A Congressional panel held the first public hearing on UFOs in over 50 years on Tuesday, during which top Pentagon officials provided insight into the military’s efforts to identify hundreds of unidentified aerial objects reported by pilots and members of the armed forces over the years.
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testified about the Pentagon’s organization system for unidentified aerial phenomena reports, per Just the News.
Last year, a congressionally mandated report revealed that most analyzed incidents of UFOs remain unidentified.
Rep. Andre Carson, the chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism, and Counterproliferation, started the morning by saying that UFOs are a "potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way."
"For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did,” Carson said. “DOD officials relegated the issue to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community. Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it's true. But they are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”
Bray told the committee that since last year’s report, the number of reported UFO sightings has skyrocketed from 144 between 2004 and 2021 to more than 400. Sightings, he said, are “frequent and continuing” and usually occur in military training areas or other federally occupied airspace.
