He "dispelled" it by running queries of the databases he had access to. Something tells me he didn't have access to every database of every sector of every branch of our government....
Not that I'm acting as if I'm on the conspiracy theorist side, my main point is in the podcast he basically said ,"Yeah I queried the database for alien stuff and nothing came up"....
Okay of all things, that isn't proof of non existence...
Yeah, I read that initial claim and thought that it was weird...particularly that Snowden would have even found that information. It did say that he was curious about that topic specifically, so it makes sense that he would directly search for such evidence.
The thing I don't like about Snowden is that he never knew what was in some 90% of the data that he downloaded. He never curated what he found, and just blindly dumped it on a couple of people, Greenwald especially, because "he liked them;" not necessarily because he had any inclination as to their ethics when it comes to handling the extreme sensitivity of what would be found.
Snowden isn't really a whistleblower, as it is commonly understood. He never had particular expertise or direct knowledge of the subject of his revelations--he didn't ever even make direct complaints (all whistleblowers first try the channels of reporting available to them, but only when that fails, do they feel a sense of duty to force the issue outside of their chain of command). He never went into his contracting gig with a sense of duty to the task--that he respected his work and only became disturbed after discovering a fundamental breakdown in the system. ...that isn't Snowden. He took that job specifically because he was interested in digging up any dirt that he could possibly find, and so that is what he devoted his time to doing. This is a hugely significant distinction.
In the end, I think what Snowden did still ends up as a net positive for the US, and for transparency, but it's really important to understand that how we went about it should never be emulated. He never discovered wrong-doing. He purposely sought it out, which is the root of any kind of uninformed bias. That, and the extremely dangerous nature of his completely blind dissemination of all of these materials.
