Pentagon committed to understanding UFOs: officials
WASHINGTON — Two top U.S. defence intelligence officials said on Tuesday the Pentagon is committed to determining the origins of what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” in the first public congressional hearing in more than 50 years concerning phenomena commonly known as UFOs.
The two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a U.S. House of Representatives intelligence subcommittee 11 months after a report documenting more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that U.S. military pilots have reported observing since 2004.
Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, acknowledged that there have been some sightings that U.S. officials “can't explain.” Some of those involved instances in which there was too little data to create a reasonable explanation, Bray said.
Bray added: “There are a small handful of cases in which we have more data that our analysis simply hasn't been able to fully pull together a picture of what happened.”
These, Bray said, have involved unexpected “flight characteristics” or “signature management.”
“When it comes to material that we have, we have no material, we have detected no emanations, within the UAB task force that would suggest it is anything non-terrestrial in origin,” Bray added.
The term UFO, for unidentified flying object, has long been widely associated with the notion of extraterrestrial spacecraft.
“We know that our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, and because UAP pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins,” Moultrie, who oversees a newly formed Pentagon-based UAP investigation team as U.S. defence undersecretary for intelligence and security, told the hearing.
Bray presented the panel with two UAP video clips. One showed flashing triangle-shaped objects in the night sky later determined to be visual artifacts of light passing through night-vision goggles. The other showed a shiny, spherical object zipping past the cockpit window of a military aircraft. “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is,” Bray said of the second object.
Moultrie and Bray said the Pentagon was determined to remove the stigma long associated with sightings of unexplained flying objects by encouraging pilots to come forward when they observe such phenomena.