A U.S. House representative recently disclosed that he had seen classified UFO footage that led him to question humanity’s ability to deal with the possibility of superior alien technology.

Speaking on John Michael Godier’s Event Horizon podcast, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) shared his thoughts on UFOs, which could be summarized by his uttering: “[T]hey could turn us into a charcoal briquette.”

Burchett is a member of the House Oversight Committee, which has held various hearings on the potential threat of UFOs — or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) in official terms — to the United States.

As Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), told the Senate Armed Services Committee, over 650 potential UAP cases were being tracked as of April, with roughly 150 identified as possible high-altitude balloons, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.

The House Oversight Committee will be meeting soon to discuss claims made by David Grusch, a former Air Force veteran and intelligence officer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Grusch came forward in June alleging that the federal government has secretly been running a UFO retrieval program for decades, claiming that information is being illegally withheld from Congress, according to the Washington Examiner.

Susan Gough, a Defense Department representative, refuted Grusch’s allegations in an email to Fox News Digital, claiming that there was no “verifiable information to substantiate the claims.”

As for Burchett, he told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview that he considers UFOs to be at “the top of the importance ladder” since “we have something that we do not control in our military airspace.”

Burchett further claimed that the government has not been forthcoming about the information they have collected on UFOs/UAPs.

“They’ve been holding stuff back since Roswell in ’47,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And maybe prior to that.”

Speaking on Event Horizon, Burchett suggested it was time to “quit with the redacted reports that look like Swiss cheese with everything whited out or blacked out … and let the American people decide.”

“If they’re out there, they’re out there, and if they have this kind of technology, then they could turn us into a charcoal briquette. If they can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen, and physics as we know it, fly underwater, don’t show a heat trail, things like that, then we are vastly out of our league,” Burchett said.

Despite such dire speculation, Burchett also said he did not really view possible extraterrestrial entities as a threat.

“We couldn’t fight them off if we wanted to. That’s why I don’t think they’re a threat to us, or they would already have been,” he explained.

Alongside AARO, NASA has also been investigating UFOs/UAPs as part of an independent study launched last October, as previously reported in The Dallas Express.

While speaking on a panel in June, NASA scientists reported that they had observed about 800 UAPs but had ruled out any extraterrestrial involvement.

Regardless, Nicola Fox, an associate administrator for NASA, spoke out on the issue of naysayers stigmatizing research into UAPs, pointing out that it “[hinders] the scientific progress … [and] also obstructs the public’s right to knowledge.”