Elijah James "Eli" Crane is a Republican member of the U.S. House representing Arizona's 2nd congressional district, a former Navy SEAL and a member of the House Freedom Caucus. He sits on the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and in 2026 he joined the small bipartisan group of House members sponsoring legislation to gather government UAP records into a public collection.

Born in Tucson in 1980 and raised in Yuma, Crane left the University of Arizona during his senior year to enlist in the Navy shortly after the September 11 attacks. He served 13 years and completed five wartime deployments, three of them with SEAL Team 3. In 2012 he and his wife co-founded Bottle Breacher, a company that makes bottle openers from shell casings. The couple pitched it on the television program Shark Tank, won investment from Kevin O'Leary and Mark Cuban, and sold the business in 2022.

Crane won his seat in 2022 with Donald Trump's endorsement, defeating Democratic incumbent Tom O'Halleran, and was reelected in 2024 over former Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez. He quickly became one of the House's most persistent conservative dissenters, voting against Kevin McCarthy on every ballot of the January 2023 speaker election and joining the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy that October. In the 119th Congress he serves on the Homeland Security Committee and on the Oversight Committee, including its Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs.

His UAP work has been done largely alongside two fellow task force members, its chair Anna Paulina Luna and Rep. Eric Burlison. In March 2026 he was one of seven lawmakers who, according to Burlison, signed a letter asking Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the Energy Department for access to specific UAP files and metadata. In June, Burlison filed a revised UAP Disclosure Act as an amendment to the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, creating an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection at the National Archives and an independent review board. When the Rules Committee made it in order in July, Crane was listed as a cosponsor alongside André Carson, Luna, Jared Moskowitz and Nick Begich. Burlison announced on July 22, 2026, that the House had adopted the amendment, which moved to the Senate with the rest of the defense bill.

Crane's public record on UAP consists mainly of these legislative actions rather than statements about specific cases or claims about what the phenomena are. His name on the House version of the UAP Disclosure Act, a records framework first proposed in the Senate by Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds in 2023, places him among the conservative members who brought that model to adoption in the House in 2026.