Congress holds historic public UFO hearing, as military struggles to understand ‘mystery’ flying phenomena
A House Intelligence subcommittee Tuesday is holding the first congressional hearing on UFOs in 50 years, as building evidence on the sightings raises more questions than answers.
The Hearing
“There are a lot of unexplained aerial phenomena. We don’t know what they are, and they can’t be easily rationalized as weather phenomenon or balloons or anything else. So it’s quite a mystery,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said of the hearing.
“We’re going to press them on some very serious issues,” Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., who chairs the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, added.
Risks
Carson said in a statement announcing the hearing that it’s crucial for the government to “seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks – especially those we do not fully understand.”
The hearing on what the U.S. government officially calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP), begins at 9 a.m. ET. It comes after years of unexplained sightings, primarily by U.S. military personnel, of flying objects, which often had no “discernable” propulsion systems and unusual “movement patterns.”
A 2021 report – a redacted classified version of which was published by The Black Vault earlier this year – said the government recorded 144 reports from 2004 to 2021, including 80 that “involved observation with multiple sensors.” The report also included information on “common shapes” of the UAPs, although the entire sections on the shapes are redacted.
UFOs
There haven’t been hearings in the U.S. Congress on UFOs since the 1960s. The House Committee on Science and Astronautics, led by Chairman Rep. Edward Roush, D-Ind., held one hearing on the matter in 1968. Around that time, then-Rep. Gerald Ford, R-Mich., called for investigations into the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which investigated UFOs and was shut down in 1969.
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray will testify at the hearing Tuesday. But it’s not clear how much they will be willing or able to share in the public forum.
“I think they will be comfortable telling the public what we do know, and what is still yet to be explained,” Schiff said when asked what people can expect from the hearing. “But they’ll be very careful not to speculate that this is some extraterrestrial or this is some foreign adversary with some… unknown technology. They will set up the limits of what we know what we don’t.”
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