Republican Rep. Tim Burchett said in an interview Wednesday that an admiral — whom he did not identify — had told him of an unidentified craft moving at incredible speeds in the sea.

“They tell me something’s moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater… as large as a football field, underwater,” the Tennessee congressman told former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, who now hosts a show on right-wing news outlet One America News.

“This was a documented case and I have an admiral telling me this stuff.”

Burchett, known for claims that the U.S. government is hiding existence of UFOs and other alien activity, said anything is possible given “the vastness of God’s great universe.”

However, he told Americans not to worry about the suspected extraterrestrials’ extraordinary advances.

“I’m not worried about them harming me,” he said. “I mean, with that capabilities, they would have barbecued us a long time ago.”No evidence has been produced of intelligent life beyond Earth.

However, Congress has taken an increasingly serious look at reports of mystery flying objects, treating the once widely mocked topic of UFOs — now often dubbed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) — into a serious issue.

In March 2024, the Pentagon released a report that it had no proof of UFOs, saying that many suspicious sightings turned out to be merely weather balloons, spy planes, satellites and other normal activity.

The Pentagon rejected claims made at a congressional hearing in 2023 by a former Air Force intelligence officer that the U.S. government had recovered a series of crashed unidentified aircraft and even non-human “biologics” over the decades.

In November, the Pentagon office investigating reports of UAPs received 21 reports last year that contain enough data for the intelligence community to continue actively investigating.

UAPs encompass a broad range of strange objects or data points detected in the air, on land or at sea. The most well-known UAPs have been reported by military pilots, who typically describe round or cylindrical objects traveling at impossibly high speeds with no apparent means of propulsion. Some of the objects have been caught on video.

The military has launched efforts to help pilots to report UAPs in recent years, and the Pentagon office dedicated to examining the encounters has received hundreds of reports in recent years.

Many UAP reports have been shown to have innocuous origins, but a subset has defied easy explanation. The issue has gained renewed attention from lawmakers over the past few years, with heightened concerns about the national security implications of unidentified objects flying in U.S. airspace.