Congressional Hearing on UFOs and UAPs: NPR

Is intelligent alien life roaming around in space – and even in the sky above us here on Earth? Has the US government covered up unexplained phenomena and used secret extraterrestrial discoveries to boost its own technology?

It is among the issues members of Congress are debating on Wednesday in a joint hearing of a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee. Its title: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Revealing the Truth.”

The Pentagon issued a report in March saying it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Four experts will testify at the public hearing, which begins at 11:30 a.m. ET. You can see the process live.

Extraordinary moments unfolded in a similar hearing last year, especially when the retired May. David Grusch, formerly part of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Forcealleged that the US government has recovered non-human “biologicals” from crash sites and has long operated a secret reverse-engineering program to collect proceeds from recovered craft.

Grusch is not among the witnesses for the 2024 hearing. Instead, those testifying include:

Tim Gallaudet, retired rear admiral, US Navy; CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC

“The confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came to me in January 2015,” Gallaudet said in his written testimony.

He describes being part of a pre-deployment naval exercise off the US East Coast that culminated in the famous “Go Fast” video, in which a Navy F/A-18 jet’s sensors picked up “an unidentified object exhibiting flight- and structural properties unlike anything else in our arsenal.”

He was among a group of commanders involved in the exercise who received an email containing the video sent by the operations officer of Fleet Forces Command, Gallaudet said.

“The very next day, the email disappeared from my account and that of the other recipients without explanation,” he said.

Luis Elizondo, author and former official in the Ministry of Defence

at Elizondo’s testimony is short and sure to raise scrutiny, claiming that a secret arms race is playing out on the global stage.

“Let me be clear: UAP is real,” he writes. “Advanced technologies not made by our government — or any other government — monitor sensitive military installations around the globe. Also, the United States possesses UAP technologies, as do some of our adversaries.”

Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who later “managed a highly sensitive special access program on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council,” according to his official bio.

“In 2012, (Elizondo) was the top ranking person in the DOD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a secretive Pentagon unit that studied unidentified anomalous phenomena,” his biography states, adding that he resigned in 2017.

Michael Gold, former NASA Associate Administrator for Space Policy and Partnerships; member of the NASA UAP Independent Study Team

Gold’s testimony stresses the need for government agencies and academics to “overcome the harmful stigma that continues to inhibit scientific dialogue and open discussion” about unexplained phenomena.

“As they say, the truth is out there,” Gold said, “we just have to be brave enough and brave enough to face it.”

Michael Shellenberger, founder of Public, a news outlet on the Substack platform

Shellenberger’s testimony runs to about 214 pages, including a long timeline of UAP reports from 1947 to 2023.

Shellenberger is pushing the White House and Congress to act, calling for passage of UAP transparency legislation and cutting funding for related programs not disclosed to lawmakers.

“UAP transparency is bipartisan and vital to our national security,” his written testimony said.

Reports of UFOs and UAPs are now more centralized

In 1977, President Carter asked NASA to investigate the resumption of UFO investigations, but the agency and the Air Force believed “nothing would be gained by further investigation.”

But in recent years there has been an increased effort to collect and centralize the reporting of unexplained phenomena.

In July 2022, the US government created the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AAROto standardize reporting methods and data collection. It collects UAP reports from the military and from the Federal Aviation Administration, including sightings reported by civilian pilots to air traffic control. The agency does not offer a way for the public to file a UAP report. It accepts “reports from current or former U.S. government employees, service members, or contractor personnel with direct knowledge of U.S. government programs or activities related to the UAP dating back to 1945.”

The agency adds that potential filers should not submit “any information that is potentially CLASSIFIED or unclassified information that is not publicly available (eg, subject to export control regulations).”

Many historical records are also available

Due to intense public interest, a number of records related to UFO studies are available online, including a the “case files” folder related to UAPs on the US Navy website. The FBI also has one online “vaulting” of recordscovering the period from 1947 to 1954.

As for the famous Project Blue Book, operated by the US Air Force from 1947 to 1969, documents related to the project are now held by The National Archiveswhich holds 37 cubic feet of case files, along with at least 5 other cubic feet of records.

The majority of Blue Book investigations of 12,618 reported sightings were resolved or explained, — but 701 remained “Unidentified,” the Air Force has said. The service said none of the incidents posed a security threat or indicated capabilities beyond modern science. It added: “There was no evidence to suggest that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”