During House intelligence panel on UFOs, official says they have nothing 'non-terrestrial'
During a House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing on unexplained aerial phenomena, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., asked Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray to clarify what is meant when he says “we can’t explain.” Bray said that there are situations where there is too little data, or the data they have doesn’t explain a phenomena, and said they have no material “that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin.”
Video Transcript
JIM HIMES: I think, Mr. Bray, you said something that I want to unpack a little bit. A number of these UAPs, you said, we can't explain. Again, in the service of sort of reducing speculation and conspiracy theories, we can't explain can range from a visual observation that was distant on a foggy night, we don't know what it is, to we've found an organic material that we can identify, right? Those are radically different worlds.
So when you say we can't explain, give the public a little bit better sense of where on that spectrum of we can't explain we are. Are we holding materials, organic or inorganic, that we don't know about? Are we, you know, picking up emanations that are something other than light or infrared that could be deemed to be communications? Give us a sense for what you mean when you say we can't explain.
SCOTT BRAY: Sure. When I say we can't explain, I mean exactly as you described there. There is a lot of information, like the video that we showed, in which there's simply too little data to create a reasonable explanation. There are a small handful of cases in which we have more data that our analysis simply hasn't been able to fully pull together a picture of what happened. The-- and those are the cases where we talk about where we see some indications of flight characteristics or signature management that are not what we had expected.
When it comes to material that we have, we have no material. We have detected no emanations within the UAP task force that is-- that would suggest it's anything non-terrestrial in origin. So there's-- when I say unexplained, I mean everything from too little-- too little data to we simply-- the data that we have doesn't point us towards an explanation.
But we'll go wherever the data takes us. Again, we've made no assumptions about what this is or isn't. We're committed to understanding these. And so we'll go wherever that data takes us.
JIM HIMES: Thank you. That's very helpful. And so I think it bears emphasis. When you say we can't explain, everything that you can't explain is in a bucket called data. Is that correct? And that would mean data collected by sensors, visual observations. Everything that we can't explain, quote unquote, is in a bucket called data.
SCOTT BRAY: Right. A narrative report from the early 2000s, if it just had a little bit of information on it, would be in our database, and it would be unresolved.
