James A. "Jim" Himes is an American Democratic politician who has represented Connecticut's 4th Congressional District, covering most of the state's southwest corner, since 2009. A former investment banker and affordable-housing executive, he has served on the House Intelligence Committee since 2013 and became its ranking member in January 2023, a post that gives him access to some of the government's most sensitive intelligence programs.

Himes was born on July 5, 1966, in Lima, Peru, to American parents, and spent his early childhood in Peru and Colombia, where his father worked for the Ford Foundation and UNICEF. He moved to New Jersey with his mother and sisters at about age ten, graduated from Harvard in 1988 and studied Latin America at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent about twelve years at Goldman Sachs, rising to vice president, then ran the New York City office of Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that finances affordable housing. In Greenwich he chaired the housing authority's board and was elected to the town's finance board.

In 2008 Himes unseated Republican Christopher Shays, becoming the first Democrat to hold the district since 1969. He sits on the Financial Services Committee, chaired the New Democrat Coalition from 2017 to 2019, and chaired the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth from 2021 to 2023.

Himes took part in the May 2022 intelligence subcommittee hearing that was Congress's first open session on UAP in more than half a century. He said any stigma that kept military personnel from reporting sightings was itself a national security threat, and, "in the service of sort of reducing speculation and conspiracy theories," asked whether "we can't explain" meant officials were holding unidentified materials. Scott Bray of naval intelligence answered, "we have no material." After David Grusch alleged in 2023 that the government held recovered craft, Himes told Ask a Pol that he had been "assured by all of the various units that there was no material" and was skeptical.

He has kept that stance as the Pentagon began releasing UAP files in 2026. In March, asked by Ask a Pol's Matt Laslo about the president's disclosure promise, he joked about aliens kept at "Area 52," welcomed the move as taking pressure off him, and said, "I would love the public to see what I've seen." In July he said he had looked at "almost all of the compartments" relevant to UAP but was not current on the Pentagon's recent releases, and that the UAP Disclosure Act had not come up in the intelligence committee's negotiations. As the committee's senior Democrat, and one who says he has reviewed nearly all the relevant classified compartments, Himes has become a leading congressional skeptic of whistleblower claims about hidden UAP programs.