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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Gustaf Kilander

The House is holding an unprecedented committee hearing on UFOs. Here’s what to expect

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The House Oversight Committee is set to hold a hearing on UFOs, possibly giving a stage to extraordinary claims about life away from this planet.

The hearing is scheduled to start at 10am on Wednesday, with David Grusch, a former intelligence official and whistleblower who said last month that the US has “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles, being one of the individuals on the witness list, The Guardian notes.

He’s set to share his claims in front of a number of members of Congress who may be partial to his perspective, such as Tim Burchett and Anna Paulina Luna, the Republicans leading the probe for the panel into UFOs.

Alien craft could ‘turn us into a charcoal briquette,’ Republican says

Earlier this month, Mr Burchett said that alien vehicles were able to “turn us into a charcoal briquette” and that the US “one hundred per cent” was spotting things in the sky “that might not be of this earth”.

Mr Grusch, who made the shocking claim regarding US possession of alien vehicles last month, headed the analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) at an agency within the Defense Department until earlier this year.

In a number of interviews, he claimed that the government and contractors had found fragments of non-human craft and entire crafts going back decades.

‘Football field kind of size’

He told NewsNation that some of the craft were “very large, like a football field kind of size” and claimed that there had been “malevolent events” in connection to UFOs.

The ex-official hasn’t seen any of the crafts himself, but told the Debrief that he bases his claims on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials”.

The hearing on Wednesday morning comes after Mr Grusch made the allegation that information regarding these vehicles was being unlawfully kept from Congress. He said the government is operating a crash retrieval programme which gathered alien craft and that his probe into that programme had been impeded.

This led to the Oversight Committee ordering the probe and hearing into what the government knows about UFOs.

At the hearing, Mr Grusch will appear, as will David Fravor, an ex-Navy commander who reported spotting seeing an object flying across the sky during a 2004 training mission.

The witness list also includes Ryan Graves, a retired Navy pilot who appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021 saying that he had spotted unidentified aerial phenomena off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”.

Bumps in the road

Mr Burchett has told the press that the probe had been “stonewalled” by federal officials.

“We’ve had a heck of a lot of pushback about this hearing. There are a lot of people who don’t want this to come to light,” Mr Burchett said during a press conference, according to The Guardian. “We’re gonna get to the bottom of it, dadgummit. Whatever the truth may be. We’re done with the cover-up.”

Following Mr Grusch sharing his claims, the Department of Defense told NewsNation that 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”.

What to expect

While there may not be any proof provided at the hearing, it’s probably going to raise additional questions about the issue. Mr Grusch is likely going to lay out his claims in detail, specifying what the government knows about UFOs and his allegations regarding evidence of aliens.

Mr Burchett hasn’t named his sources for his investigation but has claimed that the US has evidence of aliens. During his appearance on the Event Horizon podcast, he was asked if there was “compelling evidence” that the US had spotted objects in the sky “that might not be of this earth”.

“Oh, 100 per cent. 100 per cent. No question,” he said.

Mr Burchett has also said that the government has proof of technology which “defies all of our laws of physics” and he suggested that alien craft could be lethal to humans.

“If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette,” the Tennessee Republican said.

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