White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (L) looks on as National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby speaks during the daily briefing in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington on July 26, 2023. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The White House on July 26 declined to take a stance on the existence of alien life, the same day that a whistleblower testified in Congress that the U.S. military has a UFO retrieval program.
At a Wednesday press briefing, a reporter asked White House national security spokesperson John Kirby, “Does the United States believe that there may be life outside of Earth?”
Mr. Kirby responded: “I don’t have a position on that one way or the other to speak to today. What we believe is that there are unexplained aerial phenomena that have been cited and reported by pilots, Navy, and Air Force.
“That these phenomena have, in some cases, had an impact on our training ranges, on our pilots’ ability to fly, train, operate, and stay ready. That alone makes it a national security issue worth looking at. We don’t know; we don’t have the answers about what these phenomena are.”
Hearing Testimony
“The lack of transparency regarding UAP [Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena] has fueled wild speculation and debate for decades, eroding public trust in the very institutions that are meant to serve and protect them, as is evidenced by the large number of people we have here,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), chair of the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs, in his opening statement of the hearing.
“I also want to point out [that] in 1966, President Gerald Ford claimed to have seen a UFO. And in 1969, in Georgia, Jimmy Carter claimed to have seen a UFO.”
Testifying under oath at the House hearing was retired Air Force intelligence officer Maj. David Grusch, a whistleblower who adamantly maintains that the U.S. military has been concealing and preventing information going public of its secret “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” that illegally operates above and outside of congressional oversight.
David Grusch—a former National Reconnaissance officer who served on the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force at the Department of Defense—testifies at a House Oversight Committee hearing titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency" on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 26, 2023. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Mr. Grusch, decorated for combat service in Afghanistan, says that the U.S. military has recovered UAP craft and “non-human” life forms.
He said the United States has likely been aware of “non-human activity” since the 1930s.
Mr. Grusch told the subcommittee that he was asked in 2019 by the head of the government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission. At the time, Mr. Grusch was an officer in the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.
It was also in 2019 that he learned of the crash retrieval and reverse engineering program.
After being denied access to the program, Mr. Grusch decided to become a whistleblower.
Mr. Grusch says that he has been warned to keep quiet about what he knows about the military and UAPs, and that his life has been threatened.
The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims of a cover-up. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman Sue Gough said investigators have not discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”
The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ross Muscato
Reporter
Ross Muscato covers the U.S. Congress for The Epoch Times.
