First Public UFO Hearing in Decades Includes Warning of ‘Potential National Security Threat’

As anyone who’s been following recent developments in the UAP (formerly known as UFO) field already knows, Tuesday marked the first public hearing on the topic in decades. Expectedly, the public portion of Tuesday’s proceedings was characteristically light on new insights, although it included several reiterations of the seriousness with which some lawmakers are now treating this continually expanding body of research.

Congressman André Carson—the Democrat who chairs the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee—provided a brief summary of the government’s involvement in this area during his opening remarks. Project Blue Book, notably, received a mention, as did more recent UAP developments including the Department of Defense having at one point “quietly restarted” a similar program.

“This hearing and oversight work has a simple idea at its core: unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way,” Carson said, as seen above. “For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did.”

Claiming government officials now “know better,” Carson reminded participants of the hearing and those viewing at home that UAPs—while they are indeed “unexplained”—are a very real issue in need of continued investigations.

Watch Tuesday’s full hearing up top.

Amid coverage of the hearing, a number of familiar names associated with the larger UAP issue expressed everything from understandable frustration to well-earned pride regarding the historic moment. Chris Mellon, a To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences alum and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said in a tweet that Tuesday’s hearing served as “a reminder both of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.”

Meanwhile, Tom DeLonge—the Angels & Airwaves frontman and blink-182 co-founder who currently serves as interim CEO of To the Stars—commemorated the moment by reminding the public how we got to this current point in UAP history. 

“This was by far the most punk rock thing I’ve…EVER done,” DeLonge, whose directorial debut Monsters of California recently released its first teaser trailer, said in an Instagram post.

Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, meanwhile, took a harsher approach in his comments about Tuesday’s hearing, saying “we just got hosed, basically.”