A former Air Force intelligence officer told Congress that the US government has a long-standing programme that retrieves unidentified flying objects, and said that “non-human” “biologics” were found at crash sites where the objects were recovered.
Retired Major David Grusch testified to a House committee on Wednesday as part of an investigation into reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.
In 2021, the Pentagon created a group to look into the phenomena after more than 100 sightings were reported. By the following year, the Pentagon said it had received “several hundreds” of new reports of unidentified aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has not confirmed that it has a programme to retrieve unidentified flying objects.
Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force, told Congress he served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, until earlier this year.
In his testimony, Grusch told lawmakers he was informed of “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program” during the course of his work.
Asked by Republican representative Nancy Mace if the US government also has the “bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft”, Grusch suggested it might.
“As I’ve stated publicly ... biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” Grusch said.
“Were they human or non-human biologics?” Mace asked.
“Non-human,” Grusch responded. “And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge of the programme I talked to, who are currently still in the programme.”
Grusch said in June that the federal government has multiple crafts of “non-human” origin.
“Well, naturally, when you recover something that’s either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true,” Grusch told NewsNation at the time.
Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot, testified at Wednesday’s hearing that he nearly collided with an unidentified object in 2014. He said in the years since he’s talked to others in the Navy who have described similar experiences.
“We were primarily seeing dark grey or black cubes inside of a clear sphere,” Graves said of the craft he saw. “Where the apex, or tips of the cube, were touching the inside of that sphere.”
Former Navy pilot Dave Fravor testified that he saw a “Tic Tac”-shaped object during a flight off the coast in California in 2004. He and his co-pilot during the incident, Lieutenant commander Alex Dietrich, previously spoke to CBS’s 60 Minutes” about the experience, describing that the object appeared to reach speeds so quickly it seemed to disappear.
Fravor told Congress he believes more pilots are reporting their findings now that there is less of a stigma surrounding the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Starting in 2017, when it all actually came out, it took that stigma away,” Fravor said. “Prior to that, if you had mentioned UAP you’d be laughed off the Hill, and now we’re sitting here today for a public testimony on what’s actually going on.”