Military officials testified before Congress on Unknown Aerial Phenomena (UAP), commonly called Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs by the public, for the first time in over 50 years on Tuesday. Rep Brad Wenstrup, a Republican from Ohio, went on Fox and Friends to detail his thoughts.
“My takeaway is that we need to continue to pursue this and to make sure that we are doing things in the proper way and really trying to gain as much knowledge as we can of these types of things,” Wenstrup said.
Wenstrup called the issue a national security concern and called on the intelligence agencies to “work with our allies” to see if they have been recording similar phenomena, but cautioned against sharing information with the US’ adversaries because he would not trust information coming from them.
While Wenstrup stressed that there are a lot of issues Congress has to deal with within the United States, he said he thought UAPs were worth looking into because of the threat they pose.
In a 2021 classified report that was published in a redacted form on The Black Vault earlier this year, it was revealed that the government is aware of 144 reports of UAPs from 2004 to 2021 and that more than half of them were observed with multiple sensors.
Many of the UAPs have been observed over sensitive military operations and training exercises, increasing the national security risk.
Wenstrup noted that while there are many reports coming from military pilots and sailors, the government does not seem to have similar data coming from others that would be expected to see UAPs, like commercial pilots.
“One of the things that I was concerned about yesterday is in this situation, you're having things reported perhaps from pilots, perhaps from a ship, but what about private and commercial pilots, things like that?” Wenstrup continued. “Have they seen any findings? These are things that we're interested in as well.”
Government officials noted that UAPs “probably lack a single explanation” and to that point, during the Congressional hearing, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray played two videos of triangular-shaped objects in the sky and said they had gone unexplained for two years, but the Navy now believes that they were commercial unmanned aircraft – drones – that appeared as triangles because of the way light affected the night vision and SLR cameras the objects were filmed with.
However, Bray also showcased a video of a UAP zooming past an aircraft that the Navy had no concrete explanation for. Wenstrup noted that Congress received a lot more information during the private session with military officials and Congress, but did not go into details.
“Hopefully one day we'll definitively know what [UAPs are], where [they’re] coming from,” Wenstrup said.