The UFO whistleblower got what he wanted. Less than two months after he came forward to claim that the Pentagon is hiding evidence of alien spacecraft from Congress, former intelligence officer David Grusch testified under oath before a House Oversight subcommittee on national security to expand on his bold, uncorroborated claims. Together with two former Navy pilots who saw UFOs on the job — David Fravor and Ryan Graves — Grusch answered questions from the representatives on otherworldly sightings and the need for more congressional authority over the Pentagon’s UFO programs. Below are the latest updates from an unusual congressional hearing on aliens, national security, and alleged government secrets.
Grusch says there are secret government programs that are funded by private companies
Grusch claims that while on the intelligence community’s UFO task force, he became aware of secret programs inside the U.S. government that were in charge of unsanctioned technological research related to UFOs. (Crucially, Grusch has not actually seen firsthand the things he is citing.) His allegations about their funding are just as striking:
Grusch reiterates his claim that the U.S. has evidence of aliens
Grusch also claims that people have been threatened and physically hurt in the Pentagon’s coverup of the alleged UFO evidence and what he called “biologics.”
But can he back up these allegations in public?
Throughout the hearing, Grusch said he cannot expand on his bold allegations that the U.S. is in possession of alien technology and the remains of non-human pilots whose UFOs had crashed. Because the majority of the information Grusch alleges he is aware of is classified, most of his answers are brief. “I can’t discuss that in an open session,” he said on several occasions. Because he has filed a whistleblower complaint, he is also unable to provide corroborating information about the cover-up. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked where the subcommittee could look for more information and whether any other officials could come forward, Grusch said he could not answer.
While Grusch has not yet produced evidence of his allegations, throughout the hearing he encouraged Congress to “hold our government” accountable and to “thoroughly investigate these claims.” He added: “As I stand here under oath now, I am speaking to the facts as I have been told them.”
But members of Congress could soon know more. Grusch said several times that he could further debrief representatives in an SCIF — a sound-proofed room for officials with security clearances used to disclose sensitive information.
The witnesses think the UFOs are a threat
Representative Glenn Grothman asked the witnesses if they believe that UFOs post “a potential threat to our national security.” Grusch answered in the affirmative but said that he could not expand beyond what he had already claimed about the government’s alleged “crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program.” Fravor said the UFO he saw over the Pacific could be a serious threat:
And Congress wants more oversight
Since the existence of government research into UFOs was made public in 2017, there has been a complete turnaround in how the matter is treated in the military and in Congress. What was once a joke is now a matter of serious reporting on a national-security threat — even if many of the unidentified objects pilots are running into are just balloons.
As Grusch’s claims bring more attention to the unusual run-ins, representatives want more accountability from the Pentagon. UFOs, “whatever they be, may pose a serious threat to our military and our civilian aircraft, and that must be understood,” Representative Robert Garcia said. “We should encourage more reporting, not less, on UAPs. The more we understand, the safer we will be.”
There are striking allegations from the former pilots — even if it is old information
Navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves have been public with their allegations for years now, but it is still impressive to hear their claims firsthand:
Both Fravor and Graves claimed that no human could survive the G forces of the UFOs they saw in the sky. Graves claimed a colleague flew within 50 feet of a UFO that he described as a gray cube inside a “clear sphere.”
In an infamous 2004 incident, Fravor saw an unidentified foreign object that was caught on camera. The object, which moved erratically and looked like a Tic-Tac, was later investigated by the intelligence community. In 2014 and 2015, Graves claimed to have seen mysterious craft without exhaust plumes or a visible engine “almost daily” over the East Coast.
“We’re going to uncover the cover-up”
In his opening statements prior to the testimony, Republican representative Tim Burchett said the intelligence community put up several barriers before the subcommittee on national security could hold the hearings. But he said the testimony would “uncover the cover-up” by the intelligence community.
The Defense Department is having nothing to do with it — but others want more transparency
In a statement on Wednesday regarding the hearing, a Pentagon spokesperson said they 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.”
On the other end, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb told the Daily Beast that he supported the push for more transparency: “Here’s hoping that by allowing scientists to access the UAP data that the U.S. government may have, we will all get a better sense of whether there is evidence for cosmic neighbors in our backyard.”
University of Manchester physicist Brian Cox was not particularly convinced. “I watched a few clips and saw some people who seemed to believe stuff saying extraordinary things without presenting extraordinary evidence,” Cox tweeted. “Therefore I have nothing more to say, other than: It would be great if true - it would take a bit of the pressure off our civilisation if we weren’t the only means within the Milky Way by which the Universe understands itself.”
So what’s next in the Congressional push for UFO transparency?
After the testimony, Rep. Glenn Grothman told NewsNation that members of the committee are looking forward “to getting some answers in a more confidential setting. I assume some legislation will come of this.” Tim Burchett added that he expects that this will be the “first of many” hearings.
Who is David Grusch?
Grusch is a former intelligence officer who worked on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence’s group investigating UFO sightings, from 2019 to 2021. During that time, he claims that he interviewed several other intelligence officers who claimed they had seen alien technology firsthand.
“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch told NewsNation. “I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” he added. But as his career progressed, “people started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.”
