George Knapp written testimony

For the Record of
The Committee on Oversight and Accountability
Hearing on “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena”
September 9th, 2025
Good morning, Chairwoman Luna, Ranking Member Crockett, and Members of the Task Force.
I’m George Knapp, Chief Investigative Reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas—not a whistleblower,
and not a UFO witness (as far as I can remember, that is). My pursuit of the UFO mystery—and the
many rabbit holes attached to it—started in 1987, 38 years ago. Nearly every day since then, I get
asked the question: Do I believe this UFO stuff? Do I believe in aliens or ETs? And my answer is no.
Belief has nothing to do with it. To me, it is—and always has been—a news story, and an important
one, likely the biggest story I will ever cover. I am not sure if there is another reporter working for a
mainstream news organization who has stuck with this story as long, nor could I imagine anyone
would want to do so.
It is a great honor to be asked to participate here, and also an honor to be seated with these three men.
It is daunting to testify under oath in front of Congress and, essentially, the whole world, especially
about something as sensitive and controversial as this. No matter how things go here today, this will
likely change their lives. It takes courage for them to step into the spotlight because they know they
will be pummeled for it. The barrage started on social media as soon as the names were announced, as
it did for members of this Task Force.
The residents of UFO world are a tough crowd. They expect nothing less than for House staffers to
wheel in a slab with a charred alien body on it or arrange a media tour where we travel to Wright-
Patterson and kick open the doors to the Blue Room to see the crashed saucers.
I understand that impatience and was the same way. During my first deep dive into the subject, I
remember realizing this topic is a mess. And I concluded that what it needed was a good reporter. I can
have this sorted out in about six months. Youthful cockiness and naivete is not a good combination.
Topic One: The Paper Trail
What hooked me on the subject was not the tales of crashed saucers or Area 51. It was the paper trail,
the massive piles of government documents which paint a very different picture than what the public is
told about UFOs. The first time I saw some of them, they literally walked in the door under the arm of
a guy named John Lear, son of Bill Lear, developer of the Lear Jet, who had helped our TV station
break a big story years earlier—a story about the testing of a plane out in the Nevada desert, a plane
that was invisible to radar. It turned out it was the F-117, the Nighthawk, the Stealth Fighter. It proved
to be real.