Congress is due to hold its first hearing on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in decades on Tuesday (May 17)—a sign that defense officials are taking the phenomenon seriously.
While many reports of UFOs—or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) as the government now refers to them—might be easily dismissed, the issue has clearly become too big to ignore for U.S. defense officials who say reports should be taken seriously for matters of national security.
In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a nine-page report on UFOs that investigated 144 reports from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021, including 80 involving observation with multiple sensors and 11 reports of “near misses” between pilots and UFOS.
The report didn’t reveal anything about what UFOs actually were, except that some of them displayed what were described as “unusual” flight characteristics including moving quickly “without discernible means of propulsion.”
Tomorrow, the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation will hold a hearing on UFOs starting at 9 a.m. in Washington, D.C.