https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4646417-top-senators-believe-the-us-secretly-recovered-ufos/
Has the U.S. government secretly retrieved exotic craft of “non-human” origin? Newly declassified documents, along with extraordinary legislation, illustrate how two successive Democratic Senate majority leaders appear to have believed so.
Notably, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) were not alone in their focus on UFOs. The Democratic heavyweights received critical support and encouragement from a bipartisan group of high-profile senators over the years, including former fighter pilot and famed astronaut John Glenn (D-Ohio); Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who observed a UFO as a World War II pilot; Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), then-chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense; 2008 GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.); Senate Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.); Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).
In late 2011, for example, the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security met with Lieberman, then chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Reid to discuss the establishment of an ultra-secret UFO program.
As outlined in remarkable detail in newly released documents, the intent of the proposed program was to “gain access to and inventory” UFOs secretly under “investigation in National Laboratories, government organizations and/or contractors.”
From there, the program would engage in “laboratory experimentation” and “scientific investigation” to foster “technology exploitation” of the recovered materials.
In short, Reid and Lieberman were advocating, “with some sense of urgency,” for the establishment of a formal UFO reverse-engineering program.
Startling as it may be, the notion that shadowy elements of the U.S. government or defense contractors secretly possess retrieved UFOs is treated as fact in the documents.
Notably, the Reid- and Lieberman-backed proposal included an “Oral History Initiative” to interview a pre-identified “list of retired, previously highly placed government, armed services, contractor, and intelligence community individuals” with knowledge of the “location of advanced aerospace technology and biological samples.”
Even though the Department of Homeland Security’s top scientist was advocating for the establishment of the UFO program and the “very serious science involved with” it, department leadership ultimately quashed the proposal in late 2011.
More recently, Schumer and a bipartisan group of five other senators introduced extraordinary legislation alleging the existence of surreptitious “legacy programs” that retrieve and seek to reverse-engineer UFOs of “non-human” origin.
In eyebrow-raising comments on the Senate floor, Schumer said the government “has gathered a great deal of information about [UFOs] over many decades but has refused to share it with the American people.”