House Oversight Committee

House Oversight Committee

Type	Organization
On the Timeline	1 event, 2022

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, usually called the Oversight Committee, is the main investigative committee of the US House of Representatives. Its chair is one of only three in the House who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote.^[1] Since 2023 it has been Congress's main forum for public hearings on UFOs, now officially called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).^[1][2] It has held three such hearings:

• July 2023. The former intelligence officer David Grusch testified that the government ran a crash-retrieval programme.^[2][7]
• November 2024. A hearing titled "Exposing the Truth".^[3][9]
• September 2025. A hearing of its declassification task force under Anna Paulina Luna.^[4][10]

The hearings drew wide attention but produced no physical evidence of non-human craft, and the Pentagon has denied the programmes described.^[7][9]

The committee

The committee began in 1927 as the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, which merged 11 separate spending committees. It became the Committee on Government Operations in 1952.^[1] Its name has changed several times since:^[1]

• 1999. Government Reform, when it also took over the duties of the old Post Office and Civil Service committee and the District of Columbia committee.
• 2007. Oversight and Government Reform.
• 2019. Oversight and Reform.
• 2023. Oversight and Accountability.
• 2025. Oversight and Government Reform again.

Its jurisdiction includes the federal civil service, the postal service, the National Archives and government reorganisation, and it has broad power to investigate the executive branch.^[1] James Comer of Kentucky chaired it in the 118th Congress and was re-elected chair for the 119th.^[1]

The July 2023 hearing

On 26 July 2023 the committee's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, held a hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency".^[2][8] It was organised by Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett in response to Grusch's claims.^[7] Three witnesses testified, and CBS News photographed them arriving together:^[2][8]

• David Grusch. The former Air Force intelligence officer, who had served as the National Reconnaissance Office's representative to the Pentagon's UAP task force, said he had been "informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access". He accused the military of misusing funds to hide such work from Congress and said "biologics" had been recovered from some craft. He said he based his view on interviews with 40 witnesses over four years. Asked by Burchett whether he knew of people harmed to keep the programme secret, he said yes, but that details could be given only in a secure facility. When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked where she should look, he offered to tell her "in a closed environment".^[7][8] The Pentagon denied his claims.^[8]
• David Fravor. The retired Navy commander, a former commanding officer in the Navy, was the pilot in the 2004 USS Nimitz "Tic Tac" encounter.^[2][8] See David Fravor.
• Ryan Graves. The former Navy pilot appeared as executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace.^[2][8] See Ryan Graves.

Burchett read statements by the ufologists George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell, who sat behind Grusch, into the record.^[7] Afterwards, according to Burchett, officials told lawmakers that Grusch did not then have the clearance to discuss the issues in a secure facility. A bipartisan group of representatives called for a select committee on UAP with subpoena power.^[7] Skeptics such as Michael Shermer noted that the hearing offered "not a shred of physical evidence".^[7] Burchett issued a statement after the hearing.^[11]

The subcommittee pursued the claims afterwards. On 12 January 2024 the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, Thomas Monheim, gave its members a classified briefing on Grusch's claims.^[8] Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said lawmakers still "haven't gotten the answers that we need", and Burchett compared the process to "Whack-a-Mole". Moskowitz called it "the first real briefing" and said it had "moved the needle". Grothman and the subcommittee's senior Democrat, Robert Garcia, introduced the Safe Airspace for Americans Act to let civilian pilots report UAP through the FAA.^[8]

The November 2024 hearing

On 13 November 2024 two subcommittees held a joint hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth". It was chaired by Nancy Mace, who led the cybersecurity and information technology subcommittee.^[3][9] The witnesses were:^[3][9]

• Tim Gallaudet. The retired Navy rear admiral. See Tim Gallaudet.
• Luis Elizondo. The former Pentagon official. Asked by Mace under oath whether the government had run secret crash-retrieval programmes designed to reverse-engineer alien craft, he answered yes to both questions. He also confirmed his book's claim that government employees had been injured by UAP.^[9] See Luis Elizondo.
• Michael Gold. The former NASA associate administrator for space policy, who had served on NASA's independent UAP study team.
• Michael Shellenberger. The journalist said the military and intelligence agencies were "sitting on a huge amount" of clear imagery and other data. He would not name his sources, but shared a 12-page whistleblower report on an alleged programme called Immaculate Constellation.^[9] His written testimony included a long anonymous "UAP Timeline".^[12] See Michael Shellenberger.

Mace framed the issue as one of spending: "If we're spending money on something that doesn't exist, why are we spending the money, and if it does exist, why are we hiding it from the public?" Asked by Representative Lauren Boebert, the witnesses said there was no evidence of an alien underwater "base".^[9] A Pentagon spokesperson said the department had found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial activity or of any programme to possess or reverse-engineer extraterrestrial materials. The Guardian noted that the hearing again rested on testimony rather than hard evidence.^[9]

The 2025 task force hearing

In February 2025 Speaker Mike Johnson appointed Luna to lead the committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. The task force grew out of President Trump's order to declassify records on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and its scope later included UAP.^[4] On 9 September 2025 it held a hearing titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection".^[4][10]

• George Knapp. The journalist said documents released under the Freedom of Information Act showed officials privately admitting "these things are real". He urged Congress to "track down the money", saying material had been passed to private contractors to keep it beyond the reach of FOIA.^[10]
• Alexandro Wiggins. The Navy chief called UAP "first and foremost a safety issue" and asked for standard reporting without stigma.^[10]
• Nuccetelli and Borland. The Air Force veterans Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dylan Borland asked Congress to protect witnesses and whistleblowers.^[10]

Burchett and Representative Eric Burlison also questioned the witnesses.^[10]

Impact

The hearings drew wide public attention but produced no physical evidence of non-human craft.^[9] In 2024 the Defense Department formally stated that it had no information on extraterrestrial life and had recovered no alien technology.^[6] The earlier version of this article cited a report in The Hill on AARO's 2024 historical review for this point. That page could not be read here.^[5] See AARO.

Committee members, including Luna and Burchett, kept pressing for disclosure. Burchett has said the government has been "covering this up since the '40s".^[13] In February 2026 President Trump ordered federal agencies to identify and declassify UFO-related records. The Wikipedia account says the move followed agitation by Luna, Burchett and other Republicans. The first files were released on 8 May 2026 through a Pentagon portal called PURSUE.^[6] See Tim Burchett and Jared Moskowitz.

The first public congressional UAP hearing of the modern era, on 17 May 2022, was held by a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee, not the Oversight Committee. See 2022 House UAP hearing.

On the UAP Timeline

• Liberation Times whistleblower hearings report (14 October 2022) — Insiders tell a journalist that congressional whistleblower hearings are coming.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform”, “Anna Paulina Luna”, “United States UFO files”, “David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims”, “Tim Burchett”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.