Himes asks Pentagon to debunk UFO conspiracies
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.
Now referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” 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 “in the service of sort of reducing speculation and conspiracy theories.”
Bray and Moultrie had already presented evidence, including video, of aerial phenomena that 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.”