New Delhi: After half a century, in a first public US congressional hearing regarding the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO), two top defence intelligence officials are due to testify on UFOs at Capitoll Hill on Tuesday, news agency AFP reported.
The hearing before a US House Intelligence panel comes 11 months after a study detailing more than 140 occurrences of what the government officially refers to as "unidentified aerial phenomena," or UAPs, observed by US military aircraft since 2004.
For the long time, the term UFO has been widely associated with the notion of alien spacecraft, which has no mention in last June's UAP presentation.
Instead, the focus was laid upon the possible implications for US national security and aviation safety.
However, the report did contain certain UAPs previously shown in Pentagon-released video footage of mysterious aerial objects with speed and agility beyond known aviation technology and missing any obvious methods of propulsion or flight-control surfaces.
The Tuesday hearing was anticipated to re-examine the contents of that report, a nine-page "preliminary assessment" issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a Navy-led task force organised by the Pentagon in 2020.
Last week, while announcing the hearing, US Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said, "The American people deserve full transparency."
Except for one sighting ascribed to a giant deflated balloon, the defence and intelligence specialists who created the report gave no conclusions on the origins of any of the 144 sightings included in it.
The Navy task force behind the document was replaced in November by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, a new Defense Department organisation.
Ronald Moultrie, the US defence undersecretary for intelligence and security, is one of two officials invited to speak at Tuesday's session. The other is Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence.
Following the public hearing, they were both slated to testify behind closed doors.
While drawing no conclusions, last year's report stated that the UAP sightings are unlikely to have a single cause.
According to the research, more data and analysis are needed to identify whether they reflect some unusual aerial technology built by a covert US government or commercial firm, or by a foreign power such as China or Russia.
Senior US officials informed reporters ahead of the report's release last year that defence and intelligence specialists had yet to rule out an alien origin for any UAP instance, but the study itself avoided any specific mention to such possibilities.
(With AFP Inputs)