'There IS something real here!' Top UFO expert and Republican congressman say government is covering up what it knows about UFOs and should come clean

A Republican congressman and a UFO expert agree that the government knows more than they're letting on about mysterious aircraft.

Author and journalist Garrett Graff and Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett jointly spoke out on the issue in a Meet the Press Reports on NBC News. 

Graff, author of UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here - and Out There said, 'The government is covering up some level of its knowledge and understanding about what some of those things are.' 

'There is something real here. There are things out there in our air space that we do not understand what they are, and that those could represent exquisite new adversary technology, but they could also represent science that we don't understand.'

The expert said the coverup could be two-fold, including both the governments own secret development of planes, drones, new technologies as well as what the government is sensing and detecting in and around US airspace. 

Graff also said be believes the government likely knows more than they're saying - but not necessarily that they have confirmed what the mysterious aircraft themselves are. 

'What I'm unconvinced of is that the government is covering up meaningful knowledge of, you know, alien spacecraft, alien visitors, extraterrestrial contact, Graff said.

He noted it is possible NASA does not have evidence of alien life is because humans may not have the technology to detect it. 

Multiple sources told DailyMail.com a secretive CIA office has been coordinating the retrieval of crashed UFOs around the world for decades.

One source said that at least nine apparent 'non-human craft' have been recovered by the US government – some wrecked from a crash, and two completely intact.

Three sources briefed on those alleged top secret operations told DailyMail.com that the Office of Global Access (OGA), a wing of the Central Intelligence Agency's Science and Technology Directorate, has played a central role since 2003 in orchestrating the collection of what could be alien spacecraft.

The three sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, have all been briefed by individuals involved in those alleged UFO retrieval missions.

Representative Burchett is calling for transparency from the government on what they know about these UFOs. 

'If it doesn’t exist, then why do they keep spending the money to tell us,' said the congressman from Tennessee.  

'You know, since 1947, they've told us these things don't exist, yet Harry Reid funded, very well funded millions of dollars towards research of it. And and they spent a whole heck of a lot of time, effort. And money on telling the American public they don't exist, but yet they're studying.'

Burchett said, 'Case in point, I proposed an amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill and it basically just said if a commercial airline pilot were to spot some anomaly or a UFO, as we used to call them, and they would issue a report to the FAA, which they would, but also that report would be made to Congress.'

'Well, it was blocked. The whip told me that it was blocked. And I said, why was it blocked? He said the intelligence community blocked it. And I said, wait a minute. You mean you mean the committee? And he said, no the community.'

US Space Force, the Pentagon branch tasked with protecting America from space-based threats, local and galactic, has detected thousands of UFOs in Earth's orbit.

America's newest military branch created under President Trump in 2019, told personnel in November that the sightings were so regular that they are 'hindering threat identification,' the branch's core mission.

In recent years, Pentagon officials tasked with investigating UFO cases, including the now famous 2004 Tic Tac incursions.

In 2004, Navy pilot Chad Underwood shot footage of a strange flying object in the sky flying over the Pacific, which was also seen by Navy commander David Fravor. 

Underwood coined the description 'Tic Tac' for the 'perfectly white' wingless oblong that was captured from his cockpit's in-flight video. 

Fravor described the Tic Tac object as being 'perfectly white, smooth and had no windows,' with 'two little objects that came out of the bottom'.