Tennessee Republican Representative Tim Burchett said this week that Americans "deserve to know" about aliens and UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).
"That's what it is about: aliens...I think people deserve to know," Burchett told Politico, while speaking about a potential House Oversight Committee hearing on UFOs and UAPs.
The comments by Burchett come amid ongoing discussion about UFOs, UAPs and aliens throughout the U.S. after Air Force veteran David Grusch, told NewsNation that the U.S. Military has a secret program that previously recovered wreckage of a UFO.
"These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed," Grusch, who also previously served as the National Reconnaissance Office's representative to the UAP Task Force, told NewsNation last month. "Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true."
The remarks by Grusch prompted many Republicans, including Burchett, to call for a further investigation into the alleged discovery of crashed UFOs and UAPs.
In June, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer said that the committee was planning to have a hearing on UFOs and UAPs in the coming weeks, and a spokesperson for Comer's office told Politico on Thursday that the hearing is "looking like it will happen towards the end of this month."
Comer also told NewsNation on Thursday that he thinks "there's a lot of interest" in the House Oversight Committee hearing into UFOs and UAPs.
"They're very passionate about that issue," Comer told NewsNation. "I've been surprised at the number of questions I've received on that on that hearing, so I think there's a lot of interest."
This is not the first time Burchett has brought up UFOs and UAPs as he previously told Newsweek that he believes the U.S. government has "recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings."
"I think that a lot of that's being reverse-engineered right now, but we just don't understand it," Burchett told Newsweek in March.
According to a 2022 report from the Office for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), there were 510 UAP sightings in 2022, which reflected an increase of 366 from the previous report.
Burchett also previously said that he believes the U.S. government covered up a UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947.
"The military said we've recovered a saucer and then the next day they dropped this poor officer out and claim he holds up a piece of a hot air balloon and says, 'No in fact it was a hot air balloon,' which apparently was a top-secret program at the time and they've never would have disclosed it in any way," Burchett said during an appearance on NewsMax in June.
Newsweek reached out to Burchett's office via email for further comment.
