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…
34
U.S. Government with regard to UAPs, right, and so I am going to
get to that in a second.
But last week White House NSC spokesman, John Kirby, stated
that UAPs are having an impact on our training ranges and needs
to be treated as a legitimate issue. Do you concur with his state-
ments? And that is for each of you.
Mr. GRUSCH. Yes.
Mr. GRAVES. Yes.
Commander FRAVOR. Yes.
Mr. BIGGS. OK. Now, having said that, I am going to take you
to specific instances around the Phoenix Valley because that is
where I live.
In 1997, we had the famous Phoenix Lights case. I do not know
if any of you are familiar with that. There were two things that
went along with that and the explanation was military training
range off Luke and the Barry Goldwater range.
Do you know anything different other than the official expla-
nation of those lights?
Mr. GRUSCH. Only what is in the public vernacular about it. That
was outside the scope of my duties.
Mr. BIGGS. And if we wanted to—just my question along with my
colleague from New York, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, if we wanted to find
out more about that where would we go to find the files and
where—and who would we address? I know you are going to tell
me we need to go to a SCIF so you can tell us in a SCIF.
Commander FRAVOR. I could potentially give you a vector on
that. That specific case I am not—I mean, I am familiar with it in
terms of public, but I can give you a vector in a closed environ-
ment. Yes.
Mr. BIGGS. That would be good. Thank you. So, if it is true that
UAPs are having an impact on training ranges and this Adminis-
tration considers it to be a legitimate issue what steps can Con-
gress take to address training range impacts? And I say that hav-
ing two very large training rages in my state.
And so, we will start with Mr. Graves and go on down the panel.
Mr. GRAVES. Some of the initial procedures have been imple-
mented such as within the United States Navy that have a Range
Fouler Report that gathers information from pilots. I understand
that a service-wide reporting mechanism is still pending.
However, that would be a great next step not only for gathering
information but for showing the troops that is an acceptable topic
and reducing the stigma.
Mr. BIGGS. OK. Please all of you continue.
Mr. GRUSCH. Yes. As a recipient of a lot of those training range
reports sometimes we only get contextual, kind of oral reporting. It
would be nice if they attached all sensor data and there is a system
in place that can handle multiple classifications of data, and that
is an issue with the F–35, right. That jet was never built to be an
ISR platform, and it is a pain in the butt to get that data off.
So——
Mr. BIGGS. Great. Thank you.
Commander FRAVOR. Yes, I would agree with the previous two,
being a user of those training ranges, that the data has to be out

Cases discussed

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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.