UFO Hearing Witness: New UAP Bill Will 'Close the Gap'

A new bill that hopes to protect civil aviators from reprisal for reporting unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) will "close the gap" between reports of UFOs and national security channels, a whistleblower who testified to Congress last year has said.

Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Ryan Graves, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, said commercial pilots were "sometimes our best sensors that we have available to us in the sky," but faced a stigma for reporting sightings.

He added that the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, introduced in the House on Thursday, would create a channel through which pilots could make reports about objects they had seen in the sky, to "make sure that we're listening to what they say, both for national security reasons and for whatever UAP turn out to be."

The bill, introduced by California Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat, would require the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to establish procedures for reporting UAP sightings and evaluate any threat they might present to American airspace.

Pilots who make reports are specifically protected within the draft legislation from those reports being taken into account for medical and airmen certificates. Nor will they be allowed to face reprisals from employers or the federal government.

"It's important that folks have an ability to report any sort of UAPs without any fear of retaliation," Garcia said.

Graves, who now heads the advocacy organization Americans for Safe Aerospace, told Fox News that he hoped the bill would help get information that could be pertinent to national security to the right people, claiming that "a lot of this friction seems to be coming from the FAA itself."

He added: "This legislation doesn't force [pilots] to report anything, but it now provides the means for you to take that information and forces the FAA to accept it and channel it to the proper places."

An FAA spokesperson told Newsweek the agency did not comment on pending legislation but noted that it works "collaboratively" with the Department of Defense and NASA on UAPs.

Graves was among three witnesses invited to give testimony to the House Oversight Committee last July concerning UFO sightings, along with David Grusch, a United States Air Force veteran, and David Fravor, a former U.S. Navy commanding officer.

During the hearing, Grusch made claims that the federal government was in possession of alien UFOs and the bodies of "dead pilots."

DOD spokesperson Sue Gough told Newsweek at the time 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."

Graves himself has said that he and fellow Navy pilots saw UAPs "every day for at least a couple of years" off the East Coast. He has long stressed that the objects could pose a threat to national security.

Reports of UAPs have gained fresh concern since a Chinese spy balloon—which Beijing claims was a wayward weather balloon—passed over the continental U.S. before being shot down and recovered off the coast of South Carolina in February 2023. Officials later said that at least three similar balloons had passed through U.S. airspace in the prior few years.

UFO whistleblowers have often spoken of a stigma around reporting UAP sightings, owing to the association with the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

Graves said he knew first-hand of the reticence around the topic and the "very real fear of professional consequences." But he added that there was "a responsibility to national security and to the aircraft that you're responsible for" to disclose an "issue that could be a problem now or in the future."

Update 1/15/24, 10:50 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include a response from an FAA spokesperson.