In what constituted the first public hearing on the subject of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) in 50 years, Legislators in the United States warned that this type of phenomenon must be investigated and taken seriouslygiven the possibility that they constitute a potential threat to national security.
The hearing took place this morning before the House Intelligence Subcommittee. During it, André Carson, a Democratic representative from Indiana and president of the panel that held the hearing, issued a warning: “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) are a potential threat to national security. And they need to be treated that way”CNN reported.
For lawmakers and intelligence personnel, the concern is not so much that there is extraterrestrial life, but that enemy countries, such as Russia or China, are deploying technology in US airspace that the country is unaware of.
Carson said the “stigma” associated with UFOs, or UAPs, “has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots either avoided reporting, or were laughed at when they did. Defense Department officials relegated the issue behind the scenes, or hid it altogether, fearful of a skeptical national security community.
He pointed out that today Although it is true that there is still no explanation for UFOs, it is a fact that “they are real. You have to investigate them. And you have to mitigate any threat they pose.”
In his turn, Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, showed videos and images to demonstrate what UFO sightings are like and the work involved in trying to identify what they can be. One of the videos showed images of triangular shapes. Bray explained that the tape was recorded by US Navy personnel, who captured “what appear to be triangles – some flickering – several years ago off the coast of the United States.”
He then showed an image, also of a triangular object, captured “several years later, off a different coast.”
Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, said the term UAP can refer to “airborne objects that when encountered cannot be immediately identified.”
serious topic
The general consensus, among Democrats and Republicans, is that the UFO issue should be treated seriously, and not dismissed as a matter of science fiction.
The panel’s ranking Republican, Rep. Rick Crawford of Arkansas, said “the intelligence community has a serious duty to our taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries like China and Russia from surprising us with unforeseen new technologies. This committee has the obligation to understand what you are doing to determine if any PAU is a new technology or not – and if it is, where does it come from?
The hearing was convened by the House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation.. In addition to the public hearing, the panel is scheduled to hold a closed-door classified briefing in the afternoon.
In June of last year, the Pentagon released a long-awaited report on UFOs seen by military pilots and stated that of 144 sightings since 2004, only one has been able to be explained. The report does not rule out the possibility that they are extraterrestrial objects.
Since then it has been mentioned that some of these aerial objects could come from countries such as China or Russia, or be natural atmospheric phenomena, such as ice crystals. The identified object turned out to be a large deflated balloon.