UFO suspicions high as ex-intelligence officer’s claims to be investigated

A majority of U.S. eligible voters believe the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than the public ahead of an investigation into claims about the existence of spacecraft, according to new polling exclusively conducted for Newsweek.

The poll, carried out by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, comes as the House of Representatives has said it would launch an investigation after a former intelligence official said the U.S. was in possession of non-human vehicles.

The survey, conducted on July 6, found 57 percent of respondents believed that the U.S. government has more information about UFOs and alien life than it publicly shared. And 21 percent said they did not think this was the case, while 22 percent said they did not know.

In June, former U.S. Air Force and intelligence officer David Grusch told The Debrief that “intact and partially intact vehicles” had been recovered by authorities, and that information was being hidden from U.S. lawmakers.

James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, then said there would be a hearing into the claims. The investigation is to be led by GOP Representatives Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who told Newsweek that retrieved UFO technology could be “being reverse-engineered right now,” but we “don’t understand” how it works.

Grusch then told theNewsNationnetwork that objects of “non-human” origin had been discovered and collected.

“These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed,” Grusch added. He accused the U.S. government of running a “sophisticated disinformation campaign” to hide this information.

“Sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it’s true,” said Grusch.

A U.S. Defense Department spokesperson said following the NewsNation interview that it had “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Newsweek has reached out to the U.S. Defense Department for further comment via email.

When asked whether they believed the U.S. government possesses “non-human original technical vehicles,” 34 percent of those asked in the polling for Newsweek responded affirmatively, with 30 percent disagreeing with this statement. And 36 percent did not know.

Just under three out of five respondents in the poll said the U.S. government would be able to hide evidence of the existence of aliens, should they have it, whereas 21 percent responded the government would not be able to do so, Another 21 percent said they did not know.

When asked about the House Oversight Committee’s investigation, 40 percent of those asked supported or strongly supported lawmakers looking into Grusch’s claims. A further 35 percent did not support nor oppose the investigation, and 10 percent opposed or strongly opposed the scrutiny. And 16 percent said they did not know.

The poll was conducted among 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S.

In late June, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri accused the U.S. government of covering up a “huge” number of unidentified aerial phenomena.

“The number of these is apparently huge, huge,” Hawley told NewsNation. “And that is something that the government has, the best I can say about it, downplayed, if not kept from the public, for a long, long time.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida also told the network that people discussing the claims around the retrieval of alien aircraft “have held very high clearances and high positions within our government.”

In mid-January, the Office for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) published a report on UFO, or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), sightings.

There had been a total of 510 unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) sightings recorded in the 2022 report, and overall sightings had jumped by 366 since the previously published report. It included new sightings since the previous report, as well as ones that were “either discovered or reported late.”

Just over half of the new sightings were deemed “unremarkable,” but of the 171 remaining sightings, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” according to the report.