A U.S. Congressman from Tennessee will lead an upcoming House Oversight Committee hearing on the topic of UFOs, which has recently been headline news on more than one occasion.
The hearing has been years in the works, according to a report in the Daily Wire.
A former military and Department of Defense (DOD) whistleblower, David Grusch, who served in Afghanistan and worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), along with being a National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) representative to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, first blew the whistle on what are described as U.S. government “black programs” for collecting and attempting to reverse engineer UFOs in the United States in 2017.
Since then, Grusch has continued to blow the whistle on such programs, and finally, testimony will be heard publicly in an upcoming House Oversight Committee hearing, which will be led by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN-02).
Burchett spoke with the Daily Wire about what he hopes to accomplish during the hearing. He says the committee hopes to ensure that Grusch, along with other key figures like Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s (NASIC) Jonathan Grey and retired Army Colonel and current aerospace executive Karl Nell, will testify.
“They’re gonna have to have a degree of bravery to come forward with anything because of the lack of trust. Frankly, I don’t trust our Justice Department or a lot of the higher-ups in our intelligence agencies because they have been the problem,” Burchett said. “And now, they’re coming forward saying that we need to find out what’s going on, when in fact, they know what’s going on. They have all the files. Just release the unredacted files and quit with all the nonsense — because that’s all they’re doing now.”
On whether Congress has classified documents pertaining to any such supernatural phenomena, Burchett implied that the DOD has been stonewalling:
I think that the Intelligence Committee is basically spoon-fed; they don’t really care about this issue. They’ve made statements to me, you know, “Burchett, we’ve got much more important things to worry about.” And you know, we’ve documented 11 or 12 near misses with our multi-million dollar aircraft and our fighting men and women that could lose their lives. To me, something flying in our military air zones that we do not control is something very important. But then again, they’re told not to worry about it by some unelected bureaucrat, and so they don’t worry about it.
On his hopes for the hearing, Burchett said the following:
Burchett: I hope we show the American public that we’re serious about this issue — a recent poll showed that over half the people believe in this — and that we’ll get a little closer to getting to the bottom of it. And we’ll expose to the American public that this is a cover-up, that we are not being forthcoming, and that there is a group of us that want to make that happen — and hopefully, we don’t get corrupted.
And our opposition always uses this against us, and they downplay us and put stuff out against us, you know. “Oh, they’re worried about little green men and people are starving.” It’s the committee of jurisdiction where this is supposed to happen. We don’t necessarily deal with some of those other issues.
A cursory search shows that Burchett has been tracking the issue for some time.
Last month, Burchett accused the government of a cover-up on the subject of UFOs.
“I think it’s the biggest cover-up we’ve ever seen,” he said NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert.” “The Intelligence Committee reviewed it and I was asked afterwards what I thought about it and I said, ‘We got hosed,’ the American public did.”
Even last year, before the current wave of UFO interest, Burchett’s office released a statement commending Congress for finally taking interest in the subject.
That statement said, in part:
Our government has been surprisingly quiet about the topic for many decades despite the many reports of extraordinary UAP sightings from our military personnel. These more extraordinary UAPs appear to defy conventional physics and show a distinct interest in very sensitive U.S. military airspace. Many UFOs are misidentified weather phenomena, aircraft, or balloons. Some represent U.S. or foreign military technology. Others, however, do not appear to fall into any of these categories and could be vehicles controlled by an unknown source. We need to know what these things are, how they operate, who or what is controlling them, and what they are doing.
We were supposed to get a fresh start towards new answers in June 2021, when the Pentagon released an unclassified report on the existence of UAPs.
Unfortunately, of the 144 reported UAP encounters the report discussed, it provided an explanation for just one. Who on Earth wants to read a report that provides information on less than 1% of the encounters it is supposed to address?
– – –
Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter.
Photo “Tim Burchett” by Congressman Tim Burchett. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by JamesDeMers.
