Truth hurts: Fact-checking Lizzo’s incorrect claim about US House’s hearing on UFOs, aliens

A congressional subcommittee hearing this week featured testimony that sounded like it came from a script for a modern-day reboot of "Independence Day," a 1996 movie about an alien invasion. 

Without the alien abductions, for now.

After the hearing, American singer and rapper Lizzo claimed on X, formerly Twitter, that the U.S. government announced that they had UFOs and nonhuman alien bodies. 

"THE GOVERNMENT JUST STATED UNDER OATH THAT THEY ARE IN POSSESSION OF UFOs AND NON-HUMAN ALIEN BODIES YALL," she said in the post, which had garnered more than 50,000 likes and 2.5 million views by July 27. The post received a community note on X, where readers pointed out it was lacking context.

Lizzo’s claim overstates what happened at the July 26 House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee hearing about UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena, which the military calls unidentified aerial phenomena — or UFOs.

None of the witnesses who testified were speaking for the U.S. government. 

PolitiFact reached out to Lizzo’s record company but didn’t immediately hear back. 

At the hearing, former military intelligence officer David Grusch, one of three witnesses, testified the government had nonhuman spacecraft, claims he had previously made in June.

The House Oversight Committee had ordered an investigation and hearing into the matter after Grusch said the information was being illegally withheld from Congress. 

This Associated Press video shows highlights of the House hearing on UAPs. You can watch the full hearing here.

The hearing featured testimony from three witnesses: Ryan Graves, a former military pilot and the executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace; retired U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor; and Grusch, a former member of the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

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Grusch’s remarks garnered much of the media attention following the hearing. He told legislators that he was told there has been a "multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program" but was denied access to the program. 

He told his superiors, essentially "becoming a whistleblower," for which he said he suffered retaliation. Other people have been harmed or injured both by UAP activity and by government efforts to cover up the program, he testified, without giving specifics.

When asked by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., whether the U.S. has the bodies of the pilots of crashed aircraft from the UAP programs, Grusch said, "Biologics came with some of these recoveries." 

When Mace asked whether they were human or nonhuman, Grusch said, "nonhuman, and that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge of the (UAP) program I talked to that are currently still on the program." He later said that he had not seen any bodies personally.

Graves said UAP sightings are routine and grossly underreported by military and commercial airline pilots and called for more government transparency about them.

Fravor described a Tic Tac-shaped flying object he encountered during a 2004 training flight. He described it as "far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today, or are looking to develop in the next 10 years." A second flight crew that launched later that day took video of the UAP, which was published by The New York Times in 2017 in an article that quoted Fravor. 

PolitiFact reached out to the Defense Department for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

Susan Gough, a Defense Department spokesperson, said in a statement to other news outlets that the department doesn’t have "any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."

In December, Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, said the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, set up in July 2022 to investigate UFO sightings, had not "seen anything, and we’re still early on, that would lead us to believe that any of the objects that we have seen are of alien origin," The Associated Press reported. 

A January report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that office had received 247 new UAP reports since March 2021.

American singer Lizzo claimed the government said under oath that it has UFOs and nonhuman alien bodies.

The U.S. government did not say that. A former intelligence officer said, under oath, the U.S. had a longstanding program to retrieve and reverse engineer UAP aircraft that crashed, and that "nonhuman biologics" were also recovered. 

We rate this post False.