Eric Burlison

A House Republican has opened a new front in the congressional push for UFO transparency, directing his investigation at the private research labs that hold much of the government's most closely guarded defense work.

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said Friday that he sent a letter to MIT Lincoln Laboratory seeking a classified 1952 briefing video described as a "flying saucer talk," and that the lab's attorneys have agreed to respond within 30 days.

Burlison announced the request on X, saying lawyers for the federally funded lab wrote back quickly.

"Congressional letters carry weight. We're going to keep sending them," he wrote. He framed the move as one piece of a wider effort, naming RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp., MIT Lincoln Labs, and Northrop Grumman as targets, and arguing that sensitive material is easier to shield outside of government file cabinets.

The strategy tracks a theory advanced by whistleblower David Grusch, a former Air Force intelligence officer whose 2023 testimony before Congress alleged that private contractors carry out UFO crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs to keep them beyond congressional oversight.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., a leading voice on the issue, has accused the Department of War of siloing information to dodge questions, comparing the practice to wartime secrecy on the Manhattan Project.

The labs Burlison named occupy unusual legal ground.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory, founded in 1951 to build the SAGE air defense network, is one of the country's oldest Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.

Such centers hold classified and proprietary access that ordinary for-profit contractors are barred from, and they operate one step removed from the executive branch, a structure created in the 1940s and 1950s to preserve wartime scientific capability.

The Pentagon has denied that any UFO retrieval or reverse-engineering programs exist and has said there is no reason to believe sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena are extraterrestrial.

The push for contractor records comes after President Trump directed federal agencies in February to declassify UFO-related files, an effort that produced a first tranche of records released May 8 through a new Dept. of War portal, with additional material promised on a rolling basis.

The renewed congressional interest comes as related claims circulate publicly.

On the podcast "The Diary of a CEO" this week, Dr. Hal Puthoff, a physicist and former adviser to a Defense Intelligence Agency aerospace threat program, said people involved in recoveries have described at least four types of non-human life.

"Now I have not had direct access to that, but I believe the people whom I talked to," he said.

The New York Post reported that Puthoff's former colleague, Dr. Eric Davis, identified the purported lifeform categories last year as Grays, Nordics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. Those assertions remain unverified and rest on secondhand accounts.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory's response, due within Burlison's stated 30-day window, will mark the next concrete step.

As of Saturday, the lab had not publicly released the requested 1952 video.