The Pentagon showed previously classified footage of a metallic sphere zooming across the flight path of a military jet at hypersonic speeds at the first public hearing on unexplained phenomena.

The Navy pilot flying the jet saw the object through the cockpit window and it was picked up by the plane's sensors. What could it be?

During a public hearing held by a House Intelligence subcommittee, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence presented a video to the group of people. The June 2021 Pentagon report revealed that the U.S. Navy pilots had seen UAPs over the course of a decade.

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The deputy director of naval intelligence did not have an explanation for what the object was.

The metallic object can be seen as a tiny blip in split-second footage taken from the US Navy pilot's cockpit.

The metallic object can be seen as a tiny blip in split-second footage taken from the US Navy pilot's cockpit.  (Image credit: Department of Defense)

18 of the UAP reports displayed extremely unusual flight behaviors, with the mysterious objects appearing to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly or move at considerable speed, without any apparent means of propulsion. Live Science reported that one piece of footage (captured by the U.S. Navy) appears to show a spherical UFO hovering in midair while bouncing from side to side, before plunging into the ocean.

The chair of the meeting said that the hearing and oversight work had a simple idea: Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat and need to be treated that way.

The Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security gave testimony at the hearing and was an advisor to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The Pentagon could not rule out the possibility that the event was connected to extraterrestrial life.

There are elements of the government that are looking for extraterrestrial life.

Bray said that the UAP task force had not found any evidence that UAPs were non-terrestrial. Bray highlighted that no material had been found, and that Navy pilots had never tried to communicate with the objects.

Bray highlighted that UAPs had been involved in 11 near-collisions with U.S. military aircraft, and that most of the Sightings were unexplained and could possibly even be dangerous. There have been reports of encounters over sensitive nuclear facilities, such as an alleged incident at the Malmstrom Air Base in Montana where 10 nuclear intercontinental missiles were rendered inoperable while a red orb was seen overhead.

Bray said that the data is not in the UAP task force's holdings.

The militaries of other nations have identified UAPs.

Allies have seen these. Bray said that China has set up a UAP task force.

A night-vision recording of multiple flashing triangles gliding through the air was released during the hearing. The officials said that they were visual artifacts produced by the dim light of drones flying overhead as the light passed into the night vision goggles.

Other U.S. Navy assets also observed the drones nearby, and we are now reasonably confident that these triangles are related to the drones in the air.

The purpose of the hearing was to bring a degree of transparency to the process through which the Pentagon is investigating the unexplained occurrences, and to destigmatize the reporting of strange aerial phenomena.

The stigma associated with UAPs has made good intelligence analysis difficult. The pilots were laughed at when they did report. DOD officials were afraid of a skeptical national security community, so they put the issue in the back room or swept it under the rug. It is true that UAPs are unexplained. They are real. They need to be looked into. Any threats they pose need to be mitigated.

Despite this push for transparency, a lot of what defense and intelligence experts know about the spotted is still classified for national security reasons. The second hearing was reserved for classified information.

The executive branch, the administration, and both parties have been focusing on events that can be explained and avoiding those that cannot be explained, which is one of the concerns of Congress.

The last time an investigation of this type took place was in 1969 when the U.S. Air Force concluded that no unexplained flying object had ever been judged a threat to national security.

A number of testimonies from the Navy pilots and radar crew who had encountered the strange aerial objects on an almost daily basis were included in a series of bombshell reports by the New York Times and Politico.

The U.S. government has been secretly documenting strange, seemingly unexplained activity. The US Sun made a Freedom of Information Act request in April that resulted in the release of more than 1,500 pages of documents. The document database was created by the Defense Intelligence Agency and included reports on more than 300 medical accounts of people having contact with aliens.

It was originally published on Live Science.