Congressional lawmakers pressed President Trump on Tuesday to waive nondisclosure agreements and grant immunity to whistleblowers who sound the alarm on the government’s knowledge of extraterrestrial phenomena.
The bipartisan group called for the full disclosure of government documents related to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or UAP.
Rep. Eric Burlison cited claims — such as the 1996 Varginha, Brazil, incident, where witnesses allege the Brazilian military captured non-human entities — that “point to specific facilities, contractors, records and people.”
“Congress has a constitutional duty to follow them,” Mr. Burlison, Missouri Republican, said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “And that duty does not vanish because someone stamped a document classified 30 years ago. It does not vanish because some bureaucrat says so. It does not vanish because a program has become so compartmentalized that even elected officials are expected to look the other way.”
He said that those with UAP-related knowledge must go public because “playing dumb is no longer acceptable. Hiding behind classification is no longer acceptable.”
Mr. Burlison was joined at the press conference by GOP Reps. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida.
The Trump administration has been releasing waves of now-declassified documents related to extraterrestrial sightings, and while the documents contain real sightings, “unidentified” does not mean “alien,” federal officials have clarified.
“With President Trump’s unprecedented directive to release UAP files, we are seeing more and more of these types of craft captured on various government sensors,” documentary filmmaker James Fox said at the press conference. “And I’m told this is just the beginning.”
UAP whistleblower David Grusch, a former Air Force and Pentagon intelligence officer, said that many people on the president’s team have been kept “in the dark by high-ego, politically appointed actors, both because of incompetence and malicious intent.”
“Mr. President, you know that the agencies lie. You know that firsthand. They have lied to you,” Mr. Burlison said. “They do not cooperate easily and they never have. This is the moment. Use the authority that you have. Mr. President, the American people are behind you.”
Mr. Grusch, who told Congress in 2023 that the U.S. government is secretly retrieving and reverse-engineering spacecraft of non-human origin, likened the lack of transparency to a national security concern.
“For decades, unknown objects have freely operated in restricted airspace and large metropolitan areas and critical infrastructure. And the agencies responsible for securing the homeland cannot adequately defend against it,” he said. “This is a serious national security issue.”
The UAP Disclosure Act, which requires the president to direct each federal agency to declassify all UAP-related agency records and make them available on a public website, has been “stonewalled by various intelligence agencies and staff within the House,” Ms. Luna said.
She said that their next call to action will be requesting that the White House grant UAP whistleblowers temporary or permanent immunity.
“What does the government know and why aren’t they telling us? The American people can handle it. They can handle it. I trust them. And it’s time that we tell them the truth,” Mr. Moskowitz said.
Mr. Burchett, co-chair of the bipartisan House UAP Caucus, said that this push is “not about little green men or flying saucers” but “your dadgum tax dollars.”
“What are we spending all these millions and possibly billions of dollars on that these idiots tell us don’t exist, and then yet we turn right around in the skip, and then they tell us they do exist,” he said. “This is a cover-up. You all know it; we know it. We demand the answers, and dadgummit, we’re gonna get them.”
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