Gillibrand is sponsoring an amendment she hopes to attach to the National Defense Authorization Act due this year to mandate that no money be spent on SAPs unless reported to Congress. “So if there are any SAPs that are somehow outside the normal chain of command and outside the normal credit process, they have to disclose that to Congress,” says Gilibrand.
Does she think the whistleblower’s claims are true? “I have no idea,” says Gillibrand. “So I’m going to do the work and analyze it and figure it out.”
Other senators say there isn’t much to gain from it. “In general, I would view many of these reports with skepticism,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who serves on the intelligence committee. While Heinrich continues to have doubts about the whistleblower, he says UAPs are an enigma that the federal government must address.
“What I take seriously is that sometimes we have really good, decorated pilots and navigators who experience things that we can’t explain, so we need to collect data so we can figure out what’s going on,” says Heinrich. .
Yet there is radio silence among other senators. WIRED sent an inquiry to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner; in less than a minute, the Virginia Democrat staff replied, “We have no comment on this – thanks!”
When we caught the senator in the marble halls of the Capitol, Warner kept tripping over his own thoughts. “A lot has come in. Frankly, I need to find more information on this,” says Warner.
As for the accusation that the federal government lied to Congress and hid some SAPs for decades? “We’ve heard these allegations before,” Warner says, before reining himself in again. “Let me get some information first.”
“None of it is good”
Lawmakers are still waiting for more answers about the spy balloons that dominated the news — and US skies — at the beginning of the year, especially regarding the four objects the Air Force shot down in an eight-day period in February. In the aftermath of those military battles, the Biden administration held secret briefings for members of Congress, but they weren’t easy, at least initially, until lawmakers pushed officials on UAPs.
“They talked about the balloons, and then several senators pointed it out, ‘Wait a minute: we’ve had a lot of unidentified anomalous phenomena for years,’ and then the military briefer said, ‘True. Right,'” says Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri. “The bottom line is they’ve had thousands of sightings of these things over the years, which was news to me. So I’m not necessarily surprised by these latest allegations, because it’s pretty close to which they reluctantly admitted to us in the briefing.
While not necessarily surprised by Grusch’s claims, lawmakers of all stripes are disturbed by reports of UAPs hovering over US military sites.
“It’s not good. It’s all not good,” says Hawley. “I think we want to get to the bottom of this. I find it disturbing.”
