The U.S. Congress: Your Go-To Source for UFO Theater

On Sept. 9, Rep. Eric Burlison provided the House Oversight Committee with a jaw-dropping video. The 50-second clip, reportedly captured by an MQ-9 Reaper drone operating off Yemen on Oct. 30, 2024, showed a mysterious flying “orb” being hit by a Hellfire missile. The object is struck, then inexplicably continues on its path as if nothing had happened.

This is exactly the kind of dramatic and mysterious testimony that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna had in mind when she launched the committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. (You might remember her as the representative who introduced a bill to add Donald Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore.) But the deflation came quickly. Closer examination of the video shows the projectile continuing on its trajectory with no visible detonation. Independent analysts on Metabunk and other sites argue the target’s behavior and the post-contact fragments are consistent with a balloon and its debris, noting the apparent “black rim” and shape changes are image-processing artifacts. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has previously published materials showing how parallax and sensor effects can mislead observers. In a separate 2024 Middle East case, the office assessed with high confidence that a similar object was a reflective foil balloon.

Luna’s task force focuses on conspiracies that excite the Trump base, from Jeffrey Epstein’s client list to the Antifa-Chinese Communist Party connection, and of course unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). In the case of Hellfire-surviving “orb,” Burlison placed unvetted, anonymously sourced battlefield footage into the Congressional Record without attempting even basic verification. 

Among those who testified at the hearing was George Knapp, a veteran investigative journalist based in Las Vegas who has covered UFO stories for decades. He first gained prominence in the UFO community in 1989 when he interviewed Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on recovered alien spacecraft at a secret facility near Area 51 in Nevada. That reporting made Knapp a central figure in UFOlogy, and he continues to work the beat.

Knapp’s testimony highlights the way credentials have come to substitute for evidence. Instead of providing credible proof that the committee could verify (or not), his testimony rested heavily on the accounts of Bob “Bizarre” Lazar (as he is known in UFO circles) and “more than two dozen sources” that he did not name, as well as anecdotes about “men in black” that he can’t corroborate. He invoked private conversations with the late Sen. Harry Reid, a fellow UFO buff, as validation, referenced off-the-record meetings with witnesses and cited dramatic claims from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s flawed Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program — including allegations that the U.S. possesses craft “of unknown origin” — while acknowledging that the underlying reports are unavailable. The committee accepted this testimony not because he brought evidence, but because his decades covering UFOs made him seem authoritative.

This is not governance. It is viral marketing disguised as oversight. Instead of vetting sources and verifying claims, the committee is platforming spectacle and generating headlines. Either the people in charge no longer know how government is supposed to work, or they don’t care. 

Before he emerged as the face of modern UFO disclosure advocacy, David Grusch was known as a decorated Air Force combat veteran who served in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It was only following a two-year stint with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force that he decided to step forward and make extraordinary claims about government UFO cover-ups. His launch to prominence occurred on July 26, 2023, when he testified before the House Oversight subcommittee on national security and claimed under oath that the U.S. government operated “multidecade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs” and had recovered “biologics” of “nonhuman” origin. He presented no physical evidence, just rumors of interdimensional beings and secret programs hiding alien spacecraft. Skeptics noted the testimony was hearsay lacking any physical evidence, but an intelligence officer making such statements under oath captivated global attention.

Congress had multiple ways to verify Grusch’s claims before his testimony. House rules require detailed witness filings, and standard practice would include a classified deposition in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. In that secure setting, Grusch could have provided names, dates, program details and locations under oath while maintaining proper security protocols.

Instead, during his public hearing, Grusch repeatedly declined to answer substantive questions, saying he could share specifics only in a closed session. Only then did lawmakers request a SCIF meeting. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office later stated they had invited Grusch multiple times for SCIF interviews, providing official documentation of their legal authority to receive compartmented information at any classification level. Grusch refused these invitations, saying he wasn’t convinced AARO was authorized to receive such sensitive material.

His refusal to share specific evidence with AARO — the official government UAP investigation body — and the absence of a full classified disclosure to Congress continue to raise questions about the credibility of his public claims. None of this has stopped Grusch from leveraging his institutional legitimacy into a media career. He gives interviews to Le Parisien and BBC Radio 4; NewsNation aired a special, “We Are Not Alone: The Historic UFO Hearing.” His public profile has transformed from an internal whistleblower to that of a public disclosure advocate.

It’s likely that nobody would have heard of him at all if Congress had treated Grusch’s claims as intelligence requiring verification, rather than as social media content. The hearing became a platform for assertions that could not be challenged in real time, creating a public record of claims divorced from evidence. When that belated verification revealed Grusch lacked even the clearances that he claimed prevented disclosure, Congress had already legitimized a flurry of UFO disinformation. Spectacular claims had been broadcast through official channels. 

This is not the first time the U.S. government has weaponized UFO mythology. Beginning in 1979, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations spent years feeding false information about alien bases to a defense contractor named Paul Bennewitz to distract him from classified activities at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. In the more recent “Yankee Blue” hazing scandal, Air Force commanders showed new officers doctored flying saucer photos, told them they were joining an alien reverse-engineering program and threatened them with prison or execution if they spoke. This practice conditioned hundreds of loyal, cleared officers to believe in a secret program that never existed.

Credentials can be the mechanism by which disinformation achieves credibility. Combine that with extraordinary claims, a congressional platform and a lack of proper vetting, and you get theater that crowds out oversight. Luna’s Sept. 9 hearing exemplifies this perfectly: Burlison testified he’d merely received the footage from a whistleblower, a claim that the Pentagon and CENTCOM declined to verify. The committee entered this anonymously sourced battlefield video into the record anyway, generating a viral news cycle and creating disinformation that staffers are still struggling to unwind.

The motivation for this is obvious: In the attention economy, it’s much easier to build political influence through viral moments than substantive policy work. NewsNation touted a 332% audience boost during its July 2023 UAP coverage, displacing news for spectacle. The Sept. 9 hearing was titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency,” centerpieced by unvetted material the government would not and could not confirm. The committee misinformed the public in service of content that performs well on social media.

Every hour spent on UAP theater is an hour spent not running the country. The footage disclosed on Sept. 9 dramatized this perfectly: striking on first viewing, deflated by basic analysis, yet amplified before the truth could catch up. These institutions will continue to reward spectacle over substance until enough crises go unaddressed that even Congress recognizes the problem. By then, the institutional capacity to respond may have atrophied beyond repair. The balloon keeps drifting, and Congress keeps firing missiles that never seem to detonate.