CHICAGO (NewsNation) — The House Intelligence Subcommittee hosted the first congressional hearings on UFOs in more than 50 years Tuesday, but one congressman told “On Balance with Leland Vittert” that political leaders are continuing to withhold information.
“The cover-up continues,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said during Tuesday’s broadcast. “The video they showed was about 30 seconds long and they didn’t even slow it down to show the one frame that was supposed to show that evidence.”
Chaired by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), the hearing was supposed to assess threats posed by unidentified flying objects, as well as provide an informational follow-up to last year’s key government report on unidentified aerial phenomena that revealed 144 “encounters” from 2004 to 2021.
But Pentagon officials did not disclose additional information from their investigation. Instead, they announced that they had chosen a director for a new task force to coordinate data collection efforts on what the government has officially labeled “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Additionally, top U.S. defense intelligence official Scott Bray, who is deputy director of naval intelligence, acknowledged that there have been some sightings U.S. officials “can’t explain.” Some of those involved instances in which there was too little data to offer a reasonable explanation, Bray said.
“There are a small handful of cases in which we have more data that our analysis simply hasn’t been able to fully pull together a picture of what happened,” Bray said, adding that these have involved unexpected “flight characteristics” or “signature management.”
Burchett feels, however, that the opportunity to dig into these answers was missed.
“The video where the Navy pilots are actually describing what’s going on — that’s the person we should have had in. We had a Navy pilot there and he wasn’t even testifying. They have the answers but they’re not providing them,” he said.
Rep. Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican, noted that the investigations were not “about finding alien spacecraft but about delivering dominant intelligence.”
“The inability to understand objects in our sensitive operating areas is tantamount to intelligence failure that we certainly want to avoid,” he said.
But Burchett maintains that’s their job.
“When they asked … a former Marine officer about a specific incident, he said, ‘We don’t have any data on that.’ Now what does that mean? Why can’t he press Google?” Burchett asked.
“The people that are out there concerned about it, that have contacted me from all over the world, are very interested,” Burchett said.