When Washington embraced UFOs

The calm tones and bipartisan agreement at Wednesday’s congressional hearing didn’t match the zany issue on the table — UFOs. During the two-hour hearing, every congressman accepted the premise that UFOs exist. It seems the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the truth is out there.  

Three former military and intelligence officials testified before the House Oversight subcommittee that America is being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAPs — and no one in Congress questioned it.  

Representative Tim Burchett, who has been calling for a congressional hearing for months, set the tone during his opening statement. “This is an issue of government transparency. We cannot trust a government that does not trust its people. We are not bringing little men or flying saucers into the hearing. We’re just going to get to the facts. We are going to uncover the cover-up.” Burchett also promised that the hearing would be the “first of many” on the government’s handling of UAPs.  

Yet no sooner did the floor turn over to the witnesses than the committee began hearing about UFO sightings. Retired Commander David Fravor testified to seeing a UAP off the coast of San Diego during an encounter caught on video in 2004. According to Fravor, he had been directed to inspect an object while on a routine training mission with the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. “We saw a small white Tic Tac object moving very abruptly over the white water, like a ping-pong ball,” Fravor said. The object, which caused external jamming to Fravor’s aircraft, had no wings or external engine.  

Former US Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves said his aircrew began seeing UAPs during training exercises off the coast of Virginia Beach in 2014. After upgrades to fighter jet radars, Graves said pilots began to detect unknown objects flying in their airspace. Two jets then encountered “a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere” and the object came within fifty feet of the lead aircraft.  

Graves and Fravor’s claims don’t automatically make them conspiracy theorists. Americans have been seeing unified flying objects for decades and it’s possible that some of the sightings are legit. What is strange is that no congressman challenged their claims or the existence of UFOs. Representative Jamie Raskin came the closest when he questioned Fravor’s previous history of UFO sightings, but even he stopped short of outright skepticism.  

And it’s not just the House that has drunk the alien Kool-Aid. Last month Senator Chuck Schumer backed a bill that would force the government to disclose information about UAPs. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said.   

Since 2021, the government has slowly been releasing more information about UAPs. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released a review of dozens of reports of mysterious flying objects between 2004 and 2021. In May, Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, said only a fraction of these incidents demonstrate anomalous characteristics. 

David Grusch, a former member of a US Air Force panel on UAP, contested Kirkpatrick’s testimony. After interviewing more than forty witnesses over four years, Grusch claimed the government is currently reverse-engineering spacecraft and has in its possession the “non-human” pilots. “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.  

Members on both sides of the aisle sided with Fravor, Graves and Grusch. They called for increased government transparency and a formalized systems for military personnel and commercial pilots to report suspected UAPs without stigma or retaliation from supervisors. “We should have disclosure today. We should have disclosure tomorrow. The time has come,” said Representative Jared Moskowitz.