US Congress panel holds UFO hearings
WASHINGTON: Two top US defence intelligence officials were due to testify on Capitol Hill yesterday about what the government knows of unidentified flying objects, in the first public congressional hearing concerning UFOs in more than 50 years.
The hearing before a US House Intelligence subcommittee comes 11 months after a report documenting more than 140 cases of what the government officially calls “unidentified aerial phenomena”, or UAPs, that US military pilots have reported observing since 2004.
The more popular term UFO, for unidentified flying object, has long been widely associated with the notion of alien spacecraft, which received no mention in last June’s UAP presentation.
The focus, instead, was on possible implications for US national security and aviation safety.
The report did, however, include some UAPs previously revealed in Pentagon-released video footage of enigmatic airborne objects exhibiting speed and manoeuvrability exceeding known aviation technology and lacking any visible means of propulsion or flight-control surfaces.
Yesterday’s hearing was expected to re-examine the findings of that report, a nine-page “preliminary assessment” compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a Navy-led task force the Pentagon formed in 2020.
Defence and intelligence analysts who prepared the assessment offered no findings of the origins of any of the 144 sightings included in it, except for one attributed to a large deflating balloon.
The Navy task force behind the paper was replaced in November by a new Defense Department agency named the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.
Defence and intelligence analysts have likewise yet to rule out an extraterrestrial origin for any UAP case, senior US officials told reporters ahead of the report’s release last year, though the paper itself avoided any explicit reference to such possibilities.
The session will mark the first open congressional hearing on the subject since the US Air Force terminated an inconclusive UFO programme codenamed Project Blue Book in 1969.
During its 17 years in existence, Blue Book compiled a list of 12,618 total UFO sightings, 701 of which involved objects that officially remained “unidentified”.
But the Air Force later said it found no indication of a national security threat or evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles.