A former US intelligence officer joined two other retired military officials Wednesday in pushing Congress to investigate and increase transparency around UFOs. At a meeting with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, David Grusch told legislators that they were being kept unaware of the country’s true experiences with unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP.
If anyone in the US is qualified to speak on UAP, it’s Grusch. Not only did he spend a decade and a half in the Air Force and the DoD’s National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), but he’s spent the last few years helping the Pentagon investigate UAP across two different task forces. Grusch entered whistleblower territory last month when he claimed the US had both “intact and partially intact'' extraterrestrial vehicles. Not surprisingly, his claim kicked off a flurry of DoD denials and behind-the-scenes paper shuffling, neither of which was assisted whatsoever by confirmations from the National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s Jonathan Grey. “The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said.
Embracing his new role, Grusch joined David Fravor, a former US Navy commander, and Ryan Graves, a retired Navy pilot, in pushing the House to peel back the layers on America’s experiences with UAP. "I am asking Congress to hold our government to this standard and thoroughly investigate these claims," Grusch said, referring to trustworthy individuals’ “compelling evidence” for UAP in the form of “photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony.”
Grusch has reportedly known of a long-term UAP “crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” for quite some time. According to his testimony, his attempts to access the program were denied, and the DoD intentionally prevented Congress from knowing about any of the details.
Graves joined Grusch in pushing for more thorough investigations of mysterious aerial sightings. After retiring from the Navy, Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA), a military pilot-led nonprofit focused on UAP. “If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem,” he told Congress Wednesday. “If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety.”
A lot of what we think are UFOs are just foreign spying or space junk—according to the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, at least. But that doesn’t change the fact that military personnel and everyday civilians somewhat regularly spot UAP, further reinforcing the need for policy and transparency around the subject. Based on both parties’ interest Wednesday, we might hope to see more of a focus on both aspects soon.
