The number of reported sightings of UFOs has been growing for decades, but there have only been a handful of congressional hearings about the subject since the 1950s, one of the most famous being the alleged appearances of Val Valiant Thor among the government leaders half a century ago.
The hearing on Tuesday, May 17 was the first such gathering in decades, and it took place just as the world is becoming more aware of the existence of unidentified flying objects.
Why Now?
In order to effectively respond to these threats, the Department of Defense (DoD) must have an understanding of the capabilities, intent, and vulnerabilities of adversaries. The DoD is responsible for protecting the nation from a variety of adversaries that pose a threat to the United States.
The DoD is a major supplier of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to combatant commanders, joint forces, and other agencies. And it is this requirement that sparked the hearing.
AOIMSG – Who the Heck is That?
AOIMSG is the acronym for the new group charged with researching UFOs, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group. This group was spun up in 2017 and its job is to determine if unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) are a threat and whether or not they are a representation of adversarial technology from the likes of Russia or China which would be currently unknown to the US.
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 had treated unidentified anomalies in our air space as a national security threat to be monitored and investigated. In 2017 we learned for the first time that the Department of Defense had quietly restarted a similar organization tracking what we now call unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs. Last year congress rewrote the charter for that organization now called the Airborne Identification and Management Synchronization Group or AOIMSG for short. Today, we’ll bring that organization out of the shadows…
Senator Andre Carson
Senator Carson also asked the group to ensure that UAP sightings were treated seriously, as potential national security threats and that those who reported sightings were “treated as witnesses” rather than dismissed as crazy.
So, according to the US Congress, the point of the hearing is to remove some of the mystique behind the group. However, since the entire hearing was also followed up by an additional closed-door hearing that was classified, there’s no real way for the average person to know what’s really going on.
It’s important for the public to know that the classification of information exists to protect national security, not to hide the truth.
Senator Sandy Crawford
I do believe this statement is at least partially accurate. After all, if it turned out some UAPs were adversarial nation states testing unknown aircraft over US air space, this would be of obvious concern and probably discussed better behind closed doors. Unfortunately, this also means that any number of other things might be discussed in secret as well.
It’s hard to say whether the military has a complete grasp on the nature of these events. We don’t have a clue about the size or nature of the forces involved. Even if we did, we don’t know the capabilities of the technology involved. It could be the equivalent of the invention of nuclear weapons, but we don’t know that either.
There are certainly a lot of questions here, and they are difficult to answer. We can however make an educated guess based on what we do know. We know there is a large number of incidents with no obvious physical explanation. They are unexplained. These are likely to be UAPs, although they could also be conventional aircraft or natural phenomena. We know that some of these events appear to have been deliberate attacks, while others are clearly not.

Communication Issues to be Addressed
One of the primary functions of the new initiative is to ensure that various arms of the government are communicating information learned about UAPs amongst each other. Years ago, it was discovered that many agencies like The Pentagon would essentially hide information they’d learned about UAPs from other DoD & military agencies. Whether it’s aliens, natural objects, or enemy nations, the ability coordinate investigations among multiple teams would be beneficial.
Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Navy Intelligence, discussed at length how difficult it can be to identify these reported objects, if they are identifiable at all. He also used an example video from the Navy where objects were video recorded in the sky and not identified until a year later after coordinating with multiple sighting reports of similar objects over periods of time.
Would all the answers to unexplained phenomenon derived from such sharing be provided to the public? Well when it comes to national security & restricted air space, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
You can watch the entire hearing below:
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