A House panel on Wednesday heard from witnesses who say that the U.S. government is sitting on a trove of information on unidentified anomalous phenomena going back decades, The Hill reported.
This occurred during a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing.
In his opening remarks, Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., called on President-elect Donald Trump to take off the veil of secrecy regarding UAPs, saying that 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," he said.
During the hearing, Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was charged with investigating UAPs, said that such a reveal would show a "multidecade, secretive arms race."
"Let me be clear: UAP are real. 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," he said.
Elizondo spoke alongside three other witnesses in the hearing.
"I believe we are in the midst of a multidecade, secretive arms race — one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies," he said.
Elizondo 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, said Pentagon sources told him about the existence of an unacknowledged special access program known as "Immaculate Constellation."
Shellenberger delivered a 12-page report on Immaculate Constellation to Congress, which he said was written by a current or former official and UAP whistleblower.
According to the report, the executive branch "has been managing UAPs without congressional knowledge or authorization for some time, possibly decades" and Immaculate Constellation has recorded firsthand observations of UAPs and gathered high-qualities images.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who led the hearing, held up the report at one point and called Immaculate Constellation an "unacknowledged special access program that your government says does not exist."
Elizondo told Mace that the government has conducted UAP crash-retrieval programs that were meant to both identify and reverse-engineer alien craft, adding that he had seen documentation on compensating any U.S. personnel injured during a retrieval.
Another witness, retired Navy Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, testified that he first encountered UAPs a few years ago during a strike group exercise while on the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.
During a military drill, he said, he received an email on Navy's secure network asking if anyone could identify non-U.S. objects that caused multiple near-midair crashes and warning that the exercise may have to be stopped. The next day, the email was wiped from his inbox and senior staff refused to speak of the event.
Elizondo added that UAPs have flown close enough to American fighters in some incidents that they had split aircraft formations "right down the middle."