By Tim Binnall
UFOs were the talk of Congress on Tuesday morning as the House Intelligence Committee held its highly anticipated hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena. The first such open public inquiry in over 50 years, the ninety-minute-long hearing (which can be watched in full above) centered around the work of the Pentagon's recently created Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), which aims to detect and identify UAPs in "Special Use Airspace" and determine if these anomalies pose any threats to safety or national security. Testifying at the inquiry were Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie, who heads the newly formed UAP research group.
The two witnesses indicated that a considerable amount of work has been done to destigmatize the mysterious phenomenon in an effort to encourage reporting from military personnel who encounter UAPs. "The message is now clear: if you see something, you need to report it," Bray said, "and the message has been received." While this effort has resulted in an increase in UAP reports, he explained that actually deciphering the nature of the phenomenon continues to be a challenge. To that end, he observed that these accounts vary significantly as far as how long they last, whether or not they were recorded, and how many witnesses were present. "In short, there's rarely an easy answer," Bray concluded.
As an example of the difficulty in discerning what witnesses report, he shared a previously classified piece of footage which shows a small unidentified object that was only visible for a few seconds as it zipped past the cockpit of an aircraft. In a somewhat amusing moment that perhaps best captures the elusive nature of the phenomenon and the impediments which arise in trying to study it, a later attempt to pause the video so that the object could be more easily observed brought the hearing to a halt as isolating that very brief moment proved to be particularly problematic for the witnesses and their aides.
Be that as it may, the two Pentagon officials stressed that the UAP group is making a genuine effort to study the phenomenon and are not simply examining "low hanging fruit" in an effort to placate the public and members of Congress. "We want to know what's out there as much as you want to know what's out there," Moultrie told the committee, noting that they are constantly being asked about the phenomenon by their friends and family. That said, with regards to the proverbial million dollar question surrounding the origins of the phenomenon, Bray said that "we have detected no emanations, within the UAP task force that is, that would suggest it's anything nonterrestrial in origin."
While that assessment may be dispiriting to some UFO enthusiasts, the hearing provided an array of insights that will no doubt be of interest to researchers of the phenomenon and those following the government's efforts to understand it. On that note, the witnesses said that there have been no attempts to communicate with the anomalies nor any military engagement with them and that the UAP group has no wreckage in their possession. They also revealed that data is exchanged with some other countries, but opted to not name the specific nations until a subsequent closed door hearing with the committee. A similar response was offered when they were asked about underwater sensors which might detect unidentified submerged objects.
Indicative of how the UAP group appears to be focused on contemporaneous events, the two officials said that, beyond hearing stories, they have no knowledge nor have they investigated the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base case wherein it is claimed that UFOs disabled several nuclear weapons. Although they said that they would look into the matter at the behest of Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, they stressed that the group primarily studies reports that they receive from military personnel and not UFO accounts in the media or from the general public. Additionally, the pair emphasized that the work of the task force is not to search for extraterrestrials, which they noted is an endeavor already being pursued by multiple scientific organizations.
Ultimately, the hearing would seem to suggest that the newly formed group is making a good faith effort to unravel the UAP mystery from the perspective of the Department of Defense while also grappling with many of the same problems which have plagued UFO researchers for decades, whether it be the social stigma surrounding the topic or simply the incredibly enigmatic nature of the phenomenon which can sometimes be akin to trying to grasp smoke. Given the considerable public interest in Tuesday's inquiry as well as the fact that the task force's work has only just begun, it stands to reason that the hearing was merely the first in a series of updates from the group and it won't be another fifty years before Congress broaches the topic again.