Congressional Hearing on UFOs With Naval Intelligence Reveals Significant Information

Yesterday the House Permanent Select Committee held an open hearing with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray regarding the Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. While most of the mainstream press yawned at the non-classified portion of the hearing, SOFREP found some of the information shared by Director Bray of considerable interest.

First, the Navy and the military, in general, are working to destigmatize the reporting of UAPs by military personnel. The Navy now has a process in place for personnel to report in detail any contact with UAPs and procedures to preserve evidence in the form of photographic and sensor data to further understand these contacts. In the future, this reporting regime may be extended to civil aviation to expand the database of information. The Navy is leading these efforts primarily because their ships and planes most often have UAP encounters. This is due to the fact that Navy ships and planes use radar, sonar, and other sensors to detect objects on and below the sea and in the air. These sensors also gather electronic emissions from ships and planes as a matter of intelligence gathering. So when you have all these sensors on ships and planes, you are more likely to detect these UAPs. Since these measures were put in place, the Task Force has gathered some 400 contact reports of UAPs in various circumstances with the following.

So far, 11 near misses with UAPs have involved military aircraft.

Most of the contacts are brief events with little actionable data. The hope is that many points of data can reveal a larger picture over time.

Several of the UAPs are reported to have been able to remain stationary in high winds, maneuver, and accelerate at sudden speeds without any detectable means of propulsion.

Director Bray stated that they were not in possession of any physical evidence from any UAPs, but nothing in the data so far suggested that UAPs were of an extraterrestrial origin.

Of significant interest was the disclosure that data from some of the UAPs gave signs of a power source for their movement and gave off radiofrequency energy that was recorded. This energy could represent communication signals or flight control signals for remotely piloted objects.

A question put to Director Bray about whether sonars aboard ships, subs, and permanent arrays had detected anything regarding UAPs was put off to the later closed-door session that was classified. This strongly suggests that there have been detections made by sonar equipment.

A question about whether UAPs were altering our offensive-defensive capabilities or sensor capabilities was also deferred to the closed session that would follow later on.

Director Bray reported that the Pentagon was building a database of information by sharing arrangements with other countries with similar programs and stated that communist China also had a UAP program of its own but that the US was not sharing information with China.

The Task Force is comprised of military personnel with experience in aviation, intelligence gathering, and experts in electronic emissions intelligence, as well as personnel from other departments of government like the FAA and with civilian scientists specializing in aeronautics and physics.

The Task Force is interested in UAPs for the purpose of assessing them as counterintelligence threats, security threats to navy ships and installations, natural phenomena, or sensor anomalies. This is telling in a couple of ways. The Pentagon’s interest in UAPs is focused directly on matters of national security, detecting new technologies employed by adversaries, and working out technical bugs in our sensor systems that could be causing anomalies that appear to be physical objects. As radar, sonar, and electronics emissions signal processing become more and more sophisticated sensor operators are able to detect things never seen on their screens before that seem unusual or anomalous. For example, advanced airborne radars can detect things like a pod of dolphins swimming together. On the screen, it might appear as a rapidly moving shimmering patch on the ocean surface that would warrant a closer visual inspection to assure it wasn’t a submarine or something else. Once this anomaly is classified as biological, the information can be shared service-wide to make it more readily when it occurs in the future.

In the early days of acoustic sonar, the first sounds of whales were recorded, and scientists believed it was some kind of glitch in the hydrophones being used or the way the receiver was processing the sounds in the water. Operators of the Navy’s early “Jezebel” narrow-band passive long-range sonar coined a name for these strange but powerful sound pulses they were picking up on their headsets as the “Jezebel Monster.”

The Navy is not likely to classify a significant amount of the findings on these UAPs because, in many cases, the disclosures would be revealing sensor capabilities, detection methods, and how we come to know certain things.

This will likely result in accusations that the Navy is covering up some “truth” about UFOs that the government doesn’t want people to know about when it’s actually about not disclosing our capabilities in detection and analysis of the data.

Finally, Director Bray disclosed that a rather famous incident involving Navy ships off San Diego in 2019 that were buzzed repeatedly over several nights by what were called swarms of UFOs were actually UAVs and not alien spacecraft. In April last year, when the media hype of this latest UFO incident was at its peak, SOFREP wrote an analysis that these objects were most likely Chinese-made drones.