CONGRESSIONAL UAP HEARINGS

2022 — THE FIRST PUBLIC HEARING IN 50 YEARS

In May 2022, a House Intelligence subcommittee held the first open congressional hearing on UAP since the close of the Air Force's Project Blue Book era. Defense officials acknowledged a growing backlog of military reports, showed examples of Navy sensor footage, and conceded that many cases remained unidentified. The hearing established the pattern the later sessions followed: sworn testimony, declassified clips, and a public admission that the government did not have explanations for much of what its own sensors had recorded.

2023 — THE WHISTLEBLOWER HEARING

On July 26, 2023, a House Oversight subcommittee heard three witnesses under oath. David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had served on the UAP Task Force, testified that the United States operates a UAP crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering effort — claims he said he was relaying from others and that the Department of Defense has publicly disputed. Ryan Graves and David Fravor, both former Navy fighter pilots, described firsthand encounters: Graves with near-daily contacts off the U.S. East Coast, Fravor with the 2004 "Tic Tac" off the USS Nimitz. The session put military aviators and an intelligence whistleblower on the same record, in public, for the first time.

2024 AND 2025: TWO MORE HOUSE HEARINGS

On November 13, 2024, two House Oversight subcommittees held a joint hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.” The witnesses were Luis Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who ran the AATIP effort; Tim Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral and former acting head of NOAA; Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator who had served on the agency’s UAP study team; and the journalist Michael Shellenberger. On September 9, 2025, the Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, held “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection,” with testimony from former Air Force security forces member Jeffrey Nuccetelli, former Navy chief petty officer Alexandro Wiggins, former Air Force member Dylan Borland, and the investigative reporter George Knapp. The 2025 session was the first held after the PURSUE program was announced, and Luna’s prepared remarks argued that pilots feared for their flight status and careers if they spoke publicly and that access to special access programs was limited to designated defense committees.

WHAT’S NEXT: A LAME-DUCK HEARING, PROPOSED

A hearing planned for the third week of September 2026 did not happen after the House’s final two weeks of the session were cancelled. On September 16, Oversight Chairman James Comer said he would try again in November, after the election, while adding that the topic and the witnesses were not settled and that getting good witnesses is always a challenge. On October 10, Rep. Eric Burlison told the New York Post he would explore whether intelligence personnel who reported an encounter during a late 2025 helicopter mission near a West Coast military base, an incident described in an FBI report, could testify in public, with the caveat that exposing some witnesses could reveal other sensitive information. As of late October 2026 nothing has been announced: both chambers are in recess until the week of November 9, and the session is a proposal, not a scheduled event. If it is held, it would be the first congressional UAP hearing to take place with seven PURSUE tranches already public.

WHAT THE TESTIMONY POINTS TO

The hearings keep returning to the same source material: military sensor footage, mission reports, and the case files agencies have quietly held for decades — exactly the kinds of records now surfacing in the PURSUE public release. Umbra indexes that record and renders it natively, so you can read the documents the witnesses describe rather than the headlines about them.