The U.S. House Oversight Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee held a series of UAP hearings between 2023 and 2024. These hearings produced sworn testimony from Navy pilots, intelligence officials, and whistleblowers, and directly drove the legislative mandate that created NARA Record Group 615. This guide summarizes the public record from those hearings.
The July 26, 2023 hearing of the U.S. House Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee was the most significant public congressional UAP hearing since the Air Force's Project Blue Book hearings in 1966. Three witnesses testified under oath: Commander David Fravor (retired Navy F/A-18 pilot, USS Nimitz), Commander Ryan Graves (Navy F/A-18 pilot, USS Theodore Roosevelt), and David Grusch (former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officer and AARO UAP Task Force member). The hearing was broadcast live and its transcript is part of the public congressional record.
Committee members from both parties asked pointed questions about classification, compartmentalization, and the existence of programs not disclosed to congressional oversight committees. Several members publicly stated that they had sought access to programs described in classified briefings and had been denied — an admission that the oversight gap around UAP programs extended to Congress itself. The hearing resulted in commitments from the DoD Inspector General to investigate allegations of unauthorized classification programs.
Commander Ryan Graves testified that UAP encounters in U.S. restricted airspace are 'not rare or anecdotal' and that the stigma around reporting has created a systematic undercount of actual incidents. Graves described seeing UAPs 'every day for at least a couple years' during training operations in restricted airspace off the East Coast — encounters so routine that pilots had adapted their training patterns around them.
David Grusch's testimony was the most contested. Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had served on the AARO UAP Task Force, testified under oath that the U.S. government possesses 'non-human biological material' and 'intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin,' and that colleagues had been threatened to prevent them from coming forward. Grusch stated he had provided classified details to the appropriate congressional intelligence committees and the DoD Inspector General. His allegations are under ongoing investigation; neither confirmed nor refuted by the DoD as of the current archive update.
The most concrete legislative output of the 2023–2024 hearings was Section 1841 of the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandated the creation of NARA Record Group 615. This provision — with bipartisan support — directed the Archivist of the United States to establish a centralized, publicly accessible UAP records archive and required agencies to transfer responsive records on a defined schedule. The law also strengthened whistleblower protections for UAP-related disclosures and created new reporting requirements for the DoD.
Senate Armed Services Committee hearings in 2024 focused on classification reform and the existence of Special Access Programs related to UAPs that had operated outside normal congressional oversight. Senators on both sides expressed frustration at being denied access to programs apparently referenced in classified briefings. These hearings contributed to stronger oversight provisions in subsequent legislation, and their transcripts — available via congress.gov — form part of the documentary source record for the Now Declassified archive.
We'll notify you when new declassified archive material or official UAP source updates land on the site.