Congress Opens the UFO File: The First Public Hearing in 50 Years

At 9 a.m. on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in Room HVC-210 of the Capitol Visitor Center, Rep. André Carson gaveled in a hearing Congress hadn't held in a very long time.

"The last time Congress had a hearing on UAPs was half a century ago," Carson said. "I hope that it does not take 50 more years for Congress to hold another because transparency is desperately needed."

At the witness table sat the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, and Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence. For about 90 minutes, in open session, they talked about unidentified aerial phenomena.

Then everyone went behind closed doors.

"They are real"

Carson's opening statement set the tone. It was less about little green men than about a culture problem.

"For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis," he said. "Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did."

"UAPs are unexplained, it is true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated."

He gave the witnesses three jobs: update Congress on the Pentagon's new UAP office, convince aviators that people who report UAPs will "be treated as witnesses, not as kooks," and show they'd "follow the facts where they lead."

Ranking member Rick Crawford was more skeptical of the topic, saying he was more interested in Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. But he added: "It is also essential that our pilots and others feel they can report UAPs they observe without any stigma for doing so."

The Pentagon's pitch

Moultrie defined the subject plainly. "UAP are airborne objects that, when encountered, cannot be immediately identified," he said.

He said the Pentagon's goal was "to eliminate the stigma" by making UAP reporting "a mission imperative." When Carson asked whether analysts would assess every hypothesis, Moultrie said: "We are open to all hypotheses. We are open to any conclusions that we may encounter."

He even broke the ice. Asked by Carson about his love of science fiction, Moultrie admitted he'd been to conventions. "I don't necessarily dress up," he said.

400 reports and a sphere

Bray brought the numbers. He said reports were "frequent and continuing," and that since the intelligence community's June 2021 preliminary report, the UAP database had "grown to contain approximately 400 reports."

He credited part of the increase to destigmatization, and part to drones, "mylar balloons and other types of air trash," and better sensors. Navy and Air Force crews, he said, now carry step-by-step UAP reporting procedures "on their kneeboard."

Then he played a video.

It was cockpit footage from a Navy F/A-18 in a training range. For about one frame, a small, somewhat reflective sphere flashes past the canopy. The room struggled to spot it. Bray himself had trouble pausing the laptop on the right frame.

When House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff asked what it was, Bray said: "I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is."

A mystery Bray did solve

Bray's second exhibit cut the other way.

He showed Navy night-vision footage, recorded years earlier off the U.S. coast, of glowing triangles, some flashing. It had stayed unresolved for years. Then a similar recording surfaced off a different coast, while other Navy assets saw small drones nearby.

"We are now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area," Bray said. The triangle shape, he explained, came from light passing through night-vision goggles and being recorded by an SLR camera.

"I don't mean to suggest that everything that we observe is identifiable," he added. It was, he said, an example of how much effort it takes.

The exchange that made headlines

Rep. Jim Himes asked the question the public most wanted answered. What does "we can't explain" actually mean? Distant lights on a foggy night? Or strange material?

Bray's answer:

"When it comes to material that we have, we have no material. We have detected no emanations within the UAP Task Force that is -- that would suggest it is anything nonterrestrial in origin."

He said unexplained cases range from "simply too little data" to "a small handful of cases" where analysts saw "flight characteristics or signature management that are not what we had expected."

Asked by Schiff whether any foreign adversary could move objects with no visible propulsion, Bray said: "We are not aware of any adversary that can move an object without discernible means of propulsion." He cautioned that sensor artifacts may hide some of that data.

Under questioning from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, Bray said there had been no collisions, but "at least 11 near misses." The task force had made no attempt to communicate with any UAP, he said, and "doesn't have any wreckage that isn't explainable."

Nimitz, Malmstrom and the gaps

Crawford asked for a concrete example of something still unexplained. Bray named the 2004 Nimitz encounters. "We have data on that, and that simply remains unresolved," he said, while stressing he couldn't point to anything "definitively" not man-made.

Rep. Mike Gallagher pressed harder. He asked about reports of an incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where ten nuclear missiles were allegedly rendered inoperable while a glowing red orb was seen overhead. Gallagher stressed he wasn't vouching for it.

"That data is not within the holdings of the UAP Task Force," Bray said. "I have heard stories."

Gallagher also asked about other Pentagon UFO programs between Project Blue Book and AATIP. Moultrie said he wasn't aware of anything official. Gallagher then entered into the record a document circulating since around 2019, sometimes called the Admiral Wilson memo. Neither witness said they knew of it.

Secrecy, explained

Both officials defended keeping some material classified. Bray said the Pentagon doesn't want adversaries to know "exactly what we are able to see or understand."

Moultrie put it more concretely. "There aren't separate UAP sensors," he said. "There is not a separate UAP processing computer." The same sources and methods that spot UAP protect the country from everything else.

Bray did make one commitment. For information under his authority that doesn't involve sources and methods or pose a national security risk, he said, "I commit to declassifying that."

At 10:28 a.m., the subcommittee recessed for a closed session at noon.

What came next

The office Moultrie promised arrived two months later. In July 2022, the Pentagon renamed and expanded its UAP group as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, with Sean Kirkpatrick as director, The Black Vault reported. Its scope grew to include space, undersea and "transmedium" objects.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• Two senior Pentagon intelligence officials testified in open session that UAP reports had grown to about 400.
• They showed a sphere video they couldn't explain and a triangle video they attributed to drones seen through night-vision optics.
• Bray testified the task force had no material and had detected no emanations suggesting anything nonterrestrial.

What we don't

• What the "small handful" of cases with unexplained flight characteristics are.
• What the witnesses told lawmakers in the closed session.
• What the Pentagon found, if anything, after Gallagher asked it to look into Malmstrom.

Half a century of silence, broken

The hearing didn't reveal any secret. It did something arguably harder. It put Pentagon intelligence leaders on the record, under the lights, saying they had cases they couldn't explain and that pilots who report them aren't "kooks."

So, was this hearing the end of the stigma, or just the start of a longer fight over what stays classified? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Sources

• Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: open hearing transcript — House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2022
• Pentagon officials testify at first public UFO hearing in more than 50 years — CBS News, 2022
• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2021
• DoD announces the establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (July 20, 2022) — The Black Vault, 2022
• 2022 United States Congress hearings on UFOs — Wikipedia (hearing context)