Congress has typically been loath to discuss what the government knows about extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects but that ends this week as the House Oversight Committee plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday promising “three dynamite witnesses” who will reveal more details under oath.
“This hearing is going to be different,” Tim Burchett, a House Republican who sits on the committee and who has been one of the most strident congressional voices in favor of releasing information related to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), promised Thursday.
“We’ve requested documents, we’ve gone to interview pilots and been stonewalled by our Pentagon. It’s ridiculous; it’s been going on since the ‘40s,” the Republican from Tennessee said Saturday afternoon on Fox News. “We are taking the gloves off.”
And it’s not just Republicans. Top Senate Democrat and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would make public any government documents related to UAPs.
“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” insisted the senior Senator from New York. “We are not only working to declassify what the government has previously learned about these phenomena but to create a pipeline for future research to be made public.”
One of the scheduled witnesses will be David Grusch, a former intelligence official and the subject of an attention-grabbing headline in June that helped spark this most recent round of public interest in UFOs. In the piece, Grush alleged that the U.S. government was illegally withholding information related to its possession of “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin”; subsequently, Grusch has suggested that the government has come into contact with “malevolent” alien pilots.
As Vanity Fair’s Charlotte Klein reported at the time, the piece, which was written by two respected journalists and eventually published in a small science and defense outlet, had originally been brought to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, all of whom passed on the story.
On Wednesday, Grusch will be joined by Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who claims to have seen multiple UAPs, and David Fravor, another former Navy pilot who witnessed what is now popularly known as the “tic tac” incident in 2004.
According to Politico, the Pentagon was tracking around 650 incidents of unidentified aircraft as of April.
Burchett said the US had evidence of technology that “defies all of our laws of physics.” He added: “We’re gonna get to the bottom of it, dadgummit. Whatever the truth may be. We’re done with the cover-up.”