It was the moment that best summed up the hour and a half session in the US House of Representatives. Scott Bray, vice director of US Navy intelligence, spent five minutes trying to find just that one frame in a shaky video — shot from a jet pilot’s cockpit — which briefly showed a UFO — or “uap.” ‘ (unidentified aerial phenomenon), as the blurry dots on these kinds of videos are officially called these days.
It had never occurred to anyone to put the video on the correct time code. Or to take a screenshot beforehand. “It was fumbling. We mostly laughed about it in the Whatsapp group of the Dutch ufomeldpunt’, says philosopher Taede Smedes, author of a book about the UFO phenomenon and involved with ufomeldpunt.nl.
For the first time in fifty years, the US Congress held a public hearing on UFOs on Tuesday afternoon, which can be followed live (and reviewed) on YouTube, among others. A historic gathering, which UFO enthusiasts, despite low expectations about concrete revelations, eagerly looked forward to.
What is the strategy?
‘The purpose of this hearing […] is to break the cycle of excessive secrecy,” Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the intelligence committee that organized the hearing, had said in a statement.
But after an hour and a half, the feeling remained how ‘extremely clumsy’ everything was, says UFO skeptic Pepijn van Erp of the Skepsis foundation. He was annoyed at how the senior lords, from intelligence and defense circles, remained silent on specific questions. “They only said something about UFO cases that they know for sure that it is something explainable,” says Van Erp, who emphasizes that he thinks it is important that these kinds of UFO reports are looked at seriously. ‘In the end, therefore, the main question remains: what exactly do they do with a new report? What is the strategy?’
Bottom line, the 143 UFO reports listed in a government report issued last year were still unexplained. That number has since grown to 400.
Also, Bray and Ronald Moultrie, the deputy defense secretary for intelligence and security, confirmed that it’s not just the United States that receives UFO reports. They said, among other things, that China also has a ‘uap task force’ to investigate the phenomenon.
Technological Capabilities
The session gave a good summary of the tension that exists between the desire to discuss UFOs in public and how the Defense and intelligence services in particular want to keep their own technological capabilities a secret from the geopolitical adversaries of the United States. According to Smedes, you saw this, among other things, when the congressmen asked whether data had also been collected about UFOs in space or underwater. “They referred directly to the secret questioning session that followed the public hearing. Then you know: they have seen something, but they are afraid that they will reveal something of the American defense capabilities.’
Ultimately, Smedes therefore thinks that Congress will be dissatisfied with the hearing, especially since a defense law version late last year contained an explicit amendment that called for more and better research into the UFO phenomenon. “You have to seriously ask yourself whether these people are capable enough.”