The strange saga of secret UFO evidence continues without resolution

A hearing hosted by two U.S. House subcommittees continued a string of inquiries about supposed UFO activity and included numerous claims from former government officials that evidence exists and is being shielded from the public by secret programs.
But, as has been the case over the past several years of hearings, investigations and testimony about incidents now classified by the government as unexplained aerial phenomena, or UAPs, no hard evidence was offered to back up the claims.
In written testimony submitted Wednesday, retired Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet said his belief in UAPs was confirmed nine years ago when he was still on active duty and following an incident off the U.S. East Coast involving Navy pilots aboard an F/A-18 fighter jet.
“Confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came for me in January 2015 when I was serving as the commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command,” Gallaudet wrote. “At the time, my personnel were participating in a pre-deployment naval exercise off the U.S. East Coast that included the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.”
Gallaudet said he received an email during the exercise with an alarming message to the effect, “If any of you know what these are, tell me ASAP. We are having multiple near-midair collisions, and if we do not resolve it soon, we will have to shut down the exercise.” The email included an attached video, since declassified and widely known as the “Go Fast” footage, that showed “an unidentified object exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.”
Gaulladet said the email “disappeared” from his account, as well as accounts of other recipients, the following day and the incident was never discussed in follow-up meetings about the exercise involving the F/A-18 pilots who captured the unexplained footage.
“I concluded that the UAP information must have been classified within a special access program managed by an intelligence agency — a compartmented program that even senior officials, including myself, were not read into,” Gaulladet wrote in his testimony.
Author and former Defense Department official Luis Elizondo also provided written testimony to the two House subcommittee chairs, claiming a government-led UAP coverup.
“Let me be clear: UAP are real,” Elizondo wrote. “Advanced technologies not made by our government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race — one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.”
Neither Gallaudet nor Elizondo provided evidence to support their claims.
Despite widespread and long-running conspiracy theories about secret government agencies concealing recovered alien spacecraft wreckage and possibly some actual alien remains as well, the results of an investigation ordered by Congress to look into classified operations going back to the 1940s, unequivocally discounted those claims and stated no such evidence exists and the stories are the result of rumormongering.
But the Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office’s report on the “historical record of U.S. government involvement with unidentified anomalous phenomena” (the updated nomenclature for UFOs) released in March also highlighted an effort named Kona Blue that proposed to pick up where a previous government effort, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, canceled in 2012, had left off.
According to the report, those advocating for the Kona Blue program “were convinced that the (U.S. government) was hiding (unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAP) technologies. They believed that creating this program under (the Department of Homeland Security) would allow all of the technology and knowledge of these alleged programs to be moved under the Kona Blue program.”
The Kona Blue proposal was based on a presumption that the U.S. government was in covert possession of “advanced aerospace technology and biological samples” from extraterrestrial sources. The report says DHS rejected the Kona Blue proposal for “lacking merit.” And goes on to further discount the premise of those supporting the effort.
“It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected — this material was only assumed to exist by Kona Blue advocates and its anticipated contract performers,” the report reads. “This was the same assumption made by those same individuals involved with the … (Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.)”
Numerous claims about extraterrestrial spacecraft and alien remains have been made by current and former government employees for decades, including in 2023 when a former U.S. Intelligence official alleged the government is in possession of “intact and partially intact craft of nonhuman origin.”
David Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of both the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, made news in June 2023 when he went public with claims that he was privy to classified government secrets.
While working on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, Grusch said several colleagues approached him about their involvement in a crash retrieval program that researches alien technology.
“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, nonhuman exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch told NewsNation.
“I thought it was totally nuts and I thought at first I was being deceived, it was a ruse,” Grusch said. “People started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program.”
The Defense Department report released in March said investigators conducted dozens of interviews, including with those who claimed to have knowledge of secret programs studying recovered extraterrestrial materials, but found no credible evidence to support the claims, even though some of the documents and programs named by interviewees actually exist.
“… all of the named and described alleged hidden UAP reverse-engineering programs provided by interviewees either do not exist; are misidentified authentic, highly sensitive national security programs that are not related to extraterrestrial technology exploitation; or resolve to an unwarranted and disestablished program,” the report reads.
Utah’s infamous Skinwalker Ranch, long rumored to be an epicenter of unexplained paranormal activity and UAP sightings, gets a mention in the report as an area that was investigated at one time by the now-defunct Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, following up on reports of “shadow figures” and “creatures,” and claims of “remote viewing” and “human consciousness anomalies” on the property near Roosevelt, Utah.