Hearing / briefing · 1 May 2025 · U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. (House side)

Congressional briefing: Understanding UAP — Science, National Security & Innovation

Also known as UAPDF briefing

"Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation" was a nonpartisan briefing for members of Congress on 1 May 2025, hosted by the UAP Disclosure Fund and sponsored by the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets: a briefing, not a formal hearing, with no sworn testimony.

After opening remarks by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Eric Burlison and Tim Burchett (Nick Begich joined later), it had three panels, moderated by Luis Elizondo: science (Avi Loeb, Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet and Eric Davis), national security (Chris Mellon and Kirk McConnell), and science and innovation (Michael Gold and Anna Brady-Estevez).

Sources: Briefing video (2025)

Facts and claims

Key moments: Understanding UAP: Science, National Security & Innovation (House Oversight and Government Reform)

  1. 3:37 Eric Burlison: Burlison credits DNI Tulsi Gabbard, whose Director's Initiatives Group is harmonizing classification guides to allow responsible releases, and says this will be systemic change, not a one-time data dump.
  2. 16:45 Avi Loeb: Loeb: “We should invest a billion dollars in figuring out what is in our sky” — AI analysis of state-of-the-art sensor data, useful for defense even if every object turns out to be human-made.
  3. 25:57 Avi Loeb: Loeb: the Galileo Project's observatories watch the sky in infrared, optical, radio and audio and now triangulate objects; sites in Pennsylvania and Nevada would bring the total to three.
  4. 29:17 Avi Loeb: Loeb on ʻOumuamua (2017): no cometary tail, an excess push away from the sun, and a likely flat shape; he suggested it could be a thin object pushed by sunlight.
  5. 38:24 Avi Loeb: Loeb on his Pacific expedition for the 2014 interstellar meteor, confirmed by U.S. Space Command: 850 molten droplets recovered, about 10% with compositions unlike solar-system material.
  6. 44:10 Tim Gallaudet: Gallaudet: “today I call on the American scientific enterprise to mainstream UAP research”, which is shunned because of stigma and decades of DoD and intelligence disinformation.
  7. 47:27 Tim Gallaudet: Gallaudet relays a former SH-60 crew chief aboard USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in 2021 who filmed a metallic sphere on FLIR above the ship before it accelerated away; F/A-18s on that deployment met UAP frequently, and videos were kept on a squadron share drive in a folder named “range foulers”.
  8. 53:20 Eric Davis: Davis: his UFO work began in 1996 when Robert Bigelow hired him at the National Institute for Discovery Science, whose advisory board included Hal Puthoff and astronaut Edgar Mitchell.
  9. 59:50 Eric Davis: Davis: the crash-retrieval programs are more secret than the Manhattan Project, hidden from Congress under presidential emergency action directives dating from Eisenhower and exempt from FOIA.
  10. 1:01:39 Eric Davis: Davis: one four-star general and one three-star admiral located these crash-retrieval programs; the general got in with “super user” access.
  11. 1:02:29 Eric Davis: Davis: at Jay Stratton's request he briefed David Grusch and his NRO boss for two and a half days just before COVID; that material formed part of Grusch's classified IG complaint.
  12. 1:03:25 Eric Davis: Davis says the crash-retrieval programmes go back to 1944 and the U.S. Army's recovery of a craft that crashed in Italy in 1933, brought back to Wright Field; just before, he says he briefed Grusch for two and a half days before Grusch's Inspector General complaint.
  13. 1:04:55 Eric Davis: Dr. Davis: recovered craft are “not of this Earth.”
  14. 1:15:04 Eric Davis: Davis: a materials scientist hired by Ben Rich at Skunk Works told him the recovered materials' elements were identifiable by mass spectrometry but their structure was nothing they could fabricate on Earth.
  15. 1:23:10 Avi Loeb: Avi Loeb cautions that physics has no reliable theory of quantum gravity, so this is speculation, and offers to help if the government holds something scientists should study.
  16. 1:24:57 Eric Davis: Davis: “the legacy program has been very insulated and insular” — no physicists work in it, only engineers and materials scientists, so they lack the ability to understand how the craft fly.
  17. 1:27:56 Eric Davis: Davis cites James Lacatski's book account of going inside a craft with no recognizable propulsion or power systems, and speculates energy may be teleported to the craft.
  18. 1:30:23 Eric Davis: Davis: the grays he knows of came from the crash near Corona, New Mexico — “misnamed” Roswell.
  19. 1:39:35 Chris Mellon: Mellon: the solid-state phased-array radars, the most powerful emitters on the planet, have reported zero UAP to AARO in some 20 years, though ships and aircraft in their coverage report them constantly.
  20. 1:54:29 Chris Mellon: Mellon reads from a 2019 report: USS Paul Hamilton observed four drones within about 200 yards for 2 hours 20 minutes, 60–80 miles offshore; the ship's counter-drone systems were ineffective.
  21. 1:58:29 Chris Mellon: Mellon on the 2019–20 drone swarms over eastern Colorado: a deputy sheriff saw smaller lights enter a larger one that shot overhead — a “mothership”, a term also found in OSI and FBI documents.
  22. 2:00:36 Chris Mellon: Mellon: DHS publishes UAP videos while AARO and DoD do not; after he gave the three Navy videos (FLIR1, Gimbal and GoFast) to the New York Times in 2017, a classification guide made almost anything UAP-related classified.
  23. 2:12:30 Kirk McConnell: McConnell, after 37 years as a congressional staffer: the key is first-hand sources from the legacy crash-retrieval program, but they fear for their clearances, careers and safety.
  24. 2:15:32 Chris Mellon: Mellon: he published a Signal message from a very senior official describing a Secretary of the Air Force memo, a recovery site and the Air Force gatekeeper, yet no one in Congress has followed up.
  25. 2:25:33 Kirk McConnell: McConnell: witnesses can brief the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees in confidence, and a legal historian found no indictment of anyone for giving classified information to Congress.
  26. 2:27:07 Chris Mellon: Mellon warns that UAP sightings and alleged recoveries are blended in the public mind; if recoveries are never confirmed, it could discredit the urgent and very real UAP issue; he adds that he does not know how secure AARO is in the long term.
  27. 2:47:41 Michael Gold: Gold shows NASA lunar horizon glow images, from Surveyor sketches to a Blue Ghost lander photo, and questions the levitated-dust explanation; he calls it an unidentified anomalous phenomenon worth studying.
  28. 3:00:04 Anna Brady-Estevez: Brady-Estevez: while at the NSF she funded companies working on what entrepreneurs called “UAP adjacent or UAP inspired technologies”.
  29. 3:20:18 Michael Gold: Gold: on the NASA study team he asked the FAA how many commercial-pilot UAP reports it had and got “confusion and no straight answers”; he backs using NASA's ASRS for reports, crediting Ryan Graves with the idea.

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