By Justin Papp, CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

The email came through one day in January 2015, according to Tim Gallaudet, during a pre-deployment exercise off the East Coast that included the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group.

The subject line read, in all caps, “URGENT SAFETY OF FLIGHT ISSUE,” recalls Gallaudet, then commander of the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. In his telling, the email from an operations officer asked for any information on a series of unknown objects disrupting the exercise. Attached was a now declassified video of what the Navy would later confirm were unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

But the email had disappeared by the next day, Gallaudet testified Wednesday before two subpanels of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

“Moreover, the Commander of Fleet Forces Command and the operations officer never discussed the subject, even during weekly meetings specifically designed to address issues affecting exercises like the one in which the Theodore Roosevelt Strike Group was participating,” Gallaudet told lawmakers and a packed room full of members of the media and the public. Outside the hearing room, a line of hundreds waiting to get in snaked through the Rayburn House Office Building hallway.

That experience led Gallaudet to believe that some in the government may know more about UAPs, colloquially known as UFOs, than they were letting on. And it convinced him, as well as other panelists who testified Wednesday, of a potential “constitutional crisis” and a fundamental lack of transparency from the executive branch, the military and the intelligence community that leaves Congress in the dark.

“The continued overclassification surrounding UAPs has not only hindered our ability to effectively address these phenomena, but it has also eroded trust in our institutions,” Gallaudet said.

Congress in recent years has been hot on the UAP trail, as a bipartisan but still somewhat fringe-y coalition of lawmakers has held hearings and applied pressure on other government entities to release information, particularly about any clandestine programs using taxpayer money. They’ve encountered some resistance.

“I’m not going to name names, but there are certain individuals who didn’t want this hearing to happen because they feared what might be disclosed,” said South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who chairs Oversight’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation.

But the intrigue on Capitol Hill has been fueled by increased public interest in the topic, as some videos of UAPs have become public. A subject once confined to sci-fi films and conspiracy theorists has begun to enter the mainstream. UFO enthusiasts attended the hearing, posting selfies and photos of themselves with the panelists.

“The boys. #ufotwitter,” one user posted to X, accompanying a photo of the four witnesses.

Last year, David Grusch, a former military and intelligence officer, claimed in bombshell testimony to a House Oversight subcommittee that the U.S. government had recovered “non-human” material and has a secret program to recover and reverse-engineer crashed aircraft. Luis Elizondo, an author and former Department of Defense employee who testified Wednesday, said he was aware during his time at the Pentagon of reports of “biologics” recovered.

“Was anything described … that we have possession of bodies?” Missouri Republican Rep. Eric Burlison asked.

“Yes. Yes,” Elizondo responded.

“Is it multiple types of creatures?” Burlison continued.

“Sir, I couldn’t answer that. I can tell you anecdotally that it was discussed quite a bit when I was at the Pentagon. The problem is, the supposed collection of these biological samples occurred before my time — in fact, before I was even born,” Elizondo said.

Alien fever hasn’t yet broken. President-elect Donald Trump, during an October appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, spoke about interviews he’d had with former military pilots who observed mysterious spherical objects. And Kirk McConnell, a former House and Senate staffer, sparked buzz in September when he was seen in the trailer of the James Fox documentary “The Program” making startling claims.

“We have sources who have asserted not only that there have been crashes, but there have been crash retrievals,” McConnell says in the clip.

The uproar has led to legislation as well.