The United States House of Representatives held a rare public hearing on Wednesday regarding unidentified crafts. It was prompted by accounts of a secret Pentagon crash retrieval program that was unearthed by a journalist from New Jersey.

“There clearly is a threat to the security of the United States of America,” said Republican Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles.

Members of Congress are trying to figure out if Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) are secret experimental American planes, Russian or Chinese craft, or something else.

“It went from zero to matching our speed in no time at all,” said David Fravor, a retired U.S. Navy commander.

Fravor testified about his 2004 interception with a highly maneuverable craft that resembled a large Tic Tac. He said he was in his F/A-18 off the coast of California.

“The technology that we faced was far superior to anything we ever had,” he said.

“Could a human survive that acceleration rate with known technology today?” asked Democratic Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz.

Fravor told the congressman, “Not from the acceleration rates that we observed.”

Many of the questions from members of both parties were the result of the work of New Jersey-born journalist Leslie Kean, who attended Wednesday's hearing. She spoke to News 12 last month.

Kean – who is the niece of former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean Sr. – broke a story in the New York Times in 2017 about a Pentagon program studying UAPs. She was instrumental in bringing out publicly whistleblower David Grusch – a retired Air Force intelligence officer who says the US has retrieved "nonhuman" craft.

“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program,” Grusch said at the hearing.

Grusch has speculated the craft could have come from another dimension and has claimed without evidence that the government has recovered bodies of non-human intelligence.

“So you can be projected, quasi-projected from higher dimensional space to lower dimensional space. It's a scientific trope that you can actually cross, literally,” Grusch said.

But no matter where they come from, Congress says it wants to know if secret sectors of the U.S. government have kept classifieds information from lawmakers and the public.

“The American people deserve to know what's happening in our skies. It is long overdue,” said Ryan Graves, of Americans for Space Aerospace.