First Open Congressional UAP Hearing, May 2022

Brief

The Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation convened the first open Congressional UAP hearing in over 50 years, with Under Secretary of Defense Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testifying. Bray disclosed that the UAP reporting database had grown to approximately 400 reports since the June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment and showed two videos: one of an unresolved sighting and one resolving widely-circulated 'triangle' footage as an optical artifact produced when night vision goggles are paired with an SLR camera. The newly mandated AOIMSG received its first named director only in the days immediately before the hearing. Both witnesses committed to a data-driven, science-and-engineering framework and affirmed that all hypotheses, including unexplained ones, remained on the table.

Metadata

Agency

U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Release

2022-05-17

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

53 pages

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED

Programs

UAP Task Force, AOIMSG, Project Blue Book, Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group

Tags

triangles, NVG optical artifact, swarm UAS, naval training ranges, AOIMSG, UAP Task Force, 400 reports, 2022 hearing

Key points

• This was the first open Congressional hearing on UAPs since half a century prior; Project Blue Book had been shuttered more than 50 years before the hearing.p.2
• Bray disclosed the UAP reporting database had grown to approximately 400 reports since the June 2021 ODNI preliminary assessment.p.16
• The ODNI preliminary assessment established five explanatory categories still operative at the time of the hearing: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. Government or industry developmental programs, foreign adversary systems, and an 'other' bin for difficult cases.p.15
• Widely-circulated 'triangle' UAP footage was attributed to an optical artifact: light passing through night vision goggles recorded by a single-lens reflex camera, not a physical triangular object, a conclusion reached only after comparing two similar encounters from two different time periods in two different geographic areas.p.16
• AOIMSG had selected its first director only in the week of the hearing, despite the December 2021 NDAA mandate; Moultrie also indicated the organization's name would likely change.p.19
• The UAP Task Force was established in August 2020 within the Department of the Navy under Deputy Secretary of Defense Norquist's direction.p.13
• Navy and Air Force crews were given step-by-step UAP reporting procedures on their kneeboard, in the cockpit, and in postflight debrief procedures to institutionalize reporting.p.14
• The hearing was split into an open public session and a subsequent closed classified session; witnesses noted that classification exists to protect sources and methods, not to suppress findings.p.6
• Moultrie confirmed the new office is 'open to all hypotheses' and 'open to any conclusions', no explanatory category was excluded.p.20
• Bray received a personal call from a senior naval aviator with over 2,000 flight hours who reported a fresh UAP encounter directly from the flight line after landing, cited as evidence the reporting culture had shifted.p.14

Verbatim

• For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis.

  p.2

• UAPs are unexplained, it is true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated.

  p.3

• Are these phenomena that we can measure? That is, instruments report there is something there. It is not the human eye confusing objects in the sky. There is something there, measurable by multiple instrument.

  p.8

• Since the early 2000s, we have seen an increasing number of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft or objects in military-controlled training areas and training ranges and other designated airspace.

  p.13

• The message is now clear: If you see something, you need to report it. And the message has been received.

  p.14

• Since the release of that preliminary report, UAP database has now grown to contain approximately 400 reports.

  p.16

• The triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles and then being recorded by an SLR camera.

  p.16

• Absolutely. So we are open to all hypotheses. We are open to any conclusions that we may encounter.

  p.20

Most interesting

• The widely-shared 'triangle UFO' Navy videos, which had circulated publicly for years and fueled significant speculation, were debunked during the hearing as an aperture artifact produced when an SLR camera records through night vision goggles; the triangular shape is the lens assembly rendering light, not the shape of an object.
• Resolution of the triangle footage required accumulating data from two separate encounters, in two different geographic areas, years apart, illustrating how thin the evidentiary record typically is for any single UAP report.
• Ranking Member Crawford's opening statement made clear that his committee interest was primarily adversary hypersonic weapons and foreign technical surprise, not the phenomenon itself, signaling that UAP oversight was substantially threat-attribution-driven rather than phenomenology-driven.
• Moultrie disclosed 40 years in the intelligence field alongside a personal interest in science fiction rooted in watching the Apollo Moon landing, framing scientific openness and speculative imagination as complementary rather than opposed.
• The hearing marked the third iteration of a DOD UAP task force; Chairman Carson noted on the record that prior versions had been criticized for focusing on explainable cases and sidelining the ones that resisted explanation.
• A director for AOIMSG was confirmed only days before the hearing, despite the NDAA mandate having passed in December 2021, a five-month lag that Carson treated as evidence of institutional foot-dragging.
• Subject-matter experts brought into the UAP Task Force spanned physics, optics, metallurgy, and meteorology, reflecting a deliberate effort to import expertise not organically present in naval or intelligence organizations.