Dem lawmaker calls for hearings on UFOs

Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, is calling on Congress to hold a “series of hearings” on reported UFOs following last month’s highly anticipated release of an intelligence report on the subject. 

The congressman said in interview Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that because the newly unclassified report on UFOs, referred to by the Pentagon as “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), was largely “inconclusive” on the origins of more than 140 objects, additional probes are needed. 

“My hope … is that we will have a series of hearings and possibly a public hearing in the very near future,” Carson said, though he did not give a specific timeline. 

“What we do know is that … there have been nearly 150 sightings,” he added. “Eighty of those sightings have been detected with some of the best technology the world has ever seen.” 

While Carson said officials “can’t rule out something that’s otherworldly,” he added that was possible in only a “very small percentage” of cases. 

Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) on report on unexplained sightings: “There have been nearly 150 sightings. 80 of the sightings detected with some of the best technology the world has ever seen. We can’t rule out something that is otherworldly, but that’s a very small percentage.” pic.twitter.com/kb5S8nw2zC

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 4, 2021

Last month’s highly anticipated UAP report said that nearly all of the 144 such encounters documented by the U.S. government since 2004 remained a mystery, though the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force was able to confirm that one of the objects was a “large, deflating balloon.” 

One of the possible explanations included in the report was that the UAP could be advanced technologies developed by U.S. adversaries such as China or Russia, potentially posing a national security threat. 

Carson said Sunday that this possibility should be of particular concern to U.S. officials and warrants additional investigations. 

“We don’t want our adversaries to have … a technological advance over us in terms of what they can do with their capabilities,” he said, adding that it is “curious that many of these sightings have occurred around many of our military assets, our naval bases, our military installations.”

The task force in its report noted that the cluster of sightings around U.S. military bases “may result from a collection bias as a result of focused attention, greater numbers of latest-generation sensors operating in those areas, unit expectations, and guidance to report anomalies.”

The congressman also said Sunday that it would be “arrogant to say that there isn’t life out there.”

“If it is otherworldly, we have to take into account our advancements in terms of our cellphone technology and why aren’t these images being captured?” Carson said. “We have to think about the nearly 4,000 satellites that are orbiting the Earth right now. Most of those satellites have cameras attached to them. Why hasn’t any of that information been released?”