While the first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years didn’t reveal the existence of extraterrestrial life, it did affirm that the U.S. military is taking sightings of unknown craft seriously as a national security threat.

A House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing convened Tuesday morning with a 90-minute public session that was followed by closed-door testimony later in the day.

“Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) are a potential national security threat and they need to be treated that way,” Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., said at the beginning of the hearing, referring to the preferred technical term for unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

“For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” he added. “Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issues to the backroom or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community.

“Today, we know better,” Carson continued. “UAPs are unexplained, it’s true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

See Also:

Greek Minority in Albania: 108 years since the signing of the Protocol of Corfu (photos)

The tone of the hearing — the first on the topic since 1966, when congressman and future president Gerald Ford held one after a sighting in Michigan — was less focused on concerns about alien invasion and more on intelligence lapses that could lead to other nations having unknown technology about which the U.S. was not aware. That push included making sure pilots feel comfortable reporting anything they see.

“The intelligence community has a serious duty to our taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries such as China and Russia from surprising us with unforeseen new technologies,” said Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark. “This committee has an obligation to understand what you are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies or not — and if they are, where are they coming from?”

In November, the Pentagon announced the new Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group program to help with tracking. It followed a June 2021 report documenting 144 observations dating back to 2004.

“We know that our service members have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena, and because UAP pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins,” Ronald S. Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, testified at the hearing. “We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there. We get the questions not just from you. We get it from family, and we get them night and day.”

Read more: yahoo