Senior lawmakers are now escalating their demands for more information and intelligence-findings regarding unidentified flying objects (UFOs) or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) from military and other government personnel.
The requests reflect some lawmakers’ dissatisfaction with being kept in the dark about what is currently known about UFOs and UAPs.
Legislators claim that they are not entirely convinced that the administration is concealing evidence of alien life from the public and legislative scrutiny, however, they are still dissatisfied that they are not learning more about unknown objects flying in restricted U.S. airspace.
“My primary interest in this topic is if there are… objects operating over restricted air space it’s not ours and we don’t know whose it is, that’s a problem that we need to get to the bottom of,” said Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“If there’s an explanation for it that’s being kept from Congress, then we need to force the issue. We’re not getting answers,” Rubio told the press.
The Senate has amended an annual defense bill to force the federal government to gather and reveal all documents pertaining to UFOs and UAPs, unless a special review board requires them to be kept confidential.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), members of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, sponsored the amendment, which is supported by Rubio and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the Armed Services subcommittee on emerging threats, as well as Sens. Todd Young (R-I.N.), a former Marine intelligence officer, and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
Rubio, the leading Republican on the intelligence committee, reportedly has more access to sensitive material than the vast majority of members of Congress. He believes that there are documents relating to mysterious airborne occurrences that are hidden from legislative monitoring.
“Right now, what I know is reliable people tell us that and we’ve seen objects operating over restricted military and national security airspace. They claim it’s not ours. They claim they don’t know whose it is. That’s like the definition of a national security threat,” Rubio maintained. “Either there’s an answer that exists and is not being provided, or there is no answer. Beyond that, I don’t want to speculate anything,” he added.
The House Oversight Committee hearing on UAPs and UFOs this week reflects the topic’s popularity.
The meeting will be chaired by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who said legislators will hear from Grusch as well as former Navy Cmdr. David Fravor and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves.
Burchett said this month on a podcast that the federal government has known about UFOs for decades and that “they can fly underwater and don’t show a heat trail,” appearing to defy what we know about science.
According to congressional sources familiar with efforts to obtain additional information from the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, UAPs and UFOs are being observed more regularly as military sensor technology improves.
In 2020, the Department of Defense published three Navy recordings showing items flying in unusual ways and capturing the perplexed and awestruck reactions of Naval aviators who experienced the phenomenon.
Grusch, a whistleblower, claims top intelligence agents told him they were members of a covert UAP task team, although he has not directly encountered non-human intelligence. He claims he was retaliated against when he attempted to learn more about the secretive program.
“Most certainly there are elements of things, whether historic or current, that potentially Congress has not been kept fully informed of, and that would be a problem,” Rubio reiterated. “There’s really no function of the executive that shouldn’t require congressional oversight at some level.”
The Senate defense bill includes language requiring the National Archives and Records Administration to compile a collection of records pertaining to UAPs from various government agencies that would be declassified for public access.
“UAPs generate a lot of curiosity for many Americans, and with that curiosity sometimes comes misinformation,” Schumer said on Tuesday on the Senate floor.
Since there is no undeniable evidence of such trips in the public domain, most politicians are highly hesitant to claim they assume aliens from other solar systems are visiting Earth or that they exist at all.
“It’s just like with JFK and the [1963] assassination. We set up separate archive for that or central collection place for all that data, which I think gave the American people a sense of security that there was a location where it was being held. This is following that same approach,” Rounds said.
“I don’t think you can discount the possibility just simply because of the size of the universe.” He continued. “Some of the items we simply can’t explain,” he said of the Naval videos of UAPs.