Documents / Hearing transcript

Restoring Public Trust Through Uap Transparency and Whistleblower Protection

U.S. House of Representatives · 2025-09-09 · 54 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is the printed transcript of a September 9, 2025 hearing held by the U.S. House Oversight Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. The witnesses were Jeffrey Nuccetelli, Alexandro Wiggins, George Knapp, Dylan Borland and Joe Spielberger. They described UAP incursions at Vandenberg Air Force Base from 2003 to 2005 and a tic-tac-shaped object seen from USS Jackson in 2023. Members criticized AARO and called for whistleblower protections and the UAP Disclosure Act.

  • p. 9 …From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to torture programs, whis- tleblowers have not only informed the…
  • p. 31 …After filing your inspector general complaint over retaliation inside the Pentagon’s UAP office, did you…
25
Perestroika, the Russians were trying to open up to the world, and
I saw it as a window of opportunity, and it was. And we were able
to talk these folks into providing us information that otherwise we
would never have seen. Some of that was classified.
Mr. BURCHETT. Well——
Mr. KNAPP. I found out that they are—they only stamped the top
pages of these documents that were classified, so I just removed
them. I removed those pages, and I carried them out. And if they
had caught me, I would be in a gulag still.
Mr. BURCHETT. Yes. We would be saying, what happened to
George Snapp? Oh, yes. What happened to the Russians that came
forward to you in 1993, and were there any repercussions for them?
Mr. KNAPP. Well, there were. The first thing that happened when
I talked about this after getting back and going through the files
and things and sifting through it, the Russian physicist who had
helped us be—introduced all these people, wrote back and said
there was a huge eruption, that there was—the real right—far
autocratic forces that wanted a return of the USSR had—really go
after these guys. They described them as traitors.
Nikolai Kapranov, the physicist friend of mine, said, look, if this
had happened five years earlier, we would be in prison. If it had
happened ten years earlier, we would have been shot.
Mr. BURCHETT. Right.
Mr. KNAPP. Luckily, at that point, Putin was not in power, but
none of those people that we talked to on that trip in 1993 would
ever talk to me again.
I went back in 1996, and it was like I had the plague. I spoke
to different people, but they were scared. And eventually, the story
was spun where the Ministry of Defense officials who gave us this
information were described as ufologists who said there was noth-
ing really significant to these files. They did not really find any-
thing a big deal. And I can tell you, you will see those files that
I shared with you, they did find stuff.
There was an incident in October 1982 over an ICBM base where
UFOs popped up, was observed over this base where the missiles
are pointed at us, the United States. These UFOs perform incred-
ible maneuvers. They split apart. They fuse back together. They
would appear and disappear. And right at the end of this 4-hour
period, the launch control codes for the ICBMs lit up. Something
entered the correct codes. The missiles were fired up and ready to
launch, and they could not shut it down. The Russian officers were
panicking. The UFOs go—they disappeared. The launch control
system goes back to normal. Colonel Sokolov and his team came in,
took the thing apart, could not figure out what it was. It was not
a power surge or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) or some of the balo-
ney excuses that our country has given for similar events involving
our nuclear missiles. They thought it was a message from wherever
the UFOs were from. And that is a chilling thing. I mean, that
was—we were a couple of seconds away from World War III start-
ing, and the UFOs were responsible for it.
Mr. BURCHETT. All right. I am out of time, but real quick, who
are the contractors that have this material, the corporations?

Cases discussed

About this file

Hearing transcript, from the govinfo collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 54 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.