At packed UFO hearing, calls for transparency ring loud

The email came through one day in January 2015, according to Tim Gallaudet, during a pre-deployment exercise off the East Coast that included the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.

The subject line read, in all caps, “URGENT SAFETY OF FLIGHT ISSUE,” recalls Gallaudet, then commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. In his telling, the email from an operations officer asked for any information on a series of unknown objects disrupting the exercise. Attached was a now declassified video of what the Navy would later confirm were unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

But the email had disappeared by the next day, Gallaudet testified Wednesday before two subpanels of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

“Moreover, the Commander of Fleet Forces Command and the operations officer never discussed the subject, even during weekly meetings specifically designed to address issues affecting exercises like the one in which the Theodore Roosevelt Strike Group was participating,” Gallaudet told lawmakers and a packed room full of members of the media and the public. Outside the hearing room, a line of hundreds waiting to get in snaked through the Rayburn House Office Building hallway.

That experience led Gallaudet to believe that some in the government may know more about UAPs, colloquially known as UFOs, than they were letting on. And it convinced him, as well as other panelists who testified Wednesday, of a potential “constitutional crisis” and a fundamental lack of transparency from the executive branch, the military and the intelligence community that leaves Congress in the dark.

“The continued overclassification surrounding UAPs has not only hindered our ability to effectively address these phenomena, but it has also eroded trust in our institutions,” Gallaudet said.

Congress in recent years has been hot on the UAP trail, as a bipartisan but still somewhat fringe coalition of lawmakers has held hearings and applied pressure on other government entities to release information, particularly about any clandestine programs using taxpayer money. They’ve encountered some resistance.

“I’m not going to name names, but there are certain individuals who didn’t want this hearing to happen because they feared what might be disclosed,” said South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who chairs Oversight’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation.

But the intrigue on Capitol Hill has been fueled by increased public interest in the topic, as some videos of UAPs have become public. A subject once confined to sci-fi films and conspiracy theorists has begun to enter the mainstream. UFO enthusiasts attended the hearing, posting selfies and photos of themselves with the panelists.

“The boys. #ufotwitter,” one user posted to X, accompanying a photo of the four witnesses.

Last year, David Grusch, a former military and intelligence officer, claimed in bombshell testimony to a House Oversight subcommittee that the U.S. government had recovered “non-human” material and has a secret program to recover and reverse-engineer crashed aircraft. Luis Elizondo, an author and former Department of Defense employee who testified Wednesday, said he was aware during his time at the Pentagon of reports of “biologics” recovered.

“Was anything described … that we have possession of bodies?” Missouri Republican Rep. Eric Burlison asked.

“Yes. Yes,” Elizondo responded.

“Is it multiple types of creatures?” Burlison continued.

“Sir, I couldn’t answer that. I can tell you anecdotally that it was discussed quite a bit when I was at the Pentagon. The problem is, the supposed collection of these biological samples occurred before my time — in fact, before I was even born,” Elizondo said.

Alien fever hasn’t yet broken. President-elect Donald Trump, during an October appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, spoke about interviews he’d had with former military pilots who observed mysterious spherical objects. And Kirk McConnell, a former House and Senate staffer, sparked buzz in September when he was seen in the trailer of the James Fox documentary “The Program” making startling claims.

“We have sources who have asserted not only that there have been crashes, but there have been crash retrievals,” McConnell says in the clip.

The uproar has led to legislation as well.

Last year, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., backed an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act directing the National Archives and Records Administration to create a collection of UAP-related records that would carry the presumption of immediate disclosure. But the language included in the final package fell short of what some advocates had urged, and subsequent bills have followed.

Earlier this year, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett and a group of his Oversight Committee colleagues — including Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz and Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, both of Florida, along with Burlison — introduced legislation that would require the declassification of federal documents related to UAPs.

And on Tuesday, Burchett introduced a bill that aims to provide protections for whistleblowers who come forward with information about federal programs studying UAPs — a response to reports that whistleblowers have been stigmatized and targeted for making information public.

Another bill, led by California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, would require the Federal Aviation Administration to establish reporting requirements for UAP incidents.

“It’s incredibly important that civilian pilots have the opportunity to safely report the UAPs that they’re seeing or encountering in the air,” said Garcia, ranking member on Oversight’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs.

The position of the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, is that there is no evidence that any government “investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology,” according to a February 2024 report.

AARO concluded that “most sightings were ordinary objects and phenomena and the result of misidentification,” and that claims of evidence being hid from Congress were the result largely of “circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence.”

But Michael Shellenberger, a free speech activist and founder of the Substack newsletter “Public,” pushed back on Wednesday against those kinds of dismissals, testifying that he stands by his reporting about a supposed special access program called “Immaculate Constellation” despite the Department of Defense denying any record of it.

“The Pentagon, the intelligence community, is treating us like children. It’s time for us to know the truth about this,” Shellenberger said.