Congress learns of 400 UFO reports as Pentagon brass offer few explanations

The truth may be out there — and the feds are chasing after it.

Two top Defense Department officials testified before the House of Representatives Tuesday during the first public hearings on UFOs in more than 50 years.

Scott W. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the Pentagon had received about 400 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report last year calling for more data. This was after 143 out of 144 UFOs witnessed by military members, including pilots, could not be explained.

“The stigma has been reduced,” Bray said, indicating that people were more willing to come forward than in previous decades when reports were reduced to internet forums and issues of Weekly World News.

Bray said, however, the new reports leaned heavily toward “narrative-based” accounts of sightings and there are more personal drones, large balloons and other detritus in the air these days.

He added, though, that sightings in military airspace and other restricted areas have increased since the early 2000s.

Bray played a video of a UFO during his testimony, which showed a “spherical object” fly by a Naval aircraft during a training exercise.

“As they fly by it, they take a video — you see it looks reflective in this video, somewhat reflective, and it quickly passes by the cockpit of the aircraft,” Bray said. “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.”

Ronald S. Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testified that the Pentagon is establishing an office to investigate the objects.

“The office’s function is clear: to facilitate the identification of previously unknown or unidentified airborne objects in a methodical, logical and standardized manner,” Moultrie said.

The office will coordinate with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, as well as international allies and national laboratories.

California Rep. Adam Schiff, the intelligence committee chairman, said in his remarks that reports of these objects “need to be understood as a national security matter.”

“There is something there, measurable by multiple instruments, and yet it seems to move in directions that are inconsistent with what we know of physics or science more broadly,” Schiff said regarding the video played by Bray.

Schiff added these new reports “pose questions of tremendous interest.”