Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (hearing transcript, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation, 17 May 2022)

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Mr. Crawford. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Honorable Moultrie and Mr. Bray, thank you for coming here today -- we
appreciate it -- to begin the open dialogue between Congress and the executive branch
on this important topic.
While this topic evokes the creative imaginations of many, aside from all the hype
and speculation, there are important underlying issues posed by UAPs. Despite the
serious nature of this topic, I have to say I am more interested in our understanding of
Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapon development or understanding why this
administration was so slow to share actionable intelligence with the Ukrainians.
However, in as much as this topic may help us better understand unknown activities of
Russia and China, I am on board.
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.
As overseers of the Intelligence Community, this committee has an obligation to
understand what you are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies are
not, and if they are, where are they coming from? In general, the IC spends much of its
time and resources trying to understand what we call known-unknowns. When it comes
to foreign nations' weapons systems and sensors, known-unknowns are these features
we don't fully understand yet. The challenge associated with UAP is that they are
completely unknown and require a more expansive collection analysis effort.
The Intelligence Community must balance addressing known threats to our
national security with preventing technical surprise. We must continue to follow the
facts where they lead us and ensure that there are no technical surprises.
The IC must take it seriously when there are credible observations of phenomena