So, about that UFO testimony … how seriously is Congress taking it? And should we?

When renowned skeptic Michael Shermer watched the recent U.S. Congressional House committee hearing — which included shocking testimony about UFOs, alien spacecraft and alien remains — he was, perhaps not surprisingly, unimpressed.

Indeed, what was more amazing to Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, was the fact that such a hearing was even taking place. 

"It's astonishing it's come this far without any real evidence, without anybody in the scientific community making an appearance," said Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine. "We are still seeing not a shred of physical evidence."

But the fact that the House Oversight Committee would take the time to listen to allegations of dead aliens, crashed alien spacecraft and a secret government program to retrieve such technology, signifies to some just how seriously some U.S. politicians are treating the subject of UFOs, or UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena. 

"This hearing in particular was not particularly revelatory for what we learned in it, but it is part of this legitimately historic shift in serious people having serious conversations around this topic," Garrett Graff, an American journalist who studies the UFO phenomenon, told CBC's Day 6.

Greg Eghigian, a history and bioethics professor at Penn State University who also studies the history of UFOs, said there have been Congressional hearings about UFOs before. But he couldn't recall a time when actual witnesses were called in to testify.

"We've been building up to this," said Eghigian, who is also on the advisory board of the Society for UAP Studies.

" And it's very clear that [some] people have been successful in getting the ear of certain politicians." 

To observers like Eghighian and Shermer, much of what was said at this week's hearing was nothing new.

Committee members heard from former navy pilots David Fravor and Ryan Graves, who spoke about their individual encounters with flying objects of mysterious origin that could accelerate rapidly.

While he had made the claims in public before, it was the testimony of a former air force intelligence officer, retired Maj. David Grusch, that captured the most attention. 

Grusch told the committee he had been asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force's mission.

At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.

He said he'd been informed of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program."