A House task force focused on government transparency announced it will hold a hearing next week concerning unidentified aerial phenomena, (UAPs) another name for unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, said in a statement on Wednesday that the panel will push for “maximum transparency” from the government.
“The American people deserve maximum transparency from the federal government on sightings, acquisitions, and examinations of UAPs and whether they pose a potential threat to Americans’ safety,” she said.
She went on to say that “whistleblowers who provide details on spending information and policies and procedures regarding the classification and declassification of UAPs should be able to do so without retribution.”
The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday in Washington, D.C. and will be streamed online.
The witnesses expected to testify at the hearing include Air Force veterans Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dyland Borland as well as Navy veteran Alexandro Wiggins, who has previously discussed witnessed UAPs. Journalist George Knapp, a prominent figure in the UFO disclosure community and frequent guest on the alien and paranormal-focused overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, is also scheduled to speak.
The hearing is expected to focus on disclosures from the Pentagon concerning UAPs and the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which was established to investigate unknown aerial objects.
Last fall, a separate House Oversight subcommittee held a hearing concerning UAPs. Witnesses during that hearing testified that the government was holding back information about documented UFO cases stretching back decades.
In the past, unknown flying objects were often the fodder for stories about aliens, but in the age of drones it’s unclear what — if anything — pilots and others are seeing when they witness objects streaking across the sky.
Some New Jersey residents — including local officials — were left baffled and frightened by a series of strange UAP sightings that stretched for weeks last year.
One lawmaker, State Senator Jon Bramnick, even called for a “limited state of emergency” during the series of alleged sightings, according to UPI.
In 2023, three military veterans were called to testify before a House Oversight subcommittee concerning UAPs. Most of the focus of that hearing was about establishing a means for military and commercial pilots to report sightings without the stigma associated with seeing a UFO.
One of the witnesses, retired Major David Grusch, was formerly a part of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force and later became a whistleblower. He gave the most shocking testimony, alleging that the U.S. government had reverse engineered non-human built technology from crash sites and that he had spoken to people who allegedly told him the government had the bodies of “non-human” biological matter from the pilots of those craft.
He insisted that he could not provide details to the panel members outside of a SCIF, which is a small chamber meant for highly secured and protected direct discussions.
There has been more of a push in recent years by whistleblowers and some Congressional leaders for the government to reveal what — if anything — it knows about UAPs and UFOs. But some notable UFO videos, like those released by the Pentagon, were taken as early as 2004.
In the 2004 video, U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor — who would later go on to testify alongside Grusch — witnessed a white oval shape approximately 40 feet long hovering above the ocean off the coast of Southern California.
He claims that as he descended to get a closer look at the object, it ascended, matching the Navy fighter’s trajectory, and then disappeared. The video has gone on to be called the “Tic Tac” video, referencing the oval shape and white color.
While any discussion of UAP’s stirs up discussions of aliens, unmanned aerial vehicles, like drones, are becoming more common and easier to obtain and operate. They can also carry cameras and other data collecting equipment, which could pose a threat to U.S. national security.
In February 2023, Air Force jets shot down a Chinese “high altitude surveillance balloon” that was, according to then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, “being used by the PRC in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States.”
U.S. officials had reportedly been tracking the balloon for 10 days before it was shot down.
