UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RECORDTESTIMONY RECORD
UNDER OATH CONGRESSIONAL HEARING · MAY 17, 2022The 2022 House Intelligence UAP Hearing
Witnesses: Ronald S. Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security; Scott W. Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence
Chaired by Rep. Andre Carson, this was the first open congressional hearing on the subject in more than 50 years; Carson noted the last had been held ‘half a century ago’. Its focus was oversight of the Pentagon’s new UAP office, then called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). Carson said UAP were ‘a potential national security threat’ and that stigma had led pilots to avoid reporting them.
Two Pentagon officials testified: Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott Bray, the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. The open session was followed by a closed, classified session at noon, and several questions were deferred to it. Moultrie told members the department was ‘open to all hypotheses’ and that it wanted personnel to report sightings without stigma.
Bray said the UAP database had grown to ‘approximately 400 reports’ since the intelligence community’s June 2021 preliminary assessment, and that there had been no collisions with U.S. aircraft but ‘at least 11 near misses’. He said that, when it came to material, ‘we have no material’, and that the task force had ‘detected no emanations’ that would suggest anything ‘nonterrestrial in origin’.
Bray showed a short clip of a spherical object passing a Navy jet in a training range, which he called ‘somewhat reflective’; asked by Rep. Adam Schiff, he said, ‘I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is.’ He also showed night-vision images of flashing triangles, which he said were now assessed as unmanned aerial systems, with the triangular shape caused by light passing through night-vision goggles and an SLR camera.
The hearing produced few new disclosures but put UAP on the formal congressional agenda. Two months later, in July 2022, the Pentagon established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which took over the investigative role. Its director, Sean Kirkpatrick, gave AARO’s first public testimony to a Senate subcommittee in April 2023, and further House hearings followed with witnesses from outside the Pentagon.