Hearing in the US House of Representatives – Politics

You’re back. Now officially: UFOs, which are now called UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, i.e.: Unknown atmospheric phenomena instead of unknown flying objects. On Tuesday morning, the UAP were the subject of a hearing in the US House of Representatives. The last time this had happened was more than 50 years ago, when the Pentagon once had a research group called Project Bluebook to study the flying saucers that pilots used after the end of World War II all over the world, but especially in sighted the USA. The investigations were discontinued at the time because most of the reported cases were due to natural phenomena or known flying objects.

Then last year, especially in the American media, there was a short summer of UFO madness. In 2017, some videos were leaked taken by US Navy pilots showing white, oval objects performing strange maneuvers. the New York Times reported back then, and last year The New Yorker with a huge search. The American secret services could not help but admit: Yes, there is something. There are credible eyewitnesses, there are videos, there is radar data. But we don’t know what it is. At least not officially. An eagerly awaited report followed, which only said that many of the reports could of course be explained, but some not. The matter will be looked into.

The hearing on Tuesday should now inform the members of the House of Representatives, but also the public about the state of affairs. Because part of the conspiracy theory folklore surrounding the whole UFO complex is the assumption that the American government is keeping the truth about the phenomenon a secret, for whatever reason.

Currently in charge of UAPs at the Pentagon are Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval Intelligence, and Ronald Moultrie, the Department of Defense’s man for such things as counterintelligence. In short: no UFO weirdos. The two explain what has happened so far and will continue to happen in order to get to the bottom of the UAPs. Above all, this is the more systematic collection and comparison of data, but also a destigmatization of the topic. Many pilots and other people who have observed UAPs have not gone public with them in the past and have not reported them to official bodies for fear of being dismissed as insane. These prejudices needed to be dismantled and there are now guidelines for the military to report UAP sightings.

The further course of the hearing did not necessarily help to make the topic appear more serious. The two showed a short video, filmed from the cockpit of an airplane, on which a round thing in the sky can be seen for fractions of a second when the camera pans. Bray has some difficulty finding the right frame on demand when scrolling in the media player, only to present a blurry speck. The video was nothing short of ridiculous compared to the 2017 leaks.

With other recordings, for example infrared videos of flying triangles, they provided a very mundane explanation: normal drones can be seen, the triangle shape is created when filmed through a night vision device. A thesis that hobby ufologists had already put forward and which is not implausible. However, information was expected from the American Ministry of Defense that cannot be found on YouTube.

Open detailed view

So some of the questions to the two of them were also very fundamental. Whether optical effects can be excluded? Or whether they tried to reproduce some of the recordings? The glowing triangles, for example. You didn’t do it yourself, but others did, the two replied. Everyone present agreed that the phenomenon is a great mystery and a possible threat. Bray and Moultrie also reported several near-misses involving aircraft and UAPs.

When asked many questions, they referred to their duty of confidentiality as government employees: You cannot reveal everything you know about UAPs here, so as not to give opponents of the USA too much information about their own sensor systems and other reconnaissance equipment. But that also means: You know more than you say. For example, it was also about UAPs that were sighted diving into the sea. This public hearing was followed by a closed session to answer these questions. This is understandable, but questionable in the current political situation.

Not because the US has little green men hiding somewhere and wants to keep them secret, but because there is an immense distrust of institutions in the United States that is confirmed by such secrecy. This provides the conspiracy theorists with new material.

All the more weird that the group itself made the swing towards science fiction several times. Sure, the alien theme is the elephant in the room, and last year’s report frantically avoided the words UFO or extraterrestrials. But right at the beginning it was all about Ronald Moultrie’s passion for science fiction and some members of parliament babbled about possible life in space. That led a little far away from the facts that were on the table.

Because Bray and Moultrie provided no evidence that UAPs, which undoubtedly exist, are machines or intelligently controlled objects. These are still pure guesses. One is open to the topic, but Moultrie also emphasized that one is not actually responsible for the search for extraterrestrial life. That’s what NASA is in the US government for.