A House Intelligence subcommittee Tuesday is holding the first congressional hearing on UFOs in 50 years, as building evidence on the sightings raises more questions than answers.

“There are a lot of unexplained aerial phenomena. We don’t know what they are, and they can’t be easily rationalized as weather phenomenon or balloons or anything else. So it’s quite a mystery,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said of the hearing. “We’re going to press them on some very serious issues,” Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., who chairs the House Intelligence Counterterrorism,  Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, added.

Carson said in a statement announcing the hearing that it’s crucial for the government to “seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks – especially those we do not fully understand.”

The hearing on what the U.S. government officially calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAP), begins at 9 a.m. ET. It comes after years of unexplained sightings, primarily by U.S. military personnel, of flying objects, which often had no “discernable” propulsion systems and unusual “movement patterns.”

A 2021 report – a redacted classified version of which was published by The Black Vault earlier this year – said the government recorded 144 reports from 2004 to 2021, including 80 that “involved observation with multiple sensors.” The report also included information on “common shapes” of the UAPs, although the entire sections on the shapes are redacted.

The report examined 144 reports of what the government terms “unidentified aerial phenomenon” — only one of which investigators were able to explain by the end of the study. Investigators found no evidence that the sightings represented either extraterrestrial life or a major technological advancement by a foreign adversary like Russia or China, but acknowledge that is a possible explanation.

For lawmakers and intelligence and military personnel working on unexplained aerial phenomena, the bigger concern with the episodes is not that alien life is visiting Earth, but rather that a foreign adversary like Russia or China might be fielding some kind of next-generation technology in American airspace that the United States doesn’t know about.

In a statement ahead of the hearing, Carson said, “The American people expect and deserve their leaders in government and intelligence to seriously evaluate and respond to any potential national security risks — especially those we do not fully understand.”
The subcommittee chairman went on to say, “since coming to Congress, I’ve been focused on the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena as both a national security threat and an interest of great importance to the American public.

And I’m pleased to chair the first open Intelligence Committee hearing on these events. It will give the American people an opportunity to learn what there is to know about incidents. And I look forward to hearing from our witnesses on this critical matter.”