In the same way that astronomers must run through a checklist of possible explanations for a strange new phenomenon in space before considering the extraterrestrial option, aviation experts have a number of more mundane culprits at their disposal: drones, experimental aircraft, weather events, birds, balloons-even the planet Venus, appearing extra bright and ethereal through the haze of our planet’s atmosphere. (The government has tried to tiptoe away from the grabbiest version of UFO discourse, preferring to use the term UAP instead, which somehow sounds even more mysterious.)īut the reality is that unidentified flying objects, or unidentified aerial phenomena, are just that, and there’s no reason to assume, right away, that they’re something all that interesting. The assumption that UFOs could represent something truly otherworldly is right there in the language that people use to scrutinize alleged footage they “debunk” initial sightings, suggesting that, before close examination, they could be the real deal. There’s no way around the fact that, in popular usage, the term UFO-unidentified flying object -is synonymous with alien spaceships and has been for decades. Without it, we can miss important details, believe information when we should be skeptical, and see things that aren’t really there. Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the intelligence subcommittee, called the hearing’s subject “one of the world’s most enduring mysteries”-at least give us a new and spooky clue, then! If casual observers have outsize expectations for an event like this, it’s because they’re being exposed to it without any real context.Īnd this story desperately needs context. national security.”Īnd yet, when we hear something like the first congressional hearing on UFOs in half a century, we, the viewers, might expect more. It was meant to check in on the progress of a task force that the Department of Defense formed in 2020 “to detect, analyze and catalog UAPs”-unidentified aerial phenomena-“that could potentially pose a threat to U.S. This week’s hearing was not about disclosing, once and for all, incontrovertible visual evidence of extraterrestrial craft whizzing through Earth’s atmosphere. The witnesses did mention aliens-but only to say that American military officials had found no proof of them in the 400 modern-day reports of UFO sightings that they currently have on the books, from military pilots and some civilians. Yet a comment on a livestream summed up the whole affair quite nicely: “Well, this all seems rather anticlimactic,” the viewer wrote.
There was footage of mysterious objects moving around in the sky. The hearing featured more than an hour of congressional probing of two very important people, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and the deputy director of naval intelligence, before moving to a closed, classified setting. Shouldn’t there have been a little more to it? You know, alien stuff?
And yet it proceeded as many others do on Capitol Hill: dryly, politely, and uneventfully. This was, on one level, a very unusual event-the rare congressional hearing about UFOs, the first in more than 50 years. This week, a House of Representatives subcommittee on intelligence and counterterrorism gathered to discuss unidentified aerial phenomena.
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