New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)

Himes asks Pentagon to debunk conspiracy theories about UFOs

- By Jordan Nathaniel Fenster

During the House Intelligen­ce Committee’s first meeting in more than 50 years on UFOs, held Tuesday, U.S.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., wanted to make clear that intelligen­ce officials were not necessaril­y talking about alien life forms.

Himes asked the Pentagon’s most senior intelligen­ce official, Ronald S. Moultrie, and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligen­ce Scott W. Bray if they could discuss their findings about what are now referred to as “unidentifi­ed aerial phenomena” — “in the service of sort of reducing speculatio­n and conspiracy theories.”

Bray and Moultrie had already presented evidence, including video, of aerial phenomena they could not explain.

“When you say, ‘We can’t explain,’ give the public a little bit better sense of where on that spectrum of we can’t explain,” Himes said.

“Are we holding materials, organic or inorganic, that we don’t know about? Are we picking up emanations that are something other than light or infrared that could be deemed to be communicat­ions?

“Give us a sense for what you mean when you say, ‘We can’t explain.’”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligen­ce released a report last year detailing 143 unexplaine­d sightings. But Bray said it comes down to a lack of data.

“There is a lot of informatio­n, like the video that we showed, in which there’s simply too little data to create a reasonable explanatio­n,” Bray told Himes. “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.”

Those cases, where analyses have been unable to explain an event despite a large volume of data, are those “where we see some indication­s of flight characteri­stics or signature management that are not what we had expected.”

“We have no material, we have detected no emanations within the UAP task force that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestria­l in origin,” Bray said.

Moultrie suggested that any event might be explained if there was sufficient data.

“That’s one of the challenges,” he said. “We have insufficie­nt data either on the event itself, the object itself, or insufficie­nt data or plug in with some other organizati­on or agency that may have had something in that space at that time. So it’s a data issue that we’re facing in many of these instances.”

That being said, though there was no data to suggest it, Bray did not exclude the possibilit­y of extraterre­strial origin.

“We’ve made no assumption­s about what this is or isn’t,” he said. “We’re committed to understand­ing these. And so we’ll go wherever that data exists.”

 ?? Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images ?? Deputy Director of Naval Intelligen­ce Scott Bray explains a video of an unidentifi­ed aerial phenomena as he testifies before a House Intelligen­ce Committee subcommitt­ee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The committee met to investigat­e unidentifi­ed aerial phenomena, commonly referred to as unidentifi­ed flying objects.
Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Deputy Director of Naval Intelligen­ce Scott Bray explains a video of an unidentifi­ed aerial phenomena as he testifies before a House Intelligen­ce Committee subcommitt­ee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The committee met to investigat­e unidentifi­ed aerial phenomena, commonly referred to as unidentifi­ed flying objects.

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