Rep. Eric Burlison arranged White House-level access to classified UAP material, toured a key naval test facility, and says the intelligence officials who briefed him cannot identify the glowing, plasma-like objects he consistently sees on restricted footage.
The phone gets surrendered at the door. The walls are designed to block any signal from reaching the outside. In these shielded government facilities - known as SCIFs, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities - Rep. Eric Burlison has watched footage of unidentified aerial objects that most Americans will never see. He has done this not once, but repeatedly, across multiple classified briefings.
What he sees each time is the same.
Burlison, a Missouri Republican who sits on the House Oversight Committee and has become one of the most active congressional voices on UAP transparency, describes the objects on the classified footage as plasma-like spheres that glow and move without any propulsion system his briefers can identify. They are roughly half the size of a sedan, he has said. They move in ways that rule out conventional aircraft - no visible exhaust, no wing surface, no known aerodynamic mechanism. And they appear, in his characterization, to move intelligently.
When he asked the intelligence officials in the room what he was looking at, their answer was blunt.
“I don’t know what they are,” Burlison said in comments reported by Newstalk KZRG, “and neither does our intelligence community.”
The objects Burlison describes are distinct from the publicly released UAP footage that has circulated since 2021. The PURSUE (Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters) program has released three tranches of declassified material since May 2026, including images of glowing orbs and unusual aerial formations. But those are declassified by definition.
What Burlison has seen in classified briefings remains restricted - and he says it has shaped his view in ways the public record alone has not.
He has described the objects in classified footage as moving “intelligently” - a term he uses to mean that their behavior does not fit the random drift of atmospheric phenomena, the programmed path of a drone, or the ballistic arc of a projectile. He has also consistently used the word “plasmoids” - a term for discrete, self-contained plasma structures - to describe what the footage looks like, while noting he is not certain plasma is what they actually are.
“They look like what plasma would look like,” he has said, according to reporting on his public appearances, “and it’s moving intelligently.”
What the footage does not show, based on everything Burlison has said publicly, is anything that conclusively identifies the objects’ origin. No U.S. agency has officially confirmed the objects in classified UAP footage are extraterrestrial, and Burlison has not claimed otherwise.
Before these classified sessions, Burlison had been more cautious than many of his UAP-focused colleagues. What changed his access began, according to IBTimes UK, with a casual conversation.
During an unrelated meeting at the White House, Burlison mentioned his frustration with the lack of transparency around UAP briefings. He asked for access equivalent to what the president receives, along with visits to classified facilities including Area 51 and Groom Lake - sites long associated with classified aviation programs.
Within a week, a Department of Defense liaison arrived at his office. The White House, the liaison told him, had directed them to make it happen.
One of the facilities Burlison subsequently visited was Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland - the U.S. Navy’s primary flight test and evaluation center, which has featured in accounts from UAP researchers and whistleblowers for decades. He disclosed the visit on July 7, 2026, in comments to IBTimes UK.
“I saw some really cool stuff,” he said. “Our government’s doing some really cool things.”
He did not elaborate on what those things were.
Burlison’s account is part of a larger pattern of official acknowledgment without official explanation.
AARO Director Dr. Jon Kosloski confirmed in his most recent public reporting that approximately 40 percent of submitted UAP cases - from a caseload that now exceeds 2,000 active reports - remain unresolved. That is, after a full investigation, no known natural phenomenon, aircraft, or foreign technology adequately explains what was observed.
This is not a fringe position. The unresolved cases are documented by the same agency - AARO - that the Pentagon stood up specifically to find conventional explanations for these reports. The 40 percent figure reflects cases that AARO reviewed and could not close.
What Burlison adds to this picture is a firsthand congressional account of what the classified portion of that data looks like - and a direct report that the intelligence officials responsible for understanding it do not, in his telling, yet understand it.
Whether the plasma-like objects he describes will eventually receive a conventional explanation, or whether they represent something genuinely unknown, is a question the U.S. government has not publicly answered. What the congressman says he knows, after multiple viewings, is that as of mid-2026, that question has no official answer.
AARO's annual report on unidentified phenomena, missing for months, arrived this week. Of 319 new sightings, the office resolved 114 - balloons, satellites, birds, one rocket and a single jetpack - while a shortage of sensor data left most cases open.
It is the only maritime case in the Pentagon's newest UAP report, which logged 319 sightings in a year and could resolve only about a third. AARO says the Virginia encounter is still unexplained.
The Pentagon's fourth PURSUE release dropped July 10 - 40 newly declassified files including a lockdown at America's nuclear warhead factory, a star-shaped object tracked over the Yellow Sea, and a 1949 meeting of atomic scientists stumped by mystery lights.
