A former military intelligence officer-turned-whistleblower told House lawmakers that Congress is being kept in the dark about unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAPs or UFOs, alleging that executive branch agencies have withheld information about the mysterious objects for years.
David Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, appeared before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee alongside two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with UAPs.
Grusch served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating UAPs until earlier this year. He told lawmakers that he was informed of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" during the course of his work examining classified programs. He said he was denied access to those programs when he requested it, and accused the military of misappropriating funds to shield these operations from congressional oversight. He later said he had interviewed officials who had direct knowledge of aircraft with "nonhuman" origins, and that so-called "biologics" were recovered from some craft.
In addition to Grusch, the panel heard testimony from Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who has spoken out about encountering UAPs on training missions, and David Fravor, who spotted a large object captured in the now-famous "Tic Tac" video during a flight off the coast of California in 2004.
Graves was an F-18 pilot stationed in Virginia Beach in 2014 when his squadron first began detecting unknown objects. He described them as "dark grey or black cubes … inside of a clear sphere, where the apex or tips of the cubes were touching the inside of that sphere."
He said a fellow pilot told him about one incident about 10 miles off the coast, in which an object between 5 and 15 feet in diameter flew between two F-18s and came within 50 feet of the aircraft. He said there was no acknowledgement of the incident or way to report the encounter at the time. UAP encounters, he said, were "not rare or isolated."
"If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change," Graves said. "I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue."
Fravor recounted his 2004 encounter with an object off the California coast. He told the subcommittee that he and another pilot spotted the smooth, seamless oval-shaped object hovering over the water before it rapidly climbed about 12,000 feet in the air. It then accelerated and disappeared. It was detected roughly 60 miles away less than a minute later. Fravor returned to an aircraft carrier and mentioned the object to other pilots who were getting ready to take off, and they managed to get it on video.
"I think what we experienced was, like I said, well beyond the material science and the capabilities that we had at the time, that we have currently or that we're going to have in the next 10 to 20 years," Fravor said.
A bipartisan group of senators led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced an amendment to the annual defense spending bill currently making its way through Congress. The measure, modeled off legislation aimed at revealing government records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, would require executive branch agencies to hand over UAP records to a review board with "the presumption of immediate disclosure." Agencies would have to justify requests to keep records classified.
**Both Ryan Graves and David Fravor have been featured on the History Channel Show: Unidentified, which first aired in 2019. For more information about the impact that this show has had in correlation to the Congressional hearings over the last few years, read my article: UFO or Not UFO?
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