Legislation that could allow for more transparency on what the government knows about unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) is being considered in Congress; however, some lawmakers are saying there’s pushback from those with a vested interest in keeping it in the shadows.
Still, congressmen such as Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) have said citizens are long overdue to know what the government has been hiding.
“I think the American people are ready,” he told The Epoch Times. “But our government is keeping us from the truth.”
The act would centralize records on the UAPs that carry the “presumption of immediate disclosure” and set up a UAP records collection department at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to gather UAP records from government agencies within 60 days of the act’s passage.
The act gives a deadline of no later than 300 days after its passing, requiring federal agencies to “review, identify, and organize” UAP records for “disclosure to the public; review by the Review Board; and transmission to the Archivist.”
Still, the legislation allows for the UAP records collection to hold the UAP-related documents for 25 years before being disclosed, a timeframe that is being criticized by some lawmakers and advocates for disclosure.
The purpose of the disclosure, the act states, is to further scientific research and development “essential to avoiding or mitigating potential technological surprise in furtherance of urgent national security concerns and public interests.”
Mr. Burchett said his concern is that, under this legislation, the president can still prevent records from being disclosed if they pose a national security risk, but it’s “better than nothing,” he said.
“Right now, we’re spending millions of dollars on an issue many of our government agencies say doesn’t exist, so if it doesn’t exist, why are we spending so much money trying to keep it a secret?” he said.
When trying to pass earlier legislation that would have required the Federal Aviation Administration to hand over to Congress UAP reports made by commercial and private pilots, Mr. Burchett said he was informed that he had upset the intelligence community.
“I asked him, ‘Don’t you mean the intelligence committee?’ And he said, ‘No, the intelligence community,’” Mr. Burchett said.
The intelligence community, he said, is a community that wants to maintain secrecy to keep its control.
“Disclosure would mean turning over their power,” he said. “They control a lot of this technology, and they’re making money off of it.”
Mr. Burchett spoke of recovered UAP craft and technology being reversed-engineered for technological advancement.
“This has unbelievable energy capacity, and so you can imagine what this would do to our energy sector,” he said. “We wouldn’t need the oil industry; we wouldn’t be fighting all of these worthless wars in the Middle East, and the Pentagon would go out of business.”
Reversed-Engineered Technology
There have been multiple testimonies of government officials claiming that recovered UAP craft have been reverse-engineered for technological advancement.In 1997, Lt. Col. Philip Corso alleged in his memoir, “The Day After Roswell,” that when he was a member of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Security Council and head of the foreign technological desk at the U.S. Army’s Research and Development Department, he headed the Army’s reverse-engineering project that took recovered technology from the 1947 Roswell crash and seeded the information out to major corporate firms.
Using the provided information, these firms manufactured “lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests,” Lt. Col. Corso wrote.
The Roswell incident was initially reported as a confirmed recovered flying saucer by the U.S. Army Air Forces before the story was quickly retracted and reported as a fallen weather balloon.
Later, government whistleblowers, including the most recent testimony of former intelligence officer David Grusch, have spoken of the UAP Disclosure Act, which Mr. Grusch said on The Joe Rogan Experience he knew about before he testified before Congress.
“I’m like, I have to spike the football by going public because, you know, I can read the tea leaves on the Hill, and I think that they were hesitant to do anything without being able to point to something publicly,” Mr. Grusch said.
According to Mr. Grusch, the legislation was modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which directed NARA to establish the Assassination Records Review Board to collect all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Though the board never met the expectations of those questioning the official narrative, Mr. Grusch said this bill had more “teeth” to “force the issue.”
Pushback
However, Mr. Grusch and others alleged that House Intelligence Committee Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) are blocking the bill.Mr. Grusch said that Mr. Turner and Mr. Rogers both have ties to the military-industrial complex that could be what’s driving their attempts to thwart the act’s passage.
He noted Mr. Turner’s congressional representation of the Ohio-based Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where Lt. Col. Corso alleged the recovered craft from Roswell—and the bodies—were transported.
The Debrief—the publication that first broke Mr. Grusch’s story in July—said that the base was also home to Project Blue Book, which was the program that studied unidentified flying objects, as they were called at the time, from 1952 to 1969.
The publication also pointed to Open Secret’s data on Mr. Turner’s campaign funding, which includes “Misc Defense” at $62,350 and “Defense Aerospace” at $46,300.
In the 2022 election cycle, The Debrief reported that Mr. Rogers received the largest amount of funding from the defense sector at $121,200 from “Misc Defense,” down from $282,350 he previously received, an amount that was supported by a $60,750 boon from Lockheed Martin.
Though Mr. Rogers didn’t respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment, Mr. Turner’s spokesperson sent a previous response he had given to News Nation in which he denied blocking the amendment.
“What I really find interesting about what I call the pro-alien caucus over here in the House, you would think that if this is that important of an issue to them, at least one member of the House who’s, you know, advancing this cause would actually come up and substantively talk to me about this issue,” he said. “No one has even raised it.”
Mr. Grusch called the resistance “a death rattle” in the military-industrial complex, even though “the toothpaste is already coming out of the tube.”
The benefits of disclosure, Mr. Grusch said, wouldn’t only open the issue for study in scientific academic institutions, but also answer a fundamental question that still hangs over humankind.
“Are we alone? Well, the answer is we’re not alone, and I know that with 100 percent certainty,” Mr. Grusch said.
‘No 1 Member Is Above Another’
On Nov. 30, Mr. Burchett and Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) held a press conference in which they railed against the stalling of the legislation while some pointed to their hang-ups with the legislation itself, which gives the UAP records collection 25 years after the date of record creation to disclose the information to the public unless the president deems the disclosure a threat to national security.“We’ve had three-star generals tell us that we do not have authorized access to this information, but how do you expect us to continue to spend taxpayer money to fund government projects if you’re not even allowing us to see what those projects are?” Ms. Luna said at the press conference.
Ms. Luna said there’s been an orchestrated attempt by the intelligence community to deny access.
“No one member is above another, and the American people deserve to know as much about the existence in this universe as possible,” she said. “They certainly have a right to know if their safety is threatened.”
Mr. Gaetz said he’s concerned about “embracing a disclosure paradigm that mirrors the JFK assassination disclosure paradigm” because “that system failed.”
“This proposal is currently the most effective way to expose what the DoD is hiding,” Mr. Gaetz wrote. “Instead, [Chuck Schumer] is trying to jam his amendment through the NDAA conference that would establish a commission akin to the decades-long JFK investigation. Under the commission, it could take up to 25 years to declassify documents and records related to UAPs. This is unacceptable.”
He then went on to thank Mr. Rogers, whom he described as not an opponent of disclosure but an ally.
“When the Air Force tried to block my review of the information discussed below, Chairman Rogers personally made calls and broke that logjam,” Mr. Gaetz said. “The Senate now faces a choice between adopting Rep. Burchett’s amendment or Sen. Schumer’s prolonged approach.”
Restoring Trust in Government
Kevin Wright is the founder of the Washington-based Solve Advocacy, a public relations and advocacy firm with a focus on “edge sciences,” or sciences “not easily categorized into conventional areas of study,” such as UAP research, parapsychology, and consciousness studies.Mr. Wright also worked with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a nonprofit organization of scientists that investigate UAPs.
He’s been involved in grassroots efforts to pressure Congress into passing the UAP Disclosure Act, which he admitted isn’t perfect.
“That’s true of any legislation,” he told The Epoch Times. “But we have means of going back and amending and enacting new legislation, so we can’t let those excuses be a reason for not doing anything at all.”
The amendment is an important step in the process, but not the end, he said, and it would help restore the public’s faith in government.
“Polls show that we have declining trust in basically all institutions, not just the government, but the media as well,” he said.
If that trust is to be regained, he said, the government needs to come clean about its secrets surrounding “the UAP enigma.”
“Because it’s larger than just whether there are craft and bodies,” he said. “It’s also about what the government has done in furtherance of the coverup. That may be part of the reason why there is such conflict because the coverup is usually worse than the crime itself.”
Still, people have a right to know, and it’s the people who were originally intended to be the most powerful check of the government’s power.
“So, if it’s not being honest with us and we lose faith,“ he said, ”then it’s no longer the government that our Founding Fathers established for us.”
