Well if there is a...Look at
that thing! It's rotating. Strange
objects have been seen. Unidentified flying objects,
or UFOs have captured the imagination of Americans for
decades. But much of the conversation
around UFOs has been confined to science fiction movies
and novels, such as the 1982 hit E.T. In the absence of government
commentary on the topic, conspiracy theories around
the U.S. concealing alien life and
technology in secret compounds like Area 51 have
run rampant. In fact, a 2019 poll found
that 68% of respondents believed the U.S. government
knows more about UFOs than it's telling U.S.. Earlier
this year, conversation around UFOs reached a fever
pitch after the U.S. military shot down several
unidentified objects in a matter of days. It has happened again. For the third day in a row,
and the fourth time in jU.S.t nine days, the United States
has shot down an unidentified high-flying object. One of the objects was later
identified as a Chinese spy balloon. The rest, President
Biden has said, are likely objects tied to private
companies, recreation or research institutions. In an attempt to be more
transparent and address potential national security
questions, the government has taken up the charge to
publicize and legitimize the study of unidentified
anomaloU.S. phenomena, or UAPs, as the
military has rebranded UFOs. Today is the first hearing of
its kind, where we will attempt to get down to the
bottom of what is actually happening with UAPs. We want to shift the
conversation about UAPs from sensationalism to science. A 2022 UAP report published
by U.S. intelligence stated that 195
of the incidents the office had examined could be
attributed to ordinary explanations like drones,
balloons, and other objects, including birds. However, another 171
incidents were labeled as uncharacterized, with some
appearing to have demonstrated unusual flight
characteristics or performance capabilities
that require further analysis. We experienced was, like I
said, well beyond the material science and the
capabilities that we had at the time, that we have
currently, or that we're going to have in the next 10
to 20 years. I think they have started to
recognize that we should actually have the ability to
report these objects, not because we're out there
doing some type of UFO hunt, but because it's a matter of
national security and domain awareness that the tactical
air crew in this country understand what's in front
of their aircraft. Here is another UFO bulletin. The Defense Department has
just announced that the unidentified flying object
has suddenly disappeared from our radar screens. The military defines UAPs as
unidentifiable objects that travel in the air or water,
as well as transmedium objects that can transition
between space and the atmosphere, or between the
atmosphere and bodies of water. Sightings of
unidentifiable objects have been reported all over the
world. Hotspots include the Middle
East, the coast off of China and Korea, and along both
coasts of the U.S. Such objects are usually
described as round in shape, white, silver or translucent
in color, and with no thermal exhaust for propulsion. Investigation into UFOs in
the United States can be traced as far back as the
late 1940s. Project Blue Book, which ran
until 1969, recorded over 12,000 sightings. Out of those, over 700
remain unidentified. Just take a minute to go back
to the origin story of the UFOs, which is Roswell,
1947. It was learned after the
fact that that metallic, deflated object that was
found in a field by a by a rancher and his son was a
government surveillance balloon designed to look for
Soviet noncompliance with nuclear arms control that
was in place after Second World War. And the
government didn't want that program public. And so a military spokesman
actually spoke to the local press and used the phrase
'flying saucer' and then you're off to the races. I am here to discuss the
so-called flying saucers. The Air Force interest in
this problem has been due to our feeling of an obligation
to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability,
anything in the air that may have the possibility of
threat or menace to the United States. The U.S. is not the only
country to take UFOs seriously. A number of South
American nations, including Uruguay, Argentina, Chile
and Peru all have government programs that study and
investigate UFO activity. In France, the French space
agency has been studying UFOs since 1977. The modern era of UFOs being
in the news pretty much started in 2017, when the
New York Times leaked, and then the Defense Department
admitted to them, these three Navy videos that were quite
striking, showing objects moving apparently at very
fast speeds and in erratic ways that the pilots didn't
understand. And that's sort of opened up
the box, if you like. And then the government had
to take it seriously. The article brought to light
the existence of a shadowy $22 million program, known
as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification
Program that the Pentagon had funded from 2007 to 2012. Public discourse around the
topic reignited. In response to mounting
public pressure, a flurry of government activity over the
last few years has been aimed at demystifying UAPs. In June of 2021, the office
of the Director of National Intelligence released a
preliminary report on UAPs. This was followed in
November by the Pentagon establishing a group to
identify and track objects in restricted airspace. Then, in June of 2022, NASA
convened an independent expert panel to help study
UAP incidents and advise the DoD on how to gather and
interpret data on UAPs. The following month, the DoD
established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office,
or AARO, to synchronize efforts across DoD and other
federal agencies in detecting and investigating UAP
sightings. Meanwhile, Congress has
sought its own answers. During a July hearing,
Congress heard testimony from three former military
officials about their experience with UAPs. My testimony is based on
information I've been given by individuals with a long
standing track record of legitimacy and service to
this country. I was informed in the course
of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash
retrieval and reverse engineering program, to
which I was denied access to those additional read ons
when I requested it. Grusch went on to say that he
had interviewed individuals who had recovered non-human
biologics from crashed UAPs. The Pentagon has denied such
claims. Experts are also wary. I'm not going to attribute
bad intentions to David Grusch, but it was
anecdotal. I mean, if you looked at his actual
statement, he was talking about someone he knew who
told him that this existed. It was second hand. So however dramatic it was,
it's not going to be persuasive. Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves
also testified. Here he is talking about an
incident he experienced in 2014 near Virginia Beach. After upgrades were made to
our jets' radar systems, we began detecting unknown
objects operating in our airspace. At first, we
assumed they were radar errors, but soon we began to
correlate the radar tracks with multiple onboard
sensors, including infrared systems, and eventually
through visual ID. During a training mission in
Warning Area Whiskey 72, ten miles off the coast of
Virginia Beach, two F-18 Super Hornets were split by
a UAP. The object, described as a
dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere,
came within 50ft of the lead aircraft and was estimated
to be 5 to 15ft in diameter. The mission commander
terminated the flight immediately and returned to
base. Our squadron submitted a
safety report, but there was no official acknowledgment
of the incident and no further mechanism to report
the sightings. Soon, these encounters
became so frequent that aircrew would discuss the
risk of UAP as part of their regular preflight briefs. CNBC spoke with Graves, who
is the executive director of Americans for Safe
Aerospace, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
aerospace safety and national security with a focus on
UAPs. Though initially conceived
as a tool to educate the public and Congress on UAPs,
the organization's function has expanded. We weren't expecting to fill
the role of information receiving organization, you
could say, but once we stood up, we received a lot of
contact from commercial pilots, as well as other
veterans that have had some type of experience in their
professional duties that they want to share. So at
safeaerospace.org pilots and others can go, they can
submit their experiences. And we have relationships on
Capitol Hill as well as in the Pentagon, where we can
bring these cases for further investigation across
official channels. The DoD now has its own
website to publicly share declassified information and
videos of UAPs. The website will also
eventually allow current and former U.S. government
employees, service members, and contractors to submit
reports regarding UAPs directly to ARRO. The DoD
plans to open the reporting mechanism to the public as
well. While further study of UAPs
is necessary for both matters of national security as well
as the advancement of science, experts say it's
going to be a difficult undertaking. I'm not sure the government
has figured out a way to deal with the potential fire hose
of, you know, 300 million Americans reporting strange
things they see in the sky. And the reporting rate and
the number of incidents will go up dramatically because
everyone's heightened awareness of this issue. We already know that most
UFO sightings, and this is well documented, represent
atmospheric or astronomical phenomena. The planet Venus,
meteors, fireballs, weather balloons, make a list. They're not exceptional,
they're not strange. And you don't really want to
be inundated with that. Another obstacle that the
government and those trying to study unidentified
objects face is combating the stigma associated with UFOs. We've been kind of
ingratiated into the little green man and UFO
conversation due to media and whatnot for quite a while. And, you know, it's turned
into an entertainment topic for the most part. During his testimony, David
Grusch said that he had been persecuted for his reporting
of incidents. It was very brutal and very
unfortunate. Some of the tactics they
used to hurt me both professionally and and
personally, to be quite frank. NASA has said that the
scientists it tasked with studying UAPs also faced
harassment. Not only were some of the the
things that our panel members received during the course
of this study simple trolling, some of them
actually rose to actual threats. As for a connection between
aliens and UAPs, both the military and NASA have said
that they have found no evidence to suggest a link. But the possibility can't be
completely discounted. If you ask me, do I believe
there's life in a universe that is so vast that it's
hard for me to comprehend how big it is? My personal
answer is yes. It's hard for me to imagine
that we're completely alone in this universe, and that's
part of the difficulty in this conversation. It's it's
hard to deal with an unknown when we have such little
information. And it's why gathering new information is
just so important right now. NASA says one of the biggest
issues with UAP research right now is lack of quality
data. While there are numerous
eyewitness accounts and visuals associated with UAP,
they're not consistent, they're not detailed, and
they're not curated observations that can be
used to make definitive scientific conclusions about
the nature and the origin of UAP. To tackle this issue, the
organization plans to use its own highly-calibrated
instruments to gather more detailed data. NASA also
plans to utilize AI and machine learning to search
the skies for anomalies. The public can also help. There's a wealth of data that
a cell phone takes, and you can imagine designing apps
that make the images relatively tamper free. And I think if we have a
collection where interesting events are collected by
citizens, hosted, and you have multiple images of the
same event, we will be able to learn a lot. In the meantime, we may just
have to be patient. I suggest that people, the
media as well, just be uncomfortable with the
uncertainty for a while. Anomalies in the history of
science often tell you something very important. That your theories are
incomplete, or there's some whole new world of reality
that you haven't understood. And I think, you know,
scientists being open minded have to acknowledge that
that may be the case with this phenomena, too. It's a small subset. It
doesn't matter if it's only one or two, if there's some
genuinely new phenomena there, let's find out what
it is. Let's figure it out.
