A British perspective on the first US congressional hearing on UAP for over 50 years

The Australian journalist Ross Coulthart described yesterday’s hearing as “a turd tied up by a bow to make it look pretty”.

Ronald Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security

It wasn’t all bad. We learned, for example, that the successor to the UAP Task Force - the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) - is likely to be renamed. That single piece of information will undoubtedly be greeted with a loud “Hallelujah!” by all.

We heard testimony from Ronald S. Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, and Scott W. Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. They acknowledged that most UAP are real, solid objects which remain genuine unknowns because of insufficient data.

We recently reported on US lawmakers expressing frustration with the US Department of Defense’s lack of urgency to investigate UAP. Comments made by Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett were the highlight of the article. And this straight-talking politician wasn’t impressed by the first congressional hearing on UAP for over 50 years, tweeting:

The UFO hearing this morning was a total joke. We should have heard from people who could talk about things they’d personally seen, but instead the witnesses were government officials with limited knowledge who couldn’t give real answers to serious questions.

Chris Mellon tweeted:

That was a frustrating hearing as well as a reminder both of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.

The hearing was underwhelming, especially as it’s now almost one year since the UAP Task Force’s preliminary report came out at the end of June 2021.

Scott W. Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence

Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, confidently claimed that the stigma surrounding the reporting of UAP sightings was now being dealt with. He said:

The message is now clear. If you see something, you need to report it. And the message has been received. In fact, recently, I received a call from a senior Naval aviator with over 2,000 flight hours. He called me personally, from the flight line after landing, to talk about an encounter that he had just experienced.

So that’s a positive - provided that the subsequent analysis of all data is done responsibly and with an open-mindedness that many of us expect.

Representative Mike Gallagher

Wisconsin’s Representative Mike Gallagher asked several probing questions. He asked about any programs focusing on UAP from a technological engineering perspective, with Ronald Moultrie answering that he had no knowledge of any contractual programs. (The words “plausible deniability” might spring to mind here if you think there’s any possibility of a government attempt at UAP reverse engineering.) Scott Bray answered likewise, although his words were specifically limited to anything within the navy’s UAP Task Force - which could be interpreted as being “words carefully chosen” if you had a suspicious mind.

Mike Gallagher also asked Moultrie and Bray about the Malmstrom Air Force Base incident in which 10 ICBMs were temporarily rendered inoperable, as we reported here. The responses were disappointing, despite being pushed further by Gallagher who clearly expected more accountability.

Finally, Mike Gallagher dropped what might have been potentially the most shrewd question of the session. He asked if either Moultrie or Bray had heard of the Admiral Wilson memo. (If you don’t know, this refers to notes taken after an alleged conversation between Dr Eric Davies and Admiral Tom Wilson, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, about the latter’s attempts to discover an unacknowledged, super-secret UFO crash retrieval program.) The responses were a mixture of surprise and ignorance. Representative Gallagher then asked that the memo be entered into the official records - and it will be interesting if this matter arises at some point again in a future hearing.

Towards the end of the hearing, Ronald Moultrie confirmed that good contacts for future cooperation with Space Command and Space Force had been established. However, from our perspective as interested onlookers here in the UK, we were disappointed that no question was asked about UAP being tracked, manoeuvring from our atmosphere to space or through space into our atmosphere. Such data shouldn’t be too difficult to ascertain and would be potentially telling.

There were also no questions about the US Air Force’s involvement, which has been deafeningly silent in comparison to the US Navy’s recent endeavours. Again, another glaring omission.

If UAP which genuinely involve some kind of breakthrough technology were craft and/or probes made by Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, the US Department of Defense would be guilty of an even worse intelligence failure involving national security than the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This “some adversary” option has always seemed extremely unlikely to us. It is far more plausible to work on the hypothesis that our planet is being visited and watched by extraterrestrials from advanced civilisations - and that their intentions are, thankfully, non-hostile. Russia’s military forces have recently been shown to be disappointingly inadequate, despite causing obscene death and destruction, during the current invasion of Ukraine. But, in a very different way, the US military is showing disappointing inadequacy too. Regardless of whether there is a cover-up at some level, or not, there is an astonishing degree of incompetence here with regards to the monitoring and identification of UAP.

It is highly likely that there will be further congressional hearings. Assuming these will happen, it is crucial that pertinent questions are prepared in advance, and that appropriate individuals are brought to the hearings to give their testimony. We need genuine transparency, not obfuscation.

Written by Jessica Nelson & Iain Scott, 18th May 2022