Hearings & Tellings - My Reaction to the Latest Congressional Hearing

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On the way to Washington

It's been just over a month, now, since my participation in an AARO-supported workshop on UAP data, organized in part by Dr Gretchen Stahlman, one of the Society's recently-seated Advisory Council members who're helping to shape the strategic direction and overall policy infrastructure guiding SUAPS (you can read the story we wrote on the event). I was there along with along with some other distinguished colleagues and departmental leaders from the Society, and I got to meet the heads of other serious UAP organizations, like the SCU and the National UFO Historical Records Center (NUFOHRC), led by the indefatigable archivist and long-time researcher David Marler. The AARO workshop brought me back to Washington, D.C.; I hadn't been to the town since before the Pandemic. I'd lived there while in grad school - from the scary days of 9/11 (just commemorated in the twenty-fourth year hence), until the first year of the Obama administration, which saw, at the time, quite a change for the town: the first-ever African-American President of the United States of America. Returning to the town, to officially participate with other members of the defense and intelligence communities, in a workshop on the challenges of UAP data, was quite surreal. Doubly so since I live now partly in the European Union, where I have a research post at a German University coming up in October. I returned to a town, a community, a culture that I scarcely can recognize, ridden through-and-through with deep political and cultural differences that while present, surely, throughout my life (I was born at the end of the Carter Administration, in early 1978), have now blossomed into a black rosebush of conflict and enmity - signs, I dare say, of a coming storm. I met with members of the inner bureaucracy of an America that I wanted to be familiar, and recognizable to me. But it was not the same America, and these public servants were not operating under a status quo that the populace has in fact grown weary of. They seemed tested, even anxious - under an almost incomprehensible (and reprehensible) assault from their Executive Branch leaders, who seem hellbent on transforming this Branch of the U.S. government into a fully politicized arm of an ideology - rather than acting as stewards of an independent federal administrative bureaucracy whose fundamental aim is the predictable and boring functionality of our whole System - the underpinnings of our way of life. For over two centuries, the America that I thought I knew has been as good an example of republican democracy the world has ever seen: stable, fairly rational, relatively sane, and reliable - even if sometimes reliably brutal in meting out its strategic national security ends (a growing obsession since the end of the Second World War - more on that in my reaction below) and updated geopolitical Monroe Doctrine. What was that Churchill quote that's often reached for when softening the blow of the political realities of modern democratic-capitalist nation states, like the U.S. - committed in principle to high ethical standards, but in practice weighed down by the unfortunate and seemingly unshakeable history of brutality and inhumanities our species has perpetrated against itself and nature since the bludgeoning club was discovered during our collective infancy?

What is often missed in discussions of, and commentary on and about, AARO is the actual social and political context we now face - historic - just as the UAP subject gains increasing momentum in both the public sphere and, most importantly, within a widening circle of academic and scholarly interest. This larger sociopolitical context is important not only for a better grasp of AARO, but for a better understanding of the ongoing public congressional hearings and government (and private) policy machinations and advocacy for "disclosure". In my view, not only is the specific nature, aim and function of AARO - which differs quite significantly from the UAP Task Force out of which it emerged - deeply misunderstood for what it actually is (as opposed to what some would like it to be - namely, a UFO group exemplifying an authenticity of engagement reflected by the true "ufologist"), the entire subject placed now before the U.S. government - of principal concern to that Office - has been forced to conform to the external demands of an assemblage of media personalities and advocacy journalists who, while wanting the subject to be taken seriously (as it well should be), offer a confusing repetition of the ongoing entanglements of what the great ufological writer and (bone fide) scholar Thomas Bullard called the myth and mystery of UFOs. When what we want is the reality, what we get in these hearings seems to be the historically overdetermined breadcrumbs leading to alleged black projects and other secretive government goings-on that are the limitless fuel for the incessant fantasy fictions consumed by the public for decades (perpetuated today by the infinite and undying maelstrom that is social media - endlessly emerging and mutating podcasts and all). Rather, we must begin with the reality - of the witnesses' direct reporting on the phenomenology itself, which shows a structure of a mystery that is often wrapped, when reaching for narrative threads, in a myth but which, nevertheless, contains something to engage more seriously, more carefully, more sincerely ... not as apparently baffled journalists spinning the next story, but as engaged and curious scholars and students of a subject that cannot be dismissed - as it had been for many decades. Cutting away the hype, the myth, and getting to the reality of the mystery - what's left? We don't yet know. The refrain "I know what I saw" satiates the apologist or "believer" but will not further the empirical research, except to give it some tentative direction; it is research that, in time, is likely to chasten the enthusiast and temper the excitement. But the hardest question we face is: can we stay the course, navigating between the enthusiast and the skeptic, between government secrecy and open democratic science (hostile to secrets and speculation)? Whatever else must be done, we must try to disentangle the knot binding myth, mystery and reality - kept tied by a history and an imaginarium whose structure is subtle and elusive. And creative. The following, then, is written as my reaction - partly formal (more polished and well-edited), partly informal - to the recent Congressional UAP Hearings held Tuesday, 10 September 2025. They came one day before the annual 9/11 commemorations in the U.S., a day that saw, tragically, another distressing political assassination, which seems to deepen the political and social uncertainties that daily beleaguer the world's oldest functioning democratic republic.

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My Reaction to the Recent Congressional UAP Hearings.

Tuesday's Congressional Hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) underscored once again both the importance of the issue and the deep difficulties that have hampered its treatment for decades—especially as it has been handled within the government, whose aim since at least after WWII has been increasingly obsessed with national security and maintaining US military and strategic dominance, guiding principles ultimately at odds with the inner operating directives of the sciences themselves: free, open, and therefore democratic exploration of self and world (what is NASA’s mission directive, and how is this ultimately compatible with the national security state?). For those of us who have been following this issue in a scientific and policy-oriented capacity, the hearing highlighted less the prospect of exotic technology (although from a certain standpoint, there is a case to be made as I explain somewhat below) than the all-too-familiar realities of bureaucracy, classification, and governance—and the epistemic complications that all of this raises when it comes to the evidentiary import of the witnesses’ testimony (an issue that roils within the UAP community right now).

From my vantage as executive director of the Society for UAP Studies, I see yesterday’s events less as evidence of a singular hidden truth and more as further evidence for the basic hypothesis articulated most clearly by journalist Garrett Graff (Graff 2023): that the UAP problem is not a mystery with one answer but rather a somewhat unstable and chaotic amalgam of many overlapping realities, complicated by the unfortunate facts of the modern bureaucratic national security state. This perspective may be less dramatic than the sweeping claims of whistleblowers or the dismissive posture of some officials, but it is ultimately the most compelling because it can plausibly account for nearly all the evidence at hand. (The Society had Garrett for one of our monthly colloquia; you can watch his excellent talk and the follow-up discussion, led by our distinguished colleague and UFO historian Dr Greg Eghigian, here.)

The Graff-based view, which I basically endorse, holds that UAP reports are not a monolith. Instead, they are a mixed pool consisting of: (i) misidentified U.S. black projects, where cutting-edge aerospace programs are understandably shrouded in secrecy; (ii) adversarial drones and surveillance platforms, which represent a genuine national security challenge; (iii) a large number of ordinary misperceptions of balloons, satellites, or atmospheric phenomena (something consistently confirmed in every UAP/UFO database, from NUFORC to the current EngimaLabs tranche, a well-accepted fact by almost all credible researchers—past and present); and (iv) a small but stubborn residue (a recalcitrant residuum, so to speak) of anomalous cases that resist explanation (historical research indicates this averages between 2-5% of all cases reported, although there is significant cross-database variability, largely due to the absence of generally-accepted or uniform reporting systems across databases—an ongoing issue that was recently addressed in an AARO-supported workshop that I attended and at which I presented—and also possibly due to underreporting; here’s the core argument I outlined in my talk to AARO). This mixture makes the phenomenon difficult to study, not because of some grand cover-up, but because of the dysfunctional way information is handled inside the government.

Here lies the true “cover-up”: not a deliberate conspiracy, but the emergent property of a (bureaucratic) system riddled with stovepipes, redundancies, and a culture of overclassification (I recently asked a U.S. government official about their policy for classification, and whether there’s oversight on its issuance. The answer? Nope, nada—which totally shocked me). Intelligence agencies are not designed to share freely; they are designed to compartmentalize, an operating principle put in place since at least the Truman administration. Competing bureaucratic interests, the fear of embarrassment, and the institutional reluctance to admit ignorance all combine to ensure that even well-meaning actors end up with partial, conflicting pictures. This explains how figures like David Grusch and Sean Kirkpatrick can arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions—both may be speaking sincerely, but from within different blind spots of a fractured system.

The implications of this hypothesis are profound. If correct, it means the UAP debate should be reframed away from the extremes of “there is nothing here” or “there is a vast cover-up of alien technology.” Instead, we should be focusing on governance reforms, transparency measures, and scientific practices that can help bring order to the chaos (the latter providing the independent means of assessing the veracity of claims about UAP, for example). Yesterday’s hearing, for all its frustrations, at least signaled that Congress is beginning to take seriously the structural problems that have long clouded this issue.

From a safety standpoint, the mixture hypothesis is particularly important. If even a fraction of UAP reports involve advanced adversarial drones or unsafe incursions into U.S. airspace, then we face an aviation and national security challenge that demands systematic response. Pilots deserve clear reporting channels free of stigma; scientists deserve access to declassified data for study; and the public deserves transparency about what is known, and what remains uncertain.

This is where organizations like SUAPS can contribute. Our mission is not to promote a single narrative but to advance careful scholarship, develop educational frameworks, and advocate for standards of evidence and data transparency. We believe that by creating academic space for this discussion—anchored in critical thinking rather than speculation—we can help untangle the mixture and move toward genuine understanding.

In that spirit, my reaction to the hearing is one of cautious optimism. The testimonies did not resolve the mystery of UAPs, but they did shine light on the dysfunction that makes resolution so difficult. If Congress continues to press for whistleblower protections, improved data collection, and responsible declassification, then progress is possible. We may not discover one singular “truth” behind UAPs, but we may at least learn to distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary—and that would be an important step forward.

This is my formal stance … but now, personally, and more broadly: I don’t think “disclosure” and this push for declassification is an efficient use of time, energy and resources—precious few for UAP studies. Rather, what we need, as Condon himself warned should science get involved with UFOs (the terms then preferred, of course: it was the 1960s), is a decisive focus on building a radically independent scientific and scholarly ecosystem—of the sort we’re creating at the Society—that can provide a bulwark against the speculative and a measurement resource for all such claims made by witnesses, military or civilian. So far, not only do we have no independent, science-based means of verifying the claims of any UAP witnesses (aside from general science claims that are frequently not themselves evidence-based!)—because we don’t yet have the secure science in place—we probably will never have an independent means of doing so for any past, present or future military or official government witnesses of these phenomena. This fact alone should give us pause for the content of the claims made during this recent or any Congressional Hearing. But even so, when you have multiple witnesses whose testimony can in some cases be corroborated by alleged or available instrumented data, then those claims simply cannot be dismissed. And, when they rise to the level of apparent anomaly, as we see again with the latest military eyewitnesses, we have to take such claims as in fact indicative of the structure of an anomaly that merits empirical study, i.e.: the establishment of a research program and foundational framework that can possibly yield the sorts of data that would be definitive in ways that testimony and forensic evidence cannot be. So, this brings me to my final thoughts: about the specific claims themselves.

Based on the testimony of folks like Dave Fravor, of the now-famous Nimitz incidents, and that of Ryan Graves’ pilots, as well as the testimony of someone like Chief Wiggins from the Tuesday Hearing, who gave what I thought was compelling testimony, there does seem to be a core, phenomenologically coherent, and highly anomalous phenomenon that suggests (but that does not demonstrate) inexplicable flight characteristics for UAP. This, in my view, establishes a plausibility measure and a working (descriptive) hypothesis that both motivate the formation and sustained operation of a systematic empirical study of the kind of phenomena so indicated (by e.g. the Wiggins and Fravor testimonies)—the working hypothesis being that there are high-performance technologies of unknown origin being detected and operating with relative impunity in the airspace controlled by various modern nation states (the hypothesis is ‘descriptive’ because it describes without explaining a set of unidentified aerial, and sometimes also seemingly undersea, phenomena—for example Wiggins suggested the UAP he witnessed had emerged from the water, but couldn’t say for sure from his observational vantage point; Fravor described what appeared to be a structured object above a disturbance in the ocean; and so on).

How exactly to study such a phenomenon (or rather, a class of such phenomena, more generally) is a deeply challenging problem in itself, requiring philosophical and scientific sophistication—just to get the observational science right (even just set-up correctly). That’s the point where I stop, and say: ok, let’s work out the research program, and, in several years (possibly a decade), let’s see what kind of progress we can make—assuming we are successful and can fund the field (and that’s what I’m working to achieve, aside from helping to secure and establish the necessary scientific and epistemological/conceptual foundations and fundamentals).

Now, working out from the indicative and compelling observational-phenomenological core you have the other stuff: did the phenomena crash/land, so that there could be material remains (intact or not)? Are these phenomena associated with intelligences, and are there nonhuman beings governing the UAP being witnessed? Have human beings interacted more directly with (and not just at an ambiguating distance from) any of this? Have material structures or objects been recovered? This is where it starts to get much harder, much weirder, and, of course, much more into the fantasyland of the science fictional—a place wherein the imaginal starts to ambiguate the factual (there are interesting philosophical issues here that I’ll have to gloss over). From a purely statistical point of view, though, if one is willing to grant credence to the multiple-witness/instrument-visual cases (as I am), if one can find cases (involving allegations of crashes, etc.) that are evidently similar (that is, in terms of credence), then one must assign as much likelihood to the former as to these latter, weirder cases. It’s just that I’m not so sure we have good cases in this latter category, especially since the very testimony on these issues seems to be increasingly more compromised by the Graff thesis: sure, the gov’t has a “Crash Retrieval Program” for “UFOs”—but it’s not likely what the public wants it to mean, i.e., straightforwardly alien tech crash landed and recovered by the USG (sure maybe, but not likely); rather, and more mundanely: by the time the USG’s crash recovery and analysis/reverse-engineering team project goes from the SAPs and CAPs to the public, in the game of telephone it becomes about ET and his/her/its foundered ship…

In any case, as I say about all of this kind of stuff: where’s the beef (as the old Wendy’s commercial from the 1980s put it)? If there are crashed craft and beings, fine—let’s see the material evidence for the material claimed to be in existence. Each time we get to this stuff—stuff that in principle materially remains (craft, bodies), unlike the UAP/UFOs themselves which are, as observations, inherently transient like many meteorological or astronomical phenomena—we always get a song-and-dance from the alleged first-hand witnesses, with the familiar refrain “well, oh, I can tell you, but I’d need a SCIF for that” etc. And then what comes of the SCIF interaction (if it ever happens to begin with—sometimes the witnesses with their allegations seem unsure even of the legality of their testimony to Congresspeople in the SCIFs)? We never get it straight-up. When we do get names—like Knapp’s halting statements in Tuesday’s Hearing—we always get the run back to Lockheed and/or the “usual suspects” (Knapp’s own terms!), and it typically ends up with some black-budgeted project that is—unsurprisingly—secretive. So, it’s always a dead-end. And it’s a merry-go-round that, as the historical chroniclers of UFOs have always reminded us, returns time and again (see Bullard 2010 and more recently our colleague at the Society, Greg Eghigian’s 2024).

This is the crucial epistemological issue for any citizen; it’s our duty to ask: How can we verify any or all of this independently, then? For all the military or government official whistleblower testimony: it’s not even possible to independently verify, given the structural and policy realities of the current bureaucratic national security state. (The push for “declassification” is helpful and sensible from one point of view; but even if it happened, would the national security state allow the key secrets out that put it in jeopardy, or that revealed its strategic limitations or domain awareness failures, etc.? You see the quagmire: the very notion of “disclosure”—even if there’s nothing particularly exotic to disclose—is incompatible with the current structural arrangement of the modern nation state, and an authentic answer to “disclosure” would require its radical deconstruction … possibly the one thing that deeply attracts the U.S. political rightwing to the issue.)

And now, let’s add the further complication that in the US you have an incipient authoritarian state, where all the federal agencies and their leadership—including, by the way, the Inspectors General, who, importantly, were actually mentioned in the Tuesday hearing as having a key verification role to play (is anyone asking what’s the current status of that?)—have been decapitated, politicized and systematically populated by cronies/lackeys of the current presidential administration (something Congress, by putting in place protections for agency heads from being fired by admin without cause, tried to prevent but which is now under assault by the “unitary executive theory” believers that dominate the Supreme Court—who seems bent on allowing the emergence of a monarchical executive). What now remains of “trust”—especially with a sclerotic and dysfunctional Congress, who has seemed to suddenly wake up with the UAP issue as bipartisan and urgent, somehow? (You have to also look at the folks here that seem attracted to the UAP issue and wonder: do we have the best and brightest on the issue, and what, exactly, are their motivations? For the right-wingers, it’s just more fuel for their “deep state” theories, which helps further the authoritarian take-over and administrative reshuffling now underway. That’s clear, in my mind. But for the left, it’s less clear—aside from something about protecting those officials and officers who come forward with potentially valuable info about the corruptions of the government … so perhaps this corruption issue actually is the secret to unlocking the whole bipartisanism of the UAP issue: both care, at least apparently, about uncovering deep corruptions in our government; it’s just that this has very different political and strategic overtones for the different Parties.)

This, finally, is my view: I accept a certain veridical core phenomenology to UAP, derivable from the best of the witness testimony (‘best’ meaning: multiple witnesses, instrument-corroborated); that core justifies, like in medical forensics, the establishment of an independent (and not primarily forensic) scientific research program that should be capable of handling the range of claims and supplying us the relevant data to secure the phenomena as empirically confirmed and definite (if not then also giving us more secure, albeit hypothetical, explanatory options)—from the observations of extraordinary kinematics, to the allegations of crashed objects of nonhuman origin (both of which, if you think about it, seem to be—at least for the mainstream science community—an uncomfortable local SETI kind of a project; but that’s another story). This is already enough to work with for a few decades of disciplinary and institutional work.

And that’s what I’m content with: shut up and do the science (and calculate!, as Feynman once allegedly shouted); and with it, do the humanistic scholarship (even if ultimately mundane phenomena are to blame for all UAP—a possibility I personally deem unlikely, but debatable of course—mundane phenomena can nevertheless touch off profound experiences worthy of existential and more broadly humanistic or social-scientific study/engagement); and finally: do the institution-building!

For the rest of it, let’s see what data and frameworks we can establish that can handle UAP and associated phenomena/claims, and what philosophical/conceptual challenges remain, and if we’re up to the task.

And for the other claims (crashes, bodies, and so on): sure, but where’s the beef?

Thanks for reading.

>For those interested in the paper that was the foundation for my AARO workshop ("flash") talk, here it is, as a pre-print (that will likely receive heavy editing before being published - if it's accepted). (If you want to cite it, please ask for permission.)

M. Cifone_ It’s All About Evidence–But What Is The Evidence v2.3 (revised final version w

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