The new Pentagon Task Force on unidentified aerial phenomena (or UAPs) has collected about 400 reports, a congressional spokesman said at an open hearing on Tuesday. These comments came from Scott Bray, the deputy director of US naval intelligence, who was an expert witness at the UAPs hearings organized by a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee. The hearings were the first public hearings in Congress on UAPs (a.k.a. UFOs) in more than 50 years.
Bray explained the increase in the number of observations to a number of factors, including the growing popularity of quadcopters and drones, the upgrade to the sensor technology, increasing airborne interference, and others. Although many observations remain unclear, there is no evidence to suggest supernatural or extraterrestrial involvement, Bray said.
“When it comes to material that we have, we have no material — we have detected no emanations within the UAP Task Force that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin,” Bray said. “When I say unexplained, I mean everything from too little data to… the data that we have doesn’t point us towards an explanation.”
This hearing is just the latest in a recent saga that has revived interest in UFO sightings. The latest round of concerns began in 2017, when the New York Times published a report on the Pentagon’s secret program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), allegedly aimed at investigating UAPs. The story ended with the creation in 2020 of a UAP task force within the Department of the Navy, which continues to investigate sightings. The hearing served as a check-in of the work of this task force by various representatives who are interested in this topic.
To illustrate the stockpiles of the UAP Task Force, Bray showed two different videos of sighting reports that have already been circulated on the Internet and in the media. One of them included a video taken from the cockpit of a Navy plane, which showed a small spherical object approaching a window. It was a short video that lasted only a few seconds to illustrate how little evidence a task force can sometimes obtain. “In many cases, that’s all that a report may include, Bray said. “And in many other cases, we have far less than this.”
Bray showed another video showing a flashing triangle moving across the sky through night-vision goggles. He noted that the explanation of the video for many years put officials in a quandary. But over the years, other Navy officials have recorded a similar image, also watching drones nearby. Now the UAP Task Force is convinced that the original video also included a drone.
After an open meeting, another closed-door one was held, at which officials shared classified information with Congress.
Last year, the Pentagon released a detailed report on the UAPs observations, which lists five possible explanations for these phenomena, including airborne obstacles, natural atmospheric phenomena, top-secret US technology, or technologies of foreign adversaries such as Russia or China. The report also includes a fifth explanation – “other” – which includes everything they cannot explain. This is what continues to captivate the public. Although Bray stressed that the task force had not seen any fragments “isn’t consistent with being of terrestrial origin,” they are focused on explaining the incomprehensible.
“There are a number of events in which we do not have an explanation and there are a small handful in which there are flight characteristics or signature management that we can’t explain with the data that we have,” Bray said. “Those are obviously the ones that are of most interest to us.”
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