Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to an object shaped like a Tic Tac hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.

The most anticipated remarks, however, came from a former military-intelligence officer named David Grusch, who went public with his account just last month. Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on national security that the American government has spent decades secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground, and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without proper supervision by Congress.

In the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs. A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S. military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or people within the government? Both.

After not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and there has been considerable hype—says more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington state and crash-landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more than it’s letting on.

That sentiment is not new, nor is Americans’ belief in conspiracy theories. Though research suggests that conspiracy thinking is not getting worse in the modern-day United States, we are in a moment of acute public curiosity about—and acceptance of—conspiracism. Compared with QAnon, vaccine microchips, and stolen elections, a big UFO cover-up might seem almost reasonable. Even if that cover-up involves, as Grusch previously claimed in an interview, the military discovering the “dead pilots” of alien craft. (In Congress today, Grusch declined to give specifics about this and many other claims, saying that there was only so much he could disclose to the public and that he could elaborate in a closed setting.)  

The past several years have coincided with an unprecedented mainstreaming of UFO culture. In 2017, when an interstellar object showed up in our solar system, most scientists agreed that it was an asteroid or a comet, but some said it could have been an alien spaceship. (The Harvard professor leading the latter camp, Avi Loeb, recently led an expedition to recover material from the seafloor that he believes could be from alien spacecraft.) Later that year, The New York Times and other news outlets revealed that the Pentagon had a covert program dedicated to cataloging UFOs. Then NASA decided to weigh in on the topic after years of steering clear, and convened a team to consider UFOs in a “scientific perspective.” And who can forget the spy balloons that the military shot out of the sky this year?

These events have unfolded against a shift in public knowledge about the universe beyond Earth, which might help explain why people are interested. In the 1940s, the only planets we knew of were the ones around our sun, and scientists had only recently determined that there were galaxies other than our own. Today, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, and telescopes can see nearly all the way back to the Big Bang. Faced with so many wonders, the question of whether we’re sharing them with anyone else becomes more urgent, and might even seem more answerable. “I think people are just ready, or at least excited about the possibilities of alien contact, maybe more than ever,” Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, told me.

Congress has contributed to this mainstreaming too. Under the instruction of lawmakers, the Pentagon last year established a special office dedicated to investigating reports of unexplainable phenomena in the sky, at sea, and on land. The effort has been unusually bipartisan, with both far-right Republicans and progressive Democrats calling on the military to be more transparent. This month, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that would create a commission with the authority to declassify government documents about UFOs. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said in a statement.

Yes, we do. But some undisclosed documents about UFOs is not synonymous with incontrovertible evidence that aliens have visited Earth. UFOs are just that—objects that are flying, and that we cannot yet identify. If the military is misusing taxpayer money to investigate mysterious debris it doesn’t recognize, that’s bad, whether it’s the remnants of drones from another nation or a non-human craft. “If that’s the case, and auditors have not been allowed into these programs and there’s illegal layers of secrecy,” Haqq Misra said, “then that’s really important to disclose, independent of any connection to anything else”—anything otherworldly. But even as lawmakers assert that UFOs are primarily a national-security concern, by invoking aliens in their discussions, they lend credence to the idea that a connection between the two exists.

Grusch was careful to tell lawmakers that he was only “speaking to the facts as I have been told them”—that is, he has not seen any evidence of alien wreckage or its inhabitants himself. And in general, though his claims are steeped in the language of authority, he simply has not been able to offer any concrete proof. The news website that first published Grusch’s claims reported that the Pentagon had cleared him to speak publicly, but that means only that his remarks don’t contain classified information, not that they’re true. Testifying under oath before Congress is not a measure of truth, either. Outside the hearing, some lawmakers seemed like they didn’t know what to make of the claims.

The prospect of extraterrestrial interlopers may be a national-security question, but it’s also a scientific one. Science requires data, and secondhand accounts just aren’t data. “When NASA brings back rocks on the moon, those rocks are shared with qualified people,” David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who chaired NASA’s committee on UFOs, told me. “Imagine we had some samples of some craft [and] we really want to understand what it was. You would make materials from those small samples available for labs anywhere in the world.” In other words, meaningful testimony would show evidence of alien ships and pilots, not just tell the public about them. “That would be pretty awesome,” he said, but it’s not what we’ve got. Today, we heard some extraordinary claims, and, to quote Carl Sagan, they require extraordinary evidence.

If, as seems likely, Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee next year, the 2024 elections will be a referendum on several crucial issues: the prospect of authoritarianism in America, the continuation of a vibrant democracy, the relationship between the executive branch and the other two branches of government, and much else of grave significance.

It will also be a referendum on whether Trump will ever be held legally accountable for his actions. Trump faces multiple civil suits and at least two criminal indictments (with two more seemingly just over the horizon). If Trump were to win reelection, it is almost certain that none of these will ever be resolved—at least not in a way that is adverse to his interests, which any reasonable system would admit as a possibility. Such is the power of the presidency.

Take the simplest cases first: his pending indictment in Florida for violations of the Espionage Act relating to the retention of classified documents, and his anticipated indictment for actions relating to the January 6 insurrection. If Trump is elected, neither of these cases will ever result in a final judgment of Trump’s guilt (much less incarceration).

The Mar-a-Lago documents case is set to go to trial in May 2024. Although many people suspect, not without foundation, that this trial date will slip, let us indulge the possibility that the trial occurs as scheduled and that sometime in June or July 2024, a jury convicts Trump. There is virtually no doubt that Trump would appeal such a verdict, and there is likewise almost no doubt that the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, would allow him to remain free on appeal.

I have handled several criminal appeals in my career. None has ever been resolved, in even the simplest of cases, in less than a year. That’s just the way our appellate system works; there is no sense of urgency to the proceedings at all (nor, to be clear, should there be in the normal course of business—the trial has concluded and the record is complete; a mature and thoughtful review of those proceedings requires time). The result is that Trump’s appeal of his federal conviction (assuming one is secured) will quite likely still be pending before the Eleventh Circuit, the court with appellate jurisdiction over federal trials in Florida, at least through mid-2025—well past the election and into the next presidential term. And even were an appeal to be concluded quickly, Trump would inevitably then petition the Supreme Court for review, taking yet more time.

A similar calendar will apply to the possible January 6–related charges that may soon be brought by the special counsel in Washington, D.C. Even if that trial were to occur more quickly than the one in Florida (say, for example, in March or April of next year—a big if, given that the federal courts would have to negotiate an efficient trial that does not conflict with the one scheduled for March in New York), the chances of an appeal to the D.C. Circuit, which has jurisdiction over the federal court in the nation’s capital, and thence to the Supreme Court in less than 10 months is near zero.

In short, it seems to me that no possibility exists that any of the federal charges against Trump will be final before January 20, 2025—none at all. And it seems equally certain that one of the very first acts of the Trump-appointed attorney general (whoever that may be) would be for the DOJ to move to dismiss the case or cases against the president at whatever stage they are then pending. Put simply, if Trump wins reelection in November 2024, the federal cases against him will likely be terminated, without final resolution, within 24 hours of his inauguration. That doesn’t mean these proceedings will have been worthless. If Trump has been convicted in either trial, America will have the benefit of a historical record that determines his criminality. But that will be little comfort as we endure another four years of his rule, and as he continues to avoid any semblance of actual accountability.

The situation is more complex when we turn to the state charges Trump faces in a case already pending in New York and another anticipated shortly in Georgia. By definition (at least insofar as the Constitution is concerned), those states are separate sovereigns, and the federal government under Trump cannot direct that those cases against him be dismissed—nor could Trump pardon himself for his state crimes, because his pardon power is, likewise, limited to federal matters. So those cases will proceed.

But boy will they be difficult to bring to resolution.  

To begin with, we can count on the Trump-led DOJ arguing that a sitting president is immune from prosecution by a state, at least during his time in office. And their claim will have some merit. After all, if the New York and Georgia district attorneys can try Trump while he is in office, the prospect exists that any elected official in a state opposed to the president might use his or her power to go after the president on local criminal charges. What’s to stop an elected Republican prosecutor in a very red state from bringing bogus charges against President Joe Biden?

The risk is more than hypothetical. We have already seen how elected attorneys general are using their powers in ever more politicized ways. The leap from “justified” prosecutions to “unjustified” ones lies mostly in the eyes of the beholder. That’s why, more than 50 years ago, the Watergate special prosecutor’s office actually sided with the president on this score, stating that “considerations of federalism would bar his indictment in state court.” Nothing in the text of the Constitution prohibits state prosecution of the chief executive, but nothing authorizes it either, so the question has never been definitively resolved. But if Trump is elected, we can be sure that it will be—and what this Supreme Court would decide is anyone’s guess.

Nor is that the only legal hurdle that the state prosecutors will need to overcome.  Trump’s efforts to have his New York prosecution moved to federal court have thus far been rejected, as have the federal government’s efforts to replace Trump in some of the civil suits against him. Those arguments will, however, have substantially greater force if Trump returns to office; his status as a federal official and the disruption to governmental activity that would arise from his personal liability to civil suit would become significantly more palpable. The Trump-appointed AG would be all but sure to press them in court to the maximum extent possible.

Other challenges may be less legal and more practical in nature. Were New York and Georgia to persist in their cases, the nature of Trump’s retaliation would be limited only by his imagination. What, for example, would happen if he tried to pull federal-law-enforcement funding from those two states? What if he directed the FBI to withdraw from cooperative investigative efforts? What if, in Republican-led Georgia, he pressured the state legislature to pass laws limiting the power of the Atlanta DA or requiring her to dismiss the case? The country should not have to answer these questions.

The prospect that Trump will almost certainly avoid accountability for his criminal conduct if he is reelected is just a small subset of the broader threat he poses to the rule of law. But it is an emblematic possibility redolent with the odor of kingly prerogative. Sadly, the reality is clear: When Americans go to the polls in 2024, if Trump is a candidate, they will not simply be choosing between two political alternatives; they will also be making one of the most important choices in the history of the country. They will be choosing between the modern conviction that no man is above the law and a return to a time when political leaders could act with impunity. Our own national character rests on what choice we make.