Congress’ Latest UAP Hearing Was About People

Simply talking about anything related to SAPs within the government is difficult due to their compartmentalized nature, making oversight that much more challenging. This is the core allegation at the heart of Congress’s UAP inquiries—they have allocated money to programs and that money has been misused. To what ends is the U.S. government and defense contractor-centric mystery at the heart of UAPs.

Whistleblowers Face Serious Financial Hardship

“I am a former ‘1N1’ geospatial intelligence specialist for the U.S. Air Force in an active duty enlisted capacity from 2010 to 2013,” said Dylan Borland in his statement under oath. “I also worked for BAE Systems and Intrepid Solutions as a Senior Analyst, an expert in analyzing video, radar, and advanced electro optical imagery for official identification of aerial order of battle as well as naval and ground. Borland has gone through the official process to be a federal whistleblower, “having testified to both the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) and All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) with direct firsthand knowledge of and experience with craft and technologies (commonly known as UFO or UAP) that are not ours and that are reportedly operating without Congressional oversight.”

Like practically every whistleblower before him, Borland alleges that his “professional career was deliberately obstructed,” and he has “endured sustained reprisals from government agencies for more than a decade.” Borland told a story that began in 2012 at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where he “saw an approximately 100 foot-long equilateral triangle fly from near the NASA hangar on base and come within one hundred feet of where I was standing. This craft interfered with my telephone, did not have any sound, and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic.”

Borland said that “some years after that experience,” he was “further exposed to classified information from the UAP legacy crash retrieval program through a sensitive position I held within a Special Access Program.” He said during this time, yet again, intelligence officers came to him “in fear for their own careers,” citing “misconduct within these programs and the same retaliation I was already enduring.”

This is it. This is the point of the hearing. Forget all the exotic specifics that Borland talked about later or the weird object that looked like it deflected a hellfire missile off of it. Dragging Borland up to the podium alongside Joe Spielberger, Senior Policy Counsel to Project On Government Oversight, sends a clear message about the very tangible realities at the heart of this issue, and what the chief goal of this hearing really was. Whistleblowers lose their livelihoods after speaking about or even just seeing misconduct taking place within SAPs, and this is a big part of the overall fight to protect those willing to come forward and speak about waste, fraud and abuse in the government.

UAPs are yet another constitutional crisis in America. That is why I write about them and why they belong on a politics site. There are government programs operating beyond Congressional oversight according to an avalanche of whistleblowers and Congresspeople spanning across decades. Even if UAPs are all bullshit, that means that money is being stolen from us, and people’s careers are being threatened to protect that theft. That’s mafia shit.

Borland says the retaliation he faced is why he became a whistleblower, the same thing that David Grusch and Matthew Brown and countless other whistleblowers have said. They feel they have no choice, and if you think they’re grifters who are totally full of shit, ask yourself a simple question: why would people who can only work in these kinds of programs torch their livelihoods in order to lie under oath to Congress?

Unless you are up there James Clapper-style, giving everyone the biggest poker tell ever that you’re lying under oath, we should believe people testifying under oath. Disbelieving them just because they say things that give you an epistemological shock erodes democracy. Congress is the people’s branch of government, and lying under oath to it is a very serious crime punishable by extensive time in prison. The whole reason this system of testifying to Congress is designed this way is to foster an environment of trust and accountability. You can’t just say “well of course they’re lying,” and just accept that folks who earned top secret security clearances are all wildly self-destructive and irrational people without evidence. That’s an irrational point you’re making!

I do not know if David Grusch was telling the truth under oath when he testified about Vatican UFOs and people being killed to cover this up in 2023, but I do know that he is not in prison right now. He’s working on Eric Burlison’s staff. A big part of this recent push is trying to give work to these people who say they are coming forward to tell us something heinous is happening behind the doors of some of the most secretive programs in the government. They are doing it at grave personal risk to themselves and a big way to aid this disclosure effort along is simply finding ways to help them put food on their table after they blow the whistle. Greeting them with disdain and scorn is shitty, and if they are liars, they have provided testimony under oath that can be vetted and proven by actual investigators, not professional debunkers like Mick West whose brand depends on everything being swamp gas. Something is going on, there are too many of these whistleblowers with vetted and credentialed backgrounds speaking out and talking under oath, and the story they all tell is pretty harrowing.

“If This Goes Back Behind Closed Doors, This Is Gonna Get Ugly”

Borland said this in response to Luna asking him how widespread the career reprisals are across the intelligence community. He actually gave a hopeful answer, saying that “because people are able to come before you and people are speaking out, I think it has been somewhat less” impactful on members of the intelligence community, before leaving the committee with this warning. The nature of SAPs means you don’t know what the person next to you is working on, and so Borland pointed out that simply having people speak out helps others realize they’re not alone so they can come out and say they saw something strange too.

It also helps when people like current U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Alejandro Wiggins speak out about what they saw, the first active duty military member to testify about UAPs under oath. He is not enmeshed in the world of SAPs like Borland nor did he say he faced reprisals for reporting what he saw (which goes to show you how differently the Navy treats this subject compared to other parts of the government, especially the tight-lipped Air Force). Chief Wiggins said under oath that in February of 2023, while on the USS Jackson “A self-luminous, ‘Tic-Tac’-shaped object was observed emerging from the ocean (transmedium), then linking up with three similar objects. All four departed simultaneously in a highly synchronized, near-instantaneous manner. No sonic boom or conventional propulsion signatures were observed.” Wiggins said that “Objects were detected on multiple sensors, including radar, and video was recorded inside CIC using a Star SAFIRE multi-spectral EO/IR system; location and time stamps are visible in the source video frames published by journalists.”

Jeffrey Nuccetelli was the third military UAP witness in the hearing, a sixteen-year Air Force veteran, testifying under oath that “Between 2003 and 2005, five UAP incidents occurred at Vandenberg Air Force Base, home to the National Missile Defense Project, a top national security priority.”

But the signature man under oath was KLAS’s George Knapp, the UAP journalist. He has long treated this “like a story” as he told Congress, and he has influenced a wave of people like me to take this more seriously. Knapp has won all sorts of awards for non-UAP reporting (he has broken many stories about the mob in Vegas), and he is a capital-J journalist who has investigated UFOs as thoroughly as anyone has the last few decades.

And the malfeasance that Knapp and many others have long reported on is this general story: something technological fell out of the skies at some point and the United States government picked it up. It’s advanced well beyond our comprehension, and it has been hidden away inside defense contractors like “Lockheed Martin” according to Knapp, but he also says that these defense contractors are “doing what they were asked to do” by the “CIA I think primarily.” Knapp does not believe that much progress has been made reverse-engineering this exotic technology since the 1940s, because the compartmentalized nature of SAPs does not allow for true scientific study to take place within them.

Knapp believes that these defense contractors who have kept exotic technology hidden inside the byzantine structure of Special Access Programs would “like an off-ramp, that they’d like some help with figuring out this technology at some point.” This all sounds crazy, but we also learned yesterday that Etsy witches might be real, so reality is definitely stranger than we think, and Knapp is far from the only one telling this general story. Dr. Eric W. Davis, a well-respected scientist who has contracted jobs for the government for decades told the New York Times that he briefed a defense department agency in March 2020 about retrievals of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

I’m not saying that this proves the government has recovered crashed UFOs, just that there are a lot of people in and around the government who are pretty certain that we have, and we are not the only ones either.

“The guy who was in charge of that [Soviet] program, Colonel Boris Sokolov, told me that their goal was to basically develop technology that would be superior to anything we had based on what they learned from UFOs,” said Knapp. The veteran journalist detailed a story where he, uh, escorted top-secret documents out of the collapsing Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Knapp submitted them to Congress which he says reveal “almost certainly the largest UFO investigation in the world.”

This is not just an American phenomenon. This is not all some psy-op. There is something strange going on in our skies and seas that countries ranging from the United States to Russia to Brazil have demonstrated a very real interest in for many decades. What this mystery is remains to be seen, but we will never find out if we can’t find a way to protect the people risking their livelihoods to tell us about it. There are a million moving targets in UFO world and most of them are bullshit, but we should never lose sight of the fact that humanity lies at the core of this mystery.