Congress vs. The Pentagon: The UAP Disclosure Battle

The July 2023 congressional hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena was the product of years of pressure from a bipartisan group of legislators who had concluded, through classified briefings and conversations with intelligence community insiders, that something significant was being withheld from Congress and from the public. The hearing's formal title was “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency.” Its actual subject was simpler and more extraordinary: were credible people, with security clearances and direct knowledge, willing to say under oath that the United States government had recovered non-human technology? Three witnesses appeared. The answer, for the first time in American history, was yes.

Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 Navy pilot and the founder of the civilian UAP reporting organisation Americans for Safe Aerospace, opened with testimony that grounded the hearing in operational reality. Graves described near-daily UAP encounters during his squadron's deployments — encounters that had been documented on sensors and witnessed by multiple trained pilots, and that had never received a satisfactory explanation from the Navy. He noted that the stigma attached to UAP reporting remained a serious problem: pilots who reported encounters faced professional consequences, which meant that the official record of military UAP encounters reflected only a fraction of what was actually being observed.

Commander David Fravor, USN (Ret.), described the 2004 Nimitz Tic-Tac encounter — an account he had given publicly many times, but never before under oath to Congress. His testimony was notable for its precision and for its consistency with the official Navy acknowledgment that the encounter could not be explained by known technology. Fravor has said, in various interviews, that he believes the object he encountered was not of human manufacture. He said so again to Congress.

David Grusch's testimony was categorically different from anything the United States Congress had heard before on this subject. Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer who had served as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's representative to the UAP Task Force, stated flatly that the U.S. government had been operating, for decades, a programme to retrieve and reverse-engineer non-human craft. He stated that he had been informed of this programme by multiple individuals with direct knowledge and appropriate clearances. He stated that people with knowledge of the programme had faced illegal retaliation. He stated that he had reported all of this to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, who had found his complaint “credible and urgent.”

The Department of Defense, asked about Grusch's claims in the aftermath of the hearing, stated that it had found no verifiable evidence of the possession of non-human craft or biological material. Grusch, speaking subsequently, noted that the office issuing that denial was the same office that had been denied access to the programmes in question. His attorney, Charles McCullough — the former first Inspector General of the Intelligence Community — stated publicly that Grusch's claims had been reviewed through proper legal channels and found legitimate. The hearing did not resolve the question it raised. It made the question impossible to avoid.