House Oversight Committee lawmakers are set to hold a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) next week.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), a member of the panel who has helped drive the conversation about UFOs on Capitol Hill, said a hearing will be held on Wednesday, July 26.
“We’re done with the cover-ups,” he added in a tweet.
The House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on UAPs on Wednesday, 7/26.
We're done with the cover-ups.
— Rep. Tim Burchett (@RepTimBurchett) July 17, 2023
It was not immediately clear who has been invited to be a witness at the hearing, and as of press time it does not appear on the Oversight Committee’s online calendar.
But Burchett previewed the hearing last week along with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), another member of the committee, according to ABC News.
“We’re going to have professionals in here, and we’re getting blowback from some of the alphabet agencies,” Burchett told reporters.
“I’m sick of government … that does not trust the people,” he also said.
David Grusch, a U.S. military veteran who served as a combat officer in Afghanistan and a former intelligence official, revealed to The Debrief in a report published early last month that he gave classified information to the Intelligence Community inspector general and Congress. He claims the disclosure shows some programs have retrieved craft of non-human origin, and this information has been illegally kept from Congress.
“We are not talking about prosaic origins or identities,” Grusch told the outlet. “The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.”
In response to the claims, the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) tasked with investigating UAPs said it has “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick said in May that his office was reviewing about 800 cases of UAP cases, a jump from 650 he mentioned during a hearing in April when he said only a “small percentage” of the objects studied by his team displayed signatures that could be reasonably described as “anomalous” and none of them presented “credible” evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized the gravity Grusch’s claim during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week.
“We have people that have very high clearances both today and in the past, who did really important work for our government or continue to do important work for the government, who have come forward with some claims about the U.S. having in the past recovered exotic materials and then reversed engineered those materials to make advances in our own defenses and technologies,” Rubio said.
“Either they’re telling the truth, and that is something that obviously would be the biggest story in human history, or we have people in really important positions in government who are crazy, and who are out there making up stories, and who are still in positions of importance,” Rubio said. “Either one is a big problem. So we’ve got to figure out which one of these two it is, because the second one in particular would be very troubling.”
Rubio and other lawmakers are now pushing legislation to bring forth UAP disclosures from the government.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told reporters on Monday that he supports letting the American people “see what we have, where we go.”
“I’d love to see whatever facts and information we have,” McCarthy said.
McCarthy said if the U.S. military found such evidence of a UFO, “the Department of Defense would tell us because they would probably want to request more money.”