Closing summary
Thank you for following the Guardian’s coverage of the congressional hearing into claims the US government is harboring UFOs.
Here’s a recap of today’s developments:
The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse engineer, crashed UFOs, former intelligence official David Grusch told the hearing.
Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, claimed he had been denied access to secret government UFO programs, said he has faced “very brutal” retaliation as a result of his allegations. He claimed he had knowledge of “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of government efforts to conceal UFO information.
Grusch told lawmakers that “non-human” biologics had been recovered by the government, but he had never seen an alien body. Grusch has also not seen the alleged alien craft himself – he says his claims are based on “extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials” – and skeptics have noted that accusations that the government is hiding information on UFOs are nothing new.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims of a cover-up. In a statement, a defense department spokesperson said investigators 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”.
Grusch’s allegation that the federal government was hiding this evidence of extraterrestrials from Congress sparked a firestorm in June, prompting the Republican-led oversight committee to launch an immediate investigation.
Other witnesses at the hearing were David Fravor, a former navy commander who recalled seeing a strange object in the sky while on a training mission in 2004.
Ryan Graves, a retired navy pilot who has since founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a UAP non-profit, claimed that he saw UAP off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”. The sightings were “not rare or isolated” and were being witnessed by military aircrews and commercial pilots “whose lives depend on accurate identification”, Graves said.
Updated
The legitimization of UFO discussion has been propelled in part by claims from US military pilots of UFO encounters, along with leaked military videos showing inexplicable happenings in the sky.
Following those revelations, in 2021 the Pentagon released a report on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the term some experts prefer, which found more than 140 instances of UAP encounters that could not be explained. Since then, politicians appear to have moved past some of the stigma around extraterrestrial life.
“There’s a sort of critical mass building now,” said Nick Pope, who spent the early 1990s investigating UFOs for the British Ministry of Defence (MoD).
And I think even though it’s easy to portray some of the politicians as mavericks, the fact that Republicans and Democrats are lining up, are united in their stance on this … I think we have crossed a line.
The desire of politicians, of both sides, to wade into UFO discourse suggests that a corner has been turned, and Pope suggested Republicans’ and Democrats’ willingness to investigate could mean they are beginning to believe. He said:
I think these politicians are doing it because they either know, or more likely strongly suspect that some of this is true.
“I don’t think you would go all in – and they are going all in on this – if they weren’t pretty darn sure of themselves. Because the egg on the face if this all turns out to be drones – it would be staggering.
