2022 United States Congress hearings on UFOs

The 2022 United States Congress hearings on UFOs were a public hearing and a classified briefing held on May 17, 2022, by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, at which two Pentagon officials — Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence — testified on military reports of unidentified aerial phenomena. It was the first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the United States in more than fifty years, the previous one dating from the end of Project Blue Book in 1969. The subcommittee's chair, André Carson, framed the subject as a potential national-security risk to be evaluated seriously by leaders in government and intelligence. The officials told the subcommittee that the Pentagon's task force had detected no material and no emanations suggesting that any unidentified object was non-terrestrial in origin; Ross Coulthart holds the same testimony to be an official admission that a phenomenon exists that officials cannot explain, Mick West reads it as confirming that the one category the government had positively resolved was airborne clutter such as balloons, and Christopher Mellon and Tim Burchett point to the gap between the officials' promises and what followed.

Background

The hearing followed the June 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence preliminary assessment of unidentified aerial phenomena, which examined 144 military incidents between 2004 and 2021 and found only one easily explained. On November 23, 2021, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks established the Pentagon's Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), the body the officials described to the subcommittee in May 2022.

The open hearing

The public session opened on the morning of May 17, 2022, and was recessed at 10:33 a.m. so that a classified session could begin at noon on sensor capabilities and further data. Representatives Carson, Crawford, Himes, Gallagher, Schiff, LaHood, Krishnamoorthi, Welch and Wenstrup spoke in the open session. Moultrie defined UAP as "airborne objects that, when encountered, cannot be immediately identified", and said the Defense Department's aim was understanding the national-security implications rather than concealment. Bray told the members that the task force had by then collected about 400 reports, and attributed the rise in reports to the Navy's efforts to encourage reporting; of the 2004 Nimitz encounter he said "we have data on that and it remains simply unresolved." Bray said the task force had "no material" and had "detected no emanations" that would suggest that anything was "non-terrestrial in origin." The officials described the AOIMSG as a group whose director had recently been selected and which would work with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration and NASA.

Two videos were shown to the members. The first, a clip titled "Video 1 2021 Flyby", shows a spherical object speeding past a fighter jet's cockpit; the second shows a triangular object filmed through night-vision goggles off the United States coast, which the Navy later identified as a camera artifact after its own assets filmed similar unmanned systems.

Bray also committed, in open session, to declassify material under his authority that did not involve sources or methods; the former deputy assistant secretary of defense Christopher Mellon later said that to the best of his knowledge the Navy had not declassified one further UAP video following that commitment. The sceptic Mick West noted that Bray's testimony singled out airborne clutter, such as balloons seen at a distance, as the category the government had positively resolved.

Aftermath

The Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office later in 2022. Representative Tim Burchett later placed Bray's public statement that there were no signs of extraterrestrial involvement beside the contradictory accounts of other officials and witnesses, and described the result as an incoherent government position. A second open congressional hearing on UAP followed in July 2023, featuring the testimony of David Grusch, David Fravor and Ryan Graves in the 2023 UAP Congressional Hearing.

Open questions

References

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