U.S Congressman Tim Burchett has called the UFO hearing that took place on May 17 a “total joke.”
Burchett’s comments were made in a tweet shortly after the House subcommittee hearing on government investigations of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). It was the first meeting of its kind to take place in more than 50 years.
“The UFO hearing this morning was a total joke,” Burchett said after the meeting. “We should have heard from people who could talk about things they’d personally seen, but instead the witnesses were government officials with limited knowledge who couldn’t give real answers to serious questions.”
The UFO hearing this morning was a total joke. We should have heard from people who could talk about things they’d personally seen, but instead the witnesses were government officials with limited knowledge who couldn’t give real answers to serious questions. pic.twitter.com/hddRYupW3u
— Rep. Tim Burchett (@RepTimBurchett) May 17, 2022
Prior to the meeting, Burchett also claimed that wreckage from UFOs seen flying over the U.S. had been recovered. He told The Sun Online that “multiple sources” had informed him of the fact but did not elaborate further.
The congressman has previously called for more transparency from the government in their investigations of UFOs or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—a term more commonly used by government officials.
While UFO sightings can easily be dismissed because of lack of evidence, the meeting on Monday was held after the topic has become one of national security.
This comes following a string of incidents where pilots have reported “near misses” with UAPs. In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said there had been 144 reports of UAPs. Earlier this week Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray said that the number of UAPs incidents reported by pilots and service members has grown to about 400.
During the hearing, the Pentagon‘s under secretary for intelligence, Ronald Moultrie, said: “Our goal is not to potentially cover up something, if we were to find something. It’s to understand what may be out there.”
Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana called for more transparency during the meeting.
“I hope that it does not take 50 years for Congress to hold another,” he said. “Because transparency is desperately needed.”
Moultrie also said that the “cultural stigma” surrounding UFOs has previously harmed government efforts to investigate UAPs.
“Our goal is to eliminate this stigma by fully incorporating our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data gathering process,” he said.
Burchett told The Sun Online that the public need to know the truth about UFOs.
He said “all we do is cover up,” and more transparency is needed.
“What is wrong with telling the world and saying ‘We’ve got this, we are going to share it and we can figure out what it is together’?” he told the news outlet. “I don’t think a lot is going to come from the hearings. It’s bringing in the people who created the problem to fix the problem.”
Steven Tingay, professor of radio astronomy at Australia’s Curtin University, told Newsweek he does not believe the U.S. has UFO wreckage hidden away.
“If it was positively identified as from an airborne object, the most likely explanation is that it was a human-made object, Tingay said. “So, based what has been presented, no, I don’t think there is any available evidence that alien hardware is being hidden away.”
“Do we really think that a technology capable of traveling interstellar distances, taking decades, hundreds, or thousands of years at the speed of light—much, much longer at realistic speeds—would then crash on the Earth? Think about the reliability of aircraft.
“The chance that your plane will crash is about one in a million. Presumably interstellar craft would be more reliable, which means that to get one wrecked craft would require many millions of visits from aliens. Say, 1,000 visits per day for the last 50 years. It is very likely that many more credible reports would exist, especially of the near-misses that didn’t result in a crash, but almost did.”
Tingay said there are plenty of reasons why a government might cover up finding UFO wreckage, but there are also lots of reasons why it would be transparent about any findings. “One can always invent a reason for a government doing or not doing something that it is actually doing or not doing, or assumed to be doing or not doing,” he said.
On the Congress hearing, he said: “There is clearly some puzzling material, like the footage taken by Navy pilots. I have no explanation for that footage, but whatever theory is put forward about that footage has to survive all the evidence and scientific analysis.
“There is not enough information to say what is shown in the footage. But if the assertion is that it is alien technology, the evidence has to be commensurate with the magnitude of the assertion. That evidence is simply not available.”
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