Congress will hold first open UFO hearing in 50 years

A House subcommittee will hold an open hearing next week on UFOs – the first of its sort in more than a half-century.

The announcement was made Tuesday by subcommittee Chairman Indiana Democrat Rep. Andre Caron.

"Congress hasn’t held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UFO’s) in over 50 years," Carson tweeted. "That will change next week when I lead a hearing in @HouseIntel on this topic & the national security risk it poses. Americans need to know more about these unexplained occurrences."

The subcommittee is part of the larger House Intelligence committee, which is led by California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who told the New York Times that the committee will hold hearings to investigate the Pentagon's "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to "break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency." 

A pair of Pentagon officials are scheduled to testify at the hearing.

Since a 2017 report in the Times about the existence of the UFO project at the Pentagon, the government has disclosed a number of reports about UFOs.

In 2021, the Pentagon released a report about its UFO program that described 143 sightings of flying objects from 2004 to 2021, some of which could not be explained.

An un-redacted version of the report was published earlier this year by the government transparency agency The Black Vault.