Watch Live: House Panel Hears Testimony On UFO Encounters

WASHINGTON, DC — Retired Maj. David Grusch, a decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan turned whistleblower, told a House Oversight subcommittee looking into “unidentified aerial phenomena” — the official U.S. government term for UFOs — the Pentagon tried to cover up evidence in his possession of intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.

While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.

Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force's mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access,” he said.

Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.

“We are not alone,” Grusch has said.

The Pentagon has denied Grusch's claims of a coverup. 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.

Grusch says he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward. He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.

“It was very brutal and very unfortunate, some of the tactics they used to hurt me both professionally and personally,” he said.

The subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs also heard testimony from David Fravor, a retired US Navy commander; and Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot.

Lawmakers are pushing intelligence and military officials to investigate the issue of UAP, as the government calls them, on a national platform. In a news release last week, Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee said the witnesses would “provide public testimony because the American people deserve the truth.”

You can watch the livestream below.

Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the new All-Domain Anomaly office, told the both the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services subcommittee last year that the government is tracking more than 650 unexplained craft.

“Of those over 650, we’ve prioritized about half of them to be of anomalous interesting value, and now we have to go through those and go ‘How much of those do I have actual data for?’” Kirkpatrick said at the time.

In its first of its required reports to Congress earlier this year, the office said it took hundreds of new reports of UFOs in 2022, but found no evidence of extraterrestrial life.

About half of the reports taken by All-Domain Anomaly Office and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence couldn’t be explained and remain shrouded in mystery, according to the unclassified version of the report. The report said the sightings “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity.”

• Related: No Aliens, But Hundreds Of New UFO Reports, Pentagon Says

Fravor has spoken in the past about an other-wordly encounter with an oblong, Tic Tac-shaped aircraft flying erratically through his airspace at an incredible speed, defying accepted principles of aerodynamics.

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor told ABC News in 2017. “I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

Former Navy pilot Graves, whose F/A-18F squadron began seeing UAPs over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014, told CBS "60 Minutes" two years ago that intelligence officials hadn't been looking closely enough at UAP.

“I am worried, frankly,” he said. “You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin' out up there, it would be a massive issue. But because it looks slightly different, we're not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.