WASHINGTON – The powerful House Oversight Committee is in the “early stages” of preparing hearings on UFOs following unconfirmed claims by a former intelligence official that the US allegedly discovered a crashed alien spacecraft – claims the Pentagon says are baseless.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) was first asked about the claims a NewsNation reporter on Tuesday and said, “I’ve heard about it, I don’t know anything about it. . . . We’re planning to have a hearing.”
In a follow-up statement to ABC News on Wednesday, Oversight Committee spokesman Austin Hacker said, “In addition to recent whistleblower statements, reports of unspecified anomalous events continue to emerge. The House Oversight Committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing.”
Republican representatives Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett confirmed on Twitter that they would lead the committee’s investigation into UFOs, officially known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP.
A Pentagon spokesman said the Defense Department’s UAP Task Force, reorganized since 2022 as the Anomalous Resolution Office (AARO), “has not uncovered any verifiable information to support” claims of a crashed alien craft.
“To date, AARO has not identified any verifiable information to support allegations that any programs involving the possession or reverse engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or are currently in existence,” ABC News said in Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Goff said Monday night.
Former intelligence official David Grush claimed on Monday that the US government has a secret program aimed at recovering debris from crashed spaceships of non-human origin and is trying to reverse engineer the technology, according to an online resource. This is reported by The Debrief.
There has been no public confirmation of Hrush’s account, and the top Republican in the House of Representatives, Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, has also expressed skepticism about the idea that the US government has detected an alien craft.
Grush said he has provided evidence of such a program to Congress and the Office of Inspector General of the intelligence community, according to The Debrief.
Hrush said that just over six months ago, until July 2022, he was assigned to the UAP Task Force, which was the predecessor to the AARO. He admitted to The Debrief that his task force did not have access to the alleged program related to the crashed spacecraft, but said he learned about it through his work.
“Every decade there have been people saying that the United States has these pieces of unidentified flying objects that come from outer space,” Turner, of Ohio, said when asked by Fox News about Grush’s claims. “There is no evidence of that and it would certainly be quite conspiratorial for it to persist, especially at this level.”
At an April hearing, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the AARO, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his agency has reviewed 650 incidents over the decades, but “so far has found no credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity, extraterrestrial technology or objects. which contradict the known laws of physics.”
last week, Kirkpatrick said this the total number of incidents rose to “more than 800 cases”.
“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO exhibit the usual characteristics of balloons, drones, disturbances, natural phenomena or other easily explained sources,” Kirkpatrick told lawmakers in April.
