On 13 November 2024, four witnesses appeared before the Joint Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability of the US Congress for a session of testimony about so-called ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)’. This is the necessary rebrand of the term ‘UFO’ – people spouting those three letters in the past were hardly seen as credible, or worthy of testifying in front of the US government.
The four witnesses were the former commander of the US Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, Rear-Admiral Dr Tim Gallaudet; retired director of the Pentagon’s former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, Luis Elizondo; investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger; and former NASA associate administrator Michael Gold.
The four submitted written testimony ahead of the hearing. Shellenberger also filed an allegedly original document from an unnamed whistleblower about a programme called “Immaculate Constellation”, an “unacknowledged special access program” for top-level oversight of UAP-related activities.
The document referred to an allegedly extensive database of high-quality evidence collected over a series of decades, all of which had previously evaded the democratic scrutiny of congress and most of the Executive.
An earlier hearing was held on 26 July 2023, with former US Navy pilots testifying to events like the encounter with the famous “Tic Tac object” and the FLIR (forward-looking infrared) video from the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter, as well as the GoFast and Gimbal videos from the 2015 USS Roosevelt incident.
Earlier reports of UAP/UFO sightings date back to the 1940s and, according to some, even centuries before that. The UFO sightings also appeared to come in waves.
Suspicions about government cover-ups have been in the air since the 1947 Roswell incident, but this recent surge in interest regarding government secrecy was triggered in 2017 thanks to a New York Times article about the Pentagon’s alleged UAP programme.
This caused the US congress to take bipartisan interest in uncovering the extent to which the US government and intelligence agencies had withheld information about sightings. They committed to provide transparency to the American public.
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So far, it seems fair to say that the attempt at transparency has failed abysmally. Witnesses have refused to disclose classified materials that may violate their oaths of confidentiality, and the government’s denial of their declassification of materials (or even acknowledgement of the materials’ existence) created obstacles that affected the UAP disclosure debate from really taking off.
The hearing of 13 November 2024 was no exception. Chairwoman Nancy Mace started off the hiding game by stating that she wasn’t going to “name names”. She also said that there had been people trying to influence her not to hold this hearing.
All witnesses, except Gold, repeatedly stressed that they were either not allowed or willing to discuss certain questions in an open session, or not allowed or willing to discuss them full stop (Shellenberger claimed it was to protect his journalistic sources). They also reported that they had been the subject of intimidation and outright threats to not disclose any classified materials.
Close encounters
Gold didn’t disclose any confidential information at all, if he even had any. He merely – and correctly – emphasised the need for an independent scientific and academically rigorous investigation of the phenomenon.
That did not, however, stop the witnesses from claiming that they had knowledge of crash retrieval programmes and of encounters with underwater UAPs or USOs (unidentified submersible objects). They also implied that staff were being treated for injuries sustained from contact with UAPs, and that humanity was already dealing with non-human intelligence (NHI).
Pieces of information that, if true, would fundamentally change our view of our place in the cosmos. This also points towards there being a mountain of classified materials still being withheld.
The witnesses are, to some extent, allowed to talk about facts that would normally qualify as ‘official secrets’, yet they’re forbidden to disclose the classified material that would support their claims. This means we can never really know if what they say is true.
A sufficient inkling of doubt always remains around their testimony. They may all be sincere in their beliefs or have access to pertinent evidence, but it’s this personal redaction that inevitably sets witnesses up for failure – and in the worst cases, ridicule.
In many of the hearings so far, however, they’ve presented nothing more than stories they’ve been told – ‘hearsay evidence’, in legal terms – which legal systems around the world deem to be a questionable type of evidence.
This makes it easy for so-called ‘debunkers’ to point out that the evidence is always announced as being disclosed soon, but never is.
And unfortunately, not all of the witnesses who appeared before Congress on 13 November have a spotless reputation when it comes to due diligence and fact-checking their information.
Elizondo, for example, was recently caught out at a talk presenting a photo that was supposedly taken in Romania in 2022 and obtained from a government contact. He alleged it to be of a giant “mothership”, but it turned out to be a fake.
His response was to congratulate the people who spotted his mistake and to say he was always happy to have false evidence eliminated from the serious UAP narrative.
Be that as it may, former US officials ought to reconsider their blind loyalty to secrecy and examine if there’s any real benefit to obeying their government’s demand for silence. Currently, their unwillingness to disclose information is only further empowering the US government’s quest to obscure the democratic process.
If the witnesses’ claims are true, then this knowledge should be shared with the world, not held by one country’s government.
War of the words
The question of whether we’re alone in the Universe, or even on this planet, is not, by definition, a matter of national security. This short-sighted view currently held by domestic intelligence agencies is not fit to be a guiding policy principle going forward.
Someone someday will inevitably have to take the drastic decision to publish or release the classified materials they have access to, stamping their name on them and risking the consequences.
In actuality, the threat of legal consequence would not only add a lot of credibility to the whistleblower’s character, but also reliability to their testimony. Why risk revealing classified documents unless you’re 100 per cent certain that they’re true?
It’s unlikely that there would be any actual repercussions once the truth got out to the public; “There’s no point in trying to defuse a bomb once it’s gone off,” to steal a line from Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger.
Until then, the pointless charade of unchecked, hearsay testimony will play out again and again on the floors of Congress. It’s better to ignore the witnesses’ protests that they can’t reveal any real information and actively discourage their spreading of unverifiable allegations, than it is to remain in the permanent limbo of alien gossip and innuendo.
Keeping their lips zipped is ultimately doing a massive disservice to whatever truth is behind UAPs.
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For more fact-checking news, visit the BBC’s Verify website at bit.ly/BBCVerify