Bombshell UFO hearings to take place in Congress as new footage emerges of 'huge' craft near US nuclear weapons base
READ MORE: Air Force vet breaks silence on 'UFO the size of a football field'
By MATTHEW PHELAN SENIOR SCIENCE REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 18:02 BST, 15 September 2024
Another round of public UFO hearings are in store for Congress within mere weeks, according to a senior member of the Senate's Armed Services Committee.
The new Senate hearing, which could arrive as early as September, follows another bizarre summer of US military whistleblower claims about these baffling airborne mysteries — including ex-Pentagon official Luis Elizondo's revelations that he personally handled an 'alien' implant removed from a veteran servicemember.
New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who confirmed the hearing, said: 'It's a priority for me because I think it's very important we continue to make things publicly available.'
The Capitol Hill inquiry also comes as many American civilians have also reported their own UFO sightings, which Sen. Gillibrand said she hopes will soon be added to the investigative purview of the Pentagon's only one-year-old UFO hunting office
Just days ago, in fact, witnesses taped what one called a 'huge' UFO with 'tons of blinking and spinning lights' 60 miles from a US Air Force nuclear weapons base.
That sighting — filmed from Choteau Montana and hour's drive northwest of storied UFO hotspot Malmstrom Air Force Base — left one witness 'shaking and crying from the experience,' according to her husband, who posted the encounter to Reddit.
'The photos aren't scary,' the anonymous poster noted, 'but seeing what you truly believe to be a massive object in the silent night sky going over YOUR head and home carries a lot more emotional weight in person.'
The UFO, which can mostly be seen by 'a rotating orange/red light on the bottom' after it shifted from appearing like a long, gleaming white streak, was not one of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite trains commonly mistaken for alien craft, the witness said.
'I'm familiar with Starlink videos,' he emphasized. 'While we were watching the object it was very apparent that the lights were around the silhouette of a large craft.'
'You could not "see between the lights,"' as he explained the encounter to the r/UFOs subreddit. 'It was solid dark behind them. Our take is that we were seeing a disc shape from the side.'
Sen. Gillibrand expressed her hope Monday that the upcoming Senate UFO hearing would renew public trust in the Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and encourage the public to report their own sightings to AARO's UFO hunters.
'We also want to try to continue to build credibility within this office [AARO] so more of the public can feed in sightings and have a place and a platform to send information and inquiries,' she said, 'because that's eventually what this office is supposed to do.'
After a rocky first year, in which AARO's inaugural director Dr Sean Kirkpatrick sparred in public with ex-US intelligence whistleblower David Grusch and others over an alleged UFO cover-up, the office spent most of 2024 guided by only temporary acting leadership.
That changed late last August when the Pentagon announced that AARO's new lead would be an expert in quantum optics and crypto-mathematics from the National Security Agency (NSA): Dr. Jon T. Kosloski.
Gillibrand, whose fellow New York legislator Sen. Chuck Schumer has sponsored a detailed amendment pushing to declassify UFO files, gave a preview of the hearing.
The Armed Services Committee, she said, would host 'a progress report on how many unidentified aerial phenomena we've assessed and analyzed, give examples of what we have identified and give examples of what we haven't identified.'
This kind of public disclosure was a key goal, according to Sen. Gillibrand, 'so that the community can be kept up to speed about what we're actually doing and what this office [i.e. AARO] is doing.'
