Watch live: House panel holds public hearings on UFOs amid calls for military transparency

House lawmakers have convened a hearing taking place Wednesday as bipartisan support grows to pressure the executive branch to release more information to the public regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena, popularly known as unidentified flying objects.

Three witnesses, all former military members, are testifying before the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee regarding their apparent firsthand knowledge of how the federal government has handled reported of strange encounters documented by pilots and civilians alike.

Their testimony comes as members of congress are pushing for greater transparency from military and intelligence agencies regarding credible reports of sightings of craft moving in ways that known human technology cannot.

Watch the hearing streaming live here:

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Who are the three witnesses?

• Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who has spoken out about encountering UAP on training missions. Graves is now the executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, an airspace safety advocacy organization.
• Rt. Commander David Fravor, who shot the now-famous "Tic Tac" video of an object in 2004 during a flight off the coast of California. Fravor is a former commanding officer of the Navy's Black Aces Squadron.
• David Grusch, a former combat officer and member of a previous Pentagon task force that investigated UAPs. Grusch is a whistleblower who in a June interview with NewsNation accused the government of a cover-up he became aware of as a National Reconnaissance Officer representative for the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force at the Pentagon.

Specifically, Grusch said told NewsNation that he became aware of a secret "crash retrieval" program that seized interstellar spacecraft, as well as the bodies themselves of the otherworldly pilots.

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Hearing takes place as public interest grows in UFOs

The hearing comes at a time of increasing interest among the public in an answer to a simple question: Has the U.S. military or government made contact with either crafts or creatures not of this world?

In 2017, the New York Times released a report detailing evidence of a secret Pentagon program begun by the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) that tracked and studied UAP reports. In 2020, the Pentagon itself released three grainy videos of those UAPs.

In July, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that would require the Pentagon to release any information it has gathered about UAPs and what Grusch has referred to as "non-human" intelligences.

In late-May, NASA itself hosted a public hearing in which experts in astrophysics and other disciplines expounded upon sightings of UAPs, which the experts said is their responsibility to investigate as a matter of air space safety.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLagatta.