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 to create a whole select subcommittee on it, and got himself a classified briefing in a SCIF, as he told the Springfield Daily Citizen. 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 touring classified military bases connected to alleged crash-retrieval programs. On his own Fresh Freedom podcast, Newsweek reported in March 2026, he described what he'd seen:

"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."

He's toured one base. He hopes to visit several more.

The trip to Mexico City

In July 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 researchers 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, to 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."

He also would not answer the Missouri Independent when it asked where he stood. He was, along with three other Missouri Republicans, simply silent.

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 member of the House.

So: firing off demand letters to MIT Lincoln Labs and Northrop Grumman over a 74-year-old flying saucer briefing, 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. According to the Joint Economic Committee's district-level analysis of the health care cuts Burlison voted for, 32,626 people in MO-7 are projected to lose coverage — 16,600 losing Affordable Care Act plans and 16,026 losing Medicaid. That is more people than live in most towns in his district.

Burlison was not a reluctant vote on this. He was out front, telling St. Louis Public Radio that his colleagues shouldn't cower: "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.

Sources

• UFO disclosure: GOP Rep. Eric Burlison targets private labs in search of information — The Hill/NewsNation, May 16, 2026
• Congressman Burlison shows "orb" surviving missile strike at UFO hearing — KOLR/OzarksFirst, September 10, 2025
• Burlison trip to Mexico to investigate possible UFO objects — Newstalk KZRG, July 18, 2025

Top image: the drone footage Burlison played at the September 9, 2025 House Oversight UAP hearing, via KOLR/OzarksFirst.