Congress’s Second UAP Hearing Addressed the Flight Safety and National Security Implications of Ignoring the UFO Issue

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Accountability held a hearing on UAP titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth” on November 13, 2024, featuring testimony from Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, former DoD official Luis Elizondo, former NASA administrator Michael Gold and journalist Michael Shellenberger. The panel discussed the need for increased whistleblower protection, as well extending the call for the removal of the stigma that inhibits the proper investigation of the phenomenon.

The hearing, headed by Representatives Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Glenn Grothman (R-WI), included testimony from four witnesses representing a diverse set of backgrounds, including:

• Dr. Tim Gallaudet, a retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and currently the Chief Executive Officer of Ocean STL Consulting;
• Luis Elizondo, a former Department of Defense Official who was in charge of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and author of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs;
• Michael Shellenberger, independent journalist and founder of the Substack publication, “Public”;
• Michael Gold, former Associate Administrator of NASA’s Space Policy and Partnerships, and was a member of the Administration’s UAP Independent Study Team.

This was the second government hearing held on the subject of UAP, following the July 2023 hearing that heard testimony from high-profile government witnesses David Fravor, Ryan Graves and David Grusch. This year’s panel addressed the issue of the ongoing stigma that surrounds the subject of UAP, and how this stigma prevents accurate reporting of encounters with unidentified phenomena, leading not only to a lack of data that inhibits proper investigation of the subject, but also presents the potential for situations where both flight safety and national security could be compromised.

Presented at the hearing was a 12-page report on a secret program called ‘Immaculate Constellation’, an “unacknowledged special access program that your government says does not exist,” as described by Representative Mace. The report was supplied to Congress by Shellenberger, who obtained the document from an anonymous whistleblower. Shellenberger remarked that “the executive branch has been managing UAPs without congressional knowledge or authorization for some time, possibly decades.”

The program, the existence of which has been denied by the Department of Defense, was formed in response to the December 2017 New York Times article that revealed the existence of the AATIP program and the DoD’s ongoing interest in the UFO phenomenon, and is tasked with collecting and quarantining reports of UAP encounters and sightings, gathering the information from a broad range of sources.

“I don’t think that they’re faking it or that they’re lying about their fear,” Shellenberger said of his source in an interview with NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart. “This person discovered this material accidentally. This was not something they had expected to encounter.” Shellenberger also stated that the existence of Immaculate Constellation was confirmed by a number of sources.

Going beyond the nuts-and-bolts focus that typically dominates public hearings, Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) asked Elizondo if “non-human biologics” are controlling their craft through a “mind-body connection”; whether or not the NHI are interdimensional in origin; and if anyone on the panel had encountered “reports from people that claim to have first-hand experiences with these entities, whatever they might be?”

While Elizondo didn’t speculate on the nature of the crafts’ interfaces, he did point out that the objects demonstrated clear control by an intelligence of some sort. He declined to comment on the possibility of an interdimensional origin for NHI, pointing out that he is not “qualified as a scientist or otherwise, to speculate points of origin.” Unfortunately, the question regarding reports of direct encounters with NHI wasn’t allowed time to be addressed.

Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) closed the hearing, stating that “it is clear from my experience, and what I’ve seen, that there is something out there: the question is it ours; is it someone else’s; or is it otherworldly.

He went on to say “that as the legislative body, as the regulatory body, we must know” the truth about UAP. “And anyone who prevents us from gaining access to that information, I would consider that criminality. Because we have U.S. personnel who may very well be in harm’s way. We have technology that ultimately may threaten our very existence.”

“Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any potential threats these phenomena pose,” Mace and Grothman said in a joint statement released prior to the hearing.

“We can only ensure that understanding by providing consistent, systemic transparency. We look forward to hearing from expert witnesses on ways to shed more light and bring greater accountability to this issue,”

The hearing, “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth”, can be viewed on the GOP Oversight YouTube channel.