Another round of public hearings on UFOs is coming to Congress within weeks, according to a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The new Senate hearing, which could come as early as September, follows another bizarre summer of statements from U.S. military whistleblowers about these puzzling aerial mysteries, including revelations by former Pentagon official Luis Elizondo that he personally handled an “alien” implant removed from a veteran service member.
New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who confirmed the hearing, said, “It’s a priority for me because I think it’s really important that we continue to make things publicly available.”
The Capitol Hill investigation also comes at a time when 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 year-old sole UFO-hunting office.
Just days ago, witnesses in Montana filmed what one of them called a “massive” UFO with “tons of flashing and spinning lights” 60 miles from a US Air Force nuclear weapons base (pictured)
In fact, just days ago, witnesses recorded what one of them called a “huge” UFO with “tons of flashing and spinning lights” 60 miles from a U.S. Air Force nuclear weapons base.
That sighting, filmed from Choteau Montana and about an hour’s drive northwest of historic Malmstrom Air Force Base, a UFO hotspot, left one witness “shaking and crying from the experience,” according to her husband, who posted the encounter on Reddit.
“The photos are not scary,” says the anonymous poster noted“but seeing what you truly believe to be a huge object in the silent night sky passing over YOUR head and your home has much more emotional weight in person.”
The UFO, which can be seen primarily by “a rotating orange/red light on the bottom” after it changed from looking like a long, bright white streak, was not one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite trains that are commonly mistaken for alien craft, the witness said.
“I’m familiar with the Starlink videos,” he stressed. “As we were observing the object it was very apparent that the lights were around the silhouette of a large craft.”
“You couldn’t see through the lights,” the r/UFOs subreddit explained the encounter. “There was complete darkness behind them. Our impression was that we were seeing a disc shape from the side.”
Sen. Gillibrand on Monday expressed hope that the upcoming Senate UFO hearing will renew public confidence in the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and encourage the public to report their own sightings to AARO UFO hunters.
“We also want to try to continue to build credibility within this office (AARO) so that more of the public can come forward with their sightings and have a place and a platform to submit information and inquiries,” he said, “because that’s ultimately what this office is supposed to do.”
After a rocky first year, which saw AARO’s inaugural director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick publicly clash with former U.S. intelligence whistleblower David Grusch and others over an alleged UFO cover-up, the office spent much of 2024 guided only by temporary interim leadership.
That changed in late August, when the Pentagon announced that AARO’s new leader would be a quantum optics and cryptomathematics expert from the National Security Agency (NSA): Dr. Jon T. Kosloski.
Then-Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand led a hearing in April 2023 (pictured above) at which the former director of the Pentagon’s All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, spoke before the Senate for the last time.
Then-AARO head Dr. Kirkpatrick spoke about the challenges of prioritizing and identifying UFOs.
“I hope the new boss will be the one to testify,” Senator Gillibrand told Capitol Hill reporter Matt Laslo, who runs the newsletter. Ask a politician.
Gillibrand, whose fellow New York lawmaker, Sen. Chuck Schumer, has sponsored a detailed amendment pushing to declassify the UFO files, gave a preview of the hearing.
The Armed Services Committee, he said, will present “a progress report on how many unidentified aerial phenomena we have assessed and analyzed, give examples of what we have identified and give examples of what we have not identified.”
This type of public outreach was a key goal, according to Senator Gillibrand, “so that the community can stay informed about what we’re actually doing and what this office (i.e., AARO) is doing.”