A House subcommittee is set to hear out-of-this-world testimony next week as federal lawmakers hold the first open congressional hearing on UFOs since 1970.
Two top defense intelligence officials were slated to answer questions from the House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on counterterrorism, counterintelligence and counterproliferation at Tuesday’s hearing, according to The New York Times.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were hopeful that the new hearing would lead to improved national security and possibly a greater understanding of the universe.
The purpose of the event was to shed light on “one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, reportedly said.
“This may be the very thing that brings Democrats and Republicans together, at least for an hour or two,” said subcommittee chair Rep. André Carson, an Indiana Democrat, according to the article
The hearing comes on the heels of an intelligence report on unexplained aerial phenomena that was delivered to Congress last summer after being included in a COVID-19 relief bill signed by outgoing President Donald Trump in December of 2020.
The report found that the vast majority of the 144 incidents reviewed by intelligence officials over the last two decades could not be explained and were not the work of the US military or government, officials reportedly said.
The explanation means that the military eyewitnesses who encountered UFOs on an almost “daily basis” off the coast of California in 2017, and footage that was verified by defense officials, were not seeing programs the US meant to keep secret.
Some of the unidentified flying objects seen by military personnel traveled at a speed of 43,200 mph, a vindicated whistleblowing ex-intelligence officer for the US Department of Defense told The Post.
The Congressional report did not conclude if the UFOs were extraterrestrial, or the work of countries like Russia or China, but said most of the reported phenomena “do represent physical objects,” of unknown origins.
Ronald Moultrie, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security and Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, were slated to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, according to The Times.
Moultrie oversees the Pentagon’s Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, which was formally called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force and co-authored the alien report with the intelligence community.
It will be the first time Congress has taken up the issue in more than a half-century. In the late 60s, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford spearheaded a pair of hearings on UFO sightings which the Air Force dismissed as “swamp gas.”
Military leaders concluded that UFOs had never threatened national security, said there was no evidence they were from outer space and declined to investigate further, according to the paper.
