First UFO hearing in years set for Capitol Hill

Congress next Tuesday will hold a hearing next on UFOs for the first time in more than 50 years.

The House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation will hear testimony from two Pentagon officials, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, according to The New York Times.

The Hill has reached out to the subcommittee for verification.

The officials will likely discuss a key government report last year that revealed 144 unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) encounters from 2004 to 2021.

The committee’s chairman, André Carson (D-Ind.), tweeted that UFOs were becoming a “national security risk.”

“Americans need to know more about these unexplained occurrences,” Carson wrote.

Congress has not held a hearing on UFOs since the 1969 closure of Project Blue Book, an investigation into mysterious aerial phenomena based on an Air Force report.

In the ’50s and ’60s, subcommittees “fielded thousands of requests” about “ever imaginable topic” related to aerial phenomena but did not draw any explicit conclusions, according to House archives.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a highly anticipated report last June on UAPs, which also fell short of drawing any conclusions about what the 144 UAPs might have been.

ODNI did not rule out extraterrestrial life or alien technology but said the UAPs could also be linked to highly advanced tech from adversaries such as Russia and China. Some of the UAPs flew near U.S. military facilities, and officials said they would continue monitoring for more of the mysterious phenomena because it could pose a national security risk.

The report drew widespread theories on the UAPs, but also some scorn from extraterrestrial enthusiasts who questioned why ODNI left out details such as the shape of the UAPs they had encountered.

John Greenewald Jr., the creator of TheBlackVault.com, a website that releases classified government documents, told Hill.TV that ODNI officials had redacted so much information he was questioning what they were hiding.

“They won’t tell you a single, visual observation on what shapes these are,” he said. “It really solidifies the secrecy behind what these UAP really are. … That begs the question: why? Why is simply a shape of a vehicle a threat to national security if they tell the national public? What could that reveal?”