A House Intelligence subcommittee will hold a hearing Tuesday at 9 a.m. on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), with testimony expected from top U.S. intelligence and defense officials.
The hearing will be broadcast live on the House Intelligence Committee’s YouTube page.
The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, chaired by Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), will oversee the first Capitol Hill hearings on UFOs in more than 50 years.
The committee is expected to hear from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray.
The hearing follows a report on UAPs last year from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which found 144 UAP encounters from 2004 to 2021.
The report fell short of identifying what exactly the UAPs were, not drawing any specific conclusions on the UAPs and redacting information, which exasperated UFO enthusiasts.
Last year, the Pentagon created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) to succeed a task force operated by the Navy that looked into UAP encounters.
AOIMSG, which is headed by Moultrie, will “synchronize efforts” across the Defense Department to detect and identify UAPs.
Congress has not held a hearing on UFOs since the 1969 closure of Project Blue Book, an Air Force report on UFO encounters. Lawmakers held hearings in the ’50s and ’60s regarding the existence of UFOs and mysterious encounters in the U.S.
Avi Loeb, who heads Harvard’s Galileo Project, which searches for extraterrestrial technology. said in an opinion piece in The Hill last week he hopes the hearings establish the baseline for a more robust pursuit of UAPs.
Loeb also hopes the hearing creates more attention on aerial phenomena in general.
“It is common practice for experts to raise dust and claim that they cannot see anything,” he said. “We should seek evidence-based knowledge without being boxed by our egos, emotions or national security traps. This is my wish for the congressional hearing next week.”