News / Disclosure

"The 2023 UFO Hearings: What the Witnesses Said Under Oath"

"In April and July 2023, US lawmakers took public evidence on UAP. What AARO's director told the Senate, and what Grusch, Fravor and Graves told the House — and what has and has not been verified since."

By Track the Unknown · 31 October 2026

Two hearings in 2023 moved the subject further into the open than decades of file releases had managed. The question is usually what did they actually say — so here is the testimony, with claims marked as claims.

19 April 2023: AARO's first open testimony

At a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on 19 April 2023, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, gave his first open congressional testimony. He described AARO's progress: several hundred reports collected since the office was founded in 2022, work with the FAA and other agencies, and a mandate to resolve cases against known objects and phenomena. He told senators the office had found no evidence so far of extraterrestrial activity, and no evidence of a hidden programme, in what it had examined. It was a deliberately dry session — the tone of an office still building its database rather than closing its files.

26 July 2023: three witnesses under oath

The House Oversight Committee heard from three men, and the contrast between them mattered.

David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who worked at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, testified that he had been informed of a decades-long programme to retrieve crashed craft and reverse-engineer their technology, and that material had been recovered. He has not publicly provided the evidence for these claims, which he says he gave to investigators in classified channels; he had earlier filed a complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, which found it credible. In March 2024, AARO's historical review of the record concluded there was no verifiable evidence that any US government programme had recovered extraterrestrial technology. Grusch's supporters dispute the report's scope and access. That dispute is unresolved; the claims remain claims.

Commander David Fravor (ret.) described the November 2004 encounter off the coast of southern California, when pilots from the Nimitz carrier strike group were redirected from training to investigate an object tracked by another ship's radar. Fravor testified that he and his crew observed a white, wingless object roughly the length of a fighter's fuselage, hovering over a disturbance in the water, which appeared to mirror his own descent before accelerating away. The Pentagon has confirmed as authentic the Navy videos from that period, including the infrared clip recorded during the encounter — though the authenticity of footage is not the same as proof of what it shows.

Lieutenant Ryan Graves (ret.) told the committee that in 2014 and 2015, aircrew flying off the US East Coast detected objects on radar in restricted training airspace that they then encountered visually, and that reporting on such encounters was effectively informal. He later founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a group collecting reports from military and commercial pilots, on the argument that the reporting route for aircrew was inadequate.

What the hearings did and did not do

A hearing is not a trial and testimony is not evidence of the underlying claims — but it is a sworn account, and it fixes a record. What none of the July witnesses did was publicly produce evidence for the most explosive allegation. It went, by his account, to investigators through classified channels; what came out publicly was the allegation itself, and the dispute over it continues. Presenting that dispute honestly means saying two things at once: the claims have not been verified, and AARO's review has not satisfied everyone that the question has been put to bed.

More hearings and further declassifications have followed since, and AARO's reporting continues. But the pair of 2023 sessions remains the reference point for anyone trying to separate what was actually said from what was later claimed on their behalf.

What changed afterwards

The hearings fed directly into two things. First, they put whistleblower protections into the open: whether insiders can come forward to Congress and to AARO without reprisal became a live legislative question. Second, they set up the fight over the UAP Disclosure Act, which senators attached to the 2024 defence bill and which emerged from conference far weaker — see our explanation of the act and its history.

For what the Pentagon's own office has concluded since, including its historical review, see what AARO has found, and for the longer arc of incidents and programmes, the UFO timeline.

Resources

Tags: congressional hearings, house oversight, david grusch, david fravor, ryan graves, aaro, testimony, disclosure, whistleblower, 2023