The US government must come clean about UFOs

Last month’s congressional hearings on unidentified anomalous phenomena — UAP, the government's new name for UFOs — could be characterized as a tale of two testimonies.

The first hearing was before two subcommittees of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and included sworn statements by myself, a former NASA official, an investigative journalist and Luis Elizondo, a former senior leader of the Pentagon’s secret UAP office, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.

Elizondo was unequivocal about UAP: They are real, of nonhuman origin, represent advanced technologies that are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe, and information about them is being withheld by the U.S. government from members of Congress and the public.

In my testimony, I backed up Lue’s statement and commended his courage and that of other former government UAP witnesses and whistleblowers who have spoken out. I also described my personally witnessing a now-declassified UAP video captured by the infrared sensor on a Navy fighter jet during a training event off the East Coast in 2015.

The second UAP hearing took place a week after the first and featured Jon Kosloski, the director of the Pentagon’s UAP Office. Kosloski testified before the chairwoman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. He too spoke in no uncertain terms, stating that his office, also known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, has discovered no verifiable evidence of activity, technology or beings of extraterrestrial origin.

Additionally, Kosloski provided the results of a technical analysis of the very UAP video I described during my testimony a week prior. The UAP in the video has been called the “Go Fast” due to the relatively high apparent velocity it exhibited. Kosloski, however, concluded that the UAP was in fact not traveling very fast, therefore inferring that it was not anomalous in nature.

Such a conclusion is suspect: not only did Kosloski's office fail to interview the Navy aviator who captured the video, but the office’s director also neglected to address the context of this UAP observation, which I provided to the House subcommittees. Namely, the object’s speed was not of primary concern — the real issue was that it was one of a “fleet” of many UAP causing multiple near mid-air collisions with the Navy aircraft in the area.

Moreover, the Department of Defense has yet to identify the origin, intent and physical mechanisms of these anomalous objects. This is concerning because these UAP presented such a significant flight safety threat that the four-star admiral overseeing the exercise nearly shut it down. Given these gaps in information and the timing, one must wonder if Pentagon's analysis of the “Go Fast” video was presented in an attempt to directly debunk my testimony only days earlier.

Whatever the case, the testimonies at the two hearings not only differed, they completely contradicted each other. So, which was right?

The witnesses in the House hearing swore an oath to testify truthfully, so their incentive to speak to the facts was substantial. What then can be said about Kosloski’s testimony during the Senate hearing?

I have not had the opportunity to speak to Kosloski about this directly, but I can make an educated guess about the motivation behind his testimony based on my three decades of service at the Defense Department. Although he promised transparency, he also stated that he would only share “as much information as possible at the unclassified level to inform the public.” Classified information, therefore, was off the table.

Thus, at least two potential explanations exist for the discrepancies between his testimony before the Senate and ours before the House.

First, if the Defense Department in fact has no knowledge of extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence origins of UAP, my fellow witness Elizondo and I are either badly mistaken or made false statements, which of course we did not. A more likely explanation is that most of what the government knows about UAP remains classified and only a limited amount is being released to the public. Elizondo’s testimony would tend to justify such a conclusion.

More importantly, the government is withholding UAP information from Congress as well. This seriously undermines the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches and was the justification for Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) to sponsor the UAP Disclosure Act, which called for a process of controlled disclosure of a select set of UAP information as determined by a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed UAP Records Review Board. Unfortunately, opponents in the House prevented the bill's passage.

Rather than wait for Congress to act, the time is now for our executive branch to come clean on UAP. Instead of turning a blind eye and keeping the American people in the dark, the incoming Trump administration has the opportunity do away with the siloed organizational barriers and innovation-stifling overclassification that have limited society’s understanding of UAP. The solution should be a whole-of-government approach that supports open research, informs public policy, respects national security considerations and includes academia, industry and international partners.

True transparency, which the Defense Department claimed to promote, will acknowledge the new reality that UAP are interacting with humanity and enable the U.S. to usher in a bold new era of accountable government, scientific discovery and American leadership.

Rear Adm. (ret.) Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D. is a senior adviser for the Sol Foundation, a research affiliate with Harvard University’s Galileo Project, and a member of the advisory boards for the UAP Disclosure Fund and Americans for Safe Aerospace. He is a former acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce. His memoir on leadership “Holding Fast in Heavy Seas: Leadership for Turbulent Times” will be published by Koehler Books in August of 2025.

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