UAP hearings

UAP hearings

Type	Event
Also known as	Congressional UFO hearings, UFO hearings
Where	U.S. House of Representatives
First	5 April 1966
Best known	26 July 2023 (David Grusch)

The UAP hearings are public hearings in the United States Congress about unidentified flying objects, now officially called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). After a burst of interest in the 1960s, Congress held no open hearing on the subject for more than fifty years. Since 2022 there have been several, and the 26 July 2023 hearing with the former intelligence officer David Grusch drew more attention, at home and abroad, than any before it.^[1][2] The hearings have produced claims, videos and calls for whistleblower protection, but no public physical evidence of non-human craft.^[2][8]

The 1960s

April 1966: after the "swamp gas"

In March 1966 the Air Force's scientific consultant J. Allen Hynek suggested that some lights seen in Michigan might have been "swamp gas", an explanation that was widely mocked. Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan called for a hearing, and on 5 April 1966 the House Armed Services Committee held a brief one.^[3] Air Force Secretary Harold Brown defended the Air Force's UFO studies and repeated an earlier panel's call for more research, and Hynek repeated his call for "a civilian panel of physical and social scientists" to "examine the UFO problem critically for the express purpose of determining whether a major problem exists".^[3] Shortly afterwards the Air Force announced it would fund a university study, which became the University of Colorado's Condon Committee. Its 1969 report concluded that "nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge", and the Air Force closed Project Blue Book on 17 December 1969.^[3]

July 1968: the symposium

On 29 July 1968 the House Committee on Science and Astronautics held a one-day symposium on UFOs, hearing from scientists including Hynek, Carl Sagan and the atmospheric physicist James McDonald.^[4] McDonald told the committee that "UFOs are entirely real and we do not know what they are, because we have laughed them out of court", and that the possibility of "surveillance from some advanced technology" was one he took "very seriously".^[4]

The long gap

Congress held no further open hearings on UFOs for more than fifty years.^[1] Interest revived after December 2017, when The New York Times revealed the Pentagon's AATIP programme and published Navy videos of unidentified objects.^[2]

May 2022: the first hearing in fifty years

On 17 May 2022 a House Intelligence subcommittee questioned Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray in open session. Bray showed short Navy videos and said some cases remained unexplained.^[1] See 2022 House UAP hearing. Later that year Congress created the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to collect and investigate reports.^[8]

July 2023: Grusch, Fravor and Graves

Representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett organised a hearing of the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee on 26 July 2023, in response to claims Grusch had made publicly the previous month.^[2] Three former military witnesses testified under oath:

• David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, said he "was 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 said his belief rested on interviews with 40 witnesses over four years, and that the US had recovered "non-human 'biologics'". When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked "If you were me, where would you look?", he replied that he would give the details "in a closed environment".^[2]
• David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, described the 2004 Nimitz "Tic Tac" encounter.^[2]
• Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot, described frequent sightings of unknown objects by fighter crews off the US East Coast.^[2]

The ufologists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp sat behind Grusch, and Burchett read their statements into the record.^[2]

Reactions

The Pentagon said it had found no verifiable information to support claims of recovered extraterrestrial materials.^[2] AARO's director, Sean Kirkpatrick, wrote that "contrary to assertions made in the hearing" Grusch had "refused to speak with AARO", and called the hearing "insulting" to the officers who had joined his office.^[2] Senator Lindsey Graham said, "If we'd really found this stuff, there's no way you could keep it from coming out", while Senator Josh Hawley said the claims sounded "pretty close to what they kind of grudgingly admitted to us in the briefing".^[2] The SETI astronomer Seth Shostak asked, "But where is the evidence? It's MIA", and Marina Koren wrote in The Atlantic that "so far, the best evidence [Grusch has] come up with, besides his own word, is the government's denial".^[2] On 13 January 2024 members of the subcommittee received a classified briefing from the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Thomas Monheim; some said they were frustrated by the lack of new information.^[2]

The UAP Disclosure Act

In July 2023 Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds won Senate approval for the UAP Disclosure Act as part of the annual defence bill. As proposed, it would have directed the National Archives to collect and disclose UAP records within 25 years, with a presumption of immediate disclosure, and given the federal government eminent domain over recovered UAP-related material held by private persons or companies.^[5] The version enacted in December 2023 kept a requirement for the National Archives to build a collection of government UAP records, but dropped eminent domain and other measures; journalists described the result as heavily watered down.^[5]

November 2024: "Exposing the Truth"

On 13 November 2024 the Oversight Committee held a second hearing, "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth". The witnesses were the former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo, retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, the former NASA official Michael Gold and the journalist Michael Shellenberger.^[6] Elizondo said the government had secretly retrieved UFOs and alien bodies; a Pentagon spokesperson said the department "has not found any verifiable evidence" for such claims.^[6] Shellenberger submitted a report describing an alleged secret programme called Immaculate Constellation.^[6]

September 2025: the declassification task force

On 9 September 2025 the Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Luna, held its first UAP hearing: "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection".^[7][9] Luna said that "the American people deserve maximum transparency from the federal government on sightings, acquisitions, and examinations of UAPs".^[7]

The witnesses were:^[9][10]

• Jeffrey Nuccetelli, a former Air Force military police officer of 16 years, who described objects "like flying buildings" near Vandenberg Air Force Base in California between 2003 and 2005, during launches for the National Reconnaissance Office, and said "what we saw changed our lives".
• Dylan Borland, an Air Force veteran, who described an alleged UAP experience at Langley Air Force Base in 2012 and said his career had been "deliberately obstructed" in reprisal for coming forward.
• Senior Chief Petty Officer Alexandro Wiggins, the first active-duty Navy member to testify publicly about UAP, who described a 2023 incident aboard the USS Jackson in which "a self-luminous Tic Tac-shaped [object] emerged from the ocean before linking up with three other similar objects". He urged standard sensor checklists and "confidential destigmatized channels" for reports, saying "sailors need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers."
• George Knapp, the journalist, who said government documents showed officials privately admitting that "these things are real", and urged Congress to "track down the money".

During the hearing Representative Eric Burlison showed, for the first time in public, video that he said showed a US MQ-9 Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile at a fast-moving glowing orb off the coast of Yemen in October 2024. The object appeared to be hit but not destroyed: "It kept going," Burlison said. "I'm not going to speculate what it is. But the question is, why are we being blocked from this information?"^[10] Joe Spielberger of the Project on Government Oversight also called for stronger whistleblower protections.^[10]

2026

In February 2026 President Trump ordered federal agencies to identify and release government records on UAP and extraterrestrial life, and a first batch of about 162 declassified records was published on 8 May 2026.^[11] On 9 June 2026 Grusch gave a press conference with further claims about supposed alien life-forms known to the government.^[2]

What came of them

The hearings have not produced public physical evidence of non-human craft or bodies, and the Defense Department's position remains that it has found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology.^[2][6][8] They have, however, kept whistleblower protection and the release of records on the congressional agenda: Congress created AARO in 2022 and the National Archives' UAP records collection in 2023, and in 2026 the executive branch began releasing declassified files.^[5][8][11]

See also: David Grusch, UAP Disclosure Act, AARO, Immaculate Constellation, Luis Elizondo.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Unidentified flying object”, “David Grusch UFO whistleblower claims”, “Condon Committee”, “James E. McDonald”, “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 (UAP Disclosure Act)”, “Luis Elizondo”, “Pentagon UFO videos”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.