Aliens materializing from extra dimensions. Spaceships the size of football fields, hovering silently near U.S. military bases. Americans who knew too much, killed by malevolent government agents intent on concealing the biggest story in human history.
The amazing claims, first made last summer during a U.S. House of Representatives hearing, reinvigorated the national curiosity over UFOs, or what is now referred to as UAPs – Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
Believers in such things thought the government’s tight-knit secrecy was unraveling, and they were heartened when a group of lawmakers received a classified briefing from the intelligence community’s inspector general.
One of the select lawmakers in the SCIF — the sensitive compartmented information facility — was Eric Burlison, the first-term Republican congressman from Battlefield.
After that briefing, Burlison sounded ready to dig into the government’s decades-long investigation into UFOs. Whistleblowers told Burlison the government had a clandestine recovery and reverse engineering program and was in possession of “non-human” spacecraft and the bodies of their dead pilots.
“There's certain locations that they've provided that we can certainly look into,” Burlison said then. “That's what I'm looking forward to.”
Six months later, Burlison sounds less optimistic: “What I’ve been told is that the locations that we’ve been given, the moment those are mentioned, or we create a formal investigation, things will be moved.”
It’s not that Burlison has given up. To the contrary. He wants House leaders to form a select subcommittee to investigate the federal government’s response to UAP. He believes there’s a cover-up and he’s determined to find out what’s being hidden from public view.
He doesn’t think it’s extraterrestrial pilots or their spaceships.
In an in-depth interview with the Hauxeda, Burlison said he is “more skeptical” than ever of claims that aliens are visiting Earth.
“The least likely scenario is that you have an evolved form of life from another planet that traveled light years to get here, and then doesn’t have the technological capability to survive once they get here — and continues to send vehicles to this planet, and crash,” Burlison said. “As much as people believe in that scenario ... I think if you study the probability of it, it’s the least likely.”
Related: interview transcript
Eric Burlison interview transcript: ET is ‘the least likely scenario’
The Hauxeda interviewed U.S. Rep. Eric Burlison in Springfield on Tuesday, March 26, 2024. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Burlison one of six members of UAP Caucus
When he began his job as congressman from the 7th District of Missouri in January 2023, one of the first things Eric Burlison did was help create a UFO clique in the House of Representatives.
Five Republicans and a Democrat are members of the UAP Caucus, “a focused group within the U.S. Congress dedicated to the study, disclosure, and policy development surrounding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.”
It was a natural fit for Burlison. From an early age he was mesmerized by esoteric science:
“Ever since I was a child I studied quantum physics and quantum mechanics. It’s always been fascinating to me.”
Burlison’s background as a software engineer and business analyst gave him some sway as a freshman. Plus, he was intrigued by the UAP debate. “It’s an existential discussion,” he said. “Of all the items we have up there, it makes the job a little bit interesting.”
His timing and luck were good. The same month Burlison took office, the Director of National Intelligence released a report that said sightings of UFOs were on the rise — and that some of the strange craft “demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities and require further analysis.”
Have we recovered ‘non-human biologic’ material?
Over the next few months:
- The U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon
- Leaders from the intelligence community convened an unprecedented national security briefing over UAP activity at Wright Patterson Air Force Base
- NASA held its first-ever public meeting on UAP
Then David Grusch showed up.
The former Air Force office and intelligence official testified before the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs. He claimed the government had recovered several UFOs, not from this world, and “non-human biologic” material from the pilots of the craft.
Grusch called it a “multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” and said government officials had purposely kept the information from Congress.
The inspector general for the intelligence community said Grusch’s claims were “credible and urgent.”
As a member of that House Oversight subcommittee, Burlison was drawn to the talk of a government cover-up. “We cannot have taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that are being kept from Congress,” he said. “I think we have an accountability and a responsibility to bring oversight over those agencies.”
He is sure the cover-up is real, and ongoing: “We keep getting hit with a dead end as far as being able to get access to information.”
He is not so sure that Congress can — or will — do anything about it.
Tumult in House could impede effort
Part of the problem is the current tumult in the House of Representatives.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has filed a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. If she succeeds in ousting Rep. Mike Johnson, “then everything resets and we have to start over with the next person,” Burlison said.
Burlison wants to make sure a special committee on UAP is part of the negotiations. If there is a new speaker, he or she will likely need to commit to the select panel to get Burlison’s support.
“In order to investigate this properly, we’re going to need to bring in people that are knowledgeable about the intelligence community — the people that know where the bodies lie,” Burlison said.
But getting to those bodies will be complicated, even if Burlison gets his UAP panel.
Grusch’s credibility has taken a hit since last summer’s blockbuster allegations. Rep. Mike Turner, an 11-term Republican congressman from Ohio, thinks Grusch is gaslighting gullible lawmakers. “I always love it when you have somebody who comes forward and testifies about things they don't know anything about,” Turner said.
Burlison is more circumspect. “I believe they believe what they’re telling us,” Burlison said of Grusch and his fellow UAP whistleblowers.
Further complicating the issue — the conspiracy theories.
Public believes something is out there
More than 60 percent of Americans believe the government knows more about UFOs than it is telling the public, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.
Another camp turns that theory on its head and insists: UFOs aren’t real, but true believers in the government have manipulated half-truths into a propaganda campaign that fooled Congress into going on a paranormal goose chase.
It’s an extraterrestrial version of the self-licking ice cream cone — a program that only exists to justify its own existence.
Burlison doesn’t buy into either theory.
“I am skeptical of the idea that it’s a psyop the intelligence community is creating for us to be afraid so we spend more money,” he said.
‘UAPs are a fact’
As for UFOs/UAP? Burlison has never seen one. Asked whether he believes they exist, given all he has been told in classified settings, Burlison said this:
“UAPs are a fact. What they are is a mystery … what I can say is there are objects in the sky that we cannot identify. Whether they are from some other planet, or that they are the result of our advanced defense contractors, is what I’m trying to ascertain.”
He said it’s “likely” that a secret reverse-engineering program exists within the Pentagon. If that’s the case, he has a more prosaic explanation for it: “You’re paying one contractor to reverse-engineer the product that crashed that was being experimented on by another defense contractor.”
Translation: It’s just us.
Maybe.
“I don’t know that I believe anybody just yet,” Burlison said.
Pushing forward with other business
There are no UAP congressional hearings scheduled for 2024. Burlison doesn’t know when, or if, that will change. If the Oversight subcommittee takes up the issue again, Burlison wants to focus on how much tax money has gone to pay for UAP investigations. He said he has no idea what the bill is, and in an $850 billion defense budget there are plenty of places to hide a few million bucks.
In the meantime, Burlison is pushing his work on local issues as he runs for reelection.
He’s introduced a bill that would exempt large propane tanks from what he calls “burdensome regulations.”
This week he proposed the Table Rock Lake Property Protection Act. It would allow lakeside property owners to keep their septic tanks on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
He’s still fascinated by his UFO work.
“At this time I haven’t exhausted all avenues,” he said. “I think that what we’re trying to do is find a way where we can explore each Special Access Program and be able to determine what these programs are doing. If we explore every one of the programs being reported, at least we’ve explored every road and avenue, and if each one comes to a dead end, at least I can report that.”
He acknowledges the impossibility of convincing true believers that aliens are not traveling billions of miles to visit Earth: “So the question is, what will give people enough confidence?”
The answer: probably nothing.
“There are going to be people skeptical of anything,” Burlison said. “There are people, still today, that don’t believe we went to the moon. Or they believe the Earth is flat. Unfortunately, even when people are staring in the face of facts, sometimes they will deny the truth.”
