Hundreds of incidents but no sign of aliens: What we learned from Congress' first UFO hearing in more than 50 years

• Congress' first hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years ended without any major bombshells.
• Department of Defense officials stressed that there are still many incidents that they can't explain.

Congress held its first UFO hearing in more than half a century on Tuesday, but it ended without any major bombshells, like a military confirmation that aliens exist. No, instead, the discussion between lawmakers and defense officials simply bounced back and forth between serious questions about US national security concerns and speculation about what might be out there.

Over the years, there have been numerous incidents in which US military personnel observed, either through military sensors or with their own eyes, what are officially called unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs). Such incidents are more commonly referred to as sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs for short. Many of these unusual incidents have occurred in or around sensitive military bases or exercises, raising national security concerns.

"To me, among the most fascinating questions are these phenomena that we can measure, that is instruments report that something is there. It is not the human eye confusing objects in the sky," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said at the start of the hearing. "There is something there, measurable by multiple instruments, and yet it seems to move in directions that are inconsistent with what we know with physics or science more broadly."

Though observations have been unusual and at times inexplicable, defense officials testified that they have "no material and have detected no emanations" that would "suggest it is anything non-terrestrial in origin."

"When I say unexplained, I mean everything from too little data to the data that we have doesn't point us toward an explanation," said Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, adding that officials take their investigations "wherever the data takes us."

Defense officials testified that they are getting a better handle on tracking and investigating when Navy pilots and other service members report odd sightings and unexplained occurrences.

—CSPAN (@cspan) May 17, 2022

During the hearing, lawmakers pressed the officials to take seriously security concerns associated with UAPs and to do more to reduce the stigma of troops filing official reports on possible sightings.

"Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way," said Rep. André Carson, a Democrat from Indiana who chairs the intelligence subcommittee that held the hearing.

"For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, good reporting, or pilots who were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issue to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely," he said. "Today we know better."

Bray said that the government now has approximately 400 UAP reports in its database, a massive increase from the 144 reports that were publicly disclosed in a draft report last summer. Last June, the Office of National Intelligence said it had collected 144 largely firsthand reports of unexplained instances from 2004 to 2021. In that case, only one of those instances was able to later be explained.

Though many remain unexplained, some additional incidents, Bray said, can now be explained, such as a video of "flashing triangles" taken somewhere off the US coast "several years ago." Bray said because the video was taken through night vision goggles with a "single-lens reflex camera," it was difficult to perceive what they might be. But a different phenomenon observed by a separate ship has led officials to believe that the "flashing triangles" were probably drones.

"The triangular appearance is the result of light passing through the night vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera," Bray said.

Though the defense officials testified they had seen no evidence pointing to an extraterrestrial origin for the incidents that are still unexplained, Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, went further than any of his colleagues in suggesting that aliens could exist and that they would likely want to visit Earth.

"No one knows whether there is extra-terrestrial life. It is a big universe," Welch said. "It would be pretty presumptuous to have a hard and fast conclusion. And then if there is, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that there is some exploration coming here."

The officials called to testify were on Capitol Hill in part to discuss their progress standing up a special office that lawmakers mandated the Pentagon create to serve essentially as a clearinghouse for defense and intelligence community reports on UAPs. The office, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), is supposed to be fully operational by next month. But as Carson pointed out, the office still does not have a named director.

Lawmakers repeatedly pressed the Pentagon to be as open as possible with the American people on what they find out. But both the officials and some lawmakers themselves conceded that if some or all of the UAPs turn out to be technology fielded by a US adversary, then some of the answers will likely remain classified. They stressed that classification in of itself isn't evidence of a cover-up, but rather it is an example of the intelligence community doing everything it can to keep its sources and methods protected.

"There aren't separate UAP sensors, there's not a UAP processing computer, there's not a separate UAP dissemination chain or whatever," Moultrie said. "We need to protect that. This is something that we're looking at, but there are going to be other things that we'll look at in the future that we're going to need the same sensors, the same sources and methods to help us do."