Nancy Mace

Nancy Mace

Type	Person
Also known as	Rep. Nancy Mace

Nancy Ruth Mace (born 4 December 1977) is an American Republican politician. She has represented South Carolina's 1st congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2021, after serving in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 2018 to 2020.^[1] In 1999 she became the first woman to graduate from the Corps of Cadets program at The Citadel.^[1] As chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation, she has been one of Congress's most prominent voices on UAP.^[1] She questioned David Grusch, David Fravor and Ryan Graves at the July 2023 hearing.^[4] She co-chaired the hearing of 13 November 2024, where the alleged "Immaculate Constellation" programme was entered into the record.^[5] She has said she believes aliens have been "interacting with humanity".^[1] In 2026 she ran for governor of South Carolina but was eliminated in the primary, giving up her House seat.^[1]

Early life and education

Mace was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to the Army brigadier general James Emory Mace and the schoolteacher Anne Mace.^[1] Her father was commandant of cadets at The Citadel from 1997 to 2005. In 1999 she became the first woman to graduate from its Corps of Cadets program, earning a business administration degree magna cum laude. She described the experience in In the Company of Men: A Woman at The Citadel (2001).^[1] In 2004 she earned a master's degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Georgia.^[1] She founded the public relations firm the Mace Group in 2008, and was co-owner of the South Carolina politics site FITSNews until 2013.^[1]

Political career

• Early campaigns. She volunteered for Ron Paul's presidential campaign in 2012. In 2014 she ran for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina, winning 6.2% against Lindsey Graham. In 2016 she worked for Donald Trump's campaign as a coalitions and field director.^[1]
• State House. She won a special election for South Carolina House District 99 in January 2018 and was re-elected that November.^[1] In 2019 she argued successfully for rape and incest exceptions in a six-week abortion ban. She opposed offshore drilling, and in 2020 the governor signed her bill ending the shackling of pregnant women in prison.^[1]
• Congress. In 2020 she defeated the Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham. She was re-elected in 2022 and 2024, and is the first Republican woman elected to Congress from South Carolina.^[1]
• Governor's race. She announced a bid for governor on 4 August 2025. She lost in the 2026 primary without winning any county, and said she would return to the private sector at the end of her third term.^[1]

The July 2023 hearing

On 26 July 2023 the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Glenn Grothman, heard from Graves, Fravor and Grusch.^[4] Mace opened her questions by recalling the Chinese spy balloon shot down off South Carolina earlier that year. She noted that since the Roswell incident many Americans had wondered about unknown objects crossing the skies.^[4]

• Questions to all three. She asked whether any of them had faced repercussions for reporting UAP. Graves and Fravor said no, and Grusch said he had never seen anything himself. Asked whether there was an active disinformation campaign within the government to deny UAP, Graves said he had no answer and Grusch said yes. Fravor said there had been one in the days of Project Blue Book, but that he did not speak for the government now.^[4]
• Graves. Graves estimated, from his own conversations with pilots, that only about 5% of UAP sightings are reported. He said the Navy had taken the danger seriously after the incident off Virginia Beach.^[4]
• Fravor. Fravor said he had never seen anything that looked and moved like the "Tic Tac", and that its movements defied physics as we understand it. He said the government does not test advanced weapons next to its own jets without telling the pilots. He thought his encounter had simply been ignored and filed away rather than kept secret for good reason.^[4]
• Grusch. She asked Grusch whether officials had unlawfully withheld information from Congress; he said he "would not be surprised". Asked whether the government had made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, he said he could not discuss it in public.^[4] Asked whether the recovered craft came with the bodies of pilots, he said "biologics came with some of these recoveries". People with direct knowledge had assessed them as non-human, and the documentation could be discussed only in a secure facility.^[4]
• The witness list. Finally she asked whom Congress should call to future hearings. Grusch offered to give her "a specific cooperative and hostile witness list" of individuals after the hearing.^[4]

The November 2024 hearing

On 13 November 2024 Mace co-chaired, with Grothman, a joint hearing of their two subcommittees, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth". The witnesses were the retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, the journalist Michael Shellenberger and the former NASA official Michael Gold.^[5]

Her opening statement

• Pressure. She said, without naming names, that some people had not wanted the hearing to happen for fear of what might be disclosed.^[5]
• Quotations. She quoted the former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster on phenomena "inexplicable by the science available to us", and Army Colonel Karl Nell on non-human intelligence interacting with humanity.^[5]
• Pentagon transparency. She cited the Pentagon's failed audits and what she called runaway overclassification.^[5]
• AARO. She said its recent historical report had stoked suspicions that AARO was "unable or, perhaps, unwilling" to bring out the truth. She complained that even its budget was secret: "Why the secrecy if it is really no big deal and there is nothing there?"^[5][1]
• Immaculate Constellation. She announced that a 12-page document on Immaculate Constellation, which Shellenberger had delivered to Congress that day, was being distributed to members. She described it as an unacknowledged special access programme "that your government says does not exist". The document was entered into the record without objection.^[5] Its origins are discussed below.

Her questions

• Satellite imagery. She asked Gallaudet about 2017 satellite imagery of a UAP that the former official Christopher Mellon had raised with him.^[5]
• Elizondo. Asked whether the technologies he described were made by private companies or a non-human intelligence, Elizondo said "it may be both". He said he could discuss crash retrievals specifically only in closed session. But he answered "yes" when she asked whether the government had run secret UAP crash-retrieval programmes, and "yes" when she asked whether they were designed to reverse-engineer alien craft.^[5][6] He confirmed his book's claim that government employees injured by UAP had been compensated. She called the government's position "the hypocrisy and the logic".^[5][6]
• Shellenberger. Shellenberger told her that Immaculate Constellation was an unacknowledged special access programme whose mission was to document UAP. He said he had more than one credible source, and had checked that they were current or former government officials.^[5]

She said she hoped the hearing would "open the door to more hearings in the future". The Guardian quoted her: if money was being spent on something that did not exist, why spend it, and if it did exist, "why are we hiding it from the public?"^[6]

The Pentagon report

Two days after the hearing the Pentagon published its annual UAP report. Mace said its 21 unexplained encounters near national-security sites proved there was "a serious transparency problem", and that Congress must protect whistleblowers and declassify documents.^[3]

Immaculate Constellation

The Wikipedia account of the Schriever wargames says that a self-identified whistleblower, following an anonymous disclosure in 2024, alleged a secret UFO programme called Immaculate Constellation. He said he had found it in a folder labelled "2018 Schriever Wargame". The writer Jason Colavito concluded that the whistleblower had apparently mistaken fictitious wargame documents for secret UFO revelations.^[2] The 2018 wargame was set in 2028, with a scenario about stopping an adversary from carrying a conflict into space.^[2]

Views

• Aliens. Mace has said she believes space aliens have "been interacting with humanity". In an interview with OutKick she cited the cases of Bob Lazar and Grusch, and said explanations that did not involve aliens "didn't add up".^[1]
• The 2024 drones. During the 2024 drone sightings she said she would not rule out that the drones came from "outer space" or "outside the universe". A joint civilian and military investigation found nothing anomalous, and said the sightings included mistaken aircraft and other objects.^[1]

Notes on the earlier version

• Leading the 2023 hearing. The earlier version said she led the July 2023 hearing. The official transcript shows that hearing was held by the National Security subcommittee, chaired by Grothman, with Mace questioning the witnesses. She co-chaired the November 2024 hearing.^[4][5]
• Entering the document. The earlier version said she entered a document about Immaculate Constellation into the record. The transcript shows she first said Tim Burchett would enter it, then, at the committee staff's request, entered it herself without objection.^[5]
• In office. The earlier version described her as in office since 2021 without an end date. The Wikipedia account records that she gave up her House seat to run for governor in 2026 and lost in the primary.^[1]

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Nancy Mace”, “Immaculate Constellation”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.