Congress seems to be taking UFO claims seriously, but some suggest the truth is more down to earth | CBC News

When renowned skeptic Michael Shermer watched the recent U.S. Congressional House committee hearing — which included shocking testimony about UFOs, alien spacecraft and alien remains — he was, perhaps not surprisingly, unimpressed.

Indeed, what was more amazing to Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, was the fact that such a hearing was even taking place. 

“It’s astonishing it’s come this far without any real evidence, without anybody in the scientific community making an appearance,” said Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine. “We are still seeing not a shred of physical evidence.”

But the fact that the House Oversight Committee would take the time to listen to allegations of dead aliens, crashed alien spacecraft and a secret government program to retrieve such technology, signifies to some just how seriously some U.S. politicians are treating the subject of UFOs, or UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena. 

“This hearing in particular was not particularly revelatory for what we learned in it, but it is part of this legitimately historic shift in serious people having serious conversations around this topic,” Garrett Graff, an American journalist who studies the UFO phenomenon, told CBC’s Day 6.

Greg Eghigian, a history and bioethics professor at Penn State University who also studies the history of UFOs, said there have been Congressional hearings about UFOs before. But he couldn’t recall a time when actual witnesses were called in to testify.

“We’ve been building up to this,” said Eghigian, who is also on the advisory board of the Society for UAP Studies.

” And it’s very clear that [some] people have been successful in getting the ear of certain politicians.” 

Much of testimony nothing new

To observers like Eghighian and Shermer, much of what was said at this week’s hearing was nothing new.

Committee members heard from former navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves, who spoke about their individual encounters with flying objects of mysterious origin that could accelerate rapidly.

WATCH | ‘Look at it fly!’ Navy pilots encounter unknown object: 

U.S. navy pilots track a UFO

In this 2015 video declassified by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. navy pilots track an unidentified flying object off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla.

While he had made the claims in public before, it was the testimony of a former air force intelligence officer, retired Maj. David Grusch, that captured the most attention. 

Grusch told the committee he had been asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission.

At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

He said he’d been informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program.”

WATCH | Congress presses whistleblower on claims about UFOs: 

Whistleblower tries to ‘keep an open mind’ on UFOs

David Grusch, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, explains why he has used the term “non-human” activity in discussing UFOs.

Grusch also alleged that government officials had retrieved non-human “biologics” from the crafts.

But he acknowledged that he hadn’t witnessed any spacecraft or alien bodies and was relying on information from “individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country.”

Eghighian and others have raised questions about Grusch’s allegations, and noted that he himself has said it’s coming from other sources.

“The problem with Grusch is that we’ve got no other corroboration,” Eghighian said.

Still, his testimony found receptive ears with some of committee members. Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna told Fox News, that “it is possible that the U.S. government is back engineering, potentially, technology that’s not of this world.”

Hearings ‘eye opening,’ congressman says 

Republican Congressman Tim Burchett told WVLT News that the hearings were “eye opening,” that all the witnesses were credible, and that more information needs to provided about this topic.

Much of this political interest is the culmination of a pair of 2017 reports in The New York Times and Politico, according to Graff, who is the author of the forthcoming book UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life Here ― and Out There.

Those reports revealed that the U.S. Pentagon had been secretly studying the possibility of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence over the previous decade.

“That really kicked off a remarkable change in the conversation around UFOs,” Graff said, noting that the government really attempted “to destigmatize the idea of flying saucers or UFOs as something worthy.”

In 2020, Congress instructed the director of national intelligence to provide “a detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomena data” from multiple agencies. 

That report, made public the following year, did not find extraterrestrial links in its reviews of mysterious aircraft sightings. But many of those sightings could not be explained.

Then in 2022, Congress held its first UFO hearings in half a century. Pentagon officials, tasked with investigating hundreds of unexplained sightings, had no new information to disclose. But they said they had picked a director for a new task force to co-ordinate data collection efforts on what the government has officially labelled “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” 

Listening to people in the UFO world

Meanwhile, earlier this month, a bipartisan group of senators, including Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, introduced an amendment to the annual defence authorization bill that would force the government to collect records on UFOs and disclose information about them, unless a review board found reasoning for the documents to stay classified.

Eghigian noted that members of the committee like Luna and Burchett, as well as other senators like Gillibrand and Rubio, seemed to be listening to people connected to the UFO world.

“And these are people who have the ability to have hearings,” he said.

Indeed, speaking to CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2021, Rubio said that while UFOs can still prompt a “giggle” from some lawmakers, “I don’t think we can let the stigma keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”

WATCH | A call for more government transparency: 

Retired air force officer asked about alleged U.S. retrieval of UFO ‘spacecraft’

David Grusch, a former U.S. air force intelligence officer, is asked about claims he has made about the U.S. allegedly having retrieved UFO spacecraft and other artifacts.

Another agenda 

While Luna and Burchett may be true believers, Eghighian said some of the other politicians may have a different agenda that isn’t necessarily related to alien beings, but a way to make other government branches more transparent.

Since 9/11, Eghigian says the executive branch of the U.S. government and the intelligence community has accrued a great deal more power that has eroded congressional oversight. 

 He said politicians on both sides of the aisle may see this as an opportunity to regain some of that power.

“They see this as a leverage, right, for maybe other kinds of things down the road.”

Eghighian said most of the politicians seemed to distance themselves from some of the more elaborate claims made by Grusch.

“Schumer and others, these are not people who have a history of being very interested in the UFO thing. So it’s hard not to believe they’ve got another agenda.”