‘PENTAGON COMMITTED TO UNDERSTANDING UFO ORIGINS’

WASHINGTON: Two senior US defence intelligence officials said on Tuesday the Pentagon is committed to determining the origins of what it calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” - commonly termed UFOs - but acknowledged many remain beyond the government’s ability to explain.

The two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a House of Representatives intelligence subcommittee for the first public US congressional hearing on the subject in a half century. It came 11 months after a government report documented more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that US military pilots had observed since 2004. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the number of UAPs officially cataloged by a newly formed Pentagon task force has grown to 400 cases. Both officials chose their words carefully in describing the task force’s work, including the question of possible extraterrestrial origins, which Bray said defense and intelligence analysts had not ruled out. Bray did say that “we have no material, we have detected no emanations, within the UAP task force that would suggest it is anything nonterrestrial in origin.”

The 2021 report, a nine-page “preliminary assessment” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a Navy-led task force, said 80% of UAP instances it reviewed were recorded on multiple instruments. Both officials pledged that the Pentagon would follow the evidence wherever it leads and made clear that the primary interest is addressing possible national security threats, adding that the Pentagon was determined to remove the stigma associated with such sightings .