WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.
Retired Maj. David Grusch's highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress' latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena," which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.
Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force's mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.
“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access,” he said.
Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch's claims of a coverup. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said investigators have not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects.
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Grusch says he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward. He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.
“It was very brutal and very unfortunate, some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally,” he said.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., chaired the panel's hearing and joked to a packed audience, “Welcome to the most exciting subcommittee in Congress this week.”
There was bipartisan interest in Grusch’s claims and a more sober tone than other recent hearings featuring whistleblowers celebrated by Republicans and criticized by Democrats. Lawmakers in both parties asked Grusch about his study of UFOs and the consequences he faced and how they could find out more about the government’s UAP programs.
“I take it that you’re arguing what we need is real transparency and reporting systems so we can get some clarity on what’s going on out there,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
Some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not providing more details in a classified briefing or releasing images that could be shown to the public. In previous hearings, Pentagon officials showed a video taken from an F-18 military plane that showed an image of one balloon-like shape.
Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.
At that point, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”
Nomaan Merchant, The Associated Press
Whistleblowers Unveil Details of 'Incredible' UFO Experiences
IAN KRIETZBERG
JUL 26, 2023
Perhaps the greatest conspiracy theory of them all -- the one concerning an extra-terrestrial presence on Earth -- was re-ignited in June when Air Force veteran David Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the U.S. government possesses craft of non-human origin.
Grusch, alongside two other whistleblowers -- former Navy pilot Ryan Graves and former Navy commander David Fravor -- testified before a Congressional hearing on UFOs, referred to as UAPs, July 26.
DON'T MISS: See: Pentagon Releases Formerly Classified Clip of UFO Over Middle East
UAPs, Graves said, present a potential risk to national security. He claimed that the government has more information and awareness of these unidentified objects than they let on, and urged transparency in conversations surrounding UAPs.
"I have experience of UAPs firsthand. As we convene here, UAPs are in our air space, but they are grossly underreported," Graves said. "These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine. These encounters became so frequent that aircrew would discuss the risk of UAP as part of their regular pre-flight briefs."
"If everyone could see the sensory and video data I witnessed," Graves added, "our national conversation would change."
Both Graves and Fravor discussed specific situations in which they encountered these objects. Both men said that the objects represent a technology that no Earth-bound science can match; humans, they said, could not survive the g-forces of these vehicles.
"Not for the acceleration rates we observed."
Fravor discussed a scenario in which he encountered one of these such objects, saying that the UAP was "perfectly white and smooth." It had neither windows nor seams.
"The object had been observed coming down from over 80,000 feet, rapidly descending to 20,000 feet, hanging out for hours and then going straight back up," Fravor said. "Above 80,000 feet is space."
As Fravor and his pilots drew closer to the object, it vanished; it moved a distance of around 60 miles in the span of a minute.
"We have nothing that can stop in midair and go the other direction. I think it's far beyond the material science that we currently possess," Fravor said. "We have nothing close to it. It was amazing to see. I told my buddy I wanted to fly it. It's an incredible technology."
Graves reported an object that was floating, completely stationary, in the midst of category four hurricane winds, which run between 130 and 150 mph.
"These same objects," he said, "would then accelerate to supersonic speeds, 1.1, 1.2 Mach, and they would do so in very erratic behaviors that I don't have an explanation for."
Since renewing its efforts to investigate reports of UFOs in December, the Pentagon has clocked hundreds of reports. As of April, about half of its 650 reports were categorized as being worthy of investigation.
The Anomaly Resolution Office released a Department of Defense video of a UFO captured by a U.S. drone at a Senate hearing in April. The analyst who testified at the hearing, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, said that the video was "readily explainable."
"In our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics."
Victor Tangermann
Wed, July 26, 2023
The House Oversight Committee is holding a hearing about highly controversial claims that the US government is secretly hiding evidence of extraterrestrial life, and could even be working to reverse-engineer the otherworldly relics.
Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency David Grusch renewed his allegations that the government has not only recovered alien spacecraft over recent decades, but has actively sought to keep the information from leaking to the public.
If that all sounds insane, you're not wrong. And it's worth keeping in mind that Grusch has produced exactly zero evidence to back up his outrageous claims.
The big question? Whether today's hearing will manage to shed any light on the situation.
"We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing," he added. "Sorry to disappoint about half y’all. We’re just going to get to the facts. We’re going to uncover the cover-up."
Still, Grusch's opening statements did seem to allude to some of those things.
"I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program," he wrote, adding that "I made the decision based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple Inspectors General, and in effect become a whistleblower."
"It is my hope that the revelations we unearth through investigations of the Non-Human Reverse Engineering Programs I have reported will act as an ontological (earth-shattering) shock, a catalyst for a global reassessment of our priorities," he concluded. "As we move forward on this path, we might be poised to enable extraordinary technological progress in a future where our civilization surpasses the current state-of-the-art in propulsion, material science, energy production and storage."
Today's hearing also included a rehashing of existing reports of UFO sightings that have made headlines ever since The New York Times published a report back in 2017 that first uncovered a "shadowy" Defense Department UFO program that had been operating for years.
"We were primarily seeing dark grey or black cubes inside of a clear sphere," retired navy pilot Ryan Graves, the first witness to appear alongside Grusch, told lawmakers during today's hearing.
"That was primarily what was being reported when were able to gain a visual tally of these objects," he added. "That occurred over eight years."
The hearing's third witness, former navy commander David Fravor, who famously filmed a "Tic Tac"-shaped object back in 2004, described the object as being " far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today or looking to develop in the next ten years."
"All four of us saw a white 'Tic-Tac' object with a longitudinal axis pointing north-south, and moving very abruptly over the water, like a ping-pong ball," he recalled during his opening statements.
Some Congress members, unsurprisingly, balked at Grusch's previous allegations that the government had recovered "non-human" spacecraft.
North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx pointed to All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office director Sean Kirkpatrick, who told Congress back in April that the office "found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics."
Other onlookers pointed out that members of Congress clearly didn't do their homework before attending today's hearing.
"Not a great sign that [representative Glenn Grothman] launches the UFO Hearings by mentioning reading Frank Edwards' book 'Flying Saucers — Serious Business,'" journalist Garrett Graff tweeted, "which is one of the least reputable books on the subject of the last 75 years."
Graff also called today's opening statements not "compelling (or even particularly smart)," arguing that "these members haven't really done their research to understand the history of UFOs and the US government."
In short, extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence. If the government has alien artifacts, let's see them.
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