FIRST ON FOX: The U.S. government would have 270 days to release all UFO-related documents to the public if a new congressional bill is passed.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who has been a leading voice for UFO transparency, will introduce a new bill Thursday that would require President Biden to direct the heads of each federal department or agency to declassify all documents related to UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena), also known as UFOs.
"It's simple. They spend all this time telling us they don't exist, then release the files, dagnabbit," Burchet told Fox News Digital in an interview, before introducing the "The UAP Transparency Act" on Thursday.
"I don't want some crazy, fancy name for it," he said. "I just want them to do exactly what the bill is about."
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Rep. Burchett has been at the forefront of the fight for UFO transparency, along with several other Republicans in the House and Senate, but there has been a bipartisan effort.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., are co-sponsors of the bill.
In a previous interview, Burchett said he believes there has been a cover-up, and that tens of millions of dollars are being spent "on something that you say doesn't exist, (and) yet you continue spending the money on it. It makes you wonder."
The 1.5-page bill would not only force the president to direct federal agencies to declassify UFO-related files, but it would require the president to file quarterly reports that would update the House and Senate subcommittees on the progress toward releasing the information.
"That's all it is," Burchett said. "It's about transparency."
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Burchett and other lawmakers have been frustrated by the bureaucrats' diversion tactics and stonewalling, while millions of dollars seemingly vanish into a black hole.
"Like I said before, it's not about little green men or flying saucers," he told Fox News Digital in an April interview, "it's about tens of millions of dollars that our federal government is spending on something that at least some of the members of the federal government say does not exist. Yet, they will not release all the files."
To the Republican lawmakers' point, as recently as February 2021, an Intelligence Community Control Access program "was expanded to protect UAP reverse-engineering … without sufficient justification," the Pentagon's February report on UFOs said.
"This program never recovered or reverse-engineered any UAP or extraterrestrial spacecraft. This IC (intelligence community) program was disestablished due to its lack of merit," according to the report.
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Last month, there were about a dozen people (including Burchett) in a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, about UFOs, which is a highly classified briefing, and he left feeling "discouraged, as all this other stuff is."
He didn't see why the information discussed in the SCIF couldn't have been discussed in a public setting.
"I really think the whole thing is so compartmentalized that we'll never get to the bottom of it until you have a commander-in-chief who says enough is enough," he said.
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Instead of waiting for the executive branch, this short but pointed bill would essentially merge all the compartmentalized federal agency files and dump them into one declassified pool of information.
"We just got to put this stuff out. Let's clear the air. And let's move on," Burchett said.
