What happened
On 17 May 2022 the House Intelligence Committee's Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, chaired by Representative André Carson, held the first open congressional hearing on UFOs since 1969. Carson opened by saying stigma had gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon's top intelligence official, and Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, testified for under 90 minutes before a closed classified session. Bray said the UAP database had grown to about 400 reports, that there had been at least 11 near misses but no collisions, and that nothing recovered pointed to a non-terrestrial origin. He played two clips: a spherical object flashing past a Navy cockpit in 2021, and night-vision footage of triangular lights off a warship, which he said were later judged to be unmanned aircraft. Moultrie acknowledged some incidents still defied explanation and cited the 2004 Nimitz encounter. Lawmakers including Rick Crawford warned of possible Chinese or Russian hypersonic programs.
The official explanation
The officials argued that most reports can be resolved with better data, that the triangular night-vision objects were drones whose shapes were an artifact of the optics, and that the pilot-cockpit sphere remained unidentified only for lack of data. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer called the footage shown unconvincing as evidence of anything extraordinary. Bray also said the database had grown mainly because stigma had eased and reporting had been standardized, not because incursions were necessarily increasing, and that no attempts at communication had occurred.
The anomalous case
Under oath, the Pentagon's own intelligence chiefs conceded that a portion of the roughly 400 reports could not be explained, and that there had been at least 11 near misses with unknown objects. Moultrie referred to the 2004 incident in which an object reportedly descended tens of thousands of feet and hovered near Navy pilots as one that still defied explanation. Bray said the reports were frequent and continuing, not legacy cases. Representative Tim Burchett, who attended though not a subcommittee member, accused the Pentagon of dismissing the possibility of non-human craft without justification. The spherical object that shot past a Navy cockpit was shown to Congress and left unidentified. A hearing intended to calm the issue instead confirmed the persistence of real, unexplained encounters near US forces.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- House Intelligence C3 Subcommittee hearing transcript, 17 May 2022 (PDF) transcript, congress.gov
Sources
- The military's UFO database now has info from about 400 reported incidents NPR (via Michigan Public)
- House Intelligence Subcmte Hrg on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, May 17, 2022 SpacePolicyOnline
- UFO hearing in Congress (updated after hearing) EarthSky
- 2022 United States Congress hearings on UFOs Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.