Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, left, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie speak during a hearing of the House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing on "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, May 17, 2022, in Washington.

At the first public hearing on UAP held in nearly 50 years, top Pentagon officials revealed that the number of reports by Navy pilots of strange aircraft has grown to 400.

The two officials testified before a House subcommittee about the work that is currently being done to investigate U.S. military reports of flying objects. UAPs are often referred to as ufos and involve flying object maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics. These aircraft have mostly been categorized as alien conspiracy or science-fiction. The government will bring the conversation around UAPs to light after several videos of Navy pilots were leaked online.

The goal is to eliminate the stigma by bringing our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data gathering process.

The Department of Defense established an office to oversee the collection and processing of UAP. The chairman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterintelligence, Counterterrorism, and Counterproliferation said that pilots have often avoided reporting these incidents, or were laughed at when they did. They need to be investigated and the threats they pose need to be mitigated.

The Intelligence Authorization Act called for the release of an unclassified, all-sources report on UAPs after videos were leaked by U.S. Navy pilots. The videos began circulating online before the U.S. Department of Defense released the videos.

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The report was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Pentagon's UAP Task Force and listed a number of incidents that took place between 2004 and 2011. According to the report, UAPs could fall into one of five categories. The categories include airborne clutter (balloons, birds and other flying things of the sort), natural atmospheric phenomenon, U.S. industry development programs, and foreign adversary systems. Only one incident was identified as airborne clutter and the rest were left unexplained.

The UAP Task Force database has grown since the release of the preliminary report.

The task force was able to resolve one of the incidents in which a video of triangular objects floating off the West Coast was seen through night vision goggles. Bray told the subcommittee that the objects were actually drones that only looked like a triangle because of the light that passed through the goggles.

Bray showed the subcommittee another video of a spherical shaped object that whizzes by the cockpit of an aircraft, so fast that he had to pause the footage several times for members of the hearing to see.

Bray blamed a limited amount of high quality data and reporting for the inability to identify these objects. As the UAP Task Force gets more reports, and as they call on a group of experts on physics, optics, meteorology, and other fields to help categorize the UAPs, he hopes this will change. The task force doesn't get reports from civilians.

The main objective was to transition UAP efforts from an anecdotal or narrative based approach to a rigorous science and technology engineering focused study.