On May 17, 2022, The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence held a much heralded hearing on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (or UAP, the new term for UFOs). Expectations were high, in no small part due to the statements of the committee members.

Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described it as the public’s chance to “hear from experts on one of the greatest mysteries of our time.” He also said, “the American people deserve full transparency.”

André Carson, who led the proceedings, stated ahead of time that “We can’t rule out something that is otherworldly.” In his introductory remarks at the hearing, he said, “UAPs are unexplained, it’s true, but they are real, and many threats they pose need to be mitigated.”

The UFO community was agog. It would be the first congressional hearing on UFOs in fifty years! Full transparency was promised in the greatest mystery of our time. It was going to be epic.

Older UFO fans tried to temper the excitement. They had been burned before with promises of imminent “disclosure.” But the people following the #ufotwitter hashtag were largely celebratory that hearings were happening at all and giddy with excitement about what might be revealed.

So, what happened?

Two witnesses spoke, both seasoned veterans of the intelligence community. First up was Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, who is responsible for the tortuously acronymed AIOMSG (Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group)—a new office set up to investigate UAP.

Moultrie opened with a discussion about process, defining UAP as “airborne objects that, when encountered, cannot be immediately identified.” He described, in general terms, how the new office would “facilitate the identification of previously unknown or unidentified airborne objects in a methodical, logical and standardized manner.”

Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, spoke next. He narrowed down the scope of the discussion to a Naval perspective, describing an increase in the number of unidentified objects or aircraft in military training areas. He then explained, in a nutshell, what the likely reasons for this increase were:

We attribute this increase in reporting to a number of factors including: our work to destigmatize reporting, an increase in the number of new systems such as quadcopters and unmanned aerial systems [drones] that are in our airspace, identification of what we can classify as clutter, mylar balloons, and other types of air trash and improvements in the capabilities of our various sensors to detect things in our airspace

Bray talked a little about how they were putting together a team of diverse experts to look into this problem, a description that reminded me very much of the team of experts assembled by the Chilean Air Force to investigate UFOs. That team spent two years trying to figure out one UFO before failing utterly, giving up, and releasing the video as a “genuine” UFO. People online  (including me) then solved the case in a few days (West 2017).

Fly-By

Bray then reinforced the Chilean similarity with two examples. He first showed a video titled “FlyBy,” shot from the cockpit of a Navy F/A-18. It’s eight seconds long. In the last second, something is briefly visible flying past the window. They then spent a rather embarrassing five minutes attempting to freeze frame the video on the actual UFO.

Bray said about this video: “There it was. In many cases, that’s all that a report may include and in many other cases, we have far less than this. … This often limited amount of high quality data, and reporting hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.”

It was difficult to make out anything in the video shown to the committee. But they later released a higher resolution version. This showed that it was a gray object with a bright highlight—probably a reflection of the sun. It was also desperately out-of-focus. This caused the highlight to expand into a hexagonal shape—an optical effect known as “bokeh,” where the shape of out-of-focus spots of light take on the shape of the camera aperture. Bokeh is a common source of accidental “orb” UFO photos. In this case, the shape of the out-of-focus highlight was consistent with being recorded on an iPhone.

When you are moving very fast … it gives a lot of different impressions about how quickly something is or isn’t moving. Sometimes things that happen very quickly, something may be moving very slow, that aircraft is moving quite fast, how fast that object is moving that goes by, is probably very slow.

So, we have an out-of-focus reflective object just floating along in the air. The simplest explanation by far is something Bray singled out in his introduction: a mylar balloon.

Why would they not mention it? It’s surely the leading hypothesis. The problem here is that the video is so bad, so low-information, that it’s difficult to say anything about it with confidence. While a mylar balloon is the most likely answer, the cautious military mind does not want to pick a definitive answer based on incomplete information or what might be seen as speculation.

However, this should not stop them from producing some kind of confidence assessment, or at least some very basic analysis. I like to make simple lists of possibilities when a definitive answer is not available. By refusing to say anything at all, they open the door to speculation. Is it a balloon or an alien spaceship?

One, admittedly speculative, reason they might not want to say it is a mylar balloon is national security. If mylar balloons are showing up on new radar systems as unknown targets, then information about that might be something useable by an adversary to create cheap airspace decoys.

Green Triangles

The second video was the “Green Triangle.” This had been leaked from the UAP task force to UFO popularizing filmmaker Jeremy Corbell (who was rather inexplicably mentioned by Carson in his opening statement). Corbell had touted the video as the “best UFO military-filmed footage the world has ever seen.”

Unfortunately, the people on the internet and I had other ideas. Minutes after the video was leaked, I Tweeted that the triangle shape was likely a camera artifact. Over the next few days, it was shown conclusively (to most people) that what was seen was not a pyramid but rather some out-of-focus lights from a plane or drone.

I’d got a lot of pushback from half the UFO community on this, so I was delighted when Bray confirmed my hypothesis, saying “the triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles, and then being recorded by an SLR [single-lens reflex] camera.” Bray might have even been referencing the work of my fellow investigators when he said “the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] task force is aware of studies that have [replicated the effect].”

So how long did it take the UAP task force to figure it out? Bray went on to explain that the original video (that we solved in days) took “several years” to resolve. Again, this tallied with the Chilean case. A supposed highly skilled multi-disciplinary task force of experts, liaising with the vast resources of multiple Pentagon departments, took years to do what a few nerds on the internet did in days. But at least they got the right answer this time—perhaps with our help.

Introducing Mythology

The videos were the highlight for me, because they represented relatively current evidence of an ongoing situation. But for other UFO aficionados, the more interesting lines of questioning came from representative Mike Gallagher, the first of which was:

It’s also been reported that there have been UAP observed and interacting with and flying over sensitive military facilities, particularly not just ranges, but some facilities housing our strategic nuclear forces. One such incident allegedly occurred at Malmstrom Air Force Base in which 10 of our nuclear ICBMs were rendered inoperable. At the same time, a glowing red orb was observed overhead. I’m not commenting on the accuracy of this. I’m simply asking you whether you’re aware of it and whether you have any comments on the accuracy of that report

Scott Bray responded that he had heard “stories” but not official data. Gallagher seemed surprised at this. In later discussion in the UFO community, there was speculation that Bray was lying because, in the minds of part of the UFO community, the idea that UFOs were messing with our nukes had become something of an accepted fact.

What Gallagher neglected to mention was that the Malmstrom UFO incident happened fifty-five years ago, on March 24, 1967. Some mysterious technical glitches occurred a week before the “glowing red orb,” but the army investigated at the time and found no connection to any UFO sighting. The story has remained in UFO culture largely due to the account and efforts of one eyewitness, Robert Salas. Skeptical investigators suggest the red “UFO” was probably Mars and over the decades have collated numerous issues with Salas’s account (West 2014).

Gallagher then went on to ask about the “Admiral Wilson memo”—an account of a supposed interview by fringe scientist Eric Davis with Vice Admiral Thomas Wilson, where they discussed secret government programs involving crashed flying saucers and alien bodies. Again, Bray was unaware of this piece of (more recent) UFO mythology. (Wilson has denied the meeting even happened.) Gallagher asked that it be entered into the congressional record, much to the delight of UFO fans who saw this as a vindication of their belief in its authenticity.

What Does This Amount To?

Those were the highlights. There was some more talk about process and a few other details. Other bits of mythology, such as UFO wreckage retrieval, were briefly raised and dismissed or denied. Several questions regarding sensors were deferred to the closed portion of the hearing where people hoped the real meat would emerge. But in comments from committee members afterward, nobody indicated the closed portion contained a smoking alien gun. They were focused more on potential security implications.

So, the hearing consisted of two terrible videos with poor analysis, an understandable lack of knowledge about UFO mythology, and discussion about getting better at identifying things in the air. It was both disappointing and validating—but in different directions depending on your point of view.

The military seems to be proceeding in a sensible, if slow and secretive, direction. UAP, as they explicitly said, represent a variety of things. Probably some of them are mylar balloons that embarrassingly spoof the latest radar in our fighters. Some might be drones, maybe even drones from foreign adversaries. Some they can’t explain due to lack of data. They don’t seem to think aliens are anything more than an amusing hypothetical. But that doesn’t stop the fans from asking about them.

References

West, Mick. 2014. UFOs at nuclear weapons sites (Salas, Malmstrom, Eagle Flight)—skeptical resources (March 13). Online at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/salas-malmstrom.3284/.

———. 2017. Curated crowdsourcing in UFO investigations. Skeptical Briefs 27(1). Online at /newsletter/curated-crowdsourcing-in-ufo-investigations/.