'Open secret': In big UFO hearing, what whistleblowers could reveal to US Congress

The US Congress will on Wednesday hold a hearing on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) where three high-ranking officers — an intelligence officer and two former Navy pilots — will testify about their encounters and knowledge in the subject.

The whistleblowers are expected to tell Congress in the much-anticipated hearing that unidentified flying objects are being seen so often they are an "open secret'" among US fighter pilots, according to MailOnline.

The hearing, by the House Oversight Committee in Washington DC, is expected to reveal several findings about the unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

The three officers who will testify in the hearing are US Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency David Grusch, US Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, and former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves.

In June this year, former intelligence officer Grusch claimed that the US had an illegal UFO retrieval programme and that he was given proof of its existence by some officers. “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 had told NewsNation.

“I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a programme,” he added.

Grusch alleged that the US had been recovering non-human craft for decades but said that he had not seen the photos of the craft himself.

In Wednesday's Congressional hearing, Grusch is expected to disclose more details about such craft, said Christopher Mellon, the former deputy assistant secretary of defence for intelligence. Mellon told NewsNation that Grusch “will provide some new information that we have not heard before”.

Meanwhile, Graves, a former F-18 pilot, will share that his squadron regularly witnessed unidentified craft sightings while they were posted off the coast of Virginia, US, in 2014, the report added.

In his opening remarks, "Graves will say that while most of the craft were detected on radar, they were also witnessed by pilots 'occasionally up close' with their own eyes", MailOnline reported. Graves will say these became so common that, "over time, UAP sightings became an open secret among our aircrew", according to the report.

Fravor was expected to talk about the 2004 Nimitz ‘Tic Tac” UFO incident. It pertains to an official video of a 2004 encounter released by the US government. It was taken from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz.

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