing — non-U.S. weapon systems and other equipment through so-called Foreign Materiel Exploitation, or FME. This extensive espionage ecosystem, honed over nearly a century of operations, lives in the shadows, but remains an indispensable discipline that has paid off massively time and time again.
Hellbound and Down 