Documents / Hearing transcript

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency (hearing transcript)

U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability · 2023-07-26 · 54 pages · text from the file's own layer

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.

  • p. 6 …Congress should work to ensure that knowledge is not driven by fear. Today, we are not…
  • p. 8 …We need to tell the folks at the Pentagon they work for us, daggum it. We…
  • p. 9 …In being an active-duty service member working on an airfield, I have had conversations with…
  • p. 11 …I am proud to say that this hearing builds upon bipartisan work by Members of the…
  • p. 12 …I want to thank, obviously, committee staff and their staff work- ing on this on a…
  • p. 13 …And, finally, retired Navy Commander David Fravor, squadron leader who worked as a naval aviator for…
  • p. 18 …They work with Leslie Keane, who is present today, Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper to publish…
  • p. 20 …If you had one, you captured one, you reverse engineered it, you got it to work…
  • p. 21 …And so can you just briefly—you mentioned that you are working with 30 pilots right…
  • p. 22 …be an outcome that this Committee can work on. Is there anything else just for the…
  • p. 23 19 particularly by the 30 folks that you are working with, are essen- tially outside the…
  • p. 27 …To your knowledge, are NHIs working with adversarial foreign governments in either technology exchange programs or…
  • p. 29 …Grusch, as a result of your previous govern- ment work, have you met with people with…
  • p. 32 …marketplaces, and I think NASA’s work, as they work to identify and highlight specific parameters…
  • p. 33 …I have been working with the American Institute of Aero- nautics and Astronautics to help them…
  • p. 35 …hammered, but seems like it does not work the other way, right. Mr. BURCHETT. If you…
  • p. 40 …a theo- retical framework at least to work off to kind of espouse crashes. Regardless of…
  • p. 41 …did not have a FLIR system that worked. Here is what he said. They were out…
  • p. 45 …Got a Master’s from Univer- sity of Houston and I have worked in the private…
  • p. 48 …Do you have any personal knowledge of someone who has possibly been injured working on legacy…
  • p. 50 …we had at the entrance to our working area. One of these objects was completely stationary…
  • p. 51 47 exact entrance to our working areas, not only geographically but also altitude. So, it was…
  • p. 52 …I do want to thank the Committee staff on both sides for the amount of work…
  • p. 53 …the broader issue as it relates to working with our Republican counterparts on this Committee. I…
  • p. 54 …I need to compliment the folks in my office that did a lot of the work…
32
Mr. GROTHMAN. Thank you.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez?
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you
to our witnesses for coming here today. I do concur with the Rank-
ing Member as well as several other Members here on this Com-
mittee that this is a committee for whistleblowers and for the pro-
tection of whistleblowers as well. So, we understand what you are
putting on the table here and what you are putting on the line
here. We thank you for that.
Mr. Grusch, you sat on the unidentified anomalous phenomenon
task force created in the 2020 NDAA, correct?
Mr. GRUSCH. Yes.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. There have been some things that have
been mentioned here during this hearing that I wanted to pick up
on.
Mr. Graves, you mentioned specifically during the answer to one
of your questions, you named Boeing contractors being engaged in
an incident regarding this red cube about a football field wide.
I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the inter-
action—or Mr. Grusch, either of you—the interactions between de-
fense contractor companies and any UAP-related programs or ac-
tivities.
Mr. GRAVES. So, I will just say that the information about the
contractors themselves were provided by a witness and I have no
particular detail in that relationship.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Understood.
Mr. Grusch?
Mr. GRUSCH. The kind of general unclassed wave tops. Certainly,
the contractors, you know, or the metal benders, so to speak, the
ones actually doing specific performance on government contracts.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Are they required to issue any disclosure re-
garding UAP sightings or do they engage in any reporting around
this?
Mr. GRUSCH. In terms of the contractors? Not that I am aware
of.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. They do not. OK. Now, when it comes to no-
tification that you had mentioned about IR&D programs, we have
seen defense contractors abuse their contracts before through this
Committee.
I have seen it personally, and I have also seen the notification
requirements to Congress abused. I am wondering, one of the loop-
holes that we see in the law is that there is—at least from my van-
tage point, is that depending on what we are seeing is that there
are no actual definitions or requirements for notification.
Are there—what methods of notification did you observe? Like,
when they say they notified Congress, how did they do that? Do
you have insight into that?
Mr. GRUSCH. For certain IR&D activities, I can only think of
ones conventional in nature. Sometimes they flow through certain,
I will just say SAP programs, that have cognizant authority over
the Air Force or something and those are congressionally reported
compartments.

Cases discussed

About this file

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.