Tim Burchett
Timothy Scott Burchett (born August 25, 1964, Knoxville, Tennessee) is a Republican U.S. Congressman representing Tennessee's 2nd congressional district, first elected in 2018. He is one of the most persistent Congressional advocates for UAP transparency, having been a primary organizer of the first-ever congressional hearing on UAPs in July 2023 and a driving force behind subsequent disclosure legislation.
Biography
Burchett graduated from the University of Tennessee and served in the Tennessee State Senate from 1995 to 2002 before being elected Knox County Mayor, a position he held from 2010 to 2018. He is a Southern Baptist and has described his faith as compatible with the UAP disclosure effort. He represents a district adjacent to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was developed — a proximity he cites as formative in his understanding of government compartmentalization and secrecy.
UAP disclosure advocacy
Origins of involvement
Burchett traces his public entry into the UAP issue to a chance exchange with a TMZ reporter in the aftermath of a classified government UAP report: "More people believe in UFOs than believe in Congress." He predicted the report would be "a redacted piece of garbage" and says events confirmed his expectation. He subsequently joined forces with Representatives Matt Gaetz, Anna Paulina Luna, and Jared Moskowitz to push for a select committee on UAPs; when that was denied by Speaker McCarthy, they pivoted to organizing the first-ever public congressional hearing. Steven Greer corroborated this account, noting that Burchett and Eric Burlison had requested a select committee "with funding and a team of investigators with subpoena power" and were denied: "he asked for that and they were shot down."
July 2023 House Oversight Committee hearing
On July 26, 2023, Burchett was a central figure in the House Oversight Committee hearing on UAPs — the most-attended congressional hearing the venue had seen in years, with observers lining up at 4:30 in the morning and an overflow room packed with additional viewers. The witnesses were David Grusch, a former National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officer and whistleblower; retired Navy commander David Fravor, who described the 2004 Tic Tac encounter; and former F-18 pilot Ryan Graves, who founded Americans for Safe Aerospace.
Burchett's most consequential exchange at the hearing was a direct question he put to Grusch on recovered biological material:
"If you believe we have crashed craft, stated earlier, do we have the bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft?"
Grusch replied that "biologics came with some of these recoveries" and confirmed under oath, in response to Burchett's follow-up, that those biologics were "non-human." Burchett later explained that his line of questioning was deliberate: "My questions were kind of leading because I knew the answer, but I wanted them to say it."
He also defended Grusch against attempts to discredit him by leaking a PTSD diagnosis: "If you're going to discredit somebody for PTSD, then you can no longer credit any policemen, any firefighters, any first responders, any woman that's been raped, any veteran, anybody."
Classified facility visits and obstruction
Prior to the hearing, Burchett traveled to Eglin Air Force Base with Gaetz and Luna to view evidence related to a UAP incident involving test pilots over the Gulf of Mexico. They were initially denied access to the flight crew and their imagery, and were told they lacked sufficient clearance — a claim Burchett disputed. After Gaetz threatened to compel testimony at a future hearing in Washington, the base relented and allowed a limited briefing. Gaetz then asked base personnel directly whether the craft witnessed were attributable to any U.S. adversary or ally; Burchett described the response: "Without hesitation. Just went down the line" — no one could attribute the craft to any known nation.
Burchett also attempted to introduce an amendment to a transportation reauthorization bill requiring that commercial pilot UAP reports be transmitted to Congress; the amendment was blocked at the floor level after the intelligence community — not the intelligence committee — objected: "A bunch of unelected bureaucrats... it wasn't even heard in committee. And to me that's unacceptable."
UAP Disclosure Act and legislation
Burchett expressed cautious skepticism toward the UAP Disclosure Act pushed through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds, warning that its proposed intra-governmental review body would simply add another layer of secrecy rather than compel genuine release: "They're going to create this entity within government... anything to do with UFO goes to them and they decide if it gets out. So, and guess what — if it's a national defense issue or if it's a government security issue or whatever, they won't release it. Well, guess what all of it is — they're never going to release?"
His preferred approach is full unilateral declassification: "All I'm saying is, brother, I can handle it. You can handle it. Put it out there. Let us see it."
Zero-point energy and the UFO community
Burchett has described himself as new to the "UFO, UAP, and zero-point energy genre" at the time of the July 2023 hearing and subsequent interviews, and has noted a structural problem within the broader community: the leading researchers and experts do not speak to one another, and the field is as compartmentalized as the government programs it seeks to expose. "None of these experts talk to each other. It's very compartmentalized... why aren't these experts talking to each other if the common goal here is disclosure?"
Views on the coverup
Burchett believes the government has maintained a multi-decade coverup of recovered craft and biological material, rooted in power, money, and energy-industry interests rather than genuine national security concerns. He applies his Oak Ridge compartmentalization model — where thousands of workers handled atomic bomb components without knowing the bomb's existence — to explain how UAP programs can remain hidden indefinitely: "A lot of those people are dead, so there's a complete disconnect after it's been handed off to this department or that department, and now it's in some corporate vault somewhere that has a quasi-governmental relationship. So that we can't get to it through FOIA."
He dismisses the argument that the craft could be Russian or Chinese: "If Russia had that, would they be bogged down in Ukraine? And if China had that, would they'd own us more than they do now... There's no other alternative — it's something we've reverse-engineered, which means it's something we've recovered, and are flying it around in our military space, or it's something from outer space. Either way, it's something from outer space."
Burchett has stated that elected members receive conflicting information from intelligence agencies in classified briefings — with some agencies denying events that are publicly documented, and others acknowledging anomalous contacts they cannot explain: "I get in there a lot of times and they'll say anything discussed here, we remind you, is punishable by law... They'll contradict what another department has said... Another one will say this is one we don't know, but we can't figure out. There's just no answer. It defies all of our reasoning."
Burchett positions himself as a skeptic of government secrecy generally, not an ideological believer: "I don't trust government. I don't trust it, and that's — I've been in it my whole life." He has described the UAP issue as nonpartisan — collaborating across the aisle with Moskowitz — and says many colleagues have privately told him they believe, but refuse to testify publicly for fear of political blowback: "They pulled me off to the side and said, 'Man, I believe in these things... but they don't want to come testify because they don't want the heat.'"
On the technology gap between human science and the recovered craft, he uses a recurring analogy: "If I took that Harley and took it to the people on the Mayflower, gassed it up, loaded it up, got it all ready, and took it back in time, that's basically what would happen with a UFO... They won't have the technology to make gasoline to run it. And that's sort of like what we're at, I think, with this stuff."