WASHINGTON — The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.
Retired Maj. David Grusch’s highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress’ latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.
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.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims of a coverup. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said investigators have 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.” The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects.
Grusch says he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward. He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.
“It was very brutal and very unfortunate, some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally,” he said.
Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., chaired the panel’s hearing and joked to a packed audience, “Welcome to the most exciting subcommittee in Congress this week.” But members of both parties asked Grusch about his study of UFOs and the consequences he faced.
“I take it that you’re arguing what we need is real transparency and reporting systems so we can get some clarity on what’s going on out there,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.
Some lawmakers criticized the Pentagon for not providing more details in a classified briefing or releasing images that could be shown to the public. In previous hearings, Pentagon officials showed a video taken from an F-18 military plane that showed an image of one balloon-like shape.
Pentagon officials in December said they had received “several hundreds” of new reports since launching a renewed effort to investigate reports of UFOs.
At that point, “we have not seen anything, and we’re still very early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin,” said Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security. “Any unauthorized system in our airspace we deem as a threat to safety.”
can't believe there's still politicians suffering from weather-balloon hysteria. 
I think you're correct that they might just be some relatively low tech for the alien species in question. Maybe they're lost. The issue here is that we're lost now in a world of pure possibility. Based on what we're being told now however their function seems unclear but they seem to have intelligence and seem to be doing reconnaissance? Maybe that still effect on how advanced this (relatively non-advanced) tech is, that for them its like cluster munitions are for us is like Neon Genesis Evangelion. An actually interesting philosophical problem is raises is what the criteria and conditions are for identifying the type of behaviour that other life forms are engaging in. Like we feel confident with other terrestrial animals (perhaps frequently incorrectly) when we judge the intentions or functions of their behaviour, even when they are very different to us. Once we are considering off-world beings with different biological histories (even assuming they likely evolved through natural selection) then the question becomes trickier. Maybe they achieved communism and once a society takes control of itself in this way and plans its own evolutionary trajectory, and natural selection is no longer the main driving factor, then perhaps the behaviour of the organism becomes less and less predictable, based on our knowledge of terrestrial life forms.
Perhaps their level of development means that their behaviour is so different we do not really have a reasoable way to do this. This seems to me the main argument against my point that it seems unlikely that all these reports and crashes would be genuine, but again that seems to involve more unfounded speculation.
And maybe they don't care if we know they are here, but that strikes me as strange. Maybe their sense of ethics (or lack thereof) means that a notion like the moral quandary of intervening in the history and development of another species doesn't strike them as a problem. Who knows.
Again I'd like to be a Posadist and believe that the Vulcans are coming to save us and bring us fully automated luxury space communism. Or maybe it's an experiment. Maybe it's a test. Maybe they are treating us as a social experiment the way we treat rats and insect and microorganisms in petri dishes.