The House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, often called “UAPs” or “UFOs,” on Wednesday.
The panel is expected to hear testimony from at least three witnesses: David Grusch, a former U.S. intelligence official; David Fravor, a former Navy commander; and Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot. Graves and Fravor both claim to have spotted UAPs, and Grusch has claimed that the U.S. has retrieved “intact and partially intact” vehicles of nonhuman origin.
The hearing, set to begin at 10 a.m. ET, comes as a growing chorus of bipartisan lawmakers call for greater transparency.
Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a review board charged with declassifying UFO-related records.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn, said the committee’s hearing will aim to create the conditions for transparency, and that he expects the witnesses will “speak frankly to the public about their experiences.”
“I just want transparency. I just want the truth,” Burchett said.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing the hearing, said he takes his responsibility to oversee the proceedings “very seriously.”
“The American people deserve transparency about UAP’s, and Congress should work in a bipartisan way to understand any potential national security implications,” Garcia said in a statement to NBC News ahead of the hearing.
Burchett and other lawmakers on the committee have accused defense officials of stonewalling congressional inquiries into UAPs: In an interview earlier his month, Burchett claimed that one of the committee’s previous witnesses will not testify “because of pressure from the Pentagon.”
Sue Gough, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, told NBC News that the Defense Department is “committed to timely and thorough reporting to Congress” on UAPs.
This year, a NASA panel tasked with studying UAP sightings held its first public meeting. The experts said the stigma associated with reporting UAP sightings — as well as the harassment of people who work to investigate them — may be hindering efforts to determine their origins, and they called on the federal government to collect higher quality data.
Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told the panel in May that most UAP sightings have “mundane” explanations.
Those explanations, experts say, include balloons, drones, optical illusions, or even the blinking lights of a commercial airliner. Some officials and independent experts say they have seen no evidence linking UAPs to alien activity, though they have not ruled out that explanation.
Kirkpatrick said his office has received over 800 UAP reports since 1996, but that just about 2 to 5 percent demonstrate “anomalous characteristics” that require more analysis. He added that “without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the highest scientific standards we set for resolution.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
