The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has scheduled a hearing on UFOs, also called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), for next Wednesday.
The hearing has long been promised by House Republicans, who pledged to explore unconfirmed claims about UAP sightings from a former U.S. intelligence official and two former Navy servicemen.
“We’re done with the cover-ups,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said in a tweet Thursday announcing the hearing.
“Last year, the House Intelligence Committee held a hearing on UAPs. They brought in some Pentagon bureaucrats who only had two answers to the questions they were asked: ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘That is classified,’” Burchett said at a press conference Thursday. “This hearing is going to be different. We’re going to have witnesses who can speak frankly to the public about their experiences.”
Members of Congress, the Pentagon and NASA have all pushed back on holding the upcoming hearing, he said.
“There are a lot of people who don’t want this to come to light,” he continued.
David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence official, is among those scheduled to testify. Last month, he told The Debrief that the federal government has an undercover program for recovering debris from crashed spacecrafts of non-human origin. The Pentagon says it hasn’t found any evidence to substantiate Grusch’s claim.
Other witnesses scheduled are David Fravor, a former Navy commander, and Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot ― both of whom claim to have spotted UAPs.
“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor told ABC News in 2017 about what he witnessed while on a training mission in 2004.
UAP sightings have been a hot topic in Congress in recent years. In 2021, U.S. intelligence officials responded to pressure from lawmakers and publicly acknowledged for the first time that UAP sightings by certain individuals are deserving of real attention. In a report to lawmakers, intelligence officials examined 144 UAP sightings and were only able to explain one as a large deflating balloon. They found no evidence that the UAPs were connected to extraterrestrial life.
Some Democrats are also supportive of dismantling the veil of security around UAPs. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) threw his support behind bipartisan legislation to declassify government records related to UAPs.