‘We are not alone.’ Talk of UFOs again on Capitol Hill months after Congressional hearing

• 3 of those scheduled to appear during the briefing, hosted by nonprofit UAP Disclosure Fund, testified before subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee.
• The Disclosure Fund, which advocates for government transparency about UAP, said the session will “offer a science‑driven perspective” about the phenomena.

Less than six months ago, witnesses testifying in the halls of Congress reignited public interest in UFOs with regaling accounts of shadowy government cover-ups and strange craft seen whizzing through the sky.

The hearing was the second time in as many years that elected officials paid serious heed to the possibility that extraterrestrials – or some other force – were not only invading U.S. airspace, but that the military knew about it.

Now, another type of meeting to discuss UFOs is set to take place Thursday, May 1, on Capitol Hill. But this event – described as a “briefing,” not a “hearing” – won’t include testimony under oath, but rather will be a public series of discussions with members of Congress about the unexplained objects, which the government now refers to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP.)

In fact, three of those scheduled to appear during the briefing, hosted by the nonprofit UAP Disclosure Fund, testified in November 2024 before subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee. The Disclosure Fund, which advocates for government transparency about UAP, said the session will “offer a science‑driven perspective” about the phenomena, as well as the implications for national security.

Here’s a recap of what happened not only at that explosive November hearing, but in the days, weeks and months after:

UFO congressional hearing: ‘We are not alone in the cosmos’

During more than two hours of testimony Nov. 14, four witnesses described to Congress reports of strange craft out-maneuvering U.S. military aircraft and flying in ways beyond the capabilities of known human technology.

In his opening remarks, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official, lambasted the intelligence community for its decades of “excessive secrecy” around UAP reports – “all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos,” he said. Elizondo resigned and went public in October 2017 after 10 years of running a Pentagon program to investigate UFO sightings.

Timothy Gallaudet, a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy; and Michael Shellenberger, a journalist who publishes the “Public” newsletter on Substack, also alluded in their testimony to images of UAP in the government’s possession that have yet to be made public.

Michael Gold, a former NASA associate administrator, was the fourth witness to testify.

Elizondo, Gallaudet and Gold are all scheduled to appear May 1 during the UAP briefing. Elizondo is on the Disclosure Fund’s board of directors, while Gallaudet joined the organization’s advisory board in February 2025.

“I believe we as Americans can handle the truth,” Elizondo said in November, “and I also believe the world deserves the truth.”

Leader of Pentagon’s UAP office testifies

Days after the hearing – which also included reinforced claims of an active military program to retrieve downed alien spacecraft – the leader of the Pentagon’s office to investigate UFOs provided testimony of his own.

That agency, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO,) came under heavy fire at the hearing when the witnesses blasted it for what they claimed were secrecy and spreading misinformation.

Many sightings AARO has historically investigated are reported by military fighter pilots, some of whom have captured footage on jets’ cockpit gun cameras of UAP. But so far, the agency has repeatedly denied finding any evidence that the craft were extraterrestrial in nature.

Jon T. Kosloski, the newly-appointed director of AARO, reinforced those findings when he testified Nov. 19 in a Senate hearing, saying the office “has not discovered any verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology.”

National Archives releases some UFO records

The impending briefing also comes after the National Archives released in late April some records related to reports of UFOS.

The National Archives was required to release the trove under a provision included in an annual defense policy bill directing the executive branch to declassify certain records.

But not all who have long pushed for UFO transparency were happy with what was made public. That includes Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University who made headlines in August 2023 when he claimed that remnants of a meteor he and a team recovered in the Pacific Ocean were interstellar in origin.

The reports “contain limited data that cannot be verified,” Loeb, who is among the scheduled slate of speakers at the UAP Disclosure Fund event, wrote in a post on Medium. “Since the sky and oceans are not classified, it makes more sense to collect new and better data on millions of objects.”

Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com