Rick Crawford is a Republican congressman who has represented Arkansas's 1st Congressional District since 2011 and has chaired the House Intelligence Committee since January 2025. His most substantial UAP moment came in May 2022, when he was the ranking member of the intelligence subcommittee that held Congress's first open hearing on the subject in more than half a century.

Born in 1966 at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, the son of an Air Force serviceman, Crawford graduated from high school in Hudson, New Hampshire, and served in the Army from 1985 to 1989 as an explosive ordnance disposal technician, leaving as a sergeant. After a rodeo injury in 1993 he became a rodeo announcer and released a country album, then earned a degree in agricultural business and economics from Arkansas State University in 1996. He worked as a news anchor and farm reporter at KAIT-TV in Jonesboro and as farm director at KFIN-FM, and he owned the AgWatch Network, a farm news service.

Crawford won his seat in 2010, succeeding Democrat Marion Berry, and has been reelected every two years since; he is running again in 2026. He serves on the Agriculture and Transportation and Infrastructure committees and joined the Intelligence Committee in 2017. Speaker Mike Johnson named him chairman on January 16, 2025, a day after removing Mike Turner, a change Democrats warned could weaken the panel's independence. Crawford pledged "credible and robust oversight" of the intelligence agencies' funding and activities. In 2026 he appeared on NewsNation as chairman to discuss arrests near a British air base used by U.S. forces in the Iran war and an alleged plot to attack the Mall of America.

At the May 17, 2022 hearing, where Pentagon intelligence chief Ronald Moultrie and deputy naval intelligence director Scott Bray testified, Crawford said that beyond "the hype and speculation" UAP raised important underlying issues, though he said he was more interested in Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. He argued that pilots should be able to report what they observe without stigma and that classification "exists to protect national security, not to try to hide the truth." His questions covered sensor quality, the reporting chain, leak control and how the Pentagon's new UAP office would prevent intelligence surprises, and he asked the witnesses for a specific example of an object that could not be explained as human-made or natural.

Crawford's UAP record beyond that hearing is thin. As chairman he leads one of the House panels with jurisdiction over intelligence-community UAP reporting, and advocates including Matt Ford of the Good Trouble Show have tagged him in 2026 appeals for disclosure, while his public appearances as chairman have centered on terrorism, Iran and intelligence oversight. His 2022 framing of UAP as a question of foreign technology, pilot reporting and over-classification remains his clearest statement on the subject.