On June 24, 1947, a man named Kenneth Arnold reported a series of bright flashes of light speeding across the sky — the first UFO sighting that would capture the national attention. A full 75 years after that sighting, the government is ready to talk. On Tuesday, the U.S. Congress held its first public hearing about unidentified flying objects in more than 50 years and laid out some of the modern encounters with these unexplainable flyers.
The House Intelligence Committee’s Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation subcommittee welcomed two officials from the Pentagon who spoke on what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), because the government has to come up with its own terms for things so it can feel like it’s doing something. Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security and Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence, shared insight into what the government has spotted in the sky over the last half-century and what we know — which is shockingly little!
