Americans had a pandemic on their minds back in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill that stimulated the slack economy and averted a government shutdown. Tucked inside the bill, however, was another bit of business entirely—a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding “unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).” Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass legislation in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage of UAP sightings that the Navy had declassified earlier that year and that had been burning down the internet ever since.
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The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics—loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. None of the objects produced detectable exhaust. Some turned with a suddenness that would have produced g-forces deadly to any human being who might be aboard. Others dove into the ocean and then flew straight back out.
The military’s verdict? A shrug. The objects weren’t U.S. Air Force or Naval aircraft, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power—terrestrial or otherwise—was impossible to say.
“These things would be out there all day,” one pilot told the New York Times in 2021. At the speeds at which the objects were moving, he added, “twelve hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
Inauguration day for Trump’s second term is still more than two months away, but when the once-and-future president returns to Washington, he’ll find the mystery of UAPs again there waiting for him.
On Nov. 13, two subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee held a joint hearing provocatively titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth,” during which they heard from four witnesses who spent just over two hours making the case that American skies are indeed being plied by un-American—and quite possibly unearthly—machines.
“Let me be clear,” testified Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official who spent 10 years running a Pentagon program investigating the unexplained sightings, “UAP are real. Advanced technologies not made by our government or any other government are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries. I believe we are in the midst of a multi-decade, secretive arms race, one funded by misallocated taxpayer dollars, and hidden from our elected representatives and oversight bodies.”
What caused both the lawmakers and the witnesses at the hearing particular concern is not just the fact that the sightings keep occurring, but where they’re occurring—with a disproportionate share of them happening over military or other secure installations. Committee chairman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) put the question directly to Elizondo.
“I suppose, hypothetically, you could have incursions over just regular airports,” he said, “but is it obvious that these incursions are more likely over military facilities than over a random airport?”
“There is definitely enough data to suggest that there is some sort of relationship between sensitive U.S. military installations, also some of our nuclear equities, and some of our Department of Energy sites,” Elizondo answered. “This is not a new trend; this has been going on for decades and that information has been obfuscated, unfortunately, from folks like you in this committee, and I think that’s problematic.”
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Elizondo was not the only witness to charge that the government is playing cute with what it knows or doesn’t know about the origin of UAPs. Retired rear admiral Tim Gallaudet was deployed off the east coast of the continental U.S. in Jan. 2015 when one of the cockpit videos that was declassified in 2020 was first captured. According to his testimony, he and a handful of other Naval officers received an email with the video attached—an email that vanished from all of their inboxes “without explanation” the next day. The anomalous object, he said, exhibited “flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.” For Gallaudet, the content of the video, not to mention its disappearance, served as “confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity.”
Some of the most sensational claims of the two-hour session came from journalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of the news site Public on the Substack platform, who submitted 214 pages of testimony into evidence. Last month, Shellenberger published an article alleging that the government was running what he described in his testimony as “an active and highly secretive” program called Immaculate Constellation, which includes “hundreds, maybe thousands” of images and videos of UAPs. “And it’s not those fuzzy photos and videos we’ve been given,” he testified. “It’s very clear, very high resolution.”
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Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator and a member of the space agency’s UAP independent study team, weighed in too, lamenting what he described as “the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions” about UAP. “Science requires data which should be collected without bias or prejudice, yet when the topic of UAP arises, those who wish to explore the phenomena are met by resistance and ridicule.”
That’s not only a disservice to public knowledge, but a risk to public safety—one that Gallaudet, with his military pedigree, was quick to point out. “There is a national security need for more UAP transparency,” he said. “In 2025, the U.S. will spend over $900 billion on national defense, yet we still have an incomplete understanding of what is in our airspace.”
Added Elizondo: “We are talking about technologies that can outperform anything we have in our inventory. And if this was an adversarial technology, this would be an intelligence failure eclipsing that of 9/11 by an order of magnitude.”
Whatever the unexplained technology is, the witnesses stressed, it is the government’s responsibility not just to figure out its origin, but to share what it learns with the taxpaying public. “The intelligence community is treating us like children,” Shellenberger testified. “It’s time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it.”