What stands behind US Congress UFO hearings?

US Congress held hearings about the UFO threat to national security. Witnesses accused the Pentagon of concealing information and misappropriating the budget.

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Objectives of US Congressional Hearings on UFOs

Wednesday's congressional hearing aimed to find out:

• whether the government was hiding facts about "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP, formerly UFO);
• whether UAP-based technologies developed in the US and UAPs themselves pose a threat to the US.

Three retired officers testified as witnesses:

• Former intelligence officer, retired Major David Grusch. He served in Afghanistan, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). From 2019 to 2021, he was a spokesperson and then a leader on NGA's "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force".
• Former Commander of the US Navy, Admiral David Fravor.
• Retired US Navy pilot Ryan Graves.

Main witness risks going to jail

David Grusch, the main witness, said that the Pentagon had been aware of "non-human" activities since the 1930s. According to him, the Americans discovered 12 UFO crash sites, collected fragments of alien spaceships and extracted biological remains of "non-human origin" from them. The collected materials are used for so-called reverse engineering works. During the process, engineers work to create an exact copy of an object according to an already existing model. Personnel were injured during that work, Grusch said. 

When asked whether the US government had the UAP, Grusch said that he was absolutely sure of that "based on a survey of more than 40 witnesses over four years."

However, he has never seen anything related to the UAP topic because he was denied access to additional materials. Grusch repeatedly stated that he could not answer questions from congressmen, because the information was classified, and he did not want to let his informants down.

The witness accused the US government:

• of concealing the received data to the detriment of US interests;
• of financing the covert UAP research program by misappropriating the funds allocated by Congress.

It is worthy of note that David Grusch could be held accountable for false testimony.

Fravor confirmed the authenticity of the declassified Tic Tac UFO video that pilots of navy fighter aircraft  filmed in 2004 near USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. The video showed a sleek white aerial object hovering in the air. He dismissed his interest in UFOs as "little green men" hobby and asked Congress to focus on "figuring out what those ships were, where they came from, what technology they had, and how they worked."

If there are such programs in the US then they should be controlled by Congress, Fravor said.

Graves said that in 2014, while piloting an F-18, he came across an unidentified object during exercises near Virginia. He described them as "dark gray or black cubes inside a clear sphere, in which the tops of the cubes were touching the inside of the sphere." The objects, he said, were  completely motionless in Category 4 hurricane-force winds and could accelerate to supersonic speeds.

More than 30 people from his group could observe the phenomenon. People could see it from the ground as well. Graves described his reports to his superiors confirming the events, including cases where those objects were acting "aggressively" towards security personnel.

The witnesses also testified that:

• the number of sightings of unidentified objects increased in recent years,
• pilots and officials who insist on "greater transparency about their experience" were still subjected to harassment.

It was only Eric Burlison (R-Missouri), who exercised skepticism about the "non-human" origin of the UAP at the hearing. Burlison suggested that such objects could emerge when government agencies could discover them being unaware of their origin.

The Pentagon wants proofs

US DoD spokeswoman Susan Gough said that there was no statement made during the hearing that could be verified to support the claim that any programs to own or reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials existed in the past or could exist today. She also said the Department of Defence was committed to providing timely and thorough reports to Congress.

UFO topic inflated in the USA

The topic about unidentified flying objects has been the talk of the day in the US for about three years. If UAPs represent foreign drones, then this indeed appears as a pressing national security issue. Suffice it to recall how the Chinese balloon was agitating the States for a whole month. If it is something else, as the military claimed, then this is a matter for a scientific research.

However, scientific circles are full of skepticism.

Jordan Bimm, a researcher at the Institute for the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago said that one should remain absolutely skeptical when thinking about the issue. One needs to get any sufficient evidence to be able to believe in these claims. Yet, there is no such evidence, he concluded. 

In the absence of evidence, conspiracy theories traditionally emerge one after another. 

Grusch is supposedly acting at the suggestion of the Pentagon to increase the funding for the department. Why talk about budget violations then?

One needs to distract Americans from economic problems, from the struggle for power. There is a rare bipartisan consensus on the UAP topic (as well as on Ukraine).

The most famous UFO sighting incident in America occurred in 1947 in Roswell. A pilot flying over the Cascades in Washington state saw nine crescent-shaped objects flying in formation at an altitude of about three kilometres at a speed of about 1900 km/h. The media coined the "flying saucer" term, and the modern UFO mystery was born.