Inside Capitol Hill’s latest UFO hearings

ONEmericans had a pandemic on their minds back in 2020 then then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that stimulated the sagging economy and averted a government shutdown. Hidden inside the bill, however, was a completely different matter – one provision requiring Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go after the more fancy-sounding “unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).” Lawmakers wrote the requirement into legislation to be passed in the hope it might help explain cockpit footage of UAP sightings that the Navy had declassified earlier that year and had been burning up the Internet ever since.

The The Ministry of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, by analyzing both video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all sorts of ways that defy conventional aeronautics – loop-the-looping and changing directions with an agility that no existing technology could handle. None of the items produced detectable emissions. Some turned with a suddenness that would have produced g-forces fatal to any human aboard. Others dove into the sea and then flew straight out again.

The verdict of the military? A shrug. The objects were not US Air Force or Naval aircraft, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power – terrestrial or otherwise – was impossible to tell.

“These things would be out there all day,” told a pilot to New York Times in 2021. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “twelve hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we expected.”

Inauguration Day for Trump’s second term is still more than two months away, but when the once-and-future president returns to Washington, he will find the mystery of UAPs back there waiting for him.

On November 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” during which they heard from four witnesses who spent just over two hours arguing that American skies are indeed becoming to. powered by un-American – and possibly extraterrestrial – machines.

“Let me be ready,” Luis Elizondo testifieda former military intelligence official who spent 10 years running a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, “UAP is real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe .Furthermore, the US possesses UAP technologies, as do some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a decades-long secretive arms race, funded by misappropriated taxpayer dollars and hidden from our elected representatives and supervisory bodies.”

What caused both lawmakers and witnesses at the hearing particular concern is not only the fact that the sightings continue to occur, but where they do occur – with a disproportionate share of them occurring over military or other secure installations. Committee Chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) put the question directly to Elizondo.

“I suppose you could hypothetically have intrusions over just regular airports,” he said, “but is it obvious that these intrusions are more likely over military facilities than over a random airport?”

“There is certainly enough data to suggest that there is some kind of connection between sensitive U.S. military installations, including some of our nuclear stocks, and some of our Department of Energy facilities,” Elizondo responded. “This is not a new trend; it’s been going on for decades, and unfortunately that information has been obscured from people like you on this committee, and I think that’s problematic.”

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Elizondo wasn’t the only witness to charge that the government is playing nice with what it knows or doesn’t know about the origins of UAPs. Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet was deployed off the east coast of the continental United States in January 2015 when one of the cockpit videos declassified in 2020 was first recorded. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other naval officers received an email with the video attached — an email that disappeared from all their inboxes “without explanation” the next day. The anomalous object, he said, exhibited “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” For Gallaudet, the content of the video, not to mention its disappearance, served as “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity.”

Some of the most startling claims from the two-hour session came from journalist Michael Shellenberger, the founder of news page Public on Substack platformwho submitted 214 pages of testimony as evidence. Last month, Shellenberger published an article alleging that the government ran what he described in his testimony as “an active and highly secretive” program called Immaculate Constellation, which includes “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of images and videos of UAPs. “And it’s not the blurry pictures and videos we’ve been getting,” he testified. “It’s very clear, very high resolution.”

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Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator and member of the space agency’s UAP independent review team, also weighed in, lamenting what he described as “the damaging stigma that continues to hinder scientific dialogue and open discussion” about UAP. “Science requires data, which should be collected without bias or prejudice, but when the subject of UAP arises, those who wish to explore the phenomena are met with resistance and ridicule.”

That’s not only a disservice to the public, but a risk to public safety — one that Gallaudet, with his military pedigree, was quick to point out. “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency,” he said. “By 2025, the United States will spend over $900 billion on national defense, but we still have an incomplete understanding of what’s in our airspace.”

Added Elizondo: “We’re talking about technologies that can surpass anything we have in our inventory. And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure that eclipsed 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”

Whatever the unexplained technology is, the witnesses stressed, it is the government’s responsibility not only to find out its origins, but to share what it learns with the taxpaying public. “The intelligence community treats us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time we know the truth about this. I think we can handle it.”