On May 17, Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation about UFOs, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), the first such hearing in over 50 years, according to the New York Times.
On May 10, the subcommittee chair, Rep. André Carson, said in a statement, “The American people expect and deserve their leaders in government and intelligence to seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks – especially those we do not fully understand.”
According to Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the goal of the hearing is to shed light on “one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”
Carson believes that the hearing “may be the very thing that brings Democrats and Republicans together, at least for an hour or two.”
The hearing follows the release of a bombshell report on the matter that was released last summer. The report was a requirement of a COVID-19 relief bill signed in late 2020 by then-President Donald Trump.
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The report detailed 144 incidents involving UFOs over the past two decades that remain unexplained and were not attributed to U.S. military or government programs, officials said.
Reportedly, military personnel encountered UFOs on almost a “daily basis” off the coast of California in 2017 with footage of the incursions subsequently verified by defense officials.
Witnesses to the objects, all military personnel, said the objects moved at a blistering speed of 43,200 mph and exhibited “unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics” such as the ability to “remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, manuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.”
Of all the cases investigated only one was explainable. It was determined to be a deflating balloon, according to Fox News.
Following the report the Department of Defense (DOD) established the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group in November, 2021 that is tasked with detecting and identifying “objects of interest.”
At the time, the DOD said, “DOD takes reports of incursions – by any airborne object, identified or unidentified – very seriously, and investigate each one.”
Project Blue Book
The hearing on May 17 will be the first time a public hearing has been held with Congress on the topic of UFOs since 1970 following the conclusion of Project Blue Book in 1969.
Project Blue Book was the code name for a systematic study of unidentified flying objects by the United States Air Force from March 1952 to December 17, 1969.
The project was headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and was initially spearheaded by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt.
The project analyzed thousands of UFO reports and concluded that further study of the phenomena was unlikely to yield any major scientific discoveries.
Further to this, the project came to three major conclusions. First, no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of a threat to American national security.
Second, the evidence submitted to the Air Force of sightings categorized as “unidentified” did not represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge and finally that there was no evidence indicating that extraterrestrial vehicles were involved.
Over the course of the project authorities collected over 12,600 UFO reports and concluded that the vast majority of them were misidentifications of natural phenomena or conventional aircraft.
Many of the sightings logged were attributed to sightings of formerly secret reconnaissance planes; the U-2 and A-12.
However, 701 reports were classified as “unexplained” even after stringent analysis.
The UFO reports were archived and are available under the Freedom of Information Act, with names and other personal information of witnesses redacted.
