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. 
'Alien' simply means 'extraterrestrial life form'. We can debate what we mean by 'life-form' until a new pope comes over the moon but intentional, intelligent, interactive and to some degree autonomous behaviour, self-maintenance of its own structure, homeostasis, seem pretty essential. That it's evolved is not essential but seems very likely (unless its more likely that to reach such a level of technological advancement the species would normally be a superintelligent, designed type of entity).
It does not mean, as you're using it, sophistically, 'absolutely unknowable'. It would be an organism, likely evolved, and evolved functions likes intentions, desires and so on, or whatever you want to call the mechanisms that determine its behaviour, are going to reflect the fact that they are evolved. It must have basic survival mechanisms or instincts, eitherwise is would not have propagated and continued to exist. This of course changes once we consider culture, if they have something like culture (which they may not). Culture, especially if they have superintelligent control over their own biological and cultural evolution, is something which makes it more difficult to predict an alien's behaviour, I agree.
Nevertheless, saying that we 'by definition' can't know anything about something is effectively saying nothing at all about it. You might as well call it the noumenon and be done with it. Even if we just consider motivations, you seem either to be assuming that they do not have motivations, or that we cannot know if they have something like motivations, or that they perhaps do but even if they do we cannot know what any of those motivations are. Motivations are simply a way in which an organism causes behaviour in itself, in a relatively targeted and coherent way. To an extent you are correct, but if something is going to claim intelligent life exists, then we need evidence that it is life, that it is intelligent, and we need to have an idea of what that intelligence consists in, and we have no way of doing that but on the basis of our own intelligence. I haven't seen any explanation for why the claimed behaviour of these UFOs would indicate intelligence-wise, other than surveillance, but they don't need to be here to do that if they're that advanced. The only basis I have at the moment is this 'testimony'. Bar actual hard public evidence to the contrary, I'm not going to buy it, though I'd love to be proven wrong. The best explanation, if these are legit (big doubt) is that it's a kind of social experiment against us. But why would they do that?
This brings us back to Posadism: is it necessary for a space-faring civilization to be communist? A communist society implies a certain kind of morality or sense of ethics, a common basic set of agree rules for behaviour. If such a social formation is necessary for higher levels of technological advancement, then I do not think such a society would just fuck with us like this. Then again, perhaps very differently evolved intelligent species undergo completely different sets of stages of social development, and never pass through anything like feudalism, capitalism or socialism. Perhaps they have a hive-mind.
We keep on coming back to the same issue of what can we say about alien behaviour. The only behaviour we can go on empirically are earth's own. We can do that with very different species to ourselves. On that basis I do not understand their behaviour givent he testimony. Just saying they 'might, hypothetically, because we don't know' we so different that this testimony is coherent with some form of motivations is trivially true, but strikes me as bad reasoning. It makes for good science fiction and we have to think about it and be open to it, but I think there is likely in principle a way to read into behaviours what the intentions are over time when observing a social organism. Maybe we actually just have to wait to we actually encounter such life. If these testimonies are legit, then they are historically important evidence in beginning to describe and analyse the behaviour of other forms of life.