Following unconfirmed claims from a former intelligence officer — who says the U.S. government captured a crashed spaceship of non-human origin — the House Oversight Committee is now planning a hearing to investigate the issue further.
According to ABC News, the committee is in the early stages of planning this meeting after the Pentagon called the whistleblower’s claims unsubstantiated. Republican Representatives Tim Burchett from Tennessee and Anna Paulina Luna from Florida will lead the investigation, as Luna confirmed on Twitter.
“In addition to recent claims by a whistleblower, reports continue to surface regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena,” an Oversight Committee spokesperson told ABC. “The House Oversight Committee is following these UAP reports and is in the early stages of planning a hearing.”
Thank you @RepJamesComer ! Very happy to announce @RepTimBurchett and myself will be working with the @GOPoversight team to lead out the investigation into UAPs (UFOs). pic.twitter.com/OzEPo2vhk3
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) June 7, 2023
The move to meet comes after The Debrief reported on the supposedly leaked info on Monday. According to the outlet, David Charles Grusch, a veteran of the National Reconnaissance Office’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, shared the classified information with Congress and the Intelligence Community inspector general. Now, the Pentagon told ABC News that the leak in unsubstantiated.
“To date, [the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office] has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough said in a statement to ABC News.
Republicans leading an investigation into what appears to be a conspiracy theory might be a biting piece of irony — considering the GOP’s tendency to rally around the likes of QAnon, for example — but it could also be an attempt to deflect, as former president Donald Trump faces ongoing legal woes. That some Republicans want to bring the topic of UFOs further into the limelight is hardly surprising, but not any less disappointing.
But while Grusch’s leak feels sensational and credible considering he’s a veteran of the team tasked with tracking unidentified aerial phenomena (the Department of Defence’s updated name for UFOs), there are clear issues with his account, as evidenced by this week’s news coverage.
The byline of The Debrief article includes a writer for The New York Times, Ralph Blumenthal, and a veteran science journalist, Leslie Kean, but as Vanity Fair describes, the story ran into issues prior to publication. Before taking the story to The Debrief — itself a small outlet that covers science, tech, and national defence news — Blumenthal and Kean reportedly took the story to Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post — and all three outlets opted not to publish it.
If my editors said, “We need more time, don’t know how much, to vet and publish your story about literal alien spaceships based on the account of someone who heard and read about literal alien spaceships,” I’d say, “Please, thank you,” not, “See ya later.” https://t.co/gLQgIxpTAr
— Sarah Scoles (@ScolesSarah) June 8, 2023
According to Vanity Fair’s article, a source close to The Washington Post said the story failed to describe whether or not the members of Congress thought Grusch’s information was legitimate. Meanwhile, a Politico spokesperson told Vanity Fair that the authors wanted a guaranteed publication date, which didn’t leave the outlet enough time to rigorously report on the leak. The New York Times didn’t respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment on the decision to pass. Blumenthal told Vanity Fair that the rush to publish was due to concerns that Grusch’s identity as the whistleblower would leak online.
So NASA started solving the mystery. UFOs = bad data, not aliens; but this is not what people want to hear. 😁 https://t.co/pPh02JeGAa
— Prof. Abel Méndez 🔭 🔬 (@ProfAbelMendez) June 9, 2023
As a topic, UFOs, or UAPs and they’re now known, has seen higher coverage than usual in recent weeks. Late last month, NASA held a public meeting on the subject in advance of a report due later this summer. Unsurprisingly, this meeting exposed a substantial lack of high-quality data, while not revealing the presence of little green men in chrome spaceships.