The Conversation: Whistleblower calls for government transparency as Congress digs for the truth about UFOs

Article published in The Conversation by Dr. Christopher Impey on July 27, 2023.

A congressional subcommittee met on June 26, 2023, to hear testimony from several military officers who allege the government is concealing evidence of UFOs. By holding a hearing on UFOs – now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena” by government agencies – the subcommittee sought to understand whether these UAPs pose a threat to national security.

I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes, exoplanets and life in the universe. I’m also on the advisory council for an international group that strategizes how to communicate with an extraterrestrial civilization should the need ever arise.

While the hearings brought attention to UAPs and could lead to more reporting from people who work in the military and aviation, the testimonies did not produce evidence to fundamentally change the understanding of UAPs.

UFO oversight so far

The House subcommittee hearing follows a flurry of activity over the past few years. Public interest in UAPs surged in 2017 after three Navy videos were leaked and The New York Times reported on a shadowy UAP program run by the Pentagon. In June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report on the phenomena. In November 2021, the Pentagon formed a new group to coordinate efforts to detect and identify objects in restricted airspace.

Then in May 2022, a House Intelligence subcommittee held the first congressional hearing in over half a century on military reports of UAPs. Little new light was shed on the true nature of the sightings, but the officials tried to clarify the situation by ruling things out.

While officials noted 18 occasions in which aerial objects had moved at considerable speed without visible means of propulsion, nobody had found unexplained wreckage or records of the military having either received communications from or having fired shots at UAPs. As such, the subcommittee decided that there was not yet enough evidence to claim UAPs are extraterrestrial.

Most recently, NASA convened a panel in June 2022, which held its first public hearing in May this year. The panel will help NASA advise intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense on how to evaluate mysterious sightings. The panel is considering 800 sightings accumulated over 27 years, with 50 to 100 new reports coming in each month. Sean Kirkpatrick from the Department of Defense said that only 2% to 5% of these are anomalous, and the meeting drew no firm conclusions.

Which brings us to this week’s hearing. Congress is getting frustrated with the lack of transparency over UAP sightings. So the subcommittee is using its overall charge of oversight and accountability to get some answers.

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