This isn’t about finding little green men or flying saucers. This is about government transparency.
This isn’t about finding little green men or flying saucers. This is about government transparency.
A round 5 a.m. on July 26, 2023, I walked outside my office building in Washington to an early-morning interview with Fox News. As I stepped out, I stopped to talk to a group of people who were eagerly waiting for something. I soon realized they were waiting for a hearing that was scheduled to start five hours later.
That hearing was the House Oversight Committee’s hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), which is now the government-approved term for UFOs. I led the effort to make that hearing happen, along with my colleagues — and now members of the Congressional UAP Caucus — representatives Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison.
There are about 50 seats in the committee room for the public. Hundreds of people from all over the country and even the world lined up throughout the building to try to sneak a peek inside. These people have been passionate about this issue for years. They all agreed that the government needs to be transparent about what it knows regarding UAPs.
We heard from three credible expert witnesses who had different types of first-hand experience with UAPs. Americans for Safe Aerospace founder Ryan Graves testified about his time as an F-18 Navy pilot encountering UAPs during training exercises. Commander David Fravor (ret.) testified about his experience on the USS Nimitz, which engaged with the object in the famous “Tic Tac” video. David Grusch testified about his time as an intelligence officer and then as a whistleblower regarding a UAP-crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering program.
People all across the U.S. have been interested in UAPs for years. So has the federal government, whether it admits so or not. The Pentagon has spent tens of millions of dollars studying UAPs for decades. Yet every time someone asks about them, top-level bureaucrats claim there’s nothing out there besides drones, party balloons, misidentified aircraft, or swamp gas.
This isn’t about finding little green men or flying saucers. This is about government transparency. So many people, myself included, are tired of hearing from top-level bureaucrats that UAPs don’t exist. We’ve heard sworn testimony from witnesses who have everything to lose and nothing to gain from coming forward with their experiences. Members of our military have come forward and been “debriefed.” But it’s more like an interrogation followed by retaliation from their superiors and humiliation from their peers. If there’s really “nothing” as the bureaucrats claim, why are whistleblowers so mistreated and run through the mud?
Also, if there’s really “nothing,” why do we get so many redacted reports and briefings held in the SCIF, where it’s completely classified, and we can’t talk about anything that was discussed? If there’s nothing to hide, why keep it under wraps?
Why has our government spent tens of millions of dollars over many decades to study “nothing”? The federal government spent $22 million on the Advanced Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP)/Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). And for fiscal year 2024, the Pentagon requested $11 million to fund the research of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was created in 2022 to investigate UAPs.
We need to cut through all the questions and uncertainty surrounding our government and UAPs. That’s why I introduced the UAP Transparency Act in mid-May. My new bill requires the declassification of all federal documents related to UAPs within 270 days. It also requires the president of the United States to provide a quarterly report to the U.S. House of Representatives detailing the progress made toward declassifying these records by every federal agency.
The bill was co-sponsored by my fellow members of the UAP Caucus: Jared Moskowitz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Eric Burlison. These members of Congress have all been bold enough to push for transparency on this issue even when it wasn’t popular. I am grateful for all their support in this area.
The UAP Transparency Act is only a page and a half long because it’s simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just declassify the files.
Our government has a problem with overclassification. In a 2016 House Oversight Committee hearing on overclassification, then–National Security Subcommittee chairman Ron DeSantis said, “When you over-classify, I think it actually undermines the core reason of why you want to do it.” In 2023, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said, “Overclassification undermines the basic trust that public has in its government.”
They’re both right. They know the American people don’t trust our government because it lies to them. But solving the problem requires our government to admit its wrongdoing and take action to make it right. That’s why I don’t expect the UAP Transparency Act to pass. Every step of the way, my efforts to push for increased transparency around UAPs have been stonewalled by the Intelligence Community and other members of Congress. However, we need to try. We need to get everyone on the record about this. The truth about UAPs matters to lots of people, and government transparency in general matters to everyone.