Does the US government have evidence of alien spacecraft? (Picture: Getty)
A US congressman has said he believes a whistleblower who last month alleged the government had evidence of alien spacecraft and was covering it up.
Republican Tim Burchett, representative for Tennessee’s second district, told the Washington Examiner he thinks the government has been ‘holding stuff back since Roswell in ‘47, and maybe prior to that’.
In June, former Department of Defence analyst David Charles Grusch gave an explosive interview to the Debrief, alleging the government had been hiding physical evidence of “intact and partially intact” alien vehicles’, and was illegally withholding it from Congress.
‘I think he’s telling the truth,’ said Mr Burchett. ‘I think there’s a lot that’s going to be out there.
‘There are enough witnesses, enough qualified pilots, astronauts, literally heroes of ours, who have come forward about things and so I think it’s pretty evident that government is covering up.
‘And the reason we don’t have any of that information now is a lot of it is so compartmentalised that the people that could connect the dots are long gone.’
Representative Tim Burchett is calling on greater transparency from the government (Picture: Getty)
The US government has denied Mr Grush’s allegations. When referencing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – the official name for unidentified flying objects, or UFOs – it rarely comments on national security grounds, a method Mr Burchett said was part of the cover-up.
‘It’s not the Russians or the Chinese, because we know if it was the Chinese, they would own us,’ he said. ‘And if it was Russia, [Vladimir] Putin, with his ego – he sure wouldn’t be stumbling in Ukraine right now.’
Mr Burchett argues ‘we have something that we do not control in our military airspace’, and said the public has a right to know about UAP events.
In May, Nasa’s independent study group into UAPs presented its first findings. Among the data was video of a metallic, spherical orb flying over desert in the Middle East. The panel would not be drawn on what the object was. However, when speaking publicly, most government officials say they believe UAPs are foreign surveillance or weather balloons.
It was apparently the remnants of a weather balloon that sparked the Roswell incident mentioned by Mr Burchett. In 1947, metallic and rubber debris was recovered in Roswell, New Mexico, by Army Air Field personnel – who promptly issued a press release announcing they had found part of a ‘flying disc’. The Army quickly retracted the release, instead putting forward the weather balloon theory.
In 1994 it was revealed by the government to have been a secret military balloon designed to help detect Soviet nuclear bomb tests, but conspiracy theories continue to surround the event.
Roswell, New Mexico (Picture: Getty)
Mr Burchett, alongside Representative Anna Pauline Luna, are leading the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into UAPs, although no date is confirmed for a hearing.
Asked why the US government would cover up evidence of alien craft, he said ‘greed and power’.
‘I think the interesting thing you’re going to find out is the Pentagon, and all of our research institutions, you see them kind of warming up to it,’ he said. ‘And the reason they are is they’re smelling dollars.’
Despite this, he alleged the government would try to discredit Mr Grusch.
Mr Burchett has previously alleged recovered UFO technology was potentially already being reverse engineered, and that the US has ‘recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings’.