The House Oversight Committee is spending its Wednesday once again needling the U.S. government to reveal all it knows about unidentified aerial phenomena or UAP, known to the public UFOs.
Updated Wednesday, July 26 12:25 p.m. EST - The hearing adjourned at 12:22 p.m. Watch a replay of the hearing here:
Members of the congressional panel emphasized that this was a bipartisan hearing, once again proving the events of the graphic novel The Watchmen (the book not the movie) might be dead on.
Here’s a rundown from CBS of the three witnesses testifying today:
The three witnesses include Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who has spoken out about encountering UAP on training missions; David Fravor, who shot the now-famous “Tic Tac” video of an object during a flight off the coast of California in 2004; and David Grusch, a former combat officer and member of a previous Pentagon task force that investigated UAP. Graves and Fravor were interviewed for a “60 Minutes” report two years ago about the rise in UAP reports.
So far, all three have testified that reporting systems for service members remain inadequate and there is still a stigma associated with experiencing such phenomena:
Graves was an F-18 pilot stationed in Virginia Beach in 2014 when his squadron first began detecting unknown objects. During one training mission about 10 miles off the coast over the Atlantic, he said an object between 5 and 15 ft. in diameter flew between two F-18s, coming within 50 ft. of the aircraft. He said there was no acknowledgement of the incident or way to report the encounter at the time.
“If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change,” Graves said. “I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long overdue.”
Congress is particularly interested in the roles defense contractors and corporations play in reporting UAPs. Once again, many of the specifics are highly classified, and even Congress members seem to have no access to this information outside of a sensitive compartmented information facility.
(This is a breaking story and we will update.)