2025 House UAP Transparency Hearing

On September 9, 2025, the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets held a hearing titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection" in Room HVC-210 of the Capitol Visitor Center. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who chairs the task force, presided. The majority's witnesses were Air Force veteran Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Navy Senior Chief Alexandro Wiggins, KLAS-TV chief investigative reporter George Knapp and Air Force veteran Dylan Borland. The minority called Joe Spielberger, senior policy counsel at the Project On Government Oversight. It was the third UAP hearing held under the Oversight Committee since July 2023.

Luna opened by saying the subject was "national security, government accountability, and the American people's right to the truth," and argued that reports made through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and the intelligence community inspector general were "too often brushed aside." Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett backed the hearing's whistleblower focus but said there was "good reason to believe that most UAPs have origins far closer to home," noting that NASA had found no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin. Nuccetelli, a former Air Force military police officer, described reports of unidentified craft at Vandenberg Air Force Base between 2003 and 2005 and said he had given records to AARO and the FBI. Wiggins, speaking in a personal capacity while still on active duty, described four "Tic Tac"-like objects that he said were seen and tracked from the USS Jackson off Southern California in February 2023, and called such encounters "first and foremost a safety issue."

Borland, a former geospatial intelligence specialist, testified that he saw a silent triangular craft about 100 feet long at Langley Air Force Base in 2012. He also said a later position in a Special Access Program exposed him to information about what he called a "UAP legacy crash retrieval program," and that agencies had retaliated against him after he went to AARO and the inspector general in 2023. Knapp told the panel he was "not a whistleblower, and not a UFO witness," and argued that documents released under the Freedom of Information Act contradict decades of official reassurance. He said he had confirmed that Robert Bigelow's company once negotiated with a senior Lockheed Martin executive to receive unusual material, a deal he said was not completed. Spielberger focused on whistleblower law rather than the UAP accounts, urging Congress to give intelligence and military whistleblowers independent reporting channels and stronger protection from retaliation.

The hearing's most widely shared moment came from Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, who played a video he said had been given to him. He said it was taken on October 30, 2024, by an MQ-9 drone tracking an object off the coast of Yemen, and that a second drone fired a Hellfire missile at it. In the footage the object appears to be struck and continue on its path. Knapp said the missile "bounced right off," and Luna later replayed the clip and asked the witnesses whether anything in the U.S. arsenal could do the same; Nuccetelli and Wiggins said nothing they knew of could. Asked by ABC News to authenticate the footage, a defense official said "we do not have anything to provide on this."

The hearing fed directly into the task force's later work. In a March 31, 2026 letter that cited the September session and said whistleblowers had told the panel AARO held additional video records, Luna asked Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to deliver 46 UAP video files by April 14. Borland co-founded Vanguard Enterprise, a nonprofit for UAP whistleblowers launched on July 4, 2026, with Nuccetelli on its leadership team, and Wiggins said in a September 2026 podcast interview that AARO contacted his command after he declined to repeat his account in a secure facility. With an active-duty sailor, two veterans and a journalist testifying under oath, the hearing made the treatment of UAP witnesses a central subject of House oversight.