Scott Bray
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Scott Bray is a former United States Navy intelligence officer who served as Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence and was one of the two senior Pentagon officials who testified before Congress at the first public UAP briefing held in May 2022, alongside Ronald Moultrie. His testimony constituted the first official classified-to-public briefing on unidentified anomalous phenomena in over fifty years.
Background
Bray served as a career Navy intelligence officer, rising to the position of Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence — one of the most senior intelligence posts within the service. In this role he oversaw the Navy's collection, analysis, and management of intelligence bearing on aviation and maritime threat environments, giving him direct authority over the emerging corpus of UAP reports accumulated since the early 2000s. His selection to testify alongside Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, reflected both his operational familiarity with the evidence and his authority to address aviation-safety and national-security dimensions of the UAP question.
2022 Congressional UAP briefing
On 17 May 2022, Bray appeared alongside Ronald Moultrie at an open hearing of the House Intelligence Committee's Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee — the first open congressional session dedicated to UAP in more than fifty years. The hearing was preceded by a classified session for committee members. Bray presented declassified video footage of UAP encounters to the committee, including imagery described as showing "pyramid-shaped" objects filmed from a Navy vessel and a separate object described as an "acorn" shape. The "pyramid UFO" footage had previously circulated publicly via the website The Drive and the broader UAP research community, but was being formally acknowledged for the first time by a sitting Pentagon official. According to Bray, the Navy had accumulated over 400 UAP reports since 2004, a significant increase from the 143 incidents mentioned in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence 2021 preliminary assessment.
Bray framed the UAP issue consistently as a flight safety and national security concern rather than a question about the origin or nature of the objects. He stated that UAP were appearing in restricted airspace at high frequency and that pilots were encountering objects without clear explanation, creating risks of miscalculation or mid-air collision. He described the primary analytical challenge as distinguishing between adversary technology, natural phenomena, sensor artefacts, and genuinely unexplained objects.
Declassification commitment
During the hearing, Bray made a specific public commitment to declassify UAP footage that did not implicate sources or methods, a commitment later noted to have produced no additional public releases. Christopher Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, quoted Bray's commitment verbatim:
what I will commit to, at least for that material is under my authority as Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. For information we have that does not involve sources or methods, etc. I commit to declassify that. So I believe very much in the transparency of this and we worked very hard to balance that with national security.
Mellon noted that, to the best of his knowledge, the Navy had not declassified a single additional UAP video following Bray's commitment.
Exchange with Tim Burchett
Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett — one of the more persistent congressional advocates for UAP transparency — noted that Bray had publicly stated "there are no signs of extraterrestrial involvement," characterising such assessments as contradictory to what other officials and witnesses were reporting. Burchett placed Bray's statement alongside contradictory reports from George Knapp about Russian UAP encounters and Nick Pope's assessments of Chinese and Russian UAP programs, arguing that the net result was a picture of deliberate governmental incoherence on the subject. Burchett later became one of the primary congressional voices calling for the David Grusch whistleblower allegations to be investigated and for the establishment of a formal non-human intelligence recovery accountability framework.
Ross Coulthart assessment
Ross Coulthart, the investigative journalist and author of In Plain Sight, cited Bray and Moultrie's admissions to Congress as among the most significant official acknowledgements of the UAP phenomenon yet made:
admissions made to the Congress by people like Scott Bray and Ron Moultrie that yes, there is a phenomenon that we can't explain. It displays the five observables. It's doing hypersonic velocity, it's doing instantaneous velocity, going from naught to 10,000 km an hour in an instant. It's trans medium, it's stealthy and most important of all it's got positive lift.
Airborne clutter framing
Mick West, a UAP sceptic and author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole, noted at a 2022 discussion that Bray specifically highlighted airborne clutter — including balloons and drones seen at distance — as the single category the government had positively resolved within the UAP report, suggesting that the official framing remained focused on prosaic explanations wherever available.
Departure and subsequent developments
Bray departed his position as Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence following the 2022 hearing. The establishment of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in July 2022 transferred primary UAP coordination responsibility to a new inter-agency body, removing the function from the naval intelligence chain of command where Bray had managed it. His testimony remains the most detailed official public account of the UAP evidence base prior to the subsequent disclosures by David Grusch in 2023 and the expansion of congressional oversight that followed.