The 2022 UAP Hearing
Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation
May 17, 2022
For the first time in over half a century, Congress held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena. The last one had been in 1968. Fifty-four years of official silence ended in Room HVC-210 of the Capitol Visitor Center, where two senior Pentagon officials sat before the House Intelligence Subcommittee and acknowledged, on camera, that the military was tracking objects it could not identify or explain.
Full Hearing Video
The complete May 17, 2022 hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation. Room HVC-210, Capitol Visitor Center, chaired by Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN).
Source: Non Human Intelligence (YouTube). Public Congressional Record.
Chairman Carson's Opening Statement
Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) opened the first congressional UAP hearing in over 50 years by invoking the history of Project Blue Book, stressing the need to treat UAP as a national security issue, and calling for an end to the stigma that had kept military personnel from reporting what they saw.
Source: Non Human Intelligence (YouTube). Public Congressional Record.
The Witnesses
Two senior Department of Defense officials. The first to testify publicly on UAP since 1968.
The Pentagon's senior intelligence official. Moultrie oversaw the newly established Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), the successor to the UAP Task Force. He testified that the Department of Defense took UAP reports seriously and was working to destigmatise reporting among military personnel. He acknowledged that some incidents remained unexplained after analysis.
Bray presented declassified UAP footage during the hearing, including video of a small spherical object moving rapidly past the cockpit of a Navy fighter jet. He stated that the catalogue of UAP reports had grown to approximately 400, up from 144 in the preliminary assessment released in June 2021. He acknowledged that 11 near-miss incidents between military aircraft and UAP had been documented.
What Was Disclosed
The Pentagon acknowledged, on camera, what it had quietly tracked for years.
More than 50 years ago, the US government ended Project Blue Book, an effort to catalog and understand sightings of objects in the air that could not otherwise be explained. For more than 20 years, that project treated unidentified anomalies in our airspace as a national security threat to be monitored and investigated.Chairman Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN), opening statement
The UAP catalogue had grown substantially. Bray testified that the number of documented UAP reports had increased from 144 (as reported in the June 2021 preliminary assessment) to approximately 400. The increase came partly from new reports and partly from historical data being incorporated into the database as stigma around reporting decreased.
Declassified footage was shown publicly. Bray displayed video of a small, reflective, spherical object flying past the cockpit of a Navy fighter. The object remains unidentified. He also showed night-vision footage of triangular objects that the Pentagon assessed were likely drones, though their operators were unknown.
Near-miss incidents were confirmed. Bray acknowledged 11 documented near-miss incidents between military aircraft and unidentified objects. These encounters raised flight safety concerns beyond the intelligence question.
No wreckage or material had been recovered. When pressed by committee members, both witnesses stated they were not aware of any material from UAP being held by the U.S. government. This position would be directly contradicted by David Grusch's testimony 14 months later.
The classified session went further. After the public hearing, the subcommittee moved into a closed, classified briefing. Members who attended later described the classified information as more detailed and, in some cases, more alarming than what had been shared publicly.
Why It Mattered
The 2022 hearing broke a 54-year silence. From 1968 to 2022, no branch of the U.S. government had publicly addressed unidentified aerial phenomena in an official proceeding. The Condon Report had closed the book. Project Blue Book had been shuttered. The subject was treated as settled. It was not.
The hearing also established a template. Congressional questioning of defence officials on UAP became routine after this session. The 2023 hearing built directly on it, with witnesses who went far beyond what Moultrie and Bray had been willing to say. Bray's statement that no wreckage had been recovered became a reference point that Grusch's subsequent testimony contradicted under oath.
The public airing of previously classified footage normalised the subject in a way that decades of FOIA releases had not. Millions watched senior Pentagon officials discuss UAP without dismissal or ridicule. That shift in tone, from a government that denied to one that acknowledged, opened the door for everything that followed.
