Washington — House lawmakers are holding a hearing Wednesday to pressure the executive branch to release more information about unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAP or UFOs, as bipartisan momentum grows for greater transparency about the strange encounters documented by hundreds of pilots.
The House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee is hearing from three witnesses with firsthand knowledge of how the government has handled UAP reports. The hearing is streaming live in the player above.
The three witnesses include Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who has spoken out about encountering UAP on training missions; David Fravor, who shot the now-famous “Tic Tac” video of an object during a flight off the coast of California in 2004; and David Grusch, a former combat officer and member of a previous Pentagon task force that investigated UAP. Graves and Fravor were interviewed for a “60 Minutes” report two years ago about the rise in UAP reports.
“I’d like to thank these three brave witnesses here. They took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and, daggamut, they’re doing it,” GOP Rep. Tim Burchett said at the beginning of the hearing. “We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing — sorry to disappoint about half of y’all — we’re just going to get to the facts. We’re going to uncover the cover-up, and I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and many more people coming forward about this.”
Members of both parties stressed the bipartisan nature of the hearing. “It’s very important that we show that Democrats and Republicans in Congress can come together in a bipartisan way to cut through misinformation, and to look at the facts in a serious and thoughtful manner,” said Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the subcommittee.
What the witnesses said at the hearing
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
In their opening statements, the witnesses described their backgrounds and experience with UAP. All three said current reporting systems are inadequate to investigate the phenomena, and said a stigma still exists for pilots and officials who press for more openness about the encounters.
Graves was an F-18 pilot stationed in Virginia Beach in 2014 when his squadron first began detecting unknown objects. During one training mission about 10 miles off the coast over the Atlantic, he said an object between 5 and 15 ft. in diameter flew between two F-18s, coming within 50 ft. of the aircraft. He said there was no acknowledgement of the incident or way to report the encounter at the time.
“If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change,” Graves said. “I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue.”
The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which was established last year to investigate the phenomena, has investigated roughly 800 reports of UAP as of May. While military officials have said most cases have innocuous origins, many others remain unexplained.
Grusch became a whistleblower last year when he came forward with information about his work as a member of the AARO and its predecessor. An intelligence officer for 14 years in the Air Force and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Grusch said he was asked to examine highly classified UAP reports as a member of the Pentagon task force. He said he became aware of a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” but was denied access to more information when he requested it.
Fravor recounted his 2004 encounter with an object off the California coast. He told the subcommittee that the object, which was shaped like a piece of Tic Tac candy, was spotted over the water before rapidly climbing about 12,000 ft. in the air. It then accelerated and disappeared before it was detected roughly 60 miles away less than a minute later.
“I think it’s far beyond our material science that we currently possess,” Fravor said, later describing it as “incredible technology.”
Department of Defense
Congress pushes for UAP/UFO transparency
The issue of UAP has gained widespread attention from Congress and the public in recent years with the release of several recordings of the encounters, which typically show seemingly nondescript objects moving through the air at very high speeds with no apparent method of propulsion.
The hearing is taking place amid a growing willingness by lawmakers to demand the military and intelligence agencies release more about what they know regarding the mysterious incidents, with many members of Congress citing the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects in or near U.S. airspace.
A bipartisan group of senators led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced an amendment to the annual defense spending bill currently making its way through Congress. The measure, modeled off legislation aimed at revealing government records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, would require executive branch agencies to hand over UAP records to a review board with “the presumption of immediate disclosure.” Agencies would have to justify requests to keep records classified.
A different House panel heard testimony from Pentagon officials at the first open hearing about the issue in more than 50 years last summer.
At a press conference last week, Burchett said Wednesday’s witnesses would be able to “speak frankly to the public about their experiences.” He said he has received “a lot of pushback about this hearing,” claiming that “there are a lot of people who don’t want this to come to light.” The Tennessee Republican said the Defense Department, intelligence community and NASA declined to participate.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida and fellow member of the Oversight Committee, said “the status quo on the part of the U.S. government has been to leave the American people in the dark regarding information of UAPs.”
“They refuse to answer questions posed by whistleblowers, avoiding the concerns of Americans and acknowledging the possible threat of UAPs poses to our national security as well as public safety,” she said at last week’s press conference. “It is extremely unnecessary and an overclassification.”
Luna said she and other lawmakers recently traveled to an Air Force base in Florida seeking information about UAP reports by military pilots and were rebuffed by the Defense Department.
“When I take at face value the numerous roadblocks that we’ve been presented with, it leaves me to believe that they are indeed hiding information,” she said. “I look forward to bringing this topic to light and finding out the truth of what is really out there.”
