Three former military officials, whistleblower David Grusch, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, testified before the U.S. Congress on 26 July 2023. They told the House Oversight subcommittee that the federal government holds far more information about UAPs than it has disclosed, and pointed to secret “Legacy Programs” allegedly funded through the misappropriation of public money, with no accountability to lawmakers.
The hearing produced controversial testimonies about unexplained sightings and “non-human” biological matter said to be in U.S. government possession. Lawmakers from both parties stressed national-security concerns; some accused the executive branch of concealing UFO-related information from the public. In the years that followed, Grusch lost his classified clearance, AARO publicly contradicted his core claims, two more hearings produced fresh witnesses, and Grusch himself returned to Capitol Hill, this time on the staff of the very task force chasing the answers.
UFO journalists: George Knapp (left), Jeremy Corbell (right), whistleblower David Grusch (center)
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Democratic representative Robert Garcia argued that the volume of reports and witnesses warranted real investigation and oversight, since UAPs could pose a threat to aircraft. Experts have pointed out that many sightings can be explained by balloons, drones, optical illusions, or commercial airliner lights. The Pentagon denied any evidence linking UAPs to alien activity, but did not rule it out completely.
UAPs, whatever they may be, may pose a serious threat to our military or civilian aircraft. And that must be understood. The more we understand, the safer we will be.
Representative Robert Garcia
Ryan Graves, David Grusch, David Fravor taking the oath
UFO Pentagon program
Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence official, said he had personally interviewed more than 40 people who knew the government held a great deal of UAP data. According to him, evidence also pointed to the funding of an unacknowledged scientific programme. Because the relevant material is classified, the source of the budget remains unknown. Grusch also told the committee he could supply a list of “cooperative and hostile witnesses” able to give Congress more information about UAP-related programmes.
A second important reference point came from Sean Kirkpatrick, then director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), in April 2023. Kirkpatrick said the U.S. government was investigating more than 650 potential UAP cases, but maintained there was no reliable evidence that any of them defied the laws of physics.
I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue.
Ryan Graves, ex-F-18 pilot
The 2023 testimony also produced one of its most disputed claims: that the U.S. holds remains of “non-human” pilots and that the federal government has known about “non-human” activity since the 1930s. Grusch said he had not seen the material himself, but had spoken with officials who claimed direct knowledge of recovered craft of unknown origin. The biologics line generated headlines around the world, and would set the terms of every Pentagon denial that followed.
Pentagon’s response
The Pentagon rejected the cover-up allegations outright. In an official statement, Defense Department spokesperson Sue Gough said investigators had found no verifiable evidence to support the claims of past or present programmes related to the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials. Gough added that the department was committed to timely and thorough reporting to Congress on UFO matters.
Grusch explained why he had decided to act as a federal whistleblower. After he had pressed ahead with a thorough investigation of UFO matters that the Pentagon had assigned him to, he faced retaliation. His curiosity and his determination to see the work through were not well received. Citing the ongoing investigation, he declined to detail the specific retaliatory actions, but said the tactics used against him had been severe and had caused both professional and personal harm. Whistleblowers exposing institutional secrecy is a story as old as Watergate’s “Deep Throat”; what made Grusch unusual was the layer of classification on top of it.
Earlier disclosures and the 2022 hearing
The 2023 testimonies were not the first attempt to bring UFO matters into the open. The American Congress had already held a public hearing in 2022, at which Pentagon officials presented declassified images and recordings of unexplained flying objects. According to U.S. media reports, one short clip showed a small object passing rapidly by a military pilot; other footage showed glowing triangular objects.
The materials were presented during a session featuring Scott Bray, the Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Ronald Moultrie, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Bray said the “glowing triangles” had eventually been identified as unmanned aerial vehicles, but the object captured in the first recording remained unknown.
Bray also revealed that there had been at least 11 incidents involving near-collisions between U.S. military aircraft and UAPs. The U.S. military, he said, had not attempted to communicate with the objects.
Five claims from the 2023 testimonies
The 26 July 2023 hearing produced five main claims from the witnesses:
- Whistleblower David Grusch said the government was “absolutely” in possession of UAPs and described a Pentagon programme that had collected crashed UAPs, allegedly funded through the misappropriation of public money.
- Grusch testified that some humans had allegedly been harmed by UAPs and that he had interviewed individuals who recovered “non-human biologics” from crashed UAPs, while avoiding the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial”.
- Witnesses and lawmakers called for a safe and transparent reporting process for UAP information, and said pilots needed better briefings and preparation for UAP encounters.
- Witnesses pointed out that the stigma attached to reporting UFO sightings, and the harassment of investigators, made it harder to determine the origin of UAPs.
- David Fravor, a former U.S. Navy commander, recounted a sighting of a Tic Tac-shaped object that defied logical explanation, accelerating to “supersonic speeds”.
Backlash, AARO’s verdict, and Kirkpatrick’s exit
Within weeks of the hearing, lawmakers were told that Grusch no longer held the security clearance required to discuss UAPs in classified settings. In August 2023, journalist Ken Klippenstein reported leaked psychiatric-detention records from 2014 and 2018 involving Grusch. Grusch sued Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman in 2024 over the disclosure, asking for $2.5 million in damages.
On 1 December 2023, AARO’s first director, Sean Kirkpatrick, retired. In a Scientific American op-ed in January 2024, he wrote that his team had been overwhelmed by a “whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings”. He added that “none of the conspiracy-minded ‘whistleblowers’ in the public eye had elected to come to AARO to provide their ‘evidence’”. The line between credible insider testimony and self-reinforcing folklore would haunt every subsequent UAP discussion, much as the early sceptics of the Theranos whistleblowers had to push back against an aura of celebrity reputation before being heard.
On 6 March 2024, AARO published Volume 1 of its Historical Record Report, covering 1945 through October 2023. Acting director Tim Phillips said the office had “found no verifiable evidence that any UAP sighting has represented extraterrestrial activity” and named DHS’s rejected “Kona Blue” proposal as the kind of paper trail critics had mistaken for a real crash-retrieval programme.
On 26 August 2024, the Pentagon named Jon Kosloski, a physicist with intelligence-community experience, as the new permanent AARO director.
Grusch goes back to Capitol Hill
On 27 March 2025, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) announced Grusch as a Special Advisor on the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. The appointment was initially a four-month posting; it has since rolled forward, and the public LegiStorm staff register lists Grusch as Senior Adviser to Burlison from April 2025.
Burlison framed it bluntly: “The American people deserve answers about UAPs. David Grusch has risked his career to expose critical information. His expertise will be vital as we work to uncover the truth and hold the government accountable.”
Grusch, on the appointment, said he would use his expertise to “help the US Congress restore full oversight while enabling the Legislative Branch’s ability to investigate and hold those accountable who have broken the law and lied not only to our Congress, but also to the Executive Office of the President, Director of National Intelligence, and Department of Justice”. The line carried the same conviction as the testimony of corporate whistleblowers like Sherron Watkins at Enron: insiders saying they had warned, in writing, and been ignored.
With Grusch advising the task force from inside, a second wave of hearings followed. On 13 November 2024, House Oversight held “UAP: Exposing the Truth”. The witness panel was unusual: Luis Elizondo, the former DoD UAP lead; Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (USN ret.); former NASA associate administrator Michael Gold; and journalist Michael Shellenberger.
Shellenberger handed lawmakers a whistleblower report describing an alleged Pentagon special-access programme called “Immaculate Constellation”, said to have been created in 2017 to quarantine UAP sightings data across multiple intelligence streams. Sue Gough, the same Pentagon spokesperson quoted earlier in this story, denied any record of such a programme. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) introduced the first UAP Whistleblower Protection Act the day before, on 12 November 2024.
On 29 August 2025, Burchett and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) reintroduced the bill as H.R. 5060, extending federal whistleblower protections to anyone reporting on the use of taxpayer funds for UAP research and retrieval. The bill covers DoD personnel, contractors, FBI staff and the broader intelligence community.
On 9 September 2025, Luna’s task force, the same one Grusch advises, held its first UAP-focused hearing, “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection”. Witnesses included Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli (alleged 2003-2005 incursions at Vandenberg AFB), Air Force veteran Dylan Borland (alleged 2012 incident at Langley AFB and a decade of professional retaliation), and Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexandro Wiggins, who gave the first active-duty U.S. Navy testimony before Congress on UAP.
Wiggins described a self-luminous Tic Tac-shaped object emerging from the ocean off the USS Jackson in 2023, linking with three similar objects, and disappearing in a near-instantaneous synchronised acceleration. During the same hearing, Burlison played video he said showed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper firing a Hellfire missile at a high-speed UAP off the coast of Yemen in October 2024; the missile appeared to hit but not destroy the object.
Trump’s disclosure order, and Grusch’s 2026 message
On 19 February 2026, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he was directing the Department of Defense and other agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, [UAP and UFOs]…”. Six days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters during the “Arsenal of Freedom” tour stop in Colorado that the Pentagon would be in “full compliance with that executive order”.
Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough confirmed that AARO was by then “examining over 2,000 UAP cases”, with about 1,000 reports held in an active archive awaiting more data, up from roughly 1,600 in late 2024. AARO had still not published its 2025 annual report or Volume 2 of the Historical Record.
In April 2026 Grusch joined Burlison and Michael Gold on the first-ever UFO panel at the National Space Symposium. He told the audience that, in his experience, legacy UAP programmes operated as “rice bowls of stove piping”, and that data had been shared neither with his team at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency nor with AARO itself. Asked about the President’s declassification push, he answered with rare directness:
I think there is a high expectation for the President to deliver, and I think if he does reveal everything that I came in contact with, he’s going to go down in history as a great figure.
David Grusch, National Space Symposium UAP panel, April 2026
He added that, in his view, “the US government understands it represents a form of sentient non-human intelligence”, and that “the universe is teeming with life, it seems, and readily available to be explored, and the US government does have a lot of information”. Whether Trump’s order produces real disclosure or another round of denials is the open question Grusch has been chasing since 2023: first as a witness under oath, then as the staffer drafting the questions.
The hearings were ultimately about more than UAPs. They were about whether U.S. military pilots, sailors and intelligence officers could speak honestly about what they had seen. Ryan Graves had said in 2023 that pilots, both military and civilian, could not feel comfortable reporting UAP incidents. A confidential whistleblowing system, with statutory protection, could give those pilots a way to report what they had seen, without fear of being branded crackpots or pushed out of the careers they had built.
