Witnesses testified on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that government officials are not only withholding information about UFO sightings but threatening and retaliating against those who come forward with reports. Congress members also told tales of unnamed figures trying to prevent their hearing or limit its scope.

The joint hearing by two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee followed up on a bombshell July session, in which a former senior intelligence officer testified about the existence of a secret “multi-decade UAP crash, retrieval and reverse engineering program” that had recovered “non-human origin technical vehicles” along with non-human remains.

Lawmakers are calling for greater transparency from the Defense Department about UFOs, or what the federal government officially refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). They argue that pressure campaigns and retaliation deter witnesses from reporting sightings, making it more challenging to get answers. 

House members also say the Pentagon is circumventing congressional oversight by hiding its work.

“If there is no ‘there’ there, then why are we spending money on it, and by how much? Why the secrecy?” asked Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who co-chaired the hearing. “If it's really no big deal and there's nothing there, why hide it from the American people?”

Luis Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, testified there is “a small cadre” within the federal government who have created a culture of suppression and intimidation regarding UAP. He charged that he has personally been on the receiving end.

“This includes unwarranted criminal investigations, harassment and efforts to destroy one's credibility,” Elizondo said. “ … Many of my former colleagues and I have provided classified testimony to both the Department of Defense and the intelligence community inspector general, and many of us have subsequently been targeted by this cabal with threats to our careers, our security clearances and even our lives.”

Tim Gallaudet, a retired Navy rear admiral who has become an advocate for greater UAP transparency, said he thought he was meeting with leadership at the Defense Department’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, but instead found himself in an hourslong “influence operation” in which officials tried to convince him that historical reports he believed to be very flawed were accurate while also attacking the credibility of UAP whistleblowers and witnesses.  

Gallaudet told a story about when he was a Navy commander in 2015, he received an email addressed to other commanders asking if they knew what the mysterious objects were that were responsible for multiple near mid-air collisions during a naval exercise. The subject line of the email read “URGENT SAFETY OF FLIGHT ISSUE,” Gallaudet said. The following day, the email had vanished from recipients’ inboxes, and the matter was never discussed again, he said.

“This lack of follow-up was very concerning to me,” Gallaudet testified. “As the Navy's chief meteorologist at the time, I was responsible for reducing safety-of-flight risks. Yet it appeared to me that no one at the flag officer level was addressing the safety risk posed by UAP. Instead, pilots were left to mitigate these threats on their own without guidance or support.”

The email included a video that was declassified by the Pentagon in 2017.

“The continued overclassification surrounding UAP has not only hindered our ability to effectively address these phenomena, but has also eroded trust in our institutions,” Gallaudet said.

The Defense Department has not responded to an email from Spectrum News seeking comment on the claims made during the hearing.

Even members of Congress reported attempts to suppress their investigation.

Mace said in her opening remarks that “certain individuals … didn't want this hearing to happen because they feared what might be disclosed, but we stood firm.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., too, said lawmakers have encountered people “not wanting us to have hearings” and “not wanting us to ask you [the witnesses] questions.” 

“In fact, many of us were told not to ask some of you certain questions on certain topics,” he said.

“As we get into a new administration, the president-elect has talked about opportunities to declassify information on UAP, and I hope he lives up to to that promise,” Moskowitz added.

Michael Shellenberger, an investigative journalist and founder of Public, a Substack news publication, said current and former government officials have told him there is a secret Pentagon program called Immaculate Constellation that documents UAP. 

Shellenberger said the program violates federal law by not revealing “a significant body of information about UAP, including military intelligence databases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft and operates without Congress’ knowledge.”

A 2022 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said U.S. military and intelligence agencies had collected 366 reports of UAP and that 171 of those were “uncharacterized and unattributed.” Some of the uncharacterized UAP appeared to “have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” according to the report.

Elizondo testified that “UAP are real advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government” and “are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe.”

“We're talking about technologies that can outperform anything we have in our inventory,” he added. “And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure eclipsing that of 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”

Rep. Glenn Grothman, the hearing’s other co-chair, said lawmakershave not been able to substantiate the claims made in July by David Grusch, the former National Geospatial Intelligence Agency officer who testified about a UAP retrieval and reverse-engineering program. Grothman said committee members have “endlessly” questioned agencies both inside and outside of secure locations to no avail.

But when asked by Mace if there is a government reverse-engineering program, Elizondo said yes. He also said there are UAP programs operating without congressional oversight.

Until recently, the federal government referred to such unexplained events as “unidentified aerial phenomenon” but now uses the term “unidentified anomalous phenomena” as a catch-all to also include objects in the sea.