“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.” – President Barack Obama

A topic long ignored by the U.S. government has recently seen a lot of publicity as Pentagon officials testify in a Congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena. 

Ronald S. Moultrie, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, and Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, addressed the House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), on unidentified aerial phenomena. The hearing was split between a public session and a closed session, during which no media or civilians were present. 

“Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it’s true,” Rep. Carson stated in his opening remarks to the House Intelligence Committee. “But they are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

The hearing occurred on May 17, 2022, in an effort to destigmatize reporting of unidentified aerial phenomena, especially by American military forces. 

“Our goal is to strike that delicate balance – one that will enable us to maintain the public’s trust while preserving those capabilities that are vital to the support of our service personnel,” Moutrie explained during the testimony, according to NPR. 

Despite the open hearings discussions, little is known about the topic of conversation during the closed-door session that occurred. 

“We do not want potential adversaries to know exactly what we see or understand,” Moutrie suggested prior to the confidential hearing. 

Since 2017, the United States Air Force has secretly tried to probe accounts of encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena,  however, this wasn’t the first time the Air Force conducted this type of research. 

“More than fifty years ago, the U.S. government ended Project Blue Book – an effort to catalog and understand sightings of objects in the air that could not otherwise be explained,” noted Rep. Carson during the House’s hearing. “For more than 20 years, that project had treated unidentified anomalies in our airspace as a national security threat to be monitored and investigated.”  

During the hearing a report by the U.S. The Director of National Intelligence was pointed towards multiple times. The document alleges that of the 144 unidentified aerial phenomena, only 1 could be explained (it was a balloon). 

“We have detected no eliminations within the UAP task force that…would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin,” Bray stated, trying to install a focus on foreign air vehicles and drones instead of extraterrestrials. 

In an email conversation between a Pentagon spokesman and The Bobcat Prowl, the Department of Defense refused to answer if the unidentified objects were believed to be of Russian or Chinese origin. 

While the committee’s session has been described as creating more questions than answers, the hearing will likely have lasting implications for dissuading and capturing unidentified objects in the skies above America.