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Official hearing transcript PDF

U.S. House of Representatives · 54 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is the official transcript of a July 26, 2023 hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability's Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. The hearing was titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency." Ryan Graves, David Grusch and retired Commander David Fravor testified. Members pressed for transparency and whistleblower protections, and Graves described a near miss involving a dark 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…
22
And so that was—kind of shook me because I realized that this
problem was still ongoing and so I reached out to colleagues back
on the East Coast and realized that this was still a safety risk that
they were dealing with, that they had essentially hit a wall with
how they could move forward on this conversation. It was at that
point when I decided to try to move the conversation forward my-
self.
Mr. RASKIN. Are there common characteristics to the UAPs that
have been cited by different pilots and can you describe what the
convergence of descriptions is?
Mr. GRAVES. Certainly. We were primarily seeing dark gray or
black cubes inside of a clear sphere.
Mr. RASKIN. I am sorry. Dark gray or black cubes?
Mr. GRAVES. Yes, inside of a clear sphere where the apex or tips
of the cube were touching the inside of that sphere, and that was
primarily what was being reported when we were able to gain a
visual tally of these objects. That occurred over almost 8 years and
as far as I know is still occurring.
Mr. RASKIN. So, I take it that you are arguing what we need is
real transparency and a reporting system so we can get some clar-
ity on what is going on out there because there are many pilots in
your situation. But we should have a way of developing a system-
atic inventory of all of such encounters. Is that right?
Mr. GRAVES. Yes, and I think we need both transparency and the
reporting. We have the reporting, but we need to make sure that
information can be promulgated to commercial aviation as well as
the rest of the populace.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Grusch, what about you? What was your experi-
ence after you came forward?
Mr. GRUSCH. Well, it has only been about 2 months or so. So, I
guess my experience has been overwhelming support from former
colleagues of mine that have, you know, privately messaged me and
I do appreciate that.
But I do have knowledge of active planned reprisal activity
against myself, and other colleagues and it is very, very upsetting
to me.
Mr. RASKIN. Coming from where?
Mr. GRUSCH. Certain senior leadership at previous agencies I
was associated with and that is all I will say publicly. But I can
provide more details in a closed environment.
Mr. RASKIN. OK. Well, I hope you understand that there would
be bipartisan rejection of any attempt to vilify, demonize, or engage
in other reprisals against our witnesses and people who are telling
the truth from their perspective.
Mr. GRUSCH. Yes. There were certain colleagues of mine that
were brutally administratively attacked, and it actually makes me
very upset as a leader to see that happen to other co-workers and
actually superiors of mine over the last 3 years.
Mr. RASKIN. How do you account for that response? That seems
like a bizarre response.
Mr. GRUSCH. I call it administrative terrorism. That is their
quiver—their tool in the toolbox to silence people, especially, you
know, career government service cares about their career, cares
about their clearance, their reputation to climb the ladder, and

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.