Appearing Friday on Wisconsin Public Radio's "Central Time," Grothman acknowledged that the hearing had by far the most public interest of any he's seen recently. And he said there is a legitimate public interest in understanding what the government knows about UAPs that have been spotted.

"Is it something that other nations have developed that we are nowhere near developing? We ought to know that," Grothman said. "And if it is something from outer space, and there are other people monitoring us, well, we ought to know that."

Grothman said he wants to see "a little more transparency from the military" on the matter.
...
Grothman said he will receive a briefing on classified information in coming months and plans to meet with Grusch "and see what more he has to say." But overall, he used the hearing to push for greater transparency from the military on its observations.
...
"We went through a period in the late 1960s, the early '70s in which there were a lot of rumors that these things were out there," Grothman said. "As far as I know, to this day the files are not released on what pilots saw in the '60s and '70s."

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Matt Laslo: "Do you have any questions lingering for the whistleblower?"

Marco Rubio: "Um, do I have any questions?"

ML: "Do you think he classifies as a whistleblower?"

MR: "Well, the inspector general has deemed it an urgent and credible threat to the...so that's how it's been referred to us, so I have no reason..."

ML: "Yeah? So you're taking it credibly? Do you want to hear from him and others — behind closed doors? In the open?"

MR: "Well, we've begun that process. Obviously, it's up to the chairman [Mark Warner] to decide what direction to go, but I know we've already begun that process. I think, he's interviewed with staff already, so."

ML: "What do you think of the notion that there are SAPs hidden from Congress?"

MR: "Those claims have been made for years, and that's certainly something we'd be very disturbed by — and that's what the gist of the whistleblower's claim is, that there are programs that should have been notified to Congress that were not. So we're gonna be interested in that no matter what the topic is."

ML: "And that's kinda new compared to others in the past?"

MR: "Well, we've heard those claims in the past. This is the first one that's gone through this process."

ML: "Interesting."

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) exclusively tells Ask a Pol that she's requested a private meeting with Grusch, the former US intelligence official who testified before the US House Oversight Committee last week. And she wants Grusch to sit down with All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) Director Sean Kirkpatrick.

As chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats & Capabilities, Gillibrand is leading the Senate investigation into UAPs (or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, according to NASA).

Gillibrand tells Ask a Pol's Matt Laslo, she recently met with [AARO director] Kirkpatrick, and now she wants him to sit down with Grusch.

"I've asked for a meeting, and I've asked for Dr. Kirkpatrick to meet with him too," Gillibrand says.

Besides the private meetings, Gillibrand says she still wants to hear from Grusch in a public hearing. The senator, who also serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also says to expect another public UAP report from AARO by January or so.

"They're very serious allegations that we have to get to the bottom of," Gillibrand said Friday.

Gillibrand spearheaded the formation of an office, called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO. The office is charged with investigating over 600 UAP reports, including some of those mentioned by the whistleblowers last week. Some of these investigations, Gillibrand said, resulted in non-extraterrestrial explanations like weather balloons and spy drones. But those still raise significant concerns.

Gillibrand said the Defense Department hasn't responded to her requests for more information and she doesn't know why.

"I don't know,' Gillibrand said. "I don't know why. I don't know if it doesn't exist. I don't know if we're not asking the right questions. I don't know. I just know I have no, I have nothing to confirm those allegations."

Gillibrand said one of her foremost concerns over UAPs is the safety of pilots and other service members.

"It's sort of jaw-dropping, and how do you come back from that?" Mace asked, noting that Grusch is a retired military officer who has "very legitimate credentials coming to Congress before us and making these claims."

Mace said Grusch agreed to follow up with her after the hearing to provide a list of future witnesses, "both friendly and hostile, that could corroborate the information that he was bringing forward," she said, noting that much of what he was talking about was classified.

"But at the end of the day, I don't think this is really about little green men. This is about government transparency versus government secrecy," she said, emphasizing it is about the misappropriation of funds, which leads to many other questions.

"How much money is being spent? What's it being spent on? And are our government agencies hiding anything from Congress and therefore hiding it from the American people?" she asked. "The American people deserve the right to know; it's about national security. It's about technology. Is this AI-driven? Have we, as a government, developed our AI to...such an advanced level?"

"I think it's about energy. If you can defy the law, if the laws of physics and gravity are being defined in the way that these pilots have told us as being defied, then who has the power to create that kind of energy? Do we have that technology, or is it our adversaries?" she asked, emphasizing that there are so many "burning questions" following that testimony.

"The American people deserve the right to know" where their money is being invested, Mace said, explaining that she gets extremely frustrated on these issues and has trouble with some government witnesses.

"I sat in the chair as the subcommittee chairman of the Cybersecurity Committee on Oversight on Wednesday, and I literally cursed out my government witness because the guy that I asked to show up refused to show up. He sent one of his underlings, who refused to answer our questions and then laughed at us. Because these guys, these bureaucrats, they never get fired. They never lose their jobs. No one ever goes to jail. They're never held accountable, and they're mocking our institutions," she explained.

"They make a mockery out of your representatives...by just obfuscating and hiding, and they know they can get away with it. Nobody is ever held accountable...It's extraordinarily frustrating. I just call it like I see it. I walk in. I ask questions. I ask tough questions. I just want the truth that even if our government has made mistakes, or messed up, or wasted billions of dollars, we just want to know, and we want to improve the system and be completely transparent and accountable to the American people, but nobody seems to want to do that," Mace added, noting she has spoken to pilots over the years who have seen unexplained things as well.

"If this is really going on, it'll be the biggest story in history, not just U.S. history, but world history," she said, inquiring if these programs exist.

"Why can't Congress be informed about what's really going on in this country?" she asked, adding that it is "deeply frustrating because of all the cover-ups that we see, the corruption, [and] the amount of money that's wasted."

"The government has more information than it's sharing," Ratcliffe told anchor Maria Bartiromo. "Unfortunately, the Biden administration made the decision to really not reveal much, and now you have these House Republicans having to have these public hearings to talk about more of this information.

"I will say this, I believe there should be more transparency on this issue — but not full transparency," he added, noting the government's national security duties.

Questioned on whether the federal government was aware of the origins of supposed UAP sightings, he said: "There's a lot of things that are unexplained[...]I've gone to the edge of talking about information that's classified; I can't go over that line."

"The Department is aware of Dr. Kirkpatrick's post, which are his personal opinions expressed in his capacity as a private citizen and we won't comment directly on the contents of the post," Gough told The Debrief in an email.

"We do want to reinforce the Department's unwavering commitment to openness and accountability to the American people and Congress. The dedicated military service members, civilian personnel, and federal contractors who support AARO's efforts are deserving of the full confidence of our lawmakers and the American public."

"While much remains to be done to fulfill AARO's mandate, AARO's committed team has made great progress since its establishment only a year ago," Gough said.

"It would be interesting to have him [Dr Sean Kirkpatrick] sit down in a skiff [i.e. SCIF] with Grusch.

"I want to remind people that I actually asked Grusch about Kirkpatrick during the testimony because Grusch said that he brought concerns to Kirkpatrick and that he didn't follow up on them or investigate."

"I think the stake of our Constitutional Republic is on the line here.

"A lot of people say, 'well, how is this pertinent to what's happening right now with the economy and the government? When you have a government that's hiding information from its citizens, you no longer have a representative government.

"So this is absolutely about accountability and transparency."

...

Representative Luna told Liberation Times that she expects a response from Speaker McCarthy [on the creation of a special committee on UAPs] following the August recess.

Further actions are also planned - with Representative Luna confirming more hearings are on the way, stating, "we're going to do some field hearings."

That could mean Congressional public hearings held outside of United States Air Force facilities, such as Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where Representatives Luna, Burchett, and Gaetz recently confronted officials regarding a UAP incident.

...

Representative Luna also confirmed to Liberation Times that she would support invoking the Holman Rule, commenting:

"I fully support it if we're continuing to be stonewalled. And I think that my other colleagues will also agree...if there are going to be people that are preventing this information from coming out, they need to be held accountable."

"At the time, due to my extensive executive-level intelligence support duties, I was cleared to literally all relevant compartments and in a position of extreme trust in both my military and civilian capacities," Grusch said in his opening statement.

"I was informed, in the course of my official duties, of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access to those additional read-ons when I requested it. I made the decision based on the data I collected, to report this information to my superiors and multiple inspectors general, and in effect become a whistleblower," Grusch added.

Grusch served in the U.S. Air Force and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency where he was the agency's co-lead in identifying UFOs and reported to the UAP Task Force (UAPTF).

He was a member of the UAPTF from 2019-2021 and was told by the UAPTF director in 2019 to identify all Special Access Programs and Controlled Access programs to carry out the agency's mission.

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