This Tuesday, May 17, for the first time in more than 50 years, the U.S. Congress held a hearing where senior U.S. military officials appeared and testified about a wave of soldier encounters with UFOs – Unidentified Flying Objects – pointing out that these should be considered potential threats to national security.
Pentagon officials said they have recorded at least 400 reports from members of the military air force of encounters with UFOs, dating back to 2004, which would mean at least 18 years of detailed reports.
In the hearing dedicated exclusively to addressing the UFO issue and which was broadcast in its entirety via streaming, Ronald Moultrie, US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, who is also a linguist ‒specialized in Russian‒, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence of the US Army, testified.
Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation of Intelligence, convened the hearing, noting that more than 50 years ago, the U.S. government ended Project Blue Book, an effort to catalog and understand sightings of airborne objects that spanned more than 20 years. That project treated unidentified anomalies in airspace as a national security threat that needed to be monitored and investigated.
However, he detailed that in 2017, Congress learned for the first time that the Department of Defense had quietly restarted tracking these sightings, previously called UFOs and now Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), so he called on the audience to "bring that organization out of the shadows."
"This hearing and oversight effort has a simple idea at its core. Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential threat to national security and must be treated as such for far too long," Carson said.
“The stigma associated with UAPs has stood in the way of good intelligence analysis, pilots avoided reporting or laughed at them. DoD officials either brushed the issue aside or swept it under the rug out of fear of a skeptical National Security community. Today, we know better, UAPs are real and need to be investigated,” he added.
For his part, Under Secretary Moultrie noted that there is a need to convince today's public, and especially military and civilian aviators, that the culture regarding UAP reporting has changed, and that they should be treated as witnesses.
He also asked that Congress be willing to "follow the facts wherever they lead" and that it not take another 50 years to take advantage of the knowledge and experience of the work done by the organization, since "transparency is desperately needed."
Scott Bray, meanwhile, welcomed the start of an open dialogue between Congress and the executive branch on “this important issue,” even if it evokes the creative imagination of many and provokes speculation.
He added that the Intelligence Community has a serious duty to taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries, such as China and Russia, from surprising us with unforeseen new technologies.
"As overseers of the intelligence community, this committee has an obligation to understand what they are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies or not. And if they are, where they come from."
“When it comes to foreign nations’ weapons and sensor systems, known unknowns are those characteristics that we don’t fully understand. But… the challenge associated with UAPs is that they are completely unknown and require a broader collection analysis effort,” he stressed.
"We are trying to determine if any of these UAPs are new technologies, being developed by foreign governments."
The phenomenon has gained special attention when these UAPs have been observed in military and training camps.
“We have seen an increasing number of unauthorized or unidentified aircraft or objects and military control training areas and training ranges and other designated airspaces,” Bray said. “Reports of sightings are frequent and ongoing.”
However, he explained that despite all the sophisticated instruments that the US Navy has, they have not been able to explain the movements of these ships, since, according to them, they break aspects of physics that we know.
Bray said there was "the possibility of surprises and potential scientific discoveries."
According to a Pentagon report Published in June last year, in 2021 there were 114 incidents recorded at the US government's own bases, 18 of them involving unknown flight technology.
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