Are we alone? That question has been around since humankind began, but in the past decade or so we're finally getting closer to finding out what (if anything) the American government knows about this question that it isn't telling us. Do aliens exist? Is there proof? The House of Representatives held a public hearing on this question today, where some rather extraordinary claims were made.

Here's how HuffPost reported on the most stunning of the testimony:

Retired Maj. David Grusch testified to a House committee Wednesday as part of an investigation into reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.

In 2021, the Pentagon created a group to look into the phenomena after more than 100 sightings were reported. By the following year, the Pentagon said it had received "several hundreds" of new reports of unidentified aerial phenomena. The Pentagon has not confirmed that it has a program to retrieve unidentified flying objects.

Grusch, who served for 14 years as an intelligence officer in the Air Force, told Congress he served as a representative on two Pentagon task forces investigating unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, until earlier this year.

In his testimony, Grusch told lawmakers he was informed of "a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program" during the course of his work.

Asked by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) if the U.S. government also has the "bodies of the pilots who piloted this craft," Grusch suggested it might.

"As I've stated publicly... biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah," Grusch said.

"Were they human or non-human biologics?" Mace asked.

"Non-human," Grusch responded. "And that was the assessment of people with direct knowledge of the program I talked to, who are currently still in the program."

Grusch said in June that the federal government has multiple crafts of "non-human" origin.

"Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true," Grusch told NewsNation at the time.

The suspicion that the government has been covering up knowledge of what used to be called U.F.O.s (but are now referred to as U.A.P.s) goes back at least 75 years, to Roswell, New Mexico. Over all of those decades, rumors of what was being held by the government (in Area 51, perhaps) persisted. The people who held such beliefs, however, have always been seen as crackpots by society at large, to one degree or another. From Close Encounters Of The Third Kind to The X-Files and too many other Hollywood creations to list, belief in aliens was something only crazy or completely obsessed geeks would publicly admit to. The stigma that went with expressing such beliefs still has not gone away, although Congress getting serious about it all has managed to move those goalposts considerably.

The one letter in both names that is the same is the "U" -- unidentified. Sightings of aircraft that do not conform with current Earthly technology has happened for decades, and continues to this day. Here is one other bit of testimony from that hearing:

Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot, testified at Wednesday's hearing that he nearly collided with an unidentified object in 2014. He said in the years since he's talked to others in the Navy who have described similar experiences.

"We were primarily seeing dark grey or black cubes inside of a clear sphere," Graves said of the craft he saw. "Where the apex, or tips of the cube, were touching the inside of that sphere."

Trusting that a Navy pilot has good enough eyesight to clearly see and accurately describe details leads to one of only two possible conclusions: either he saw an alien spacecraft, or some other country on Earth has made stunning breakthroughs in the fields of physics and aeronautics and are regularly using it to spy on our military. Cubes inside of transparent spheres are not in the realm of known aircraft technology, obviously. What means of propulsion would something like that even use?

This is added to a mountain of other such sightings, where airborne vehicles have moved so stunningly differently than anything human science has yet produced that the same two conclusions have to be the answer: either China or Russia or someone else has perfected something like anti-gravity (or some other fundamental new physics), or we are not alone in the Universe.

The government's position in all of this is somewhat understandable. Because both possible answers would spur the same reaction -- wanting to keep everything secret. The Roswell incident happened at the dawn of the Cold War. The mentality in the military and government hasn't changed much from back then. If the objects are from an Earthly adversary, then they are beyond us technologically, and since they're not admitting what they've got we're not going to admit that we know of such advances. If the objects are truly extraterrestrial, then that would mean we've got something that our adversaries don't (assumably... flying saucers can crash anywhere on Earth, so maybe they've got some too?). Either way, the next step is obvious, and was spoken about in today's testimony: "reverse-engineering." If you have solid proof -- either intact craft or wreckage from a crash -- you would want to figure out what makes it tick. You would put it to every test you could dream up, in the hopes of unlocking its secrets -- which might mean an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the basic forces of the Universe. Either way, though, you wouldn't want either the public at large or our adversaries to know about it. At least not until you were ready to actually deploy the new technology in our own terrestrial-made aircraft. Which hasn't happened yet -- at least, not that we know about.

The Pentagon is denying everything, of course:

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Susan Gough, said in a statement that the Defense Department task force [which is looking into U.A.P.s] does not have any "verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently."

Like I said, though, there are a few members of Congress who are quite determined to get all of this out in the open, once and for all. These can't just be dismissed as the ravings of lunatics anymore -- as any alien sighting was treated for many decades (again: go see Close Encounters again, it's one of the better portrayals of how normal people are seen after such an experience). These are military pilots making these reports. Trained and vetted individuals, in other words. And they've reported hundreds of such sightings, not just one or two or even a handful.

This was the second recent congressional hearing on the subject (the first happened last year, when Pentagon officials testified). This follows decades of Washington ignoring the issue. More hearings should be held, and more investigation into what the Pentagon (or other branches of the government) knows or doesn't know are also warranted.

There was no smoking gun produced today. There was no hard evidence displayed to the public. Plausible deniability still remains, to put it another way. But because of a few intrepid elected officials, we're beginning to examine what we actually do know and what we still don't. Perhaps this won't lead to the full truth being exposed any time soon, but we may wind up with a lot more of the truth than the public so far has access to. And these hearings have something which is (can't resist) almost alien to Congress these days -- truly bipartisan cooperation. There's nothing partisan about any of this. Which is why I remain hopeful that the American public may finally get at least some more of that truth.

Are we alone? Or not? Stay tuned....

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant