At 1 p.m. on June 9, 2026, members of Congress and former intelligence officer David Grusch held a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to press for full disclosure of government records on unidentified anomalous phenomena. Grusch, a former Air Force officer, became the movement’s best-known whistleblower in 2023 when he told Congress under oath that the government had recovered non-human craft.

The speakers included Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Tim Burchett and Eric Burlison, along with filmmaker James Fox and journalist Leslie Kean. Rep. Burlison, a Missouri Republican, argued that Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee these programs and that the duty doesn’t vanish because a document was stamped classified decades ago.

Their demands, as reported, included immunity for whistleblowers, waivers releasing witnesses from nondisclosure agreements, declassification of specific files including those on the 1996 Varginha incident in Brazil, and passage of a full-strength UAP Disclosure Act. Grusch also urged the president’s fraud task force, led by Vice President JD Vance, to investigate what he described as UFO slush funds.

The headline was Grusch’s claim that the government is aware of “several” kinds of non-human life. As before, he offered no public evidence.

The event came as the Pentagon was releasing UFO files in batches, which advocates said were heavy on history and light on the programs they believe exist. The Pentagon’s UAP office said in 2024 that it found no verifiable evidence of any secret crash-retrieval program.