UFOs Return to Congress

T he subject of UFOs has once again captured congressional attention, having been the focus of a House Intelligence subcommittee open hearing this morning. Just don’t call them UFOs. In recent years, government communications have largely replaced the classic term with the initialization “UAP” for “unidentified aerial phenomena.” But today’s hearing was still billed as the first of its kind in 50 years. And while it did clear some of the often-murky air around the topic, much remains unexplained.

Though some of us have been interested in this sort of thing for many years, today’s hearing was the latest sign of a renewed public interest in these phenomena. This renewal seemed to begin with the 2017 revelations about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, an apparent government effort to investigate sightings of mysterious “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Since then, we’ve seen a slow but steady release of more information, some of it via a report mandated by Congress (through an effort largely spearheaded by Florida senator Marco Rubio) released last year. The latter revealed, among other things, that some UAP sightings remain unexplained, and most “probably do represent physical objects.”

Today’s hearing was largely intended to clarify the mission and examine the findings of the newly formed Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, an investigatory body housed within the Department of Defense intended to “synchronize efforts across the Department and the broader U.S. government to detect, identify and attribute objects of interests in Special Use Airspace, and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security.” It was represented today by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray. The two men fielded a variety of questions from members on the committee but ultimately left many of the questions at the center of this issue unsurprisingly unresolved.

Though contemporary partisan politics were pleasantly absent from the hearing, it was nonetheless marked by a different sort of tension: one of conflicting purpose. Representative Peter Welch (D., Vt.) aptly described it as “competing but different narratives” of, on the one hand, a general interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life and its visitation to Earth, and, on the other, “the responsibility to make sure that our national security is protected” from threats.

Much of the substance of the hearing focused on the former. As committee chairman André Carson (D., Ind.) put it in his opening remarks, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national-security threat, and they need to be treated that way.” In this concern, he was joined by Rick Crawford (R., Ark.), who seemed most interested in preventing what he called “intelligence surprises” from adversary nations such as Russia and China — that is, ensuring that their technical capabilities do not vastly exceed our own, or at least knowing if and when they do. Likewise, Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) stressed that we should be careful not only with reports of other nations dealing with the same problem — Bray noted that China has launched a similar investigatory effort — but also with what we share with them about what we know. And Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) brought up a 1967 incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in which an unidentified aerial object reportedly rendered inert some of the nuclear missiles located there.

While national security was the overriding focus of the hearing, it was not the only one. Bray and Moultrie were also asked, in a more general fashion, about the nature of what was seen, with Wenstrup quizzing them about the “composition” of the objects, Raja Krishnamoorthi (D., Ill.) seeking clarification that there had been no known collisions, attempted communications, or “discharged armaments” relative to them, or wrecks from such objects, and Adam Schiff (D. Calif.) examining the possibility that some of these objects can move “without any discernible means of propulsion.” Schiff’s query somewhat ominously revealed that our government is unaware, at least publicly, of any adversaries with access to such technology, leaving three possibilities for these (as well as other) unexplained sightings: faulty data; technology our enemies have that is unknown to us; or . . . something truly unexplained. Bray’s preferred term for this “small handful” of events that “we can’t explain with the data we have” was “unresolved.” He considers them “obviously the ones that are of most interest to us.” Bray included in this category the infamous USS Nimitz encounter, in which Navy pilots observed the seemingly impossible maneuverings of a Tic Tac–shaped aerial object.

The hearing also revealed that it’s impossible to discuss this subject without straying at least somewhat into more popular attitudes and tropes about it. Schiff could not help but label UAPs “one of the world’s most enduring mysteries.” Carson’s labeling of the Mutual UFO Network, a decades-old private UFO investigatory body as a “civil-society group” was a tremendous P.R. win for a group whose attempts to take UFOs seriously have not always defeated its undeserved reputation as being on the fringes. And there was a universal recognition of a “stigma” around reporting such incidents, one that has emerged from the pop-culture cache of aliens. Many on both sides of the panel argued that the stigma must be challenged if we are to get to the bottom of what is going on. Moultrie went so far as to say that “our goal is to eliminate this stigma.” (Moultrie dealt with some amusing stigma of his own, when he revealed that he has attended sci-fi conventions; Crawford was facetiously dissatisfied with Moultrie’s assurance that he had “not necessarily” dressed up for them.)

But even if this hearing represented a kind of advance for the cause of investigating these unidentified phenomena, it was hardly definitive. That was, in part, because of the nature of the hearing: It was structured in two sections, open and closed. At times, this led to tantalizing hints of more interesting revelations that will remain, for now, hidden from the public. For example, Moultrie alluded to, and Krishnamoorthi asked about, UAP activity happening underwater; Moultrie simply replied, “I think that would be more appropriate to address in closed session.” A similar reply met Wenstrup’s inquiries about what information concerning these objects other countries are privy to.

This behavior, even if warranted, can disincline one to trust government assertions that such secrecy is meant only to protect national security, not hide the truth. “We’ve had to sometimes be less forthcoming with information in open forums than many would hope,” Bray admitted. Well, despite some movement of these efforts at investigation out of the shadows, much remains mysterious, not only about what these phenomena are but also about what our government might know and isn’t telling us. Until one or the other of those mysteries is solved, hearings such as this will do only so much. And people will continue to wonder what these things are — whatever we decide to call them.