"Come at me bro": Mace's most striking lines from the 2024 UAP hearing

On November 13, 2024, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) co-chaired a joint hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth." She shared the gavel with Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI). Among the witnesses was Luis Elizondo, former director of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Maceopedia clip: the Mace/Elizondo exchange from the hearing, C-SPAN footage. Full clip page: uap-reverse-engineer-craft.

Mace opened by putting an alleged classified program name directly into the congressional record:

"If I say, 'Immaculate Constellation,' I will be on some list. Maybe a FISA warrant. So, come at me bro, I guess."

She then ran through a yes/no exchange with Elizondo on the core contested claims:

"Has the government conducted secret UAP crash retrieval programs? Yes or no?" … "Were they designed to identify and reverse engineer alien craft? Yes or no?"

Elizondo answered "Yes" to both questions.

Mace then put to Elizondo the logical tension she said the DoD's public denials created:

"How can the government deny we have recovered craft if they are paying people because they have been injured by recovered craft?"

She pressed further on the question of who or what was behind the technology:

"If these technologies are not made by any government, who is making them? … are you implying they are crafted by a nonhuman intelligence?"

Elizondo answered: "It may be both."

All four exchanges are drawn from the official congressional transcript, GovInfo record CHRG-118hhrg57440.

The same hearing drew formal cross-aisle recognition. Elizondo opened his written testimony by thanking Mace for her "leadership on this important matter." Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) stated he wanted to "especially thank Chairwoman Mace for her continued advocacy on this topic." Rep. Grothman credited Mace for "working with me on this topic and for making this a joint Subcommittee hearing." For the full catalog of praise statements, see Nancy Mace's UAP leadership recognized by journalists, Congressional colleagues, and UAP advocates.

The full hearing is on the public record. The House Oversight Committee posted the complete video, and C-SPAN carried it gavel-to-gavel:

Full hearing, House Oversight Committee official upload (about 2h26m). Mace's yes/no exchange with Elizondo on crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering runs roughly 51 minutes in; the "Immaculate Constellation" line comes near the 24-minute mark. The official transcript is at GovInfo, linked below.

Source: House Oversight Committee, full hearing video (YouTube) · C-SPAN, gavel-to-gavel coverage · GovInfo, Official hearing transcript, CHRG-118hhrg57440 · House Oversight, Written Testimony of Luis Elizondo (PDF)