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Official hearing transcript PDF (mirror)

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This is the official transcript of a July 26, 2023 hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." Witnesses Ryan Graves, David Grusch and retired Commander David Fravor testified under oath. Members pressed for transparency, and Graves described a near midair encounter with a cube inside a clear sphere.

  • 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…
11
was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further
mechanism to report the sightings.
Soon these encounters became so frequent that aircrew would
discuss the risk of UAP as part of their regular preflight briefs.
Recognizing the need for action and answers, I founded Americans
for Safe Aerospace.
The organization has since become a haven for UAP witnesses
who were previously unspoken due to the absence of a safe intake
process. More than thirty witnesses have come forward and almost
5,000 Americans have joined us in the fight for transparency at
safeaerospace.org.
The majority of witnesses are commercial pilots at major airlines.
Often, they are veterans with decades of flying experience. Pilots
are reporting UAP at altitudes that appear above them at 40,000
feet, potentially in low Earth orbit or in the gray zone below the
common line, making unexplainable maneuvers like right hand
turns and retrograde orbits, or J hooks.
Sometimes these reports are reoccurring with numerous recent
sightings north of Hawaii and in the North Atlantic. Other vet-
erans are also coming forward to us regarding UAP encounters in
our airspace and oceans. The most compelling involve observations
of UAP by multiple witnesses and sensor systems. I believe these
accounts are only scratching the surface and more will share their
experiences once it is safe to do so.
In closing, I recognize the skepticism surrounding this topic. If
everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our na-
tional conversation would change. I urge us to put aside stigma
and address the security and safety issue this topic represents.
If UAP are foreign drones, is an urgent national security prob-
lem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case,
unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American
people deserve to know what is happening in our skies. It is long
overdue.
Thank you.
Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Grusch?
STATEMENT OF DAVID GRUSCH
FORMER NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICER
REPRESENTATIVE
UNIDENTIFIED ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA TASK FORCE
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Mr. GRUSCH. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Members and Congress-
men, thank you. I am happy to be here. This is an important issue,
and I am grateful for your time.
My name is David Charles Grusch. I was an intelligence officer
for 14 years both in the U.S. Air Force, both active-duty Air Na-
tional Guard and Reserve at the rank of Major and most recently
from 2021 to 2025—excuse me, 2023—at the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency, NGA, at the GS–15 civilian level, which is the
military equivalent of a full bird colonel.
I was my agency’s co-lead in unidentified anomalous phenomena
and trans medium object analysis as well as reporting to the UAP
Task Force—UAPTF—and eventually, once it was established, the
All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office—AARO.

Cases discussed

About this file

Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. 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.