This Tuesday, May 17, for the first time in more than 50 years, the U.S. Congress held a hearing where top U.S. military commanders appeared and testified about a spate of UFO encounters by soldiers with UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects - noting that these should be taken as potential threats to national security.
Pentagon officials said they have recorded at least 400 reports by members of the military air force of soldiers' encounters with UFOs dating back to 2004, which would mean at least 18 years of detailed reports.
Testifying at the hearing devoted exclusively to the UFO issue, which was broadcast in its entirety via streaming, were Ronald Moultrie, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and a linguist specializing in Russian, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence for the U.S. Army.
Indiana Democratic Representative André Carson, chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterintelligence Proliferation, convened the hearing, in which he pointed out that more than 50 years ago, the U.S. government completed Project Blue Book, an effort to catalog and understand sightings of objects in the air for more than 20 years, that project treated unidentified anomalies in airspace as a national security threat 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 a follow-up on these sightings, formerly called UFOs and now Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - UAP, so he called the hearing, to "bring that organization out of the shadows."
"This hearing and oversight work has a simple idea at its core. Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential threat to national security and should be treated that way for far too long," Carson pointed out.
"The stigma associated with UAP's has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, pilots avoided reporting or laughed at. Defense Department officials relegated the issue or swept it under the rug totally fearful of a skeptical National Security community. Today. We know better, UAP's are real and need to be investigated," he added.
For his part, Undersecretary Moultrie noted that it is necessary to convince today's public and especially military and civilian airmen that the culture of UAP reporting has changed, and that they should be treated as witnesses.
At the same time, he requested that Congress should be willing to "follow the facts wherever they lead" and that it would not take another 50 years to take advantage of the knowledge and experience of the work done by the organization because "transparency is desperately needed".
Meanwhile, Scott Bray appreciated the beginning 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 the taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries such as China and Russia from surprising 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 UAP's are new technologies or not. And if they are, where they are coming from."
"When it comes to foreign nations' weapon and sensor systems, the known unknowns are those characteristics that we don't fully understand. But...the challenge associated with UAP's is that they are completely unknown and require a broader collection analysis effort," he stressed.
"We are trying to determine if any of these UAP's are new technologies, being developed by foreign governments."
And, the phenomenon takes special attention when these UAP's 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 airspace," Bray said. "Reports of sightings are frequent and ongoing."
However, he explained that despite all the sophisticated instruments available to the U.S. Navy, it has not been possible to explain the movements of these spacecraft because, according to them, they break aspects of the physics we know.
Bray indicated that there is "the possibility of surprises and potential scientific discoveries".
According to a Pentagon report published in June last year, in 2021 there were 114 recorded incidents at the U.S. government's own bases, 18 of them involving unknown flight technology.
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