EUREKA SPRINGS, Ark. — A House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee held an historic hearing on unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. A whistleblower testified to the fact that U.S. has been concealing a longstanding program that retreives and reverse engineers UFOs, however, the Pentagon has denied his claims.
Retired Maj. David Grusch said he was 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.
“I 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.
Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.
Lawmakers heard from two other witnesses who claim to have come in contact with these objects.
Retired Navy Commander David Fravor testified about an encounter he cannot explain... a "Tic Tac" shaped object he says he saw in the sky during a training mission in 2004. "The technology that we faced was far superior than anything that we have," Fravor said.
For David Fravor's full statement for the House Oversight Committee, click here.
Federal lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are demanding more transparency from the US department of defense. Lawmakers in the hearing said they'd like to talk to the witnesses again in a classified setting to learn more.
Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.
But here in Arkansas, Adnan Ademovic with the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference said the hearings help add legitimacy to the subject.
"What is exciting about it is if you, prior to this, were to talk about this with family members or at the kitchen table, this would be a crazy conspiracy realm and now they can actually look at this in a different light," Ademovic said. "To where they can say, 'hold on, they just talked about this in the congressional hearing... can you still call it a conspiracy?'"
The group meets every year in April and will meet again next year from April 12 to the 14.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.