A recent congressional hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), commonly known as UFOs, has revealed what one expert said is a decades-long government effort to reverse engineer UAPs.

Retired 14-year Air Force major and later National Geospatial Intelligence Agency officer David Grusch said that as a lead in the agency’s UAP program he learned about a government program to retrieve crashed vessels and replicate the technology.

When asked by a congress member if the government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, Grusch said he could not discuss that subject in a public setting.

He did say that “non-human biologics” have been retrieved from crashes, based on assessments from people he talked to that had direct knowledge of the program.

People have also been physically hurt by UAP technology itself and by efforts to cover it up, he said, based on his personal knowledge.

When asked if anyone had been murdered over these things he responded: “I have to be careful [answering] that question. | directed people with that knowledge to the appropriate authorities.”

The Pentagon has denied Grusch’s claims, the AP reports.

The Defense Department said in a statement that they do not have “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Grusch became a government whistleblower after his discovery and has faced retaliation for his statements, he said.

Former Navy Commander David Fravor also testified before the House Committee on Oversight on July 26 to describe his personal encounter with a UAP about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego in November 2004.

He said he and his three colleagues witnessed a white water over the ocean and a white “Tic Tac” shaped object moving “very abruptly” over the white water.

The object had no rotors, or wings, and no thermal exhaust he said. When he flew closer to the object, the object began to move closer to his plane. When they were about half a mile apart, the object “rapidly accelerated and disappeared right in front of our aircraft.” The white water on the ocean had also disappeared.

They were then told by an air controller that the object had reappeared on radar about 60 miles east.

“This Tic Tac Object had just traveled 60 miles in a very short period of time (less than a minute), was far superior in performance to my brandnew F/A-18F and did not operate with any of the known aerodynamic principles that we expect for objects that fly in our atmosphere,” Fravor said.

The incident was seen by four crew members, and captured on video, and was never investigated until he was contacted by naval intelligence five years later, he said.

“It’s probably the most credible UFO sighting in history based on all the sensors that were tracking it,” he said. “And for us to get visual it goes against the naysayers who say it’s something on the screen or whatever. I mean there’s four sets of human eyeballs on it.”

In 2014, former F-18 pilot Ryan Graves also witnessed a UAP off the coast of Virginia Beach.

In his testimony last week, Graves said that after his squadron upgraded their radar systems they began to detect unknown objects in U.S. airspace and they became a common occurrence on radar and sometimes up close.

During air combat training, a pilot saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere sitting motionless in the wind causing them to terminate their mission and return to base. While they submitted a safety report, there was no official acknowledgement of the incident, he said.

The UAP they witnessed surpassed human understanding and technology. They could accelerate up to Mach 1 and hold their position in “hurricane-force” winds, operating continuously throughout the day without any means of propulsion or lift.

Commercial aircrew have also witnessed UAP but they are directed to report the incidents to civilian organization and have no protections against retaliation.

“If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, it is a concern for safety of flight,” he said citing a UAP Task Force reported in 2021 that found 11 near misses with UAP.