Why is America’s Congress being briefed on UFOs?

AMERICA’S SPIES brief the country’s lawmakers on sober topics. In 2023 they gave classified briefings on artificial intelligence, Israel, Russian and Chinese misinformation, Sudan and Ukraine—in other words, on the biggest stories on Earth. But on January 12th, according to Axios, a news website, members of Congress will hear from the Office of National Intelligence about an altogether otherworldly subject: UFOs, or “unidentified flying objects”. Why?

UFOs (which the government calls UAPs, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, a broader term used, in part, to avoid the familiar, loaded acronym) are getting more attention from the political establishment. In 2017 the New York Times revealed that the Department of Defence had, from 2007 to 2012, funded a small programme to investigate military reports of UFO sightings; similar programmes followed. Footage of unexplained encounters between Navy jets and objects travelling at high speeds accompanied the Times’s story. A follow-up article quoted a former Navy pilot who described his encounter over the Pacific Ocean in 2004 with an aircraft that accelerated “like nothing I’d ever seen”. Congress became interested: in 2020 the Senate’s Intelligence Committee asked the Pentagon to track data on UFOs and report on its findings. The resulting document did not draw many conclusions.

The programmes the Times described were not the first to study the national-security implications of unexplained aerial events. In 1947, after a newspaper ran an account of a private aviator’s encounter with nine “flying saucers” near Mount Rainier in Washington state, members of the public reported hundreds of UFO sightings to the Air Force. That year the “Twining memo” (written by a lieutenant-general of that name) concluded that the sightings of “flying discs” ought to be taken seriously—not least because they might use “a form of propulsion, possibly nuclear”, developed by an enemy. It recommended that the Air Force study them. The resulting Project Sign, which became Project Blue Book, ended in 1970.

But that was not the full story, a whistleblower alleged in June 2023. David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, went on the record in an obscure publication called the Debrief. He claimed that he had learned about decades-old Pentagon programmes that had recovered “craft of non-human origin” and tried to re-engineer the technology. His claims sparked a frenzy among UFO fanatics—but many stretched credulity. (He suggested, for example, that a UFO crash in Italy in the 1930s spurred the formation of the Axis powers.) Mr Grusch said he had submitted relevant classified information to Congress, though he admitted that he had not seen physical evidence of aliens himself. In July the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee invited Mr Grusch, as well as Navy pilots, to a hearing on UFOs. His jargon-filled testimony was evasive: he repeatedly offered to answer questions in a “SCIF”, a secure room where classified information is reviewed. But one allegation was clear enough: the government harbours non-human “biologics”—in other words, bodies.

Many lawmakers are sceptical of Mr Grusch’s explosive claims. Prominent Democrats and Republicans—including Senators Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Marco Rubio—say the real issue is that the government is not disclosing what it should. Some echo cold-war-era concerns: Congress should know about what is flying around America’s airspace, Mr Rubio said in 2021, “especially if it’s an adversary that’s made a technological leap”. In December Congress passed a law directing the National Archives to collect documents related to UFOs and to disclose confidential ones within 25 years. Three House Republicans and a Democrat have lobbied for a select committee on UFOs, which would have subpoena authority. One, Tim Burchett, said in July that he thinks the effort to increase transparency will help restore faith in government. “More people believe in UFOs than believe in Congress.” ■