Two military officials released a new “unidentified aerial phenomena” video on Tuesday at a congressional hearing on UFOs, where they said they now had 400 reports of such sightings. And they did their damndest to not talk about aliens.
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence public hearing was the first one on UFOs since 1968 and was followed by a closed session, where technical details of sightings could be discussed without breaking military secrecy rules.
“Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way,” said committee chair Rep. André Carson of Indiana, setting the tenor for the hearing as one driven by military concerns about the incidents as potential espionage cases, rather than being about flying saucers or little green aliens.
“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” Carson said. “Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did.”
Public interest in the UFO question has crested since 2017, when news reports emerged that the Defense Department had run a program looking into UFO sightings. The hearing was a follow-up to a report released last June by the director of national intelligence that looked at 144 UAP observations made by military pilots from 2004 to 2021. That report found one was a weather balloon and only 18 merited follow-up investigations, while the rest were too vague to pursue. The Defense Department now has some 400 records of such observations, many of them historical accounts, according to hearing testimony.
“We know our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena,” Defense Department intelligence official Ronald Moultrie said at the hearing. “We want to know what is out there as much as you do.”
As of this week, the Pentagon’s new Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group now has an official picked to run the office investigating the incidents, he added.
The big concern for defense officials is that some UAPs were actually foreign drones spying on military flight maneuvers. They don’t want those incidents going unreported by pilots for fear they will be branded as “kooks,” said naval intelligence official Scott Bray.
“The message is now clear. If you see something, you need to say something,” he added, describing a culture change where the military now encourages pilots to disclose incidents so they can be investigated in a systematic way. Pilots are expected to preserve data and fill out reports on UAPs for that reason.
Part of the hearing spent several minutes going over a video of a fleeting observation of a bright dot in the sky that zipped across the glare of a bright blue sky as seen through the window of a military plane.
“I do not have an explanation for this observation,” said Bray, which he called typical for such incidents. “We have no material. We have detected no emanations within the UAP Task Force that would suggest it’s anything nonterrestrial in origin.”
