June 30, 2026 · COMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY · 9,957 words · 9 speakers · 57 segments
Okay, we know there's a big press conference downstairs, so some members might have been held up down there. I'd like to welcome you all here this morning. We've got feedback. The informational meeting explored reports on unexplained phenomenon in aerospace and beyond. And this is going to be a great hearing. We're going to learn a lot of different things. I know we've talked about it a lot, and we're excited to do it, and we'd like to thank Representative Waxman for bringing it to our attention. With that, though, I guess, do we need to call the roll? No, we don't need a roll call, right? Procedurally? All right, we don't need a roll call. Who's here? You can see who's here. So before we begin, I just want to thank all of our testifiers who come out today, both here in the room and online. You know, when we talk about, everyone's brought up, are aliens real? We've heard a lot of that, right? We're hearing a lot of that, and different people are saying it. But this is more also about Pennsylvania and the engineering that's come out of this state in space exploration. And as we all know that through the 60s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, Pennsylvania played a pivotal part in exploring space, landing on the moon, satellites. And we continue as a Commonwealth to be a leader in space exploration and what we develop here in the Commonwealth. We had the opportunity a few months ago to go to one of the labs out in Pittsburgh where they were working on the lunar lander. That landed, I think, in December. It took off in September. Yeah, I think you're getting ready for the next phase here in the fall. Yeah. And it was really exciting to see again how Pennsylvania is leading the charge on exploration of space and technology. and what technology comes out of space exploration, as we've all seen over the course of time, different things that we use every day that were built for the astronauts or for different sub-things that went into space. So here, what we're doing here, what's happening in this industry and what's happening throughout the country is very interesting and exciting.
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Representative Waxman. Thank you very much, Chairman Cerisi. I just want to thank you so much for this, the last hearing you're ever going to let me organize. It's good. No, it, you know, why are we doing this? I think that the chair really touched on a number of interesting points, you know, and covered sort of science, education. But for me, it's also about looking at topics maybe where we don't know the answers. And I think that's something in this building that we fall into a lot, which is, you know, don't ask a question that you don't know what the answer is. And I think today we're going to have quite a few questions that we don't know the answer to that is going to be really the focus of the discussion. And so, you know, I think that it's wonderful that we're going to do something that is a little bit different and a topic that is something that captures public imagination and something that people are interested in really not just in the state and the country but all over the world. And so I'm really looking forward to the testifiers and the folks who are joining us today and to hear what they have to say. Thanks.
Thank you. And our co-chair.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm excited about this hearing, hearing about technology and some of the things that we've already seen as a committee, both on the western part of the state and hopefully here on the eastern part of the state here soon, especially about the space industry. We visited, what, astrobotics? I mean stuff that was once thought of as just imagination and sci is now becoming reality and it quickly happening the fact that we going back to the moon what were you talking about were going to the moon and they going to mine some of the moon They going to build a base there I mean that the stuff you hear about is just like make And now it's actually happening. It's happening in Pittsburgh. If you go to Astrobotics, you can actually see them building and working on the lunar lander there. And it is quite a sight. It is not something that I thought I would ever see in my life. But there is a lot of other technology that's out there I'm sure we're going to hear about today. maybe life beyond and looking forward to the testifiers today so thank you all for coming and I'm sure I'm gonna have a lot of questions thank you with that
we'll have our first testifier come up dr. Jason Wright a professor of astronomy and astrophysics from Penn State University thank you much thank you very much for showing up today
All right. Is that on? All right. Is that better? Okay. All right. Chairman Cerisi, Chairman Otitai, and members of the House Communications and Technology Committee, thank you for your invitation to speak with you today on astronomical and scientific research into life elsewhere in the universe. I'm Jason Wright, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, and I'm Director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. For most of my career, I've worked on a variety of problems related to stars, the planets that orbit them, and life in the universe. And recently, I've shifted my focus to searches for technological life elsewhere in the universe. Penn State and its Eberly College of Science have been extremely supportive of research in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The P. SETI Center receives internal support for student training, grant writing, curricular development, and community building within the field, and members of the center have raised philanthropic and federal grant money totaling almost $1 million. To offer some background on this topic, the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence started around 1960 with the realization that humanity's capability to transmit and receive radio communications had developed so far that our technology could send and receive signals at interstellar distances. This raised the novel possibility that humans might be capable of detecting other species' communications across the galaxy. Over the next few years, numerous other methods of detections were proposed, including the use of optical light for communication, the search for probes in the solar system orbiting the sun, searches for Dyson spheres, and the potential detection of atmospheric industrial gases on the surfaces of other planets, much like we have CFCs in our atmosphere. We call all of these detectable signs of technology technosignatures. In the 1970s and 80s, NASA proposed and received small amounts of federal funding to pursue the search for radio signals. But deficit hawks in the U.S. Senate found the program to be a right target for grandstanding, and the program was canceled. NASA would then avoid the topic for the next 35 years, and the field was primarily driven by philanthropy at the SETI Institute, which is a non-profit research institution in Mountain View, California, and more recently at UC Berkeley and Oxford. The tide at NASA began to turn in 2018 when Congress began pushing it to consider more technosignature work. I organized the scientific program for a NASA workshop to consider how NASA could reenter the field and shortly afterwards began organizing a series of symposia at Penn State University Park to explore all aspects of the field including contributions from the social sciences and the humanities. We've held three international symposia on the University Park campus so far. Now, a species that's living on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, wondering if our sun hosted any kind of life, might look for our planet and our planet's biosignatures by building some sort of orbital telescope, sort of like NASA's planned habitable world observatory, to search for the telltale signs of perhaps methane and ozone in our atmosphere, which are produced entirely by life. But actually, a simpler and cheaper method for them to know that there is life in the solar system would be for them to build a large radio telescope and detect our leaked radio emissions, for instance, from our 5G radio towers and our aircraft radar. In other words, our technosignatures are probably more obvious to aliens beyond Earth than our biosignatures are, and they might only grow with time, our technosignatures. And so it stands to reason that when we are doing searches for life elsewhere in the universe, we should include studies for both biosignatures and technosignatures. That's why today the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center works to serve as an academic hub for the field, attracting graduate students who wish to work in SETI and securing funds from NASA, the National Science Foundation, and philanthropic foundations. Much of our research focuses on novel methods for searching for technosignatures, and we also train a large fraction of all the new researchers in the field. Three of the six PhD theses in SETI in the past six years have been by Penn Staters. I've recently completed the first comprehensive upper-level textbook in the field, where it is used in two courses for our undergraduate majors and our astrobiology graduate students at Penn State. Penn State undergraduates also maintain a curated bibliography of the SETI literature that's used by researchers worldwide, and astrobiology PhD students continue to develop novel ways to search for technosignatures that continue to be published in peer-reviewed journals. One common misconception regarding this field is if we find a signal, we will be able to quickly start communicating with another species, asking them questions, exchanging technological breakthroughs, and planning visits. In truth, SETI scientists largely expect that the origin of such a signal will come from many light years away, and unless it is explicitly intended for us, it will be difficult or impossible to interpret. Even after a signal is detected, the process of discovery may take decades before it is widely agreed that it is of alien and technological origin. There's no reason to think that they would notice any signal we send toward them, which would take decades, centuries, or even millennia to arrive. But this does not diminish my excitement at the fact that we are searching for such technology smarter and more effectively than ever. Penn State remains a major player in this space because of its long-standing strengths across astronomy, having one of the largest astronomy departments in the world. People often ask me which method of technosignature search is most likely to succeed or in what form the first definitive sign of alien technology will take. I honestly respond, I don't really know. But if I had to guess, I would say it will come in a form that we haven't even started looking for yet. Part of the purpose of the P. SETI Center is to incubate a new generation of inventive scientists who will expand the search in ways we haven't even thought of yet. And I'm excited to see where they take us. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Other questions for anyone?
Waxman go ahead I just wondering if you could describe a little bit your team and what the Institute looks like at Penn State
Great. Yeah, the P-SETI Center, I'm the director of the center, and we have four or five affiliated faculty that work in various, usually other programs, and do a little bit of work on various aspects of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I am probably the only one doing most of my research on SETI. We have a postdoc, which is about 50% time on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and then three or four graduate students doing part of their research on it, and then we usually have three or four undergraduates as well. We have members of the center in the Eberly College of Science at the Astronomy Department. We also have members at the Rock Ethics Institute and the Geosciences Department.
Good morning. Thank you, Chair, so much for having this hearing. This is incredibly delightful, and I think a departure from some of the testimony that we get to hear every day. So thank you so much for being here. A few questions for you. I'm kind of curious about the workforce, the type of person that is able to do this incredibly exciting work. Could you talk a little bit about what the pipeline looks like and maybe resources and supports to make sure that we have enough thoughtful, intelligent, curious people to expand the work that you do?
Absolutely. So historically, most of the work in this field has been in radio astronomy. And so most of the labor that's needed there has generally actually been radio engineers and people working in radio astronomy there, largely at philanthropic centers. I feel like that part of the workforce is rather mature and there's a large philanthropic base through what's called the Breakthrough Listen program that's developed a lot of the software and hardware to make that happen around the world. More generally working in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence most of the background there for the actual searches should is astronomical and so it's people being trained in physics as undergraduates and then getting usually astronomy related or astrobiology related PhDs at universities. Because NASA refused to fund the field for decades, there was no federal money to work on it. And as such, almost no work was happening at universities. And so the field really atrophied for a while and no one could work on it because academia is so reliant on federal funds. That's really started to turn around. And since NASA has started accepting such proposals again across the country we see mostly graduate students and junior faculty at universities taking up the mantle and working on it so it it really is it really is grant money into universities that's going to make it work and if I may have a follow-up I'm curious to about competition so as universities are really struggling with lack of federal funding going to the research departments I represent the city of Pittsburgh. We're seeing it acutely at the University of Pittsburgh as well as CMU. I'm kind of curious how competition plays into your work in terms of international competitions and how maybe recent shortage of funding or kind of historical shortage of funding has made us possibly not as competitive to other countries doing the same work. This is a field that's been dominated by the United States since it started. And I've even had my colleagues in Europe say, what is it about the United States that you can work on this? And it's just not considered serious here. That is starting to change a bit, and we're certainly feeling The pinch, a lot of the work that we do, most of the work we do in astronomy and astrophysics is through the National Science Foundation and NASA, and both of those funding pipelines have dried up significantly. We've had a lot of trouble placing our students into graduate programs, and I do worry we'll fall behind there. The new player in the field is China, which has a 500-meter radio telescope that is even bigger and more sophisticated than the recently, than Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, which was recently destroyed. So in terms, I wouldn't phrase it in terms of competition, however. This field is extremely collaborative. Everyone in it is extremely committed to transparency and working together. There's also, just as an illustration, the team working on SETI at the FAST telescope, the Chinese radio telescope, found a signal that looked very good and very persuasive, one of the best signals we've ever seen. It looked like it was coming from space. And the first thing they did was contact their colleagues at Berkeley to help them understand what it was. And very quickly, within a couple weeks, working together, they established that it was a false alarm. And that is completely normal in our field. And so while I always want the United States to remain at the forefront in this field, if it's a competition, it's always a friendly one with our international colleagues.
Thank you. Representative Gatos.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you so much for being here and giving these remarks. So to follow up on Representative Williams' comment, I'd like to even go back a little bit further talking about how do you get kids motivated even at an early age to go into these sectors, STEM, education, science, other that's, how do you as a university take that down to trying to get younger kids involved and get them motivated. Growing up, I actually, my classmate was Colonel Mike Fink. In fact, Colonel Mike Fink, who just got back from the space station, he was in my physics class. Obviously, he did a lot better in physics than I did. But how do you find those Colonel Mike Finks and get them motivated, even at the grade school level?
Yeah. No, that's a great question. thing I've found about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that it's very easy to get anyone interested in it. Everybody immediately understands what it is I work on and what it is we're trying to do, and kids especially can relate to these ideas. Penn State does a huge amount of outreach at every level. Our astronomy department brings in thousands of people every year during AstroFest, which is happening just next week. And so I don't think it's hard to get them interested in this specific thing. Now, science and STEM more generally, yeah, I think it has to do with outreach and showing kids that real people really work on these subjects. Having them meet an actual scientist who will, you know, tell them about what they do in a way that excites them, I think, can help a lot. We don't have any shortage of people that want to be astronomers. The challenge, I think, is making sure that they have the solid mathematics and physics background that they can pursue. And often they're very surprised to discover that becoming an astronomer is mostly becoming a physicist first, which means learning a lot of math. And so not hiding the fact that it's hard work and that it involves a lot of math and science, but also just getting real astronomers out there that they can see themselves as becoming when they grow up. And so we do things like astronomy on tap where we go out to local restaurants and just reach out to the community and tell them about our research is one example. And so what can we as legislators do to encourage that and provide more resources for that specifically What are your suggestions I mean I imagine that would mostly come at the schools It really important that we have really robust STEM education in the schools that inspires kids and makes sure that they all have that preparation they need. Often it's hard for them when they're learning algebra to imagine why they would need it or why this is relevant to anything. But if we tie it in, these are the sorts of tools that can send us to the moon or give us moon bases or help us find aliens. I think that would go a long way. Thank you.
Thank you. Representative Waxman, another question before I go to the chair?
I just am curious. I have two questions that are broad questions, but the first one is, you mentioned if there was some kind of contact with some kind of extraterrestrial life or how long it would take to communicate. I guess I'm just curious. Do you think it would be wise for humanity to try to communicate? There's a novel, The Three-Body Problem, which is a Chinese science fiction novel where humanity does contact, and it goes badly for humanity. So I'm curious about that. And then obviously you think about this a lot. You think about these issues a lot. And I'm just wondering if you've ever seen anything that makes you think that there are life from outside this planet that are visiting here.
so to the second one I haven't seen anything that has made me think there's anything local anything in the solar system or closer related to alien life yeah in terms of whether it might be dangerous my general philosophy is if they're out there they're much older than us and if they know we're here they've known we're here for a long time the earth has had its biosignatures its signs of life for over a billion years so that earth exists and has life on it, if they have astronomers, they will know that. And like I said, they can probably detect that we have radio waves. So I don't think there's anything we can do that would suddenly make them notice us and think, oh gosh, we got to go hurt them. Like, I don't think we can do anything to make ourselves significantly more obvious than we are. I think most of the time we're talking about sending signals. It has to do with what sort of message we want to send. Frank Drake, the founder of the field liked to say they already know we're here we might as well be friendly but I frankly think we're getting ahead of ourselves when we think about interstellar diplomacy, like I said the most likely result is they know we're here, we then know they're there and the time involved will likely be centuries and the communication barriers will be enormous and so it's not something I'm personally worried about very much
Chairman Otitai Thank you. I was wondering if you could just walk us through some of the technology and some of the equipment that you use on a daily basis and maybe just overall.
Great. So most of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence looks a lot like astronomy. The tools that astronomers build, especially the large ones, the large radio telescopes, the space telescopes like JWST and Hubble, they're designed to be general purpose instruments for all astronomers to use. They span the entire electromagnetic spectrum and allow us to study the universe in every way we can imagine how to design. And so the search for extraterrestrial intelligence largely uses all of that equipment. Historically, it's focused on radio searches, and so that's involved very large, basically supercomputers on site at the largest telescopes in the world. We're very excited at the expansion of the very large array in New Mexico, for instance, that the National Science Foundation is planning because it will make the telescopes larger and more sensitive. the biggest challenge is that we don't know which technosignature will be most likely and only some light comes through Earth atmosphere only the kind of light we see and radio waves That leaves most kinds of light gamma rays x ultraviolet most infrared radiation, doesn't get to the surface. And so we have to have space telescopes to explore those things. And so that's why I'm always an advocate for new NASA missions that explore new domains in
space. Is there anything unique equipment-wise or technology-wise that is unique and specific to Penn State and your program?
Oh, yes. Penn State has an enormous instrument program with a long legacy of space programs. We helped develop the Dragonfly quadcopter that's going to go to Titan. We developed one of the cameras on the Chandra X-ray telescope that is still in use. Penn State proposed, helped build, and currently operates the SWIFT Observatory orbiting the Earth. And in fact, NASA this week is going to launch a rescue mission to try and keep that satellite in orbit, which would allow it to run perhaps for another 10 years. It's the most productive satellite in NASA's entire fleet. And so, yeah, we're one of the largest departments, as I said, astronomy departments in the world. And we have expertise across the electromagnetic spectrum. It's the perfect place for the Peace City Center, frankly.
All right. Thank you. Thank you, and thank you for your testimony.
A lot of the questions I was just asked are the same things I was thinking about. It's great to hear about the technology that's coming out of this research that's going beyond just what we're talking about here in the room, but for other things that we're using it for in everyday life. So we appreciate your testimony, and thank you for coming out and continue to do the great work you're doing.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next testifier, I guess, is by Zoom? Is that right? Okay. It's Ryan Graves, the founder and executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace. So if we can click over to the television. Is it a retired military? Retired military fighter pilot? Nick, could you put it up on the full screen? We're only seeing the room. Yeah, don't split it either if you don't have to. We don't need to see ourselves. There we are. Ryan, could you hear us?
We can't hear you.
And technology. You can on.
Oh, now we can.
All right. So the floor is yours. Want to introduce yourself and then get to your testimony? We'll get to some questions.
Thank you so much for being here with us. My pleasure. Good morning. And thank you to the chair and the committee members for taking the time to address this important issue. My name is Ryan Bob Graves. I'm a former F-18 pilot with over a decade of service in the United States Navy, including multiple combat deployments. As a naval aviator, I tracked advanced unidentified anomalous phenomenon, or UAP, on military sensors firsthand. Today, as the founder and executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, I represent thousands of commercial and military air crew, law enforcement officers, engineers, veterans, and regular citizens. I also share the UAP committee for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, leading over 50 PhDs in aerospace engineers understanding this issue. Advanced UAP represent a documented gap in domain awareness and an immediate aviation safety risk. The data is clear, the physical presence of these objects is established, and the conversation is no longer about whether they exist. The priority is now to establish infrastructure at the federal and state levels to manage the operational reality, remove the stigma, and protect our airspace. Between 2012 and 2015 my squadron VFA the Red Rippers was operating the F Super Hornets off of Virginia Beach as part of a pre naval exercise that included the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group Following a significant radar upgrade we detected unknown objects in our airspace Initially dismissed as software glitches, we soon corroborated these tracks with infrared sensors and direct visual observation. These settings became part of our daily activities. A pivotal incident occurred during an air combat training mission in Whiskey Area 72, an exclusive block of airspace 10 miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude. Just at the moment two jets crossed this threshold, one of the pilots observed a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere passing between the two aircraft, which were about 150 feet apart. The object appeared motionless against the wind, fixed at the entry point, and was estimated to be 5 to 15 feet in diameter. Pilots terminated the mission immediately and returned to base. Our squadron submitted a safety report, but there was no acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings. Due to the investigation that the safety officer conducted, we learned that there were four other near misses that occurred in the previous six weeks, all that went unreported due to stigma. As a pilot and trained engineer, I have no conventional explanation for what we witnessed. objects demonstrating immediate acceleration of Mach 1, staging, keeping in hurricane-force winds, and outlasting our aircraft by operating all day without visible lift, control surfaces, or thermal propulsion. Simply stated, if UAP originated from a foreign adversary, it's a national security problem. If they represent something else, it's an issue for science. In either case, it's a critical hazard to flight safety. Recognizing the need for action and answers, I found in Americans for Safe Aerospace. a military pilot-led 501C3 advocacy organization dedicated to aerospace safety, national security, and scientific research regarding UAP. ASA provides secure confidential mechanisms for military personnel, law enforcement, flight crews, veterans, and others to report UAP encounters and for the first time make them actionable. The seasoned professionals often begin reports with, I realize this sounds crazy, the fear of professional ruin is real, and the safety and security provided with the reports is important. Reporters routinely describe anomalies flying above 40,000 feet, approaching the Carmen line, executing instantaneous right-hand turns, performing sharp J-hooks, and clustering over highly trafficked commercial corridors, including over the continental United States. Consider three recent examples of incidences reported to ASA The first, a law enforcement encounter In February 2025, on a clear night in the vicinity of Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant in Minnesota A suburban police sergeant and SWAT leader, along with three fellow officers Observed a spherical object with a rapidly changing multicolored light low on the western horizon Over a 90-minute period, the object initially drifted lethargically between 10, an estimated 10 to 30,000 feet. The witnesses reported it reacting sharply when a helicopter transited the area accelerating northward and climbed to approximately 40,000 feet in less than 10 seconds. The object then resumed slow westward movement before a second similar object was briefly spotted to the north. This incident followed a similar five-minute sighting by the same lead witness two nights prior. commercial aviation encounter. Boeing 737 crew departed Houston was ordered into an urgent level off by air traffic control due to an unidentified target they explained was quote unquote, popping up all day. Pilots spotted a massive, metallic oblong spheroid object resembling liquid mercury, which hovered and then instantaneously accelerated off his wing line. The encounter lasted seven seconds, but shifted the pilot's perspective. He now urges his fellow aviators to report their sightings. Military encounter. February 2022, a former U.S. Special Army Special Forces and intelligence officer, along with four fellow officers at Fort Carson, Colorado, witnessed a 300-foot translucent white oval hovering silently about 300 meters above Cheyenne Mountains in Tenerae. Its surface consisted of articulating angular panels, pulsating irregularly. After two minutes, the object simply vanished without a sound in front of their eyes. No emissions or environmental effects noted. These are three of over 1,100 compelling reports that often involve multiple witnesses, sensor systems, and overwhelming support and documentation. ASA believes these accounts only scratch the surface. More will share their experiences once they believe it is safe and know how and where to report such experiences. To effectively manage operational societal impacts during a time of emerging technology like UAP, a comprehensive framework of training, policy, and structured processes must be established across public safety sectors, critical infrastructure, and local communities. Regardless of the nature or origin of the unknown phenomenon, I believe we must address three core vulnerabilities at the state level. One, support state and local law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies require structured training, policies, and standardized processes to address UAP. Frontline officers and leadership currently lack defined protocols to handle, document, and evaluate encounters in local airspace. This operational vacuum leads to widespread confusion and a lack of reporting. Without a formal framework, critical baseline data is lost, leaving agencies blind to public safety anomalies and facing unknown operational consequences. Protect critical infrastructure, number two. Security personnel safeguarding critical infrastructure, such as power plants and grids, urgently need specialized UFP training and policy integration. Tasked with protecting highly sensitive assets, these organizations often operate without guidelines to identify, log, or escalate sightings over restricted zones. Absent dedicated reporting mechanism and escalation channels, these vital sites remain vulnerable to unmonitored incursions, leaving a glaring gap in infrastructure defense. And three, improved communication with local communities. Communities need transparent communication processes, proactive policies, and public education to manage the societal impacts of UMP events. Historical precedents like the New Jersey flap show that widespread sightings generate thousands of reports, but a lack of structured communication leaves citizens anxious, confused, and vulnerable to misinformation. Establishing clear reporting pipelines and public-facing strategies is essential to mitigate panic, prevent public mistrust, and restore institutional credibility. Over a decade after my own encounters, military and civilian flight crews, law enforcement, and many others continue to face similar hazards daily. The identity of these objects remain unknown. Existing infrastructure is not designed to problem solve. Stigma is pervasive. And we still do not have sustainable solutions. I will leave you today with the fundamental question, why are we allowing unidentified objects to operate with impunity in our skies? Thank you for your time and leadership on this critical issue, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you so much Hopefully we can get your picture back on the screen Talking about space technology and again we can get a picture on the screen Oh wait he was up he gone Alright. It's failing on my end for some reason, very strange.
Yeah, I don't know.
Keeps turning off. Questions? Go ahead, Representative.
Hi, thank you so much for your testimony, it was really interesting. I have a question about your last bit about what we can do to kind of support, especially communication with local communities. I was recently a council member in my town, and like anytime anything happens, people are right in the Facebook group, like talking about what's going on. And it's very hard, especially on an extreme local level, to manage information. And especially in something like this case, where there may not be a lot of detail because of what it is, it's unexplained, right? So can you talk a little bit more about kind of like how you might imagine a communication structure that would be like efficient and able to get correct information out there about what's happening without confusion or, you know, maybe not enough information where people are like, you're not telling us what's going on?
Yeah, so, you know, it's a good question. And the suggestion isn't necessarily that at the state level there needs to be a very tight loop between the community level reports that are going out and a defined understanding of what that object is, is coming back to that particular citizen. I don't think that's necessarily a feasible path. But when we do have these large incidences, people are, for example, not just reporting the incidences that they see, but they are becoming agitated, confused, and that is also burdening the reporting processes for state and local police. In New Jersey, over a several-week period, there were about 1,500 reports that went in to this local police level across all the counties of New Jersey, 1,500 cases, where that information just hit a wall, right? There was no place for that to go for any further analysis to occur. And then, therefore, the results would be communicated back out. And so how do we take that information from where it's coming from, whether that be organizations like myself who are receiving this from concerned citizens, from state or local police, from air traffic controllers or other officials that might be receiving this information, bring it into one spot. And then to your question, what happens next is the analysis needs to be done. And although these are defined as unidentified anomalous phenomenon, many useful pieces of information can be gathered from the sighting itself. And ultimately, it's about saying what the object is not, not necessarily saying what it is, right? So if we can eliminate air traffic or satellite data or a drone test or a military test, then what we're left with is a UAP. But all those things we've eliminated are very useful. and many of these objects might resolve into one of those categories which could then be shared with the public in regular updates. But I think right now it feels like these things are happening and there is no eventual outlet for the confusion that's happening. It just goes off into the ether.
Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? Representative Davidson? Yeah, not really a question. Just wanted to
thank Mr. Graves for your service to our country. First of all, extend my compliments on the wonderful lamp behind you on that it's beautiful and thanks for bringing us this this is an important issue and bringing it to our attention in a way that's digestible with some real concrete steps that we could take to increase communication uh as as we try and learn more about these unexplained events so uh thank you hopefully we be able to do something with this in the committee Mr Chair the truth is out there Thank you
Anyone else before I get to Representative Waxman? I knew we had about 50 questions, so I was just trying to wait, see if anyone said anything. Go ahead.
I just have one question for you. So you're a decorated pilot. You're a war veteran, been deployed multiple times. How difficult was it for you to tell this story in terms of like the
stigma that is attached to it for yourself, for other pilots? I mean, they don't give those F-18s to people they think are unstable or not able to fly them or anything like that. They don't give them to idiots, I think is the quote that I like. So I'm curious, you know, what has been your own process with that I mean because all you've said today is just there are things that we can't identify and explain whether they're potentially drone incursions potentially something else how hard was it for you to be able to just take that step well it was very hard it's probably one of the hardest things I've done in my career frankly because yeah I was the new guy in the squadron as these encounters started happening and I was as any good young fighter pilot does taking his lead from the guys that have been there for a while and been through the training uh it was very clear to me uh through demonstration that hey we're all going to bury our heads in the sand on this and not pay attention to it ultimately that almost led to one of our aircraft being struck at the entrance to the working area when the object came within 50 feet of our aircraft and we learned just how pervasive this was with more people that were not reporting And so even still, then I knew people didn't want to talk about it, and it continued for a number of years. But ultimately, you know, the report happened. We assumed it would get a result by counterintelligence or someone else down the road, but that never happened. I left to become a flight instructor in Mertie, Mississippi, advanced strike fighter instructor still in the Navy. and then in 2017 I saw a New York Times article come out saying that the internal investigation on what we had been seeing was stalled by stigma again and so I called my friends that were still flying on the East Coast and elsewhere and learned that these events were still happening to that day all the operational responsibility was just thrown right back on the shoulders of my colleagues and although it was a very difficult choice and who was right to actually speak up about this so that I could relieve that load and allow them to do the job they're actually supposed to do. And I think what can be done at the state level now is the exact same thing for local and state police to create the proper procedure so we can take this load off their shoulders and allow them to do their job. Thank you.
Thank you. Chairman Rotez, any questions?
No. I'm good.
You know, I want to thank you for your testimony and also for your service. to our nation. I think it's important as we talk about anomalies, unidentified objects, whatever it might be, all of us get on an airplane and fly. And more and more reports we hear, I think there was just a report the other day, I don't know if it was at Newark or one of them, with a drone, the possibility of a drone, that a plane was coming in for a landing and a drone was somewhere in the area. Those things, we do know what they are, But we also need technology to be able to find out what these objects are that are in our airspace. God forbid one of these collides with a commercial jet or even a military jet. What happens? And you know as we look to develop technology your input in this is important as we just spoke with Penn State and the things that they doing and our astronomers and our physicists and engineers There are things that we can explain And this isn't new to discovery of the world, too. You know, three, four, five, six hundred years ago, things that they couldn't explain and technologies that we developed to try to explain it. So we appreciate what you're doing. Keep up on what you're doing and let us know what's happening as a committee of technology. We're interested in seeing what we can do to prevent something in the future, God forbid, from happening. But it's important for people to be able to speak out when they do see things like this and for us to hear it. So thank you again for being here today and your testimony.
Thank you.
With that, our next panel is a panelist in the room. It's Chris Mellon. Chris Mellon is the chairman of the board of the Disclosure Foundation, the former deputy secretary of defense, and the former minority staff director of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for having me today. It's a pleasure to join you, and I appreciate the testimony of the other witnesses as well. There's some great work being done by Ryan's organization, and obviously the techno-signature work is very exciting at Penn State. I thought I would provide a little background on how I got into this issue and why it is so important and worthy of your consideration. Americans are increasingly aware that drones and small unmanned aircraft are playing an unprecedented and devastating role in Ukraine today in that conflict. What Americans do not yet realize is the shocking extent to which unmanned aircraft of unknown origin are already penetrating restricted U.S. airspace and disrupting military operations here in the United States. The situation is so bad that fighter aircraft from Langley Air Force Base were relocated last December. Due to the collision hazards presented by recurring incursions, the Air Force proved unable to stop over a period of 17 consecutive days at Langley Air Force Base. This is the Air Combat Command. They were totally unable to identify these craft. Our counter-drone systems were completely ineffective, and that kind of activity is not a singular event. That has been occurring across the nation and at sea and at U.S. bases overseas. Somebody is demonstrating the capability at will to penetrate our most sensitive and restricted airspace. This is a base and a facility that is, among other things, charged with protecting the nation's capital. and yet it appears they could not protect their own airspace. I encourage you, if you're interested in this and wish to learn more, there was a 60 Minutes episode which included interviews with the four-star commander of NORAD and, as I recall, the base commander. You can hear more detail about this and you'll see just the degree to which their hair is on fire over this kind of activity. This is only the latest instance, actually it's no longer the latest instance, of Air Force and Navy training activities being disrupted by the President's presence of unidentified aircraft. The continuing inability of our military to continue. control or defend its own airspace should shock and concern policymakers and the public. After all, if the Air Force and Navy can't defend the airspace around their own bases, how can they defend the rest of the country? So this includes Guam in 2018, where small, brightly lit vehicles went to the most sensitive part of the base, where the theater high-altitude air defense system is located, shone bright lights down on it on consecutive nights, and again, there was no ability to track them. This included numerous incidents involving multiple U.S. Navy ships off the west coast of the United States. It included interference with training activities at Hill Air Force Base. We had a period of three months out west in Colorado and Nebraska where groups of as large as 40, quote, drones, unquote, were observed. This went on for months. The FBI and Air Force was involved once again. None of these aircraft failed. None of them responded to counter UAS systems. None of them were located. No operators were located. since the event at Langley. This has happened at Barksdale Air Force Base, which is known for, among other things, storing nuclear weapons, which is a long pattern we've seen going all the way back to World War II. With UAP, this has happened now at NATO bases. And in the Middle East, in this fall, there was an incredible incident out west at one of our test ranges where the administration actually dangled some activity that has been associated with interest by UAP in the past. And sure enough, very strange vehicles arrived, very strange objects, including orbs, a ball of fire that approached a helicopter with intelligence personnel on board. That object split into two. This was filmed and observed at close range by the intelligence community. and they remain completely baffled. My understanding, there was another vehicle that showed up as well. So this is a big challenge for our country, and my personal involvement began in 2017 as an unpaid consultant to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and I learned about the experience that Ryan and his colleagues were having off the east coast of the United States. I learned about the Nimitz incident off the West Coast, and I was the director of that office. Lou Elizondo shared a wide range of videos with me. We spent months trying to get someone in the Defense Department to pay attention. Nobody wanted to take responsibility. Nobody wanted to touch the issue. So at the end of the day, we were faced with a decision of walking away from this and allowing the Russians or Chinese or whoever it is to continue undertaking these activities because our government was frankly paralyzed by a social phenomenon called stigma. And that was more effective than any technical system I've ever seen. The U.S. intelligence community was kneecapped. It was totally ineffective. Failing to report ongoing incursions of restricted U.S. military airspace. So at that point I managed to get my hands on several of these videos They were cleared for public release by DOD I approached several outlets including the New York Times They agreed to carry this in a front page story on December 16th, 2017. When that failed to energize the Congress, I then took Lugolizondo to Capitol Hill and introduced him to former colleagues with the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, and then we brought in Navy pilots to include Ryan Graves, Commander Dave Fravor from the Nimitz incident, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich and others who met with the senators, and the senators became persuaded at that point, they understood at that point when they met with the pilots, that something very irregular and mysterious was going on in some of our most important military areas, which posed a serious counterintelligence risk and an air flight safety risk. One of those senators happened to be Senator Nelson, who later became director of NASA. And that, I believe, is the reason that NASA did a study on UAP. and sadly the scientists who participated in that study were subjected to unbelievable threats and retaliation from the academic community, from the scientific community. It was stunning to me the degree of hostility that this aroused, that they were simply even considering this issue. Some people lost their jobs. There was all manner of ugliness. But they proceeded on that basis, and today we have an office that is assessing and analyzing these reports. The military is required now to report these instances. And I can tell you we're over 2,000 military reports in just the last few years since the requirement has been established for military personnel to report these incidents. That's how the extent of this activity. So anything that we can do with state and local officials and government officials to help to fill out the picture, a lot of these incidents occur at the state and local level. State police often get these reports or get calls from citizens. I live in western Pennsylvania. I understand in many cases what our local officials do is refer people to a gentleman named Stan Gordon, who is a former director for the Mutual UFO Network. And he records this, but I don't think that information is necessarily getting back to the people who are trying to put together the big picture in Washington. And it would be very helpful to have that data get to those people in Washington who are trying to put all the pieces together nationally to understand this phenomenon and try to determine what these things are and where they're coming from. In some cases, they're drones. In some cases, they're what we used to call UFOs. For example, out west, I talked to a sheriff out there who responded to a number of incidents. And in one case, there were a large number of these small, brightly lit objects over a farm. And a much larger object came into the picture. the smaller objects went inside of it and it took off he said I've never seen anything move that fast and that what we call a UAP that was not a drone that was not a rotor aircraft That was something that instantaneously accelerated to phenomenal speeds And those kind of things are being seen and detected by our military and others, including commercial airline pilots and citizens of all kinds across the country. We're over, I think, 200,000 sightings recorded in the U.S. And probably maybe one person out of 10 bothers to report a sighting. So this is an extensive pattern of activity. It's something that Washington now realizes it needs to take very seriously. And the president is actually trying to get out the records on this, the data. It has ordered the administration officials to release as much UAP data as possible to help the American people understand what we're dealing with. They've released three tranches of records so far, and I understand that they're intending to release many, many more. At this point, it appears millions of records have been identified, whereas just a few years ago we were told they didn't have any information. So we've come a long way in a very short period of time, and I think the kind of legislation that I understand is being contemplated here could be a big help. And without further ado, I will be happy to entertain any questions, answer any questions that I can.
Thank you so much. Are there any questions from any of the members? Representative Waxman, you don't have any questions?
I think my question is that you view this primarily as a national security issue. Is that right?
And so coming from that training and from the background, the Intelligence Committee, but also as someone who reported directly to the Secretary of Defense, you touched on it, but you see that sort of unwillingness to engage in the conversation at the highest level, basically. Right. So we were told that even to brief the Secretary of Defense could put his reputation in jeopardy. That's the sensitivity that we encountered in Washington, in the Pentagon, and I would say elsewhere. And that's why when we set out to do this, it was hard to believe. It was not with an expectation we would succeed as well as we have. We've surpassed my expectations and my hope. It's gone further faster than I thought we could have. But the reason is because people are getting the data now, and they're seeing the data, and they're talking to people like Ryan Graves, and they're beginning to understand that this is not Hollywood. This is not a science fiction novel. This is very real, and it's very tangible. This morning, there was an interview released with a gentleman named Eric Davis who claims to have been involved directly with people who are working on recovered materials from a crashed off-world craft. I've just had a quick listen this morning. I've known Eric for many years, so it wasn't new information to me, but I think for many people in the public, it might be. And that is one of the issues that we at the Disclosure Foundation pursuing and trying to facilitate whistleblowers coming forward trying to assist members of Congress and members of the Senate and the administration in helping to get to the bottom of this I know we out of time so I leave my questions Mr Tickack
Thank you, Chairman.
Sorry, I may have missed this. I was running between meetings. But I'm curious, is it always, for lack of a better term, benign visual phenomenon, or are there other, like, damage that's been done or disruptions to communications or, you know, lasting harm to any of our systems, or is it always visual?
It's not always visual. I mean, first of all, there's a lot of sensor data. There's a lot of radar data, infrared data, that kind of thing. There has been jamming of our sensor systems on some of our aircraft, And that is viewed as an act of aggression. That's something that, for example, we and other leading nations do not do to one another's aircraft when they encounter one another because that is a possible prelude to the conflict. So those pilots, if someone's jamming their radar, they're thinking maybe the next thing is a missile is going to be coming flying at them. So you don't want to. So then the temptation is to fire first. Right. So you don't get shot down. And so that's considered a form of escalation by the military, and that's a serious issue, and that has occurred on a number of occasions. If you go and research the history back far enough, there are a couple of instances where aircraft sent to intercept the UAP have crashed or disappeared, a handful of those. But generally speaking, we're not seeing hostility. We're seeing probing and, in some cases, what in the intelligence community we call ferreting, which is where you try to provoke an adversary and see how they respond, see what capabilities they have, and see what channels they communicate on. Do they have a wartime reserve mode? Who talks to who and what is the hierarchy and that kind of intelligence picture that you want to fill in? as a prelude to better prepare yourself to engage an adversary. And sometimes this activity is very provocative and has that kind of a feel about it, an object going up to a Navy ship and shining lights right in the bridge on the senior officers running the ship, for example. Very provocative.
Anyone else? Well, I want to thank you for your testimony and being here today to answer any questions for us. This has been very enlightening for all of us. I think that the thing I take away from this is the technology that we need to have to make sure that we can see objects. And whether we know what the objects are or not, you know, we could speak about it even though we talk about drones. The technology is moving so quickly, and there are things that we don't see on radar. And when pilots report that a drone is above the airport and the air traffic control didn't see it, you know, what technology are they using? What's new technology that's out there? And how do we develop technology moving forward? I know this committee is interested in communications everywhere we go and the technological advances. You know, we often think about where we were 100 years ago compared to today and where we'll be in the future. And some of the things you described might well be other countries with technology that's beyond ours. That's top secret. And our government knows things that, of course, they won't be able to share with us because it is top secret. but for everyone who's flying and the safety and when they see objects, yes, you do get a little like, what was that? And your mind goes to different places. And when it can be explained, I think it settles us all down. And as we move technology forward and we see it continue, it's wonderful. And as also we explore what's beyond our planet. We're looking at the moon. If you look at the pictures that you see from Mars, where Curiosity is on the surface of Mars, and they show you the night sky and what it looks like and what technology to think that we're on another world and can see what's happening in other parts of the universe. It is exciting. And 100 years, 1,000 years from now, who knows where we'll be as humanity in the universe. We want to explore as they came to our country, you know, 500 years ago when they came to America and discovered that. We discover other things are out there and the technology that we're looking at. We hope we can advance. So thank you. Thank you to all of our testifiers and all of you who are here today. And we look forward to continuing the conversation on the technology and where we go with it. Thanks again.
Sorry to bear unpleasant news. There is a big role for science, obviously. It's not just a national security issue, but that is what got me involved, and I think that is what is of greatest concern to members in Washington and what is driving a lot of the interests there.
Absolutely. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you Thank you. Thank you.