Rep. Tim Burchett argues that unidentified flying objects deserve more attention and that both Congress and the public have a right to access information about them, reports gazette.com.
He told the Washington Examiner in an interview that he was worried about “the presence of something that we cannot control in our military airspace.”
The Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office director, Sean M. Kirkpatrick, appeared before Congress in April. He reported to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the DOD was monitoring over 650 possible instances of unidentified aerial phenomena.
This number is much higher than the more than 350 cases disclosed in the UAP report that the director of national intelligence delivered to Congress in January.
Burchett says that UFOs are not a trivial matter, but rather “at the top of the priority list.”
This Saturday will be the 76th anniversary of the Roswell Incident in New Mexico, a mysterious event that still puzzles many people. In 1947, a rancher reported a “flying disc” to the sheriff. It was found about 100 miles from Roswell Army Air Field. The next day, a press release announced that the U.S. Army Air Forces had retrieved a “flying saucer” from the site.
Later, the military claimed that the debris was from a weather balloon that had crashed.
The story has continued to intrigue and mystify people for over seven decades.
However, Congress has seldom discussed the topic until recently.
The House Oversight Committee plans to hold a hearing on the issue and a recent whistleblower who alleges that the government has been hiding information from Congress. Burchett and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) are leading the committee’s inquiry into UFOs, which are officially called UAPs.
Burchett said he is working on planning a hearing, but he cannot share any details about the dates and witnesses.
He added that the witness list will be attacked by the skeptics, as they have done with him.
David Charles Grusch, a 36-year-old former combat officer in Afghanistan who received several medals, recently revealed information that he claims has been illegally hidden from Congress.
Grusch worked for both the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. He was the NGA’s co-lead for UAP analysis and represented the task force last summer.
He said that intelligence operations that recover whole or partial nonhuman crafts have been kept secret from Congress and the public.
The whistleblower said that such discoveries have been made for decades by the United States, its allies, and defense contractors.
Burchett said he trusts Grusch’s statements.
“I think he’s telling the truth. I think there’s a lot that’s going to be out there. I think the interesting thing you’re going to find out, though, is the Pentagon and all of our research institutions, you see them kind of warming up to it. And the reason they are is they’re smelling dollars. And I think there’ll be an effort to discredit him,” the Tennessee Republican said.
For Burchett, it isn’t difficult to think the government might be holding something back. “They’ve been holding stuff back since Roswell in ’47,” he said. “And maybe prior to that.”
“There’s enough witnesses, enough qualified pilots, astronauts, literally heroes of ours, that have come forward about things and so I think it’s pretty evident that government is covering up,” the congressman said. “And the reason we don’t have any of that information now is a lot of it is so compartmentalized that the people that could connect the dots are long gone.”
Asked what reason the government might have for covering these discoveries up, Burchett suggested, “Greed and power.”