According to techcrunch, an unusual hearing in the U.S. Congress raised unusual questions to government officials on Tuesday, the first time in half a century that the U.S. Congress held a hearing on UFO, now known as UAP (unidentified air phenomenon)**
The House subcommittee on counter terrorism, counterintelligence and counter proliferation intelligence held a question and answer session, received two Pentagon officials, and held a rare public discussion on one of the most controversial and conspiracy prone topics with the federal government.
"UAPs cannot be explained; this is a fact," Andre Carson, the chairman of the Subcommittee and Indiana representative, pointed out in his opening remarks. "But they are real. They need to be investigated and many of the threats they pose need to be mitigated."
At the hearing, Scott Bray, deputy director of the US Naval Intelligence Agency, shared a decrypted Video , in the video, a reflective unidentified spherical object is "magnified" from a pilot flying at a naval training ground, which is only visible in a few short frames.
"I didn't explain what this specific object is," Bray said of the video.
The public discussion was followed by a confidential hearing where Pentagon officials were able to discuss the technical details of how the U.S. military collected UAP data.
In public meetings, officials took the opportunity to pour some cold water on a popular plot: the U.S. military secretly has evidence of crashed aircraft that did not originate from earth. In response to a question from Illinois representative Raja krishnamoorthi about the mysterious wreckage, Bray said that the military did not have any "unexplainable and inconsistent with the origin of the earth".
"We don't have any material," Bray said in response to a different question about unexplained evidence. "We have not detected any divergence within the UAP task force that can indicate that it is of any non terrestrial origin."
The U.S. Department of defense set up a special working group to investigate UAPs in 2020, which is a milestone in the recent efforts of the U.S. government to be more transparent on a topic it once refused to discuss directly. The working group described its mission as an effort to "detect, analyze and catalogue UAPs that may pose a potential threat to the national security of the United States".
The Pentagon's UAP task force maintains a database of unexplained aerial sightings. Bray points out that the database now contains 400 reports, an increase from 143 less than a year ago.
At the hearing, Pentagon officials and lawmakers tried to legalize the discussion on UAPs and encourage soldiers who observed such phenomena to come forward. "Reports of sightings are frequent and ongoing. The stigma has decreased," Bray said
Tuesday's hearing provided little material for the strangest extraplanetary explanation UFO followers like to speculate, but pushed the dialogue to a more grounded area of national defense.
One possible explanation is that some UAPs observed by U.S. soldiers may be hypersonic technology from foreign opponents to monitor military activities. If this theory is confirmed, it will show that other countries have advanced technical capabilities, which far surpass the U.S. Army in some aspects.
Unfortunately, however, for true believers, more mundane explanations are still working. These explanations include visual distortions caused by stray weather balloons and devices used to record mysterious images.