The United States is concealing a decades-long programme that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects (UFOs), a former Air Force intelligence officer testified under oath to Congress on July 26 (U.S. time).

The public hearing also heard claims that the government is covering up its knowledge of UFOs, major news media in the U.S. and UK reported.

The allegations were that the executive branch agencies have withheld information about the mysterious objects for years.

The highly anticipated hearing has generated immense interest worldwide.

Whistleblower a military veteran

The whistleblower, David Grusch, a retired major, served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

He had earlier in June claimed in media interviews that the U.S. has possession of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles.

The Pentagon has denied his claims of a cover-up.

The U.S. military said it is actively trying to investigate the small number of sightings for which there is no obvious explanation.

Grusch was joined by two former fighter pilots who had firsthand experience with unidentified anomalous phenomena, known as UAP.

UAP is now the official parlance the U.S. government uses instead of UFO.

Other witnesses at the hearing were David Fravor, a former navy commander.

Fravor said he recalled seeing a strange object in the sky while on a training mission in 2004, The Guardian reported.

Ryan Graves, a retired navy pilot, claimed that he saw UAP off the Atlantic coast “every day for at least a couple years”, according to The Guardian.

He has since founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a UAP non-profit.

The trio appeared before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee.

What Grusch said

“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access,” Grusch said, AP reported.

Asked if the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of “non-human” activity since the 1930s.

Grusch said he became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for coming forward.

He declined to be more specific about the retaliatory tactics, citing an ongoing investigation.

But he did say he was hurt "both professionally and personally", AP reported.

He said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programmes relating to the task force’s mission, according to AP.

At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

He also said he led analysis of UAP within a U.S. Department of Defense agency until 2023, The Guardian reported.

Bi-partisan push

Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter.

The concerns stemmed from the chance that sightings observed may be related to U.S. adversaries, CBC reported.

Lawmakers in both parties asked Grusch about his study of UFOs and the consequences he faced and how they could find out more about the government’s UAP programmes.

Grusch claimed he had been denied access to secret government UFO programmes.

Sceptical about claims

However, Grusch appeared less forthcoming under oath than he had been in media interviews, The Guardian reported.

In the interview with NewsNation in June, Grusch claimed the government had “very large, like a football-field kind of size” alien craft.

He also previously said that the U.S. had possession of a “bell-like craft” that Benito Mussolini’s government had recovered in northern Italy in 1933.

This was told to Le Parisien, a French newspaper.

But Grusch appeared reluctant to go into details on those outlandish claims before congress though, citing issues of security.

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