Congressman Tim Burchett recently discussed the possibility that non-human entities may have arrived on Earth “millennia ago” and have been traveling underwater to—more-or-less—hide their presence from humanity, during a short interview recorded while walking through the streets of Washington, D.C. While he appears to have couched his words as speculation, if one considers the top-secret briefings on UFOs the Tennessee Representative has reportedly attended there is the possibility he may have been speaking of something he learned from his foray into the sub rosa world of unidentified aerial phenomena.

“What if these are entities that are here on this earth, that have been on this earth for who knows how long, and we think they’re coming in from way out,” Burchett mused in a video posted on September 17 by Red Panda Koala on the UFO podcaster’s x/Twitter account. “Maybe they did millennia ago, but they’re here; they’re in these deep water areas.”

“And like we say, we know more about the face of the Moon than we know what’s going on [in the ocean],” Burchett continued while crossing at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue SE and C Street SE. “We have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six, I believe, deep water areas. And so, to me, it creates a question there.”

He continues:– “And then when we have naval personnel telling me that we have these sightings, and that there’s these underwater craft they’re chasing that are doing hundreds of miles an hour, and the best we got is something that does maybe a little under forty miles an hour…  So I got a lot of questions about that stuff.”

While it is impossible to know if Burchett was simply couching verifiable information he learned in a classified briefing as conjecture by starting the conversation with “what if”, or if it was genuine speculation on his part, UFO lore is rife with reports of unidentified craft entering, exiting and traveling under bodies of water, with some accounts dating back centuries, with many of these stories documented in Richard Dolan’s recent book, A History of USOs: Unidentified Submerged Objects: Volume 1: From the Beginning to 1969.