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At House UFO Hearing, Military Members Push for Answers: “It Is Long Overdue” — Two former Navy pilots and a former intelligence official called for a safe and transparent system of reporting the phenomena. “If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed,” one said, “our national conversation would change.” With national interest around UFOs at fever pitch, House lawmakers on Wednesday held a rare hearing on the US government’s knowledge and handling of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)—the second House hearing of its kind in decades, with the first in a half-century occurring last year. “I can’t remember ever seeing a line this long to get a seat into a congressional hearing,” NewsNation correspondent Joe Khalil tweeted prior to the event on Capitol Hill.

“These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine. Military air crew and commercial pilots, trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena,” said Graves, who claimed that the stigma attached to UAP “silences commercial pilots who fear professional repercussions, discourages witnesses, and is only compounded by recent government claims questioning the credibility of eyewitness testimony.”

To that point, the witnesses called for a safe and transparent system of reporting such encounters. “The objects that are being seen by commercial pilots are performing maneuvers that are unexplainable due to our current understanding of our technology and capabilities as a country, and that applies for the military as well,” said Graves. “We have nothing that can stop in mid-air and go the other direction, nor do we have anything that can, like in our situation, come down from space, hang out for three hours, and go back up,” added Fravor.

Grusch made headlines last month as the source of a seemingly bombshell report in The Debrief, a little-known science and defense website. The report alleged that the US government was concealing information related to its possession of “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin”—information about which “has been illegally withheld from Congress.” Grusch went on to claim that the government had even retrieved “dead pilots” from “nonhuman exotic-origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed.” The story published in the Debrief was written by journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal, both of whom helped break the eye-popping 2017 UFO New York Times report about a defunct secret Pentagon program founded to investigate “unidentified flying objects.”

That 2017 report, Fravor said, “opened the door for the government and public that cannot be closed,” leading to the Whistleblower Protection Act under the NDAA. “What concerns me is there is no oversight from our elected officials on anything associated with our government processing or working on craft believed not from this world.”

Kean and Blumenthal’s latest UFO dispatch, however, appeared to run up against different editorial challenges. As I reported back in June, the Times passed on it, while both Washington Post and Politico weren’t able to turn the story around at the speed that the reporters wanted.

In his testimony Wednesday, Grusch underscored what has been for some a red flag in the reporting process of the Debrief story: that neither he nor Kean personally saw documents or photographs of the alleged craft. “My testimony is based on information I’ve been given by individuals with a long standing track record of legitimacy and service to this country, many of whom also have shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony to myself and many of my various colleagues,” said Grusch, who said he has “taken every step I can to corroborate this evidence over a period of four years while I was with the UAP task force and do my due diligence on the individual sharing it.” Throughout the hearing, he also acknowledged he had never seen the phenomena personally.

"If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change," Graves added. "The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue."