A long-awaited hearing that promised to “pull back the curtain” on UFOs has heard from witnesses about alleged secret crash retrieval programs, communication with non-human intelligence, and government intimidation of whistleblowers.
The US Congressional hearing on UAPs on Wednesday, titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” featured testimony from Dr. Tim Gallaudet, a retired Rear Admiral in the US Navy, former Department of Defense official Luis Elizondo, former NASA administrator Michael Gold and independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.
Much of the testimony was rehashed from previous public claims, including those made by Elizondo in his August memoir about his role in a Pentagon UFO program — and there was little in the way of new evidence presented.
“This hearing is intended to help Congress and the American people to learn the extent of the programs and activities our government has engaged in with respect to UAPs and what knowledge it has yielded,” Republican co-chair Nancy Mace said in her opening statement.
“This includes, of course, any knowledge of extraterrestrial life or technology of non-human origin. If government-funded research on UAPs has not yielded any useful knowledge, we also need to know those facts. Taxpayers deserve to know how much has been spent. They shouldn’t be kept in the dark to spare the Pentagon a little bit of embarrassment.”
Shellenberger, most significantly, provided the committee with a copy of an 11-page alleged whistleblower report describing various types of UAP evidence being illegally withheld from US Congress, including a supposedly unacknowledged special access program (USAP) collecting military-intelligence data on UAPs called “Immaculate Constellation.”
The Pentagon last month categorically denied the existence of any such program after portions of the unnamed whistleblower’s claims were first reported by Shellenberger on his Public Substack blog.
The full document describes a number of alleged encounters or observations of UAPs, including a “large saucer-shaped UAP” 200 to 400 meters across that was seen on satellite imagery emerging from thick clouds before suddenly reversing direction.
“This behavior was evasive in nature and implied that the saucer-shaped UAP had become aware that it was under observation by a space-based collection platform,” the document stated.
It also describes the shape and behaviors of the most common types of UAPs reported by government witnesses, including pilots between 1991 and 2022.
Spheres or orbs were the most reported shape, followed by discs or saucers, then oval-shaped craft including “Tic-Tacs.”
Triangle, boomerang, and arrowhead shapes “were by far the rarest,” while there were also rare reports of “irregular or organic” shapes such as “floating brain” or “jellyfish” UAPs characterized by a “central mass form from which multiple ‘arms’ or spars hang downward.”
The US government allegedly holds infra-red footage of one such “Jellyfish” UAP flying across the southern border with Mexico.
“In appearance and behavior, footage of this UAP violating the airspace of the southern border resembled the same class of UAPs observed near DoD facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the document said.
In his written testimony, Gallaudet said his “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity” came in January 2015 when he witnessed an email mysteriously disappear from his inbox on the Navy’s secure network.
Gallaudet was serving as the Commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command at the time and his personnel were taking part in a naval exercise off the US east coast.
The email, from a Fleet Forces Command operations officer to all subordinate commanders, bore the subject line “URGENT SAFETY OF FLIGHT ISSUE” and said words to the effect, “If any of you know what these are, tell me ASAP. We are having multiple near-midair collisions, and if we do not resolve it soon, we will have to shut down the exercise.”
Attached was the now-declassified video known as “Go Fast,” depicting a Navy F/A-18 encounter with an unknown object.
Gallaudet said the next day, the email disappeared from all recipients’ inboxes without explanation, and superiors never discussed the incident again.
“This lack of follow-up was concerning,” he said.
“As the Navy’s Chief Meteorologist at the time, my primary duty was to reduce safety-of-flight risks. Yet, it was evident that no one at the Flag Officer level was addressing the safety risks posed by UAPs. Instead, pilots were left to mitigate these threats on their own, without guidance or support. I concluded that the UAP information must have been classified within a special access program managed by an intelligence agency — a compartmented program that even senior officials, including myself, were not read into.”
Gallaudet and the other witnesses decried the level of government secrecy around the topic, arguing it posed national security and economic risks.
Elizondo claimed a small group of people within the government had “created a culture of suppression and intimidation” and that “excessive secrecy has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel, and the public — all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos.”
Gold called for an end to the “stigmatization of the UAP phenomena.”
Democratic committee member Jared Moskowitz agreed that “unnecessary over-classification has led to a void of information which has allowed theories to foster over the decades.”
Under questioning from Mace, Gallaudet described seeing satellite imagery from 2017 depicting a UAP, but could not provide many details as they were “classified.”
“It was a UAP, ma’am,” he said. “The term that the analysts used, they called it the ‘button’. It was a disc-shaped object.”
Asked whether the US government had conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs “designed to identify and reverse-engineer alien craft,” Elizondo answered a definitive “yes.”
He added he was aware of discussions within the Pentagon that alien bodies had been recovered “before I was even born.”
“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked.
“The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said.
“When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and … they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”
Wednesday’s hearing was a follow-up to July 2023’s Congressional hearings which heard from witnesses including David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who claimed the US had retrieved crashed non-human craft and bodies.
Facing growing calls for transparency from Congress, the Pentagon established a new UFO investigation agency, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), in July 2022.
AARO’s first report, released in March, concluded there was “no evidence that any [US government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology.”
“AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the [US government] is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence,” the report said.
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