Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed transcript of a July 26, 2023 hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. Glenn Grothman. Ryan Graves, David Grusch and retired Navy Commander David Fravor testified on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Members pressed for transparency, whistleblower protection and better pilot reporting. Graves described a near mid-air collision with a dark cube inside a clear sphere off the Eastern Seaboard.
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17 Mr. GRUSCH. Yes, I can speak to that very briefly in an unclassi- fied manner. As you know, the preponderance of my complaint was classified to the intelligence communities. Both material acquisition and exploitation activity, also baselining the UAPs but not sharing it with, you know, intelligence professionals that are actually doing step briefs to pilots, that kind of information. Mr. GROTHMAN. OK. Thank you very much. Now we will go to Mr. Garcia. Mr. GARCIA. Thank you. Again, thank you all for your service and for testifying today. I want to just talk about UAPs as it re- lates to what we are seeing and pilots’ interaction with UAPs. Particularly, Mr. Graves, one of the, I think, concerns from Mem- bers of this Committee is this idea that pilots—there is no system to actually report UAPs and the stigma around pilots. And so can you just briefly—you mentioned that you are working with 30 pilots right now that have had encounters with UAPs. But you have also, I believe, discussed and know of many more pilots. This is just those that you are currently working with. Is that correct? Can you expand on that? Mr. GRAVES. Certainly. I will break that down in two ways. First, when we were first experiencing these objects off the Eastern Sea- board in the 2014 to 2015 time period, anyone that had upgraded their radar systems were seeing these objects. So, there was a large number of my colleagues that were detect- ing these objects off the Eastern Seaboard. They were further cor- relating that information with their other onboard sensors and many of them also had their own eye sightings as well of these ob- jects. Now, that was our personal firsthand experience at the time. Since then, as I have engaged this topic, others have reached out to me to share their experiences both on the military side as well as a commercial aviation side. On the military aviation side, veterans that have recently got out have shared their stories and have expressed how the objects we were seeing in 2014 and 2015 continued all the way to 2019, 2020, and beyond. And so, it became a generational issue for naval avi- ators on the Eastern Seaboard. This was something we are briefing to new students. This is something that was included in the notice to airmen to ensure that there was no accidents, and now with commercial aviators, they are reaching out because they are having somewhat similar experi- ences as our military brothers and sisters, but they do not have any reporting system that they can send this to. Mr. GARCIA. And let me just add to—and both to Mr. Fravor as well as Mr. Graves, not having the system for reporting would you both agree that is harmful to not just our national security inter- est, but to understand this phenomena of what is happening with UAPs? Commander FRAVOR. I think it is actually—it is a travesty that we do not have a system to correlate this and actually investigate. You know, so if you took the East Coast, you know, there is coastal radars out there that monitor our air defense identification zone so out there 200 miles.
Hearing transcript, from the hearings collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 54 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.