Documents / Hearing transcript
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.
“Anderson”1 page
34 Mrs. LUNA. Perfect. My first question is to Mr. Knapp. Mr. Knapp, how do we know that the files that you obtained from the former Soviet Government are not BS and just given to you as a disinformation campaign against U.S. Government? Mr. KNAPP. That is a good question. So, I shared some of them with the Senate Intelligence Committee when I first got back be- cause that was requested by the Russians who shared some of that information with me. Second, I gave all of that material to the DIA through BAASS, the AAWSAP program. Sorry for the acronyms. Mrs. LUNA. Can you name names real quick? Sorry. Mr. KNAPP. At BAASS or AAWSAP? Mrs. LUNA. Or who did you give them to directly? Mr. KNAPP. I gave them to Robert Bigelow and to Jim Lacatski, and they hired a whole team to go through them and retranslate them and analyze it, and they created a structure of how the UFO programs in the USSR and Russia were put together. They said they were real. The other person who said they were real is David Grusch. Mrs. LUNA. Noted. Thank you. Representative Gill? Mr. GILL. And thank you. I would like to yield the remainder of my time to Eric Burlison. Mr. BURLISON. Thank you, Representative Gill. Mr. Wiggins, Chief Wiggins, in your view, what mechanisms such as internal protocols, witness debriefings, or cross-agency doc- umentation should be better established in order to ensure that such a credible sighting like the one that you have given are pre- served and made available to oversight bodies like this? Chief WIGGINS. Thank you, sir. As an active-duty Navy member, we—our mission is to carry out the ship’s mission or the com- mand’s mission, and we, on a general basis, do not have knowledge of what to do when we see things like this. We just do not. We are there to do our mission and do what is told of us, right? So I think what would be important is giving active-duty members a clear way of being able to report things like this to where it gets to this point and ensuring that we have a standard level of understanding that there would not be any level of reprisal or anything happening because, you know, I have been in the Navy for almost 24 years, but what about the sailors that have been in for two years that ex- perience things like this? They are not going to have the knowl- edge, or they will probably be a little bit more fearful to speak up, being that their career is just starting. Mr. BURLISON. Yes, I want to commend you. You are the first witness to come forward that is currently serving, and it is recog- nized, and so I thank you. And your testimony is unbelievable. Let me ask this question. Are you familiar with the Witness Pro- tection Act that Representative Burchett has filed? Chief WIGGINS. I am not too familiar, sir. Mr. BURLISON. Anyone on the Committee familiar with it? It is fantastic. It is the language that we need. It is language that will protect, you know, whistleblowers from any kind of reprisal, and yet it is again and again blocked by, you know, this body in some way. Many times, it is being blocked not by elected officials but by staff behind the scenes.
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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.