Journalist Says Congressional Staffer Revealed “Recovered Crafts And Recovered Beings”
Written by Christopher Sharp - 4 September 2026
Investigative journalist Tom O’Neill has described an extraordinary conversation with a senior congressional staffer who, he says, claimed classified briefings on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) included information about recovered craft, recovered beings and technology being exploited for U.S. defense purposes.
O’Neill made the comments during an August appearance on Andrew Gold’s Heretics podcast, weeks after testifying under oath before Congress about the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
The alleged encounter occurred while O’Neill was in Washington preparing for that testimony.
On June 30, O’Neill appeared before the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets at its hearing, Mind Control and Accountability: Uncovering the Truth of the CIA’s MKULTRA Project. The task force was chaired by Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna.
Five days earlier, on June 25, O’Neill attended Disclosure Forum 2026, an all-day UAP event organized by the Disclosure Foundation in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building.
The event brought together lawmakers, scientists and former national-security officials to discuss UAP transparency, congressional oversight and the implications of disclosure. Participants included Senator Mike Rounds and Representatives Luna, Eric Burlison, André Carson and Suhas Subramanyam, alongside former senior congressional staffer Kirk McConnell and former Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon.
O’Neill said he had not travelled to Washington because of any particular expertise on UAP, but had accepted an invitation to attend the forum before beginning preparations for his MKULTRA appearance.
During the event, O’Neill said he left to attend a private preparation meeting with Democratic minority staff ahead of the MKULTRA hearing. Because Republicans controlled the task force and had called the hearing, O’Neill said the Democratic staff wanted to know in advance what he intended to tell lawmakers.
According to O’Neill, the congressional staffer escorting him to that meeting already knew where he had been.
“You’re coming from the disclosure conference, right?” O’Neill recalled the staffer asking.
When O’Neill asked how he knew, the staffer allegedly replied: “We all work together. We know everything that’s going on.”
The conversation then turned to UAP. O’Neill told the staffer that he remained agnostic and deliberately avoided becoming immersed in the subject because of the demands of his own investigations.
The response, according to O’Neill, was shocking.
“If you knew what we knew,” the staffer allegedly told him, “you wouldn’t be agnostic.”
O’Neill said the individual explained that, as a senior congressional staffer, he accompanied the lawmaker he worked for into SCIFs - Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities - secure locations used for the discussion and review of highly classified information.
According to O’Neill, the staffer told him: “I go in, and I see what they see, and it’s terrifying.”
O’Neill then asked why government-released UAP imagery remained limited or indistinct despite growing demands for disclosure. He said the staffer responded that the government could not reveal everything because some information related directly to capabilities being developed for national defense.
O’Neill recalled the staffer saying that the United States possessed “recovered crafts and recovered beings,” and claimed knowledge obtained from recovered technology was being used to understand capabilities conventional human-made aircraft could not reproduce.
O’Neill paraphrased the argument as being that revealing detailed information about matters such as UAP velocity, propulsion or other unusual performance characteristics could expose technology being developed for U.S. military applications to adversaries.
O’Neill also described another striking detail from his meeting with the Democratic staff.
He said the same individual told him that exposure to classified information could be psychologically disturbing, claiming that congressional personnel who entered SCIFs sometimes experienced nightmares because of what they learned.
The Democratic staffers, according to O’Neill, were later present at the MKULTRA hearing itself. However, none of the task force’s five Democratic members - Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett, Stephen Lynch, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Summer Lee or Dave Min - ultimately attended.
Liberation Times previously reported in 2023 that Senate Intelligence Committee members had heard whistleblower testimony about hidden legacy UAP programs which, according to multiple sources, had been verified to some extent.
Sources also told Liberation Times in 2022 that classified UAP briefings and videos had “altered the lives of those involved.”
O’Neill’s account adds a striking new dimension to that reporting. During his interview with Gold, he said the congressional staffer told him that personnel exposed to classified information in SCIFs could suffer nightmares, and claimed that staffers with such access had been provided with psychological support to help them cope with what they had learned.
O’Neill’s account also comes amid renewed speculation that President Donald Trump could eventually go further and publicly acknowledge the existence of non-human intelligence.
The speculation follows an unprecedented White House-led UAP disclosure initiative, which has seen government records, videos and other materials released across five tranches since May.
Speaking to Sky News this week, barrister Jonathan Caplan KC, who has extensively researched the subject and developed a substantial network of sources, said:
“The debate now is no longer whether this is a real phenomenon or not - in Washington, it’s an open secret that it is. The debate now is trying to force disclosure, because Congress has been misled for 80 years…”
In his book Not for Disclosure, Caplan alleges that a small number of members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been briefed, on a highly restricted basis, about the recovery of UAP craft. He further claims that some members of the House Intelligence Committee’s CIA Subcommittee have also been given access to the same information.
