Anna Paulina Luna
Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna first got interested in UFOs when serving in the Air Force. She is pictured with husband Andrew Gamberzky, an Air Force combat controller
A group of lawmakers is planning to put the search for the truth about UFOs front and center by demanding a special committee with the power to prize information from government that could prove whistleblowers' claims of a secret program hiding 'non-human' crashed craft.

Four members wrote to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Friday requesting a Select Committee on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena to ramp up their probe.

One of the signers, Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, told DailyMail.com she and her colleagues would not stop until they got to the bottom of the UFO mystery, and threatened to defund Pentagon bosses' salaries if they didn't cough up their alleged secrets.

The news comes after an historic congressional hearing last Wednesday where 14-year intelligence veteran David Grusch testified under oath that he had evidence of a secret alien ship crash retrieval program - including photographs and interviews with insiders.

House Oversight Committee member Luna - who says she first became interested in UFOs while serving in the Air Force - revealed she is asking the Defense Department and intelligence agencies for the classified reports Grusch made, including his alleged evidence.

She also vowed to probe his claim that he had been threatened for coming forward, and that others may have even been killed.

'To me, that is extremely scary. That's not how a republic runs itself, that's how a mob runs itself,' Luna, 34, told DailyMail.com.

'We're trying to go after all of them,' the Florida congresswoman - who is expecting her first child - said. 'This is a massive deal and we have to get to the bottom of it.

'We are requesting the Inspector General report that Grusch was testifying to in the hearing. That's going to be pretty important, because that contains a lot of bombshell information from what we're gathering.

'We're actually trying to get a select committee under Oversight so that we can do the subpoenaing,' she added.

Luna joined Republicans Matt Gaetz and Tim Burchett as well as Democrat Jared Moskowitz writing a letter on July 27 to Speaker McCarthy requesting the new UFO committee.

If granted new powers, Luna said she would be hauling in front of lawmakers 'people that know more information that can divulge and can possibly even protect lives.'

'I want to see names, documentation, images and footage. According to what Grusch says and what I have seen, that exists. So let's try to declassify it,' she said.

In Wednesday's hearing, Grusch even offered Congresswoman Nancy Mace to write a list of 'hostile' and cooperative witnesses for the committee to target - though Mace's spokesman said the former top intelligence official has not followed through yet.

Among other measures Luna and Tennessee congressman Burchett are proposing in their UFO hunt are 'field hearings', to grill Pentagon officials at locations where they believe crashed craft may be stashed.

They are also planning to give teeth to whistleblower protection laws, with 'punitive actions for those that try to harm, intimidate or intentionally discredit whistleblowers that are coming forward with information that is pertinent to national security and the US government,' Luna said.

'It needs to be so tight, that people will fear if they come after a whistleblower.'

And if denied records or access, the Florida Republican said she is ready to strip government officials of their salaries.

'We pay these people's salaries, we're paying into these programs billions of dollars and yet they don't want to share this information. I just disagree with that,' she said.

'If we continue to see this wall of silence, where they're giving us the runaround, we reserve the right to actually defund positions.'

Although he dropped several bombshells, including sworn claims of a decades-long government coverup of crashed 'non-human' spacecraft, Grusch answered many of the lawmakers' questions by saying he was unable to divulge classified data outside of a secure environment.

Luna and Burchett complained that they had tried to book a session in a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) ahead of the hearing, but intelligence agency civil servants turned them down.

'The reasoning for why we could not get the SCIF according to the Hill was that Grusch did not have active security clearances,' Luna told DailyMail.com.

A source close to Grusch said he retained his clearance after leaving government, as is normal for recent veterans, but that he needs the Pentagon to 'read him back in' and provide new non-disclosure agreements for him to sign before he can talk freely to House members.

'It's pretty disturbing. We're talking about him saying he was in fear of his life, that people have been harmed in the process, technology that we don't necessarily have,' Luna said.

'And yet we were not authorized any access to any of that information. And we have 'Need To Know' clearances. We have to find out what happened.'

Luna revealed that her interest in UFOs was first piqued while serving as an Air Force airfield manager at Portland Air National Guard Base, Oregon, in 2018 before becoming a politician.

'During shifts one day, there had been a response from some of the pilots to something that had violated our airspace,' she said.

'When they got back, I asked them what happened. They said 'we can't really talk about it.' Later on, one of the pilots pulled me aside and was like, we think it might have been a UFO or UAP.

'This was a pretty credible person, I obviously knew them to be sane, of sound mind.'