The US government conducted a “multi-decade” program which collected, and attempted to reverse engineer, crashed UFOs, a former intelligence official told a congressional hearing.
David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, made his claims in front of a House oversight committee in Washington, as the issue of alien life received its highest profile airing to date.
The hearing was prompted by claims from Grusch in June that the government was harboring alien space craft. On Wednesday, Grusch repeated some of those claims under oath.
“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,” Grusch told the committee.
Grusch, who filed a whistleblower complaint in 2022, claiming he had been denied access to secret government UFO programs, said he has faced “very brutal” retaliation as a result of his allegations.
“It hurt me both professionally and personally,” Grusch said.
Under questioning, Grusch confirmed that he had knowledge of “people who have been harmed or injured” in the course of government efforts to conceal UFO information.
Asked by an oversight committee member if he had “feared for his life”, Grusch replied: “Yes definitely.”
Grusch added: “I am hopeful that my actions will ultimately lead to a positive outcome of increased transparency.”
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.
Since then, the intrigue around what evidence the government has, or doesn’t have, around UFOs has only intensified.
Tim Burchett, a Republican congressman from Tennessee who is co-leading the UFO investigation, has claimed in recent weeks that the US had evidence of technology that “defies all of our laws of physics”, and that alien craft possess technology that could “turn us into a charcoal briquette”.
On Wednesday, however, Burchett sought to downplay, somewhat, what people would hear.
“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing. Sorry to disappoint about half y’all. We’re just going to get to the facts,” Burchett said.
That announcement drew a chuckle, but Burchett became more serious as he accused government agencies of a lack of cooperation with the oversight committee investigation.
“It’s been so difficult to get here today. In the Baptist church we say that the devil is in our way, and the devil has been in our way for this thing. We’ve run into roadblocks from members, the intelligence community, [and] the Pentagon.
Other witnesses at the hearing are David Fravor, a former navy commander who on Wednesday 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 unidentified aerial phenomena – the term preferred to UFO by some experts – off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”.
In June Grusch prompted headlines around the world when he alleged the US had operated a crash retrieval program which had recovered downed alien craft.
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He claimed in an interview with the Debrief that when he tried to investigate the program – as he had been charged to do in his role at the Department of Defense – he was prevented from doing so, and filed a whistleblower complaint.
The oversight committee announced its investigation into Grusch’s claims a day later, and appears to have run into hurdles of its own.
Last week Burchett said he and his co-investigator Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, had been “stonewalled” by federal officials when asking about UFOs, and prevented from accessing some “information to prove that they do exist”.
“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,” Burchett said.
It was unclear how muchnew information would be revealed during Wednesday’s hearing, but it seems Burchett, during the course of his investigation, has found enough evidence to be convinced that extraterrestrials exist.
In an appearance on the Event Horizon podcast in early July, Burchett claimed alien craft possess technology that could “turn us into a charcoal briquette”, and claimed that the US has been hiding evidence of UFOs since 1947.
Asked if had seen “compelling evidence” that the US was seeing things in the sky “that might not be of this earth”, Burchett replied: “Oh, 100%. 100%. No question.”
For all the excitement and inevitable media speculation, some have cautioned against reading too much into what we might hear.
Grusch has 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 story aligns with a lot of similar stories that have played out, going back to the 1980s and 1970s, that together allege that the US government has kept an incredible secret, the literal most extraordinary secret that mankind could have, for not just weeks or months, but years and decades, with no meaningful leak or documentary evidence to ever come forward,” Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian who is writing a book on the government’s hunt for UFOs, told the Guardian in June.
“I think when you look at the government’s ability to keep secret other really important secrets, there’s a lot of reason to doubt the capability of the government to do that.”
