Eric Burlison Controversy Checks & Balances Missouri

Eric Burlison Won't Hold an In-Person Town Hall. He Did Fly to Mexico City to Look at 'Alien' Mummies.

Burlison chairs a subcommittee on economic growth and sits on the UAP Caucus. Guess which one gets his time. Meanwhile 32,626 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 05, 2026

Eric Burlison Won't Hold an In-Person Town Hall. He Did Fly to Mexico City to Look at 'Alien' Mummies.

In May 2026, Eric Burlison announced a win. He had sent a letter to MIT Lincoln Laboratory — one of the country's oldest federally funded research centers — demanding a classified briefing video from 1952.

The subject of the video: a "flying saucer talk."

"Their attorneys wrote back fast," he posted. "They'll comply within 30 days." Then he added the line that says everything about how this congressman spends his time:

"Congressional letters carry weight. We're going to keep sending them."

He is right that they carry weight. That's the problem. Burlison has one of the most powerful investigative platforms in American government — a seat on the House Oversight Committee, plus a subcommittee gavel — and he has pointed it at flying saucers. In another post, reported by The Hill, he wrote that his investigation is "following the trail into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world."

Meanwhile, back in southwest Missouri, 32,626 of his own constituents are projected to lose their health insurance.

Congress's most determined UFO hunter

This is not a one-off. Burlison is a member of the UAP Caucus — UAP being the military's term for what everyone else calls UFOs — and he has made the subject his signature issue.

He asked Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries to create a whole select subcommittee on it, and had a classified briefing with the Pentagon's UAP office scheduled in a SCIF, as he told the Springfield Daily Citizen in March 2024. And at a September 9, 2025 Oversight hearing called "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection", he played a video he said he'd been given — drone footage he said showed a U.S. military drone firing a missile at an object off the coast of Yemen, with the object flying on after being hit.

"I'm not jumping to the conclusion that there are aliens coming from another planet, but I'm open to that," he said at that hearing, according to KOLR/OzarksFirst.

It goes further than hearings. Burlison has been pursuing access to classified military installations he believes may be connected to alleged crash-retrieval programs — reporting the New York Post broke and Newsweek relayed in March 2026. On his own Fresh Freedom podcast he described the videos he has been shown:

"What you're often seeing is these glowing type orbs. They look like balls of plasma that seem to be stationary and then sometimes they'll just move at incredible speeds."

"I've already visited one. I plan to visit at least three more," he said on that podcast. One base, so far, and three to go.

The trip to Mexico City

In the summer of 2025, Burlison got on a plane to Mexico City. He explained why to Newstalk KZRG: because he's on the Oversight Committee, he "got invited to go down to Mexico City to take a look at some mummified remains of what they claim to be aliens," plus a metal ball called the Buga sphere.

Here is the part worth sitting with. The "alien mummies" circuit in Mexico City was not some fresh mystery nobody had looked into. Doll-like three-fingered specimens — the same kind a Mexican UFO promoter had paraded before Mexico's own Congress — were seized by Peruvian customs and taken apart by actual scientists. In January 2024, forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada announced the findings of Peru's prosecutors at a Ministry of Culture press conference, as CBS News reported:

"They are not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids, they are none of those things that this group of pseudo-scientists who for six years have been presenting with these elements."

They were dolls. Animal and human bones stuck together with modern synthetic glue. And the man who has promoted this material has a long record: Snopes documented that back in 2015 he unveiled another "alien" corpse that was later shown to be the body of a human child.

Burlison's own verdict after making the trip? "I wasn't totally impressed. I would say the same thing with the mummies. There's a lot of fakes out there."

He could have learned that from a fact-check. Instead he learned it in person, in another country, as a sitting member of Congress.

What he actually said he believes

To be fair to Burlison, he does not claim these are little green men. He told the Springfield Daily Citizen that extraterrestrials are "probably the least likely scenario." He has described the possibilities as "aliens, angels, or just us." When David Grusch and other UAP whistleblowers told him the objects weren't traveling through space but "transitioning into our plane of existence," his response was that "you've thrown all of conventional science out the window."

He knows the ground he's standing on. He is chasing it anyway.

And his stated reason is a taxpayer argument: "we cannot have taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that are being kept from Congress." Fine. But hold that thought, because Burlison's commitment to prying secrets out of powerful institutions has some very specific limits.

Letters carry weight — except on the Epstein files

When the House was fighting over whether to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, there was a discharge petition — the tool that lets rank-and-file members drag a bill to the floor over leadership's objection. Burlison would not sign it.

His explanation, given to Joplin's KZRG and reported by Missourinet in October 2025:

"The mechanism of doing a discharge petition in a legislative body is considered one of the… most hostile moves that you can make against your leadership other than voting against the Speaker."

When the Missouri Independent asked all six of Missouri's Republicans how they would vote, his office was one of four that never replied. Only Mark Alford answered.

The petition got the signatures anyway. And once the bill reached the floor on November 18, 2025 — once voting for it cost him nothing — Burlison voted yes, along with all but one of the 428 members who voted.

So: firing off a letter to MIT Lincoln Labs over a 74-year-old flying saucer briefing, and announcing that Northrop Grumman is next, no problem. Adding your name to a petition about a child sex trafficking ring, when your own leadership doesn't want you to? Too hostile.

This is the same instinct we've watched play out on the same Oversight Committee before. Anna Paulina Luna's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets — the very task force that convened Burlison's September 2025 UAP hearing — also held Congress's first MKUltra hearing in 49 years and turned a real, documented government atrocity into a conspiracy free-for-all. The oversight power is real. It just keeps getting spent on the wrong things.

What southwest Missouri was dealing with the whole time

Burlison chairs the Oversight Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs. Economic growth. That's his gavel.

Here is what economic reality looks like in Missouri's 7th District. The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates that 16,026 people in MO-7 lose Medicaid coverage by 2034 under the health care cuts Burlison voted for, and another 16,600 lose Affordable Care Act coverage — 32,626 in all. That is more people than live in most towns in his district.

Burlison was not a reluctant vote on this. He was out front. Two months before the first vote, St. Louis Public Radio reported that some Republicans were wary of paying for the bill with big changes to Medicaid, and that Burlison "isn't one of them." His line: "If we're really going to save Medicaid for the people that truly need it, then we must make some reforms to the program."

He has time for mummies. He doesn't have time for you.

In that same St. Louis Public Radio interview, Burlison explained why he doesn't do in-person town halls:

"I think that the town halls create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up."

He kept going: "Normal people who go about their daily lives do not choose to go to" them.

When constituents showed up outside his Springfield office in March 2025 to ask for a real meeting, his office told KY3 that in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups." He does his town halls by telephone instead.

And when he does hear from constituents directly, he has a habit of going the other way. When hundreds of people in his district opposed a data center that would drink up southwest Missouri's water, Burlison wrote a letter supporting it — and told voters that "what the business is doing doesn't matter."

So let's line it up. A constituent in Springfield asking to look their congressman in the eye and ask about their health insurance: political nutjob. A promoter in Mexico City with a box of glued-together bones: worth a flight, a hotel, and a personal inspection by a member of the United States Congress.

Burlison is right that congressional letters carry weight. That weight belongs to the 32,626 people in his district about to lose their coverage. He's spending it on flying saucers.

We deserve better.