Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the transcript of the open session of a hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, held on 17 May 2022 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation. Under Secretary Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray testified on the new AOIMSG office, efforts to reduce stigma in reporting, and a UAP database of about 400 reports. Bray showed videos, explained flashing triangles as drones seen through night vision goggles, and called the 2004 Nimitz incident unresolved.
2 Chairman Carson. The subcommittee will come to order. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. Before we get started, I want to recognize a moment of silence for the victims of the White supremacist hate crime in Buffalo, New York. The subcommittee has focused intently on that threat in both open and closed hearings. It is utterly devastating to see more victims of this violence. Buffalo, our heart breaks for you. [Moment of silence.] Chairman Carson. With that, I ask my colleagues to join -- pardon me. We will now turn to the business of this hearing. More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Government ended Project Blue Book, an effort to catalogue and understand sightings of objects in the air that could not otherwise be explained. For more than 20 years, that project had treated unidentified anomalies in our airspace as a national security threat to be monitored and investigated. In 2017, we learned for the first time that the Department of Defense had quietly restarted a similar organization, tracking what we now call unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. Last year Congress rewrote the charter for that organization, now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG for short. Today we will bring that organization out of the shadows. This hearing and oversight work has a simple idea at its core. Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way. For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issue to the back room or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community.
Hearing transcript, from the hearings collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 53 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.