The House Oversight Committee's Wednesday hearing with Department of Defense whistleblower David Grusch will "open the floodgates" on the issue of unidentified anomalous phenomena, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.
This is according to Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who led the committee's UAP investigation alongside Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL).
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Burchett, who has long sounded the alarm over UAPs and the Pentagon's relative secrecy on the matter, expects that the hearing will prompt more representatives to take the issue seriously. "For the longest time, the Pentagon has said they don't exist," he said. But now, he says members are coming to him because some of their prominent constituents are expressing concerns.
Revelations from the hearing could very likely headline Wednesday afternoon and evening news coverage. Burchett said, "Every major news outlet in the world has contacted me" about the hearing.
"I think it's huge and all this is going to do is open the floodgates," he added.
According to Nick Pope, a former UFO investigator for a now-discontinued division of the British Ministry of Defense, "all eyes will really be on David Grusch, just because his claims are the most sensational ones."
"It's one thing to tell a story exclusively to a particular news media outlet, but it's quite another to testify under oath to Congress," he explained. "It elevates it. It puts it in the spotlight in a way that a media interview doesn't do. It gives it that official seal of approval."
Pope predicted that this hearing wouldn't be the end of Congress's quest for more information on UAPs.
"I think the key question for tomorrow is: Can he give Congress anything that would help them validate those claims?" he said.
Grusch, a 36-year-old decorated former combat officer in Afghanistan, came forward last month with information about UAPs that he alleged has been withheld illegally from Congress.
He previously worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, and as recently as last summer, he was co-lead for the NGA's analysis of UAPs, also serving as representative to the UAP task force.
Grusch claimed that information on covert operations has been kept from Congress and that he was retaliated against for making disclosures alleging such. According to him, secretive programs have been retrieving both intact and partially intact crafts of nonhuman origin for decades. He also said the DOD still possesses them.
He further claimed that the United States and ally governments have made these discoveries, as well as defense contractors.
For Congress to conduct a substantive investigation into the Pentagon's programs concerning UAPs, lawmakers need to use Wednesday's hearing to determine the "Project Name, Director name, and lead agency" responsible for the retrieval of these crafts and fragments.
"That should go a long way towards enabling Congress to then go after this," Pope said.
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Grusch, however, will not be the only witness during the 10 a.m. Oversight hearing. Retired Cmdr. David Fravor and former Navy pilot Ryan Graves claim to have seen UAPs during their tenures.
The hearing will focus specifically on the implications to national security, public safety, and government that are presented by UAPs.