World UFO Day: Whistleblower’s Spaceship Recovery Claim Adds Intrigue

ACROSS AMERICA — Americans have long been fascinated by the prospect of extraterrestrial life, but World UFO Day on Sunday has added intrigue this year after a whistleblower from the Pentagon task force studying unexplained anomalous phenomena, or UAP, said the government is hiding information on a covert program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft and reverse-engineer the technology.

The powerful House Oversight Committee plans to convene hearings on the report from whistleblower David Grusch, a career Air Force intelligence officer. His story to Debrief, an outlet that reports on science, technology and defense news, was confirmed by Jonathan Grey, a U.S. intelligence official with the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, who said, “We are not alone.”

In a statement to ABC News earlier this month, Oversight Committee spokesman Austin Hacker said the panel plans to look at the whistleblower’s claim, but also reports of other UAP that have recently surfaced. Right now, the new All-Domain Anomaly Office is tracking around 650 UAP reports.

After decades of denying their existence, the Pentagon has acknowledged UFOs are real. And although a task force reviewed hundreds of new reports of UFOs in 2022, there’s no evidence of alien life, officials said in a required report to Congress earlier this year.

The All-Domain Anomaly Office did leave some intrigue, ending its report with a teaser: “Additional information is provided in the classified version of this report.”

All of that is interesting to ponder while reviewing reports on the crowd-sourced National UFO Reporting Center about strange sightings in every state over the past few years.

World UFO Day on July 2 commemorates the Roswell, New Mexico, crash, that more or less made it safe for Americans to talk about strange occurrences in the sky. On July 8, 1947, the Roswell Army Air Field said in a news release that it had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disc” from W.W. “Mac” Brazel’s ranch about 75 miles north of Roswell.

The crash occurred at the dawn of the Cold War, a time of escalating tension over the arms race when school children were taught duck-and-cover drills to protect themselves in a nuclear attack, fueling wild speculation about the object’s origins.

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

Earlier that summer, on June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington, according to History. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

The Roswell Army Air Field mentioned nothing in its press release about alien life, but people were already growing uneasy about what might be circling overhead. Brazel was among them.

He thought the object he found on his ranch was similar to what Arnold had seen, or to the objects described stories about flying saucers and discs, so he gathered some of the material from the wreckage, including rubber strips, tinfoil and thick paper, and deposited them with Sheriff George Wilcox, who in turn turned it over to the commanding officer of the Roswell Army Air Field.

Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren’t saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term “flying saucers.”

And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.

The Defense Department was loathe for many years to even acknowledge the existence of UAP, but had to walk back years of public denial after a shadowy five-year program to investigate UFOs was exposed in 2017 by The New York Times and Politico.

The intelligence gathered over the five years of the program, which was initiated in 2007, included former Naval Cmdr. David Fravor's account of 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.”

The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, formed in 2022 after Congress held its first public hearing on UFOs in half a century, is charged with investigating reports of aircraft flying at mysterious speeds and trajectories.

Grusch, the whistleblower, resigned from the task force last year. He told ABC he turned over the evidence of the alien vehicle retrieval program to the Office of the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, according to The Debrief.

Grusch said the task force did not have access to the information about the program to retrieve crashed alien spacecraft, but he was aware of it through is work.

“Every decade there’s been individuals who’ve said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space,” House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) told Fox News. “There’s no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level.”