CNN
Key lawmakers warned at a House hearing on Tuesday that unidentified aerial phenomena — popularly known as UFOs — must be investigated and taken seriously as a potential threat to national security.
The event marked the first congressional public hearing on UFOs in decades, a high-profile moment for a controversial topic that has long been relegated to the fringes of public policy.
For many lawmakers and intelligence and military personnel working on unexplained aerial phenomena, the bigger concern with the episodes is not that alien life is visiting Earth, but rather that a foreign adversary like Russia or China might be fielding some kind of next-generation technology in American airspace that the United States doesn’t know about.
Democratic Rep. André Carson of Indiana, the chairman of the panel holding the hearing, warned in his opening remarks, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat. And they need to be treated that way.”
He went on to say, “For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting, or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issue to the back room, or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community.”
“Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it’s true. But they are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated,” he said.
The hearing featured testimony from top government officials and the display of images and video of unidentified aerial phenomena. The public portion of the event lasted fewer than 90 minutes. Following the conclusion of the public hearing, the panel will hold a closed-door, classified briefing Tuesday afternoon.
During his testimony, Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, argued there is a need to balance transparency with the protection of sensitive intelligence information, saying there is an “obligation to protect sensitive sources and methods.”
“Our goal is to strike that delicate balance, one that enables us to maintain the public’s trust while preserving those capabilities that are vital to the support of our service personnel,” he said.
‘It takes considerable effort to understand what we’re seeing’
Scott Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, also appeared before the panel to answer questions from lawmakers.
During his testimony, Bray showed video and images to demonstrate what observations of UAPs may look like — and the effort it takes to try to identify what they might be.
One video featured images of flashing triangle shapes as seen through night-vision goggles. “In this video, US navy personnel recorded what appears to be triangles — some flashing — recorded several years ago off the coast of the United States,” he said.
He went on to show an image of what appeared to be another triangle-shaped object that he said came from “several years later and off a different coast.”
“This time other US navy assets also observed unmanned aerial systems nearby and were now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area,” he said.
“I don’t mean to suggest that everything that we observe is identifiable,” he said, “but this is a great example of how it takes considerable effort to understand what we’re seeing in the examples that we are able to collect
.”The first video Bray displayed featured only a very short clip of what appeared to be a blue sky with some white markings visible in the distance. He said that…
