KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Congressman Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) held a news conference on Thursday with congressional colleagues to announce an upcoming committee hearing and to demand transparency from the federal government over unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), which are more commonly dubbed "UFOs."
Burchett said the news comes after he tried to introduce a late amendment to the rules committee in HR 3935, which reauthorizes the Federal Aviation Administration through 2028. The amendment, he said, would have required the FAA to report UAP sightings by commercial pilots to Congress.
The amendment was not introduced, and Burchett said he was told the amendment was shot down by either the House Intelligence Committee or the "intelligence community," saying he wasn't totally sure who knocked it down.
"This is ridiculous, folks. They do exist or they don’t exist. They keep telling us they don’t exist, but they block every opportunity for us to get ahold of the information,” he said.
In a back-and-forth conversation on Twitter, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) said Burchett's amendment was blocked and no one voted on it because Burchett voted for a rule that blocked his own amendment.
Burchett said that McGovern's claim he voted against his amendment was "incorrect and misleading," saying no one had a chance to vote on that particular amendment.
Burchett was joined by Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) during the news conference. He said they plan to hold a House Oversight Committee hearing on July 26 at 10 a.m. over the issue.
For the past year, Burchett has become increasingly vocal about UFOs, saying the government has been "surprisingly quiet" about the topic.
"Many UFOs are misidentified weather phenomena, aircraft, or balloons. Some represent U.S. or foreign military technology. Others, however, do not appear to fall into any of these categories and could be vehicles controlled by an unknown source. We need to know what these things are, how they operate, who or what is controlling them, and what they are doing," he said in an opinion originally featured in the Washington Examiner in 2022.
The discussion Thursday focused primarily on an ongoing push for government transparency and accountability.
“We’re not gonna bring you a saucer or a little green man, that’s not what it’s gonna be about," he said. "The reality is that the American public deserves to know. You better be careful about a government that doesn’t trust its people because there’s no telling what they’ll pull on you.”
Moskowitz echoed his concerns about the government withholding information from Congress and the public, also pointing to government documents that remain withheld from the public in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The National Archives has released around 97% of the assassination documents to the public after the recent release of nearly 13,000 documents in late 2022.
He said the lack of transparency ends up fueling conspiracy theories.
"When we ask these questions... if the answers are, ‘There are no unidentified aerial phenomena,’ then say that. But that’s not what the answers are. The answers are, ‘We can’t say that,'" Moskowitz said.
Burchett and Luna said the issue recently came to a head for them after they tried to follow up with the U.S. Air Force and Pentagon about UAPs after hearing from whistleblowers. The two said they were "stonewalled" by military leadership at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida from seeing pictures and receiving information in regards to the whistleblowers' claims, saying they were given a synopsis that had "nothing to do with" what they had asked about.
“After much arm twisting we got some of the information, but the fact is that they answer to Congress and thus the American people, and any government entity that attempts to stonewall us is doing nothing in the vested interest of the American people," Luna said.
"If there isn’t anything, then why the push to cover it up?” Burchett said.
Burchett said the committee will hear from three witnesses next week, including former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who made national news documenting his experiences with UAPs through his pilot-led advocacy organization, Americans for Safe Aerospace. The group is similarly pushing for more disclosure and better protections for whistleblowers.
“Unidentified objects in our airspace present an urgent and critical safety and national security issue, but pilots are not getting the support they need and the respect they deserve,” Graves told NBC News in June. “When I served, my squadron was encountering UAP nearly every day, and nothing was being done.”