Congressman Tim Burchett (R-TN) has announced a second round of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) hearings in the wanning days left in this session of Congress. The House of Representatives (and the Senate as well) will conduct separate hearings beginning this Wednesday. During these hearings, the House & Senate will seek the UAP truth. The exchange will be testy at times, because a number of people on the committee seem to be running out of patience with the defense and intelligence communities.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
According to the announcement by Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Chairwoman Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.):
“This is our second hearing on the topic of UAPs and the American people are tired of the obfuscation and refusal to release information by the federal government. Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose. We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue. . .”
These witnesses include:
- Dr. Tim Gallaudet, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (RET.); Chief Executive Officer, Ocean STL Consulting, LLC.
- Mr. Luis Elizondo, Author, and Former Department of Defense Official.
- Mr. Michael Gold, Former NASA Associate Administrator of Space Policy and Partnerships; Member of NASA UAP Independent Study Team.
- Mr. Michael Shellenberger, best selling author and journalist; founder and President of Environmental Progress.
The government in recent years incorporated the term “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” from earlier official designations, including “Unidentified Flying Objects” and “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” because there are an increasing number of reports, particularly from the U.S. Navy, of supersonic objects pursued by jets that dive under the surface of the sea to continue their travels (or, perhaps, emerge from the sea.) This has been an area of interest to Admiral Tim Gallaudet who may be able to testify on his personal observations and research assuming it is not classified. Previous Congressional meetings this year are described in detail here and here. The proceedings will begin at 11;30 a.m. this Wednesday (November 13, 2024), and will be live-streamed at this address: https://oversight.house.gov. The website Space.com is also offering a link with which to access the hearings, but it possibly simply cycles you to the house.gov page noted immediately above. In the past, CSPAN and other public access channels have replayed the hearings in the following days, but there is no suggestion they will do it for these hearings.
Time and date of the Senate hearing is TBA. The meeting will be chaired by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY.) More information and commentary as it becomes available.
IN A NUTSHELL
There are several possible explanations for the reports being collated by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Department of Defense. This is the investigative body in the Pentagon. By far, the most common explanation of UAPs has to do with observer error. Often, Starlink satellites launches, weather balloons, drones, astronomical effects such as bolides and comets or meteorological conditions are misidentified as UAP. Perhaps, there is an explanation for 95% of all reports. That leaves fifty unsolved incidents out of a thousand, but then what if the number of annual or biennial reports is equal to ten thousand sightings? Now, we’re look at potentially hundreds of cases that cannot be explained away. What, then are the other possibilties?
One possibility that concerns Congress and which should concern you as well is that these amazing craft have been developed by Russia or China or some other country in the world, and the advanced technology employed puts U.S. forces at risk. But the technology would be many years, perhaps centuries beyond what the rest of the world has (including the U.S.) We cannot defend against an craft flying at 10,000 mph when the fastest known plane (the Russian Mikoyan MiG-31 Foxhound) can barely reach 2,200 mph. The fastest U.S. jet (believe it or not) is the F-15E Strike Eagle, though it is several hundred miles per hour slower than the Foxhound. Military fighter jets, missiles and drones in this category are described or referred to by Congress using the adjective “prosaic” which is intended to mean “ordinary” or “common.”
A second possibility is that these objects come from “elsewhere,” either another planet or another dimension. This should concern you as well, though no such craft has proven hostile as yet. Yet, these craft are often found in sensitive locations, including over military bases, nuclear power plants or research facilities, missile silos, and otherwise restricted air space, such as Area W-72A (See below.) Some members of Congress are primarily concerned at what they see as the undue secrecy wrapped around this topic or the misappropriation of allocated funds. Of particular note is that this current generation of observers are often trained pilots and crew members who have many flying hours in our most advanced high performance aircraft or the observers are familiar with state-of-the-art detection devices which represent vast improvement over earlier devices (radar, sonar, infrared cameras, etc.) used only decades ago.
“We’re being visited by non-human intelligence with technology we really don’t understand and with intentions we don’t understand either.”
Navy Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet
In the chart above produced by the AARO, you can see that most objects are less than twelve feet in size, though there have been striking exceptions. This tendency towards smaller size have led researchers such as Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the AARO and Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard University to hypothesize that these craft seen in our skies may possibly be robotic drones developed and sent to earth in the past, perhaps very distant past to surveil our planet and other planets much as we send unmanned probes to other worlds in our neighborhood as well.
THE SCHUMER AMENDMENT
The text of the Schumer Amendment (SA 2610), a bipartisan addition to S. 4636, the DOD Appropriations Bill for FY 2025 may indicate exactly what members of Congress might believe exists locked away in some hangar or secret government or private research facility. Specifically mentioned and demanded of government employees (military or civilian) and contractors are technologies, whether intact or damaged that are capable of:
- Instantaneous acceleration absent apparent inertia.
- Hypersonic velocity absent a thermal signature and sonic shockwave.
- Trans-medium (such as space-to-ground and air-to-undersea) travel.
- Positive lift contrary to known aerodynamic principles.
- Multispectral signature control.
- Physical or invasive biological effects to close observers and the environment.
Most of the characteristics listed above defy our current knowledge of physics. Our best minds cannot even theorize these capabilities yet alone develop them. Featured prominently and/or repeatedly in the text of the amendment (hyperlinked above for your review) are terms such as “flying discs” and “flying saucers,” “non-human intelligence” and “biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence.” Presumably, the term “non-human intelligence” does not refer to primates or penguins. How much of the Schumer Amendment ultimately survived mark-up or other parliamentarian objections or points of order, or privilege is uncertain to me and I don’t have the time or inclination to go through perhaps thousands of pages of appropriations to find out. Suffice it to say that some members of both parties of Congress (including the current Senate Majority Leader) have been swayed by the evidence and/or testimonies provided to date either in public or in classified, i.e., closed hearings, enough to conclude that pertinent information is being withheld from them.
REAR ADMIRAL DR. TIM GALLAUDET
With the exception of Luis Elizondo who “outed” the Pentagon with the now famous “tic tac” videos,1 I am unfamiliar with the witnesses who are scheduled to testify. But based on sheer credentials alone, I look forward to hearing from Dr. Gallaudet, who has testified to Congress on many other occassions, though on different scientific topics. He has an impressive mastery of everything from global warming to how the U.S. Navy should be responding to the Houthi attacks on trans-world cargo shipping and British and American naval vessels in the Red Sea. What he will say will most certainly be worthwhile hearing.
UAPS ABOVE AND BELOW THE OCEANS
The public is versed enough from news stories and television and movie shows to know that UAPs travel effortlessly through the air. But relatively few know that they have been detected under the surface of the sea as well. One issue that Admiral Gallaudet will almost certainly address is the characteristic for at least some unidentified flying objects traveling at high speed over the ocean to suddenly plunge under the surface and be clocked at speeds approaching 100 mph, something that no submarine can currently match, though the Russian VA-111 Shkval torpedo is said to reach speeds as fast as 230 mph.
There is also a suggestion that at least on one occasion, a UAF stalked a U.S. nuclear submarine. Then again, this is difficult to confirm because in spite of all the advanced electronic “gear” that a Virginia class submarine has, submarines don’t have windows you can peek through to see what is “out there.” Nonetheless, Admiral Gallaudet believes that there is a potential threat to U.S. naval forces or marine shipping, and he cites accidential collisions involving U.S. submarines as an example. He also points out in his writings that we know much more about the detailed topography of distant planets such as Mars which is 140 million miles away, than we know about the ocean floor, perhaps only one hundred miles west of Spain.
In his paper “Beneath the Surface: We May Learn More about UAP by Looking in the Ocean” published earlier this year, Admiral Gallaudet reports of one incident:
“The most dramatic example of an apparent transmedium UAP is the video from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, captured by the thermal imaging system on a US Customs and Border Protection DHC-8 aircraft in 2013. Detailed analysis of the data by the Scientific Coalition of UAP Studies (SCU) reveals several potentially unexplainable aspects of this object. It was initially detected moving at a low level over a runway at Rafael Hernández Airport, where its presence was so prominent that it delayed the departure of a commercial flight.25 Over three minutes, the object appears to fly at speeds between 40 and 120 miles per hour, enter and exit the Atlantic Ocean without any significant deceleration, reach a maximum underwater velocity of 95 miles per hour, and at one point split into two parts before entering the water again.”
Area W-72A
Writing in an article on Politico, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves who testified last July to Congressman Tim Burchett’s subcommittee wrote:
“On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base.
“’I almost hit one of those damn things!‘ the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. We all knew exactly what he meant. ‘Those damn things‘ had been plaguing us for the previous eight months.“
At this point, I’d like to pause until the hearing begin tomorrow, after which I will provide a summary of what was covered plus my own interpretation of where these objects come from. Please visit again late this week.
QUICK FEEDBACK ON HEARING
So, the hearing just ended. It ran a few minutes over two hours. There were a lot of empty seats as one might expect because the House is in the process of choosing their leadership over the coming days.
It started off slow. In fact, ninety minutes into the session I was convinced that the wirnesses and testimony of David Grusch, David Fravor and Ryan Graves last July was more compelling than this was, a bit more “crisp” to put a point on it Today, Tim Gallaudet was so-so, Luis Elizondo was a bit vague, almost evasive about his sources. He referenced his recent book which did not impress me. Michael Shellenberger was also so-so and Michael Gold played a part that was half scientist, half philosopher. It was only during the Q&A that the session found the groove. Congressman Eric Burlison (R-MO) wanted to know what the nonhuman pilots of these craft looked like. No witness offered any precise description, probably because none of them had ever seen one. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) had a similar question at the end and received equally vague responses except from Mr. Gold who said wisely that a nonhuman intelligence need not be a biological lifeform. It could be AI driven, and while he didn’t mention robots, obviously that could equally be true. Part of this question was related to comments about how our bodies and our aircraft cannot survive 18-20 G’s (gravitational force) before death and destruction occur, yet these UAPs can travel and maneuver at hundreds of times that. It is possible that machines could control these UAPs and not not suffer the consequences of these physical stressors.
One congressman asked that since these advanced craft fly daringly around our planes, could the pilots be hostile (another congressman brought up the subject of “good extraterrestrials” vs. “bad extraterrestrials” but revised her question before it could be answered. Elizondo had a worthwhile answer here. Understanding that the Pentagon and State Departments are concerned with the intentions of other countries as well as their capabilities, Elizondo replied that we already know what the capabilities of the UAPs are, but we know nothing about their intentions, and that needs to be discerned.
Congressman Anna Luna (R-FL) focused on the undersea aspects of the UAPs and Gallaudet mentioned an encounter between an American nuclear submarine decades ago and “something” underwater that behaved like a Russian torpedo as it approached the American “boomer,” but then slowed down, changed course and acted decidedly in a different manner.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was present at the hearing which may have explained Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) absence. Congresswoman Boebert asked the witnesses if they ever heard of attempts by the DOD or a Pentagon program to manipulate the genetic material of aliens to combine it with that of people to create hybrids. All four witnesses answered no. Emphatically.
All four witnesses had praise for the current leadership of the AARO agency mentioned earlier in this post, compared to the leadership there a year ago. When asked who in the DOD a member of Congress should approach for specific answers to questions, the witnesses replied that he should start with the AARO.
I do want to mention one thing. The issue of UAPs is slowly becoming salient. I was reminded of reports Congress likely received in the years before World War II broke out dealing with the treatment of Jews in Germany, or the Kurds of Shia in Iraq leading up to the first Gulf War, or of the brutal treatment of women in Iran today. Two or three reports today becomes ten reports next year, and forty beyond that. These reports are voices, and over time the voices become deafening. Eventually, action seems clearly indicated since the topic can no longer be ignored.
I will likely add to this in the coming days after I can watch a tape of the proceedings and track down some exhibits submitted to the committee or mentioned in testimony. Meanwhile, check out the Executive Summary of Michael Shellenberger’s statement to the committee.2
Be sure to bookmark this and check back this weekend!
BINGO
Hi Everyone. Someone suggested last evening that I come up with a “Bingo Card” for the sake of today’s hearing. I’ve never done this before, but I did make a stab at it. Below is a bingo card which does not compromise national security in anway. Below the card are the instructions that help you figure what to mark off on your card as the hearing progresses. Once you get all the squares in a row (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) covered, add a comment to this post stating such. Winner will be announced at the close of the hearing.
B. Congressman Tim Burchett says: “Ain’t” (B-3); “Fixin’” (B-8); “Bless your heart” (B-4); “Dagnabbit” (B-10); “Doggone it” (B-13.)
I. Intelligence community: References to terms “Confidential” (I-23); “Classified” (I-19); “Secret” (I-18); “Top Secret” (I-25) or “SCIF” (I-28.)
N. NHI: Reference to “Non-human intelligence” (N-37); “Biological” (N-33); “Lifeform” (N-40) “Extraterrestrial” (N-38.)
G. Congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Green: “MTG uses words “Monkeypox and STD” in the same sentence” (G-58); Reference to “Israeli Space Lasers” (G-53); Leaves Committee hearing once (G-49); Leaves Committee hearing twice (G-55); Doesn’t show up for hearing at all (G-48.)
O. Oscar Sierra: Reference to Last week’s election (O-73); Reference to Fox News (O-68); Reference to Chinese weather balloons (O-70); Reference to Joe Biden (O-63); Use of the term “stable genius” (O-64.)
FOOTNOTES
1The Tic Tac videos were a series of camera shots of UAP encountered earlier this century by fighter aircraft flying from the USS Tedd Roosevelt and the USS Nimitz. The term was coined by one of the pilots who described the target as resembling a Tic Tac. Once the videos were seen by the public, and especially following an indepth report on the news program “Sixty Minutes” which included the video and tstimony from the pilots involved, there was no way for anyone to “get the horse back into the barn” or “the cat back into the bag.” Rather than go into detail here, I would refer you to the Wikipedia article for a good introduction to this particular phenomenon. Of interest, however, is that in one of the released videos in the series (all taken by U.S. Navy pilots), viewers will note that the surface of the ocean under the object which is presumably a thousand feet or more above sea level appears to be perturbed. This suggests to some researchers (or, at least to Dr. Gallaudet) that the UAP is causing the disturbance, having either just emerged from the ocean depths or perhaps is in the early stage of submerging.
2Introductory document submitted to Committee by Michael Shellenberger on Immaculate Constellation which was mentioned in the hearing.