(OPINION) A Tennessee lawmaker issued a dire warning after claiming to have seen classified UFO footage that hasn’t been released to the public.

According to Fox News, Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., speculated extraterrestrial life forms could have technology that humanity “can’t handle” during an appearance on the “Event Horizon” podcast.

“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,” Burchett said.


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“And 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 is a sitting member on the House Oversight Committee, which has held hearings about potential threats and unexplained UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, a government-derived word for UFOs.

“We can’t handle it,” Burchett said during his podcast appearance about potential alien tech. “We couldn’t fight them off what we wanted to. That’s why I don’t think they’re a threat to us, or they would already have been.”

His startling comments came after whistleblower David Grusch, a decorated Air Force veteran who’s considered by many to be credible, came forward with claims the government has been running a secret UFO retrieval program.

The House Oversight Committee is preparing a hearing to discuss Grusch’s unverified claims. Burchett and fellow Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida will lead the committee’s investigation.

Susan Gough, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense, told Fox News Digital in a previous email June 6 there is no “verifiable information to substantiate the claims.”

Since Grusch’s shocking claims, other “high-level” government whistleblowers with “high clearances” have come forward that backed Grush’s claims, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told NewsNation in an interview at the end of June.