@blazera

An oath or legal affirmation can be made if what you're saying is true and accurate to the best of your own ability and perceptions.

If you say something under oath with the intent to deceive or omit key information or evidence for any reason really, then this could be considered perjury, which is a crime under most legal systems.

If you truly believe you saw an alien and were completely convinced of that and testified that you saw one, yet your claim was found to be factually incorrect, you most likely would not be liable for perjury nor did you do anything illegal (in many modern legal systems). You would simply be wrong.

This could cause you to become an "unreliable witness" which might mean anything else you say or claim is taken with less weight, even in areas you might specialize in. For example, how much would you trust a cardiac surgeon who claimed they had frequent encounters with aliens from outer space?

It doesn't need to be aliens.

Gourch was very clear to dismiss extraterrestrial origins. And his boss's quoted denial to Congress claimed there was no evidence of extraterrestrial origin.

The same theoretical physics Gourch discussed (effectively wormholes) to travel faster than light is the same principle to travel through time (i.e. spacetime).

Earth has only been sending out detectable signals of intelligence for around a century which would have reached a max radius of around a hundred light years.

That's not a lot of area for extraterrestrial life to have come from to give a crap about visiting us.

But would future Earth be interested in visiting past Earth?

Would that origin maybe be more likely to be flying in formations like our own pilots do?

Or more likely to have tech tailored to explicitly target our modern radar systems to disable them?

It's much more of a leap to arrive at extraterrestrial life being aware of and interested in Earth and humanity so early on in our signals production to come so frequently that sightings are commonplace, and yet be using tech and behaviors that are closer to a far future version of our own rather than something that seemed to have evolved entirely separately.

If this is some physics breaking origin, it's from our own future, not from some odd corner of space.