US Congress to hold a UFO hearing after a flying disc was spotted near a Montana missile base witness was left in emotional turmoil police issued handbooks in dealing with encounters of the third kind
The Senate Armed Services Committee is preparing to stage a new hearing to boost the credibility of the Pentagon’s division charged with dealing with unidentified flying objects, a senior lawmaker has said.
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was founded in July 2022, with the help of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat. She told the Daily Mail on Monday that she’s working to schedule a hearing within weeks.
“It’s a priority for me because I think it’s very important we continue to make things publicly available,” Gillibrand said.
The Armed Services Committee intends to host “a progress report on how many unidentified aerial phenomena [UAP] we’ve assessed and analyzed, give examples of what we have identified and give examples of what we haven’t identified,”she told the outlet.
According to Gillibrand, the hearing should renew public trust in AARO, after a series of military whistleblower claims about the government covering up possible alien encounters. “We also want to try to continue to build credibility within this office [AARO] so more of the public can feed in sightings and have a place and a platform to send information and inquiries,” she added, “because that’s eventually what this office is supposed to do.”
The hearing announcement comes just two weeks after a video of a “huge UFO” with “tons of blinking and spinning lights” was posted on Reddit. The sighting was recorded in Choteau, Montana, less than 100 kilometers from the Malmstrom Air Force Base, a major nuclear missile facility.
“The photos aren’t scary, but seeing what you truly believe to be a massive object in the silent night sky going over YOUR head and home carries a lot more emotional weight in person,” said the anonymous witness.
When some users suggested the phenomenon may have been a constellation of Elon Musk’s Starlink communication satellites, the witness disagreed.
“I’m familiar with Starlink videos,” he wrote. “’While we were watching the object it was very apparent that the lights were around the silhouette of a large craft. You could not ‘see between the lights’, it was solid dark behind them. Our take is that we were seeing a disc shape from the side.”
The encounter happened around 10 pm local time on August 31, the man said, adding that his wife was “shaking and crying from the experience” afterwards.
Police officers across the US have been issued a handbook on how to deal with reports of ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena’ (UAP).
Getty Images / Joe McBride
The guidelines, which detail several past encounters, were sent out earlier this summer by the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCAA), which represents police executives from the largest cities in the US and Canada.
In the 11-page guide, the MCAA notes that UAPs detected in US airspace represent a “domain awareness gap” which poses a “clear and present danger to pilots and our soldiers that is more acute than ever.” It also cites reports by several government agencies, such as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concluding that such phenomena are also a “clear threat to national security, since their capabilities and origins are unknown.”
The handbook provided details on several UFO investigations, and cited the testimonies of whistleblowers who have been involved in such incidents, such as former US Air Force officer and intelligence official David Grusch.
In one Congressional hearing on UAPs, Grusch claimed he had interviewed several Pentagon officials with direct knowledge of aircraft that were of “nonhuman” origin, who reported that so-called “biologics” were recovered from some of the craft. The document also recalled the testimonies of US Navy pilots Ryang Graves and David Fravor, who described encountering UAPs on training missions. Fravor was the pilot that spotted and recorded the famous ‘Tic Tac’ UFO during a flight near California in 2004.
The booklet also provides several stories shared by officers who had encountered unknown aircraft while on duty.
One officer’s report claimed that he had once seen a triangular UFO in the sky with three dim green lights while driving in his patrol vehicle. He stressed that he was aware of what helicopters and airplanes looked like in the sky, and that what he saw was “unlike anything I had ever witnessed.”
Within an hour after the encounter, the officer claims to have responded to a call from a homeowner in the area that reported “something running outside of his home” which “did not sound like an animal.”
The MCAA guidebook concludes by providing a number of links to various UAP reporting websites, and encouraging police officers to report any bizarre incidents and sightings. At the same time, it is noted that the document does not represent the opinions of policies of the MCAA and is intended to share information collected from open sources.
Source X/RT/AP