Last week's remarkable congressional hearing on what the military now calls "unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAPs — what used to be called UFOs — didn't shed much light on what exactly it is that U.S. pilots have been seeing in the skies lately.

But it did provide an impressive example from freshman Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison of what responsible public discourse should look like regarding such explosive issues. That stood in stark contrast to the typically irresponsible conspiracy-mongering that the state's senior senator, Josh Hawley, had earlier promoted on the same topic.

Both Missouri Republicans have now weighed in on the unlikely claims of retired military intelligence Maj. David Grusch, who says (without evidence, of course) that the U.S. government is hiding recovered alien bodies and spacecraft — and that humans have been injured or killed as part of the cover up.

Grusch's testimony Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee was the stuff that science fiction culture is made of. In fact, his claims that the government has engaged in a decades-long project to hide its possession of alien crafts and bodies is almost a cliche of the kind of unsupported allegations that UFO conspiracists regularly make. And which are regularly, and appropriately, dismissed for lack of evidence.

The thing that separates Grusch from the cranks (the only thing, really) is his resume as a former intelligence officer whose specific assignments theoretically put him in a position to access the information he claims to have. That factor alone merited at least a respectful congressional review of his allegations. But they inherently merit skepticism as well.

Burlison, in his first foray on the national stage after being seated in January to represent the 7th Congressional District in southwestern Missouri, did an admirable job of walking that line.

"I'm pretty skeptical," he told Grusch. "I'm from Missouri — you've got to show me."

It was soon clear that Grusch wasn't prepared to actually do that. In response to Burlison's polite but probing questions, Grusch repeatedly offered enticing hints of a deep-state conspiracy that involved captured spacecraft and "non-human biologics" (read: dead aliens) and strongly implied the U.S. government has murdered people to keep it secret.

Yet each time Burlison or others on the subcommittee pressed him for more details on these astonishing allegations, Grusch withdrew behind the shield of classified information.

Burlison ultimately invoked Occam's razor — the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best one — to suggest that perhaps Earth-bound military experiments are more likely responsible for what Grusch claimed to have seen or heard about than the "far-fetched" specter of alien visitation. Indeed, to the extent that Grusch's claims are anything more than whole-cloth fabrication, that explanation would make more sense.

It would have been even better had Burlison, or someone, asked what, exactly, would be the government's motivation for hiding such an extraordinary development (assuming that keeping a secret like that for decades was even possible). As always seems to be the case with conspiracy theories, the presumption of a malevolent government driven by dark and mysterious motives is virtually a given.

Which brings us back to Hawley.

Back in June, Grusch made his allegations to the conservative media outlet NewsNation. "(They) are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed," Grusch told the outlet, adding: "Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true."

Well, naturally.

In that interview, Grusch also claimed there was Vatican involvement in the cover-up. That particular trope alone would seem to nudge his claims from unlikely to bonkers.

Yet Hawley's reaction in a subsequent interview was typical of the man who helped foster the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by credulously and officially promoting the toxic falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

"The number of these (incidents) is apparently huge, huge," Hawley told NewsNation in June, responding to Grusch's tale. "And that is something that the government has, the best I can say about it, downplayed, if not kept from the public, for a long, long time."

The cover-up allegations, Hawley said, "sound plausible, based on what I've seen this government do in other instances."

Other instances of murder plots by the government to hide recovered alien spaceships for no rational reason beyond being evil? We must have missed that headline the last time it happened.

Hawley's deep-state schtick is by now so familiar that his embrace of this nonsense barely registered in the mainstream press. That's a measure of how un-serious this senator, who once enjoyed presidential buzz, has become in his endless quest to appeal to the worst, most conspiracy-minded elements of the right-wing base.

It's true (if inconvenient to Hawley's sinister narrative of malign secrecy) that the military in the past few years has acknowledged increasing numbers of reports from its pilots of aerial sightings that can't be explained, some of which have yielded intriguing if inconclusive video footage.

As we've said before on this page, it's important to get to the bottom of the issue — not because this is likely to turn out to be little green men, but because other, more plausible explanations potentially involve Russia or China or other adversaries. Burlison demonstrated that it's possible to explore the issue without making it a partisan cudgel of destructive anti-government conspiracies. His less-serious congressional colleagues should take notes.

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