Undoubtedly, the most out-of-this world UFO event of 2023 came two months after NASA’s UAP study group meeting when, on July 26, three former U.S. military personnel testified to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on National Security at the Border and Foreign Affairs. Two of the witnesses, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, are former U.S. Navy aviators who had previously reported highly publicized encounters with unknown objects in military training airspace that have become touchstones for the UFO community in terms of credible sightings from reputable, trained witnesses.
But it was the third witness at the July hearing that caused the biggest stir. That witness, David Grusch, a decorated U.S. military combat veteran and former Pentagon intelligence officer, told the subcommittee that the U.S. government has operated a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program,” along with a disinformation campaign to keep the public in the dark.
Grusch would go on to state to the subcommittee that “biologics came with some of these recoveries” and that these “biologics” were “non-human,” according to individuals with direct knowledge of these crash recovery programs that he had spoken with during his time in the intelligence community.
Naturally, a media feeding frenzy ensued, and Grusch has since become a regular talking head on the podcast circuit and television news programs. Evidence for his claims has yet to surface.
A month later, on Aug. 31, the Pentagon’s AARO office quietly unveiled an official government website through which U.S. government personnel can report UFO/UAP sightings “in the vicinity of national security areas” such as military bases or other U.S. government sites.
NASA’s UAP study team would then go on to release a written report on Sept. 14 that reached similar conclusions to AARO director Kirkpatrick’s testimony in April. “The top takeaway from the study is that there is a lot more to learn,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a teleconference held after the agency released the report. “The NASA independent study team did not find any evidence that UAP have an extraterrestrial origin, but we don’t know what these UAP are.”
The year in UFOs would ultimately end not with a bang, but with a whimper, when in December the U.S. Congress approved legislation containing a portion of the Schumer-Rounds language that ordered that some government records related to UAP must be released.
However, many UFO disclosure proponents felt that the final version of the Schumer-Rounds amendment was far weaker than what was originally proposed.
“The most important components of the Schumer-Rounds language were dropped — an independent Senate-confirmed review board with subpoena power, professional staff to search out records, and other serious resources,” Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent researcher who writes on various aspects relating to UAP, told Space.com. “What is being enacted instead is a modest mechanism that is far less likely to result in the location, extraction and disclosure of important UAP-related records that may be tightly held or even long forgotten.”
