Increasing Number Of UFO Sightings Reported In Sky Since Early 2000s, Says Pentagon

Scott Bray told a House security panel that since the early 2000s, an increasing number of unauthorised and/or unidentified objects or aircraft have been seen in military controlled training areas.

New Delhi: Over the past 20 years, an increasing number of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have been reported in the sky, a top United States defense official told lawmakers Tuesday, in a public hearing. This was the first public hearing on UFOs in half a century.

Scott Bray, deputy director of Naval intelligence, told a House security panel that since the early 2000s, an increasing number of unauthorised and/or unidentified aircraft or objects have been seen in military controlled training areas and training ranges and other designated airspace, according to a report by news agency AFP. 

Bray attributed the increase in sightings to efforts by the US military to "destigmatize the act of reporting sights and encounters" as well as to technological advances, the AFP report said.

Bray, however, added that the Pentagon had detected nothing "that would suggest it's anything non-terrestrial in origin" behind these phenomena, according to the report. The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the US Department of Defense.

The report said that Bray did not definitively rule out that possibility. 

"We've made no assumptions about what this is or isn't," Bray was quoted as saying in the report.

The US intelligence, in June 2021, had claimed in a long-awaited report that there was no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials in the skies. The US intelligence also acknowledged that they had no explanation for dozens of phenomena observed by military pilots.

Some of the phenomena observed by military pilots could be explained by the presence of drones or birds creating confusion in the radar systems of the US military, while others could stem from tests of military equipment or technologies carried out by other powers, such as China or Russia, according to the report.

Whether these aerial objects may be linked to threats against the US is what the US military and intelligence are primarily interested in determining.

Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana, who was chairing the panel holding the hearing said that "unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat. He added that they need to be treated that way.