Last week, the Pentagon's UFO investigative office, AARO. released the first volume of its long-awaited UAP historical report. A second volume is expected later this year. They concluded that there was "no evidence" to support recent contentions that the Pentagon has been secretly studying captured technologies from non-human intelligence or biological specimens of "extraterrestrials." In short, they claimed that there was "nothing to see here," so everyone should go on about their business. The staggering number of errors in the report, along with the direct contradictions to recent sworn congressional testimony meant that the report satisfied basically nobody in the ufology community or the members of Congress who comprise the new UAP Caucus. Perhaps the Pentagon believed that they could simply sweep everything that's taken place over the past few years under the rug and the conversation would end. If so, they were mistaken. This week, a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries formally requesting the creation of a select panel under the House Oversight Committee to investigate the federal government's response to recently revealed information about UFOs and the Pentagon's potential involvement in studying them. (Daily Wire)

This week, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers formally requested the creation of a select committee to investigate the federal government’s response to UFOs as interest in mysterious sightings and concerns about flight safety continues to grow.

A letter sent on Tuesday to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) noted that “recent” whistleblower testimony and “new evidence” pertaining to unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), which is the government’s preferred term for UFOs, underscore the need for a select panel under the auspices of the House Oversight Committee.

“Given the Oversight Committee’s role as the principal investigative body in the House of Representatives and its broad authority to investigate ‘any matter’ at ‘any time’ under House Rule X, we believe it is proper for the committee to investigate and assess how transparent and accountable the federal government is when it comes to UAP,” the letter says.

You can read the letter here.

My colleagues and I formally requested that the Speaker establish a select committee focused on UAP.

Transparency is coming. pic.twitter.com/Sptwy05fI3

— Rep. Eric Burlison (@RepEricBurlison) March 13, 2024

The frustration of the House members is understandable. The report issued by AARO was little more than a very unfunny joke. It was rife with errors and omissions. They managed to get the dates of critical UFO incidents investigated by the Air Force and recorded in the Blue Book files wrong. They got the names of some of the military witnesses wrong. They completely left out some of the most famous historical cases that raise the most disturbing questions. My friend Micah Hanks has torn apart the report and detailed all of the shortcomings. In a separate article, he digs into one of the most famous cases of all time and examines how AARO dropped the ball on it. 

Keep in mind that AARO didn't just create this report and release it as a favor to anyone. The report was a requirement set forth as part of the 2023 NDAA. They were tasked with investigating all of the government's responses to incidents dating back to 1945. They also should have taken into account the astonishing claims made by Intelligence Community UFO whistleblower David Grusch. Yet none of those allegations are addressed in any detail. It's already known that AARO never even spoke to most of the roughly 40 witnesses and still-anonymous whistleblowers who have been providing all of this information to Congress. Many of the witnesses simply did not trust AARO or its former director Sean Kirkpatrick. 

The problem that the UAP Caucus could face is that Speaker Mike Johnson is not exactly an ally in the UFO disclosure movement. He was one of the Republicans who helped torpedo the UAP Disclosure Act language in the latest NDAA, crafted by Chuck Schumer and others. We shall see if he complies with this request for a new panel under the Oversight Committee to address these questions. 

And there are plenty of questions to be fielded. It has long been reported that there are hundreds of Blue Book files marked Secret or Top Secret that were never released from the archives to the public, despite the fact that the records are now more than 60 years old. Did AARO get to examine those? If you'd like to hear from one of the only non-government/military people who ever gained access to those classified files, check out this interview with legendary attorney Danny Sheehan of Pentagon Papers and Iran-Contra fame by investigative journalist Ross Coulthart. (Skip ahead roughly 15 minutes to get to the interview portion.) He was reportedly given brief access to the files in 1977 at the behest of President Jimmy Carter. His story of what he found inside is simply mind-blowing. 

Stay tuned. That report from AARO was only the first shot across the bow. There's plenty more to come.