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By Kaitlin Lewis
Night Reporter
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The American public may get some insight into the government's knowledge of UFOs and extraterrestrial life forms this week during a House Oversight Committee hearing.
On Wednesday, the panel is scheduled to hear from three witnesses about their experiences with UFOs, including former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, ex-Navy commander David Fravor and former U.S. intelligence officer David Grusch. All three witnesses have claimed to have encountered unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), while Grusch said in June that U.S. authorities have also uncovered wreckage of "non-human origin" aircraft.
Investigations into U.S. intelligence of UAP have become a bipartisan effort in Congress. Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pushed for an amendment to the national defense bill last week that would compel information regarding UFOs to be released to the public. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also recently voiced his support for the Department of Defense (DoD) to provide greater information about UFOs to the American people.
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According to Graves, who spoke with Newsweek via email, many aircrew witnesses feel a "very real fear" of facing potential consequences for coming forward about UAP, adding that he felt a sense of "stigma" when he began to share his own experiences. The former Navy pilot has previously shared details of him and his flight crews encountering unexplained flying objects on a nearly "everyday" basis.
"Congress needs to hear that military aircrew and civilian pilots are routinely observing mysterious objects making inexplicable maneuvers in our sky," Graves told Newsweek. "I hope they gain a sense of the stigma I experienced coming forward and the frustration that commercial pilots experience that there is no way to report UAP to the government."
A 'Stigma' Surrounding UAP Reporting
Graves, who served in the U.S. Navy from 2009 to 2019, is the founder of the nonprofit advocacy organization Americans for Safe Aerospace, which helps empower military and commercial pilots and aircrews who have been impacted by UAP. According to the organization's website, the group works to bridge the gap for witnesses who otherwise do not have a secure system to report inexplicable experiences to the government.
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"I have been talking to veterans and commercial pilots about daily UAP encounters, and they want answers about what is flying in our skies," Graves said. "Whether these UAP are foreign drones or something else, this data should be collected, evaluated and identified."
"Right now, there is very little formalized support for UAP aircrew witnesses, and Americans for Safe Aerospace has the expertise to mobilize and fill that gap," he added.
Graves is hoping that testifying before the House Oversight Committee will help "elevate" other pilots "who are seeing UAP every day and deserve answers."
"Unidentified objects in our airspace present an urgent and critical safety and national security issue," Graves told *Newsweek. "*If UAP are foreign assets, we must respond appropriately. If UAP continue to defy conventional explanation—we must invest in scientific research."
Who's Leading the UFO Investigation?
Wednesday's hearing is not the first public testimony on UFOs. The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation held the first public hearing in 50 years on the topic in May 2022.
But House GOP members Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida—co-leaders of the Oversight Committee's current investigation—have promised that the coming hearing will allow the witnesses to "speak frankly to the public about their experiences," unlike the previous public hearing, where, according to Burchett, Pentagon "bureaucrats" continuously responded to questions with "I don't know" or "that's classified."
"We've had a heck of a lot of pushback about this here," Burchett told reporters on Thursday. "We've had members of Congress who've fought us, we've had members of the intelligence community and also the Pentagon. Even NASA backed out on us. There are a lot of people who don't want this to come to light."
"When I take at face value the numerous roadblocks that we've been presented with, it leads me to believe that they are indeed hiding information," Luna noted during the briefing. "I look forward to bringing this topic to light and finding out the truth of what is really out there."
Democratic Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz also spoke alongside his Republican colleagues Thursday and emphasized that the effort to increase government transparency was bipartisan.
"Taxpayers are paying for programs that are keeping this information secret," Moskowitz added. "They have a right to know where their dollars are going."
Next week's hearing is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. EST and will be hosted at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. A livestream of the event will be available on the House Oversight Committee's website.
What the DoD Says
The Defense Department has yet to speak publicly about next week's meeting or the accounts from witnesses like Graves, although officials did establish last summer the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within the Pentagon that is tasked with reviewing UAP cases.
During an April Senate hearing held by the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick told lawmakers that "only a very small percentage" of UAP reports can be described as "anomalous," adding that a majority of the cases "demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources."
"We cannot answer decades of questions about UAP all at once, but we must begin somewhere," Kirkpatrick said during the hearing. "While I assure you that AARO will follow scientific evidence wherever it leads, I ask for your patience as DoD first prioritizes the safety and security of our military personnel and installations in all domains."
At the time of April's Senate hearing, AARO said it was examining 650 cases of reported UAP, and that its team had "prioritized about half of them" that seemed to be particularly "interesting and anomalous," read a release from the DoD.
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