Senate Armed Services Committee holds UFO hearing

The Senate Armed Services Committee plans to hold a UFO hearing after the November elections, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's (D-N.Y.) office confirmed to The Hill.

The announcement of the hearing follows an increase in sightings of so-called unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), including one reported near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. It would also come more than a year after an explosive House hearing in July 2023 at which three former Pentagon officials testified about their experiences with or sightings of UAP and warned that a lack of information about the phenomena posed a risk to the could represent national security.

Now Gillibrand, who in 2022 helped found the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), created to evaluate UAP reports, wants to be updated on the progress of the office's work.

“This is a priority for me. I think it's very important that we continue to put things in the public domain,” Gillibrand told Matt Laslo's DC podcast “Ask a Pol” earlier this month.

She wants “a progress report on how many unidentified aerial phenomena we have assessed and analyzed” and for the office to “provide examples of what we have identified and examples of what we have not identified.”

Gillibrand, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities, added that she wants AARO to “continue to build credibility.”

Her office confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday that there would likely be a hearing in November.

At last summer's headline-grabbing House hearing on UAP, in which former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch claimed the government was hiding technology of foreign or even extraterrestrial origin, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) addressed the inspector general the intelligence community to further investigate the allegations.

But lawmakers have been frustrated with any progress since then, and Burchett suggested in April that he believed the U.S. government had been involved in a “cover-up” of information about UAP.

A Pentagon report on UAP released in March concluded that there is no evidence that the U.S. has reverse-engineered alien technology, dismissing claims that it is hiding alien spacecraft.

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