For a brief two-hour window Wednesday, the bombast and bluster that normally looms over Capitol Hill fell by the wayside and a bipartisan group of House members courteously turned their attention to what Americans apparently really want to hear about: UFOs.

Representatives Matt Gaetz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat on the same dais without as much as a cross word between them. Congressman James Comer finally stopped talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Representative Jaime Raskin uttered not a word about President Trump’s troubles, and Congresswoman Nancy Mace had nothing to say about the travesty of Bidenomics.

Instead, what viewers got was a hefty dose of good old-fashioned conspiracy theory. For decades, viewers were told, the American government has been sitting on recovered extraterrestrial spacecraft and the remains of their “non-human” occupants — “biologics,” they were called — without informing either the public or Congress. The technology recovered, one witness said, is “far beyond the material science we currently possess.”

The reputations and careers of those who have come forward to divulge the details of these programs have been threatened or ruined, viewers were told. “Administrative terrorism” is involved, it was said. There were even whispers of murder and physical violence to intimidate witnesses, and chatter about an active disinformation campaign by the government to deceive the public and lawmakers. Taxpayer funds have been illegally diverted to these off-the-books programs, it was said, and it’s all still going on right under many Americans’ noses.

The hearing before the House Oversight Committee’s national security subcommittee brought together three witnesses to testify about what are now called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Two of the witnesses are former Navy pilots who have experienced these UAPs first-hand; the third is a former Air Force intelligence officer who, until earlier this year, served on a Pentagon task force investigating UFOs.

“We’re going to uncover the cover-up, and I hope this is just the beginning of many more hearings and many more people coming forward about this,” Congressman Tim Burchett, a Republican of Tennessee whose office helped organize the hearing, said.

The pilots, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, had fantastical tales to tell. Mr. Graves described seeing what he described as a dark gray or black cube surrounded by a clear sphere between five and 15 feet across performing “unexplainable maneuvers” near two F-18 jets during a training mission off the east coast of America in 2014. He told the committee that dozens of similar reports from other pilots have been filed in the nine years since and the incidents are, as far as he knows, still going on.

“The UAP we encountered and tracked on multiple sensors behaved in ways that surpassed our understanding and technology,” Mr. Graves said. “The UAP could accelerate at speeds up to Mach 1, hold their position against category 4 hurricane winds, and outlast our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day. They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces, or propulsion — nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps, or engines.”

Mr. Fravor’s story is better known and dates to 2004, when he was stationed on the coast. In what has since come to be known as the tic-tac incident, he and his fellow pilots on a calm day over the Pacific came face-to-face with a white object shaped, as he put it, like “a flying propane tank” hovering in mid-air above the surface. When he approached the object in his jet, he said, it disappeared straight upward in the blink of an eye. The object, he said, “was far superior in performance to my brand new F/A-18F and did not operate with any of the known aerodynamic principles that we expect for objects that fly in our atmosphere.”

The incident, Mr. Fravor testified, is “the most credible UFO sighting in history,” but reports to his commanders about it were simply “placed in a file somewhere and forgotten about.” They only surfaced in 2017 following the publication of an article about the incident in the New York Times.

Unfortunately for those who have been paying attention and were hoping for more details, the star witness for the day, David Grusch, had little more to say about UFOs than what he has already said publicly. Mr. Grusch repeated his claims that, according to witnesses he has spoken with, the American government is already in possession of alien spacecraft — along with the remains of the pilots of those aircraft — but has withheld that fact from the American public and Congress.

Much of Mr. Grusch’s testimony Wednesday consisted of repeated assertions that he is unable to divulge who is behind these secret programs, where they are located, and what exactly they have found without falling afoul of laws regarding classified information. He repeatedly promised the House members that he would be happy to share more “behind closed doors” in a secure setting with people who have the proper security clearances.

The Pentagon has repeatedly denied Mr. Grusch’s allegations.

The main point of Wednesday’s hearing, all three witnesses insisted, was that there should be a mechanism by which commercial and military pilots can report such phenomena without fear of being labeled crackpots and without the threat of retaliation. Government transparency about UFOs should be priority no. 1, they said.

“If everyone could see the sensor and video data I witnessed, our national conversation would change,” Mr. Graves said. “I urge us to put aside stigma and address the security and safety issue this topic represents. If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, it is a concern for safety of flight.”