House panel hears of hidden UFO trove, ‘secretive arms race’

House lawmakers on Wednesday heard from witnesses who claim the United States government is sitting on a trove of information on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) stretching back decades.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), in his opening remarks, called on President-elect Trump to throw off the veil of secrecy on UAPs.

He said the push for transparency has been “bipartisan bicameral, and as we get into a new administration, the President-elect has talked about opportunities to declassify information on UAPs and I hope he lives up to that promise.”

Speaking during the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing, one previous Pentagon official claimed such a reveal would show a “multi-decade, secretive arms race.”

“Let me be clear: UAP are real,” Luis Elizondo said in his opening testimony during the hearing. “Advanced technologies not made by our government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries.”

Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon’s now defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), charged with investigating UAPs, spoke alongside three other witnesses in a more than two-hour hearing that called into question the U.S. government’s classification process and entered several bombshell claims into the public sphere.

“I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies,” Elizondo said.

He later added that “excessive secrecy” has led to “grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public, all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos.”

Another witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, who publishes the "Public" newsletter on Substack, said Pentagon sources acknowledged to him the existence of an Unacknowledged Special Access Program (USAP) known as “Immaculate Constellation.”

A 12-page report on Immaculate Constellation — delivered to Congress by Shellenberger and authored, he says, by a current or former official and UAP whistleblower — claims that the executive branch “has been managing UAPs without congressional knowledge or authorization for some time, possibly decades.”

The report also claims that Immaculate Constellation has gathered high-quality images of UAPs, as well as recorded first-hand observations.

“The U.S. military and intelligence community are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information — still photos, video photos, other sensor information — and they have for a very long time,” Shellenberger said. 

He added that he’s been told there are hundreds, maybe thousands of pieces of such visual evidence “and it's not those fuzzy photos and videos that we’ve been given, it’s very high resolution.”

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who led the hearing, at one point held up the report and declared Immaculate Constellation was an “unacknowledged special access program that your government says does not exist.”

The hearing, part of a larger effort by Congress to investigate UAPs and whether government sectors are withholding evidence from lawmakers, takes place more than a year after a similar hearing held in July 2023. 

During that now gathering, retired Maj. David Grusch, formerly part of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, claimed that the U.S. government has long run a secret program to reverse-engineer nonhuman material from crash sites of UAP vessels. And two former Navy pilots relayed first-hand sightings of unexplained objects routinely violating U.S. airspace.

The testimony reignited long-held doubts that the U.S. military and other high-level government agencies have been forthcoming with what it knows about possible extraterrestrial activity.

The hearing also set off a push in Congress for more transparency, but lawmakers say movement by the U.S. government has been too slow.

The Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in March issued a report that said it has found “no evidence” of alien spacecraft. 

“To date, AARO has found no verifiable evidence for claims that the U.S. government and private companies have access to or have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology,” Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement at the time.

Mace said the office “is unable, or perhaps unwilling, to bring forward the truth about the government's activities concerning UAPs.

“So if there is no there there, then why are we spending money on it, and by how much? Why the secrecy if it's really no big deal and there's nothing there, why hide it from the American people? Because I'm not a mathematician, but I can tell you that doesn't add up,” she said. 

Elizondo on Wednesday repeated Grusch’s explosive claims, telling Mace that the government has conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs meant to identify and reverse-engineer alien craft.

He even said he had seen documentation on compensation for U.S. personnel injured during a retrieval.

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, meanwhile, testified he first encountered UAPs a few years ago during a strike group exercise aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier. 

During the military drill, he received an email on the Navy’s secure network urgently asking if anyone could identify non-U.S. objects that caused multiple near-midair collisions, warning the exercise might have to be shut down.

But the next day, he claimed, the email had been wiped from his inbox and senior staff would not speak about the whole event.  

Elizondo later said that UAP have flown so close to American fighters in some incidents that they have split aircraft formations “right down the middle.”