A House Oversight subcommittee convened a hearing on UFOs on Wednesday, as lawmakers who called for the hearing continued to call for the government to be more transparent about unidentified anomalies.
“If these UAPs are foreign drones, they are a major national security issue,” said Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who is now president of Americans for Safe Aerospace, an organization he founded to encourage pilots to report UAP sightings. “If they are anything else, they are a scientific issue. Either way, these unidentified objects raise concerns about aviation safety.”
The government designates unexplained sightings as UAPs and has published numerous reports on recent sightings, some of which remain unexplained, while others have been described as “balloons or balloon-like objects,” as well as drones, birds, weather events, or airborne objects such as plastic bags.
Graves and David Fravor, a former U.S. Navy commander, both testified about UAP sightings they made while serving in the military. David Grusch, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, accused the government of covering up its research into unexplained sightings, and of reporting the information to the inspector general of intelligence agencies.
Asked why UAPs are a national security risk, Fravor referred to his 2004 discovery: “The technology we saw was much more advanced than what we have.”
The hearing is the latest push to address the issue on a national stage by lawmakers, intelligence officials and military personnel who work with unexplained aerial phenomena.
“This is about transparency in government,” said Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who called for the hearing. “We’re not bringing aliens or flying saucers into this hearing. We need to get to the truth. We need to expose cover-ups, and I hope this is just part of a series of hearings.”
No government officials testified at Wednesday’s hearing. In April, Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which Congress created to focus on UAPs, told a Senate subcommittee that the government had tracked 650 UAP sightings and screened two related videos. Kirkpatrick stressed that there was no evidence of alien life and that his office had “found no credible evidence” of objects that defied the laws of physics.
Lawmakers have questioned the Defense Department about the findings, describing them as a potential national security risk.
“These UAPs, whatever they are, pose serious risks to our civilian and military aircraft, and they need to be understood,” said California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia. “We need to encourage more reporting, not less. The more we know about them, the safer we are.”
Both Garcia and Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz said it was important for Congress to address the issue through bipartisan approaches to promote government transparency.
“Many Americans care about this issue, and the potential for them to be extraterrestrial in origin should not be the only reason that brings us back to the negotiating table.”
Mr. Grusch asserted that the US government not only possesses some UAPs but also parts collected from pilots of “non-human” origin. However, when asked, he said that these were only details that others had told him, and he had no direct information.
Before the subcommittee, Mr. Grusch said he could provide a list of “cooperative and adversarial witnesses” who could give Congress more information about UAP-related programs.
Witnesses and lawmakers have complained that information about these discoveries has been kept too secret by the US government.
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said he requested information about an incident he was told about at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Gaetz said he was turned away when he went to Eglin, but was later shown a photo of the discovery. “I can’t link it to any human capability, whether it’s American or foreign,” he said of the photo.
There is still a stigma surrounding commercial and military pilots reporting UAP incidents, Graves added.
“We need a system now that allows pilots to report without fear of losing their jobs. There is still a lot of fear that the stigma around this topic will lead to career consequences through the management of the organization or through annual physicals.”
Last year, the House Intelligence Committee held its first congressional hearing on UAP in decades, and Kirkpatrick's testimony was the first Senate hearing in recent years.
Of the 650 cases under investigation, he said: “We have prioritized about half of them as unusual, of interest, and now we have to investigate them, asking the question ‘how many of these do we have data on?’”
Nguyen Quang Minh (according to CNN)
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