Moultrie and Bray’s Congressional Testimony Suggest a Walkback of Recent UAP Transparency

• The May 17 open congressional hearing on UAP gave us important insights into how the Department of Defense (DOD) is currently thinking about the challenge of identifying UAP. 
• Ronald Moultrie (Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security) and Scott Bray (Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence)  were called before Congress because they will be the senior DOD leaders responsible for that process. 
• Their presentation and responses tell us a great deal about DOD’s internal strategy, and how they intend to manage public and congressional expectations going forward. 
• While future hearings may reveal more, Moultrie and Bray signaled that a policy of secrecy will continue.
• Suggestions that some UAP represent anomalous, breakthrough technology, made last year by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are being walked back. 

Before we unpack how Moultrie and Bray characterized their UAP evidence, let’s take a quick look back at a time when someone in their position was trying to answer the exact same question they are now faced with. 

The Proof Point for UFOs

It was 1952. Captain Edward Ruppelt, director of Project Blue Book, was giving frequent Pentagon briefings about the spike in UFO sightings that year. DOD officials spent much of these briefings needling Ruppelt about his proof point: when will he have enough evidence to prove UFOs are or are not interplanetary visitors? One idea of sufficient proof was if an object seen visually had also been tracked on radar. Did Ruppelt have that? 

“No, we didn’t have proof if you want to get technical about the degree of proof needed. But we did have reports where the radar and visual bearings of the UFO coincided almost exactly. Then we had a few reports where airplanes had followed the UFOs and the maneuvers of the UFO that the pilot reported were the same as the maneuvers of the UFO that was being tracked by radar.”

Since that sounded like pretty ironclad proof, a lieutenant colonel in the briefing interjected: “It seems the difficulty that Project Blue Book faces is what to accept and what not to accept as proof. Everyone has a different idea of what proof really is.”

Another Blue Book briefing that summer, held in an inner ring of the Pentagon, was requested by General Samford, the director of Air Force Intelligence (a historical predecessor to Scott Bray, who is the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence). Ruppelt repeated Blue Book’s stance that there was still “no proof the UFOs were anything real.” He added: “We could prove that all UFO reports were merely the misinterpretation of known objects if we made a few assumptions.”

A colonel on General Samford’s staff interrupted him: 

“Isn’t it true, that if you make a few positive assumptions instead of negative assumptions you can just as easily prove that the UFO’s are interplanetary spaceships? Why, when you have to make an assumption to get an answer to a report, do you always pick the assumption that proves the UFOs don’t exist? … Maybe the ball of fire had made a 90-degree turn. Maybe it was some kind of an intelligently controlled craft that had streaked northeast… at 2,400 miles an hour. Why not just simply believe that most people know what they saw?”

The briefing room fell quiet, and then lurched into a “hot exchange” between two factions on the general’s staff. One wanted Blue Book to begin investigating reports from the starting assumption that the observer “had actually seen something foreign to our knowledge” (today, DOD calls this the ‘other’ category for UAP). Ruppelt held his ground against this approach: “In any scientific investigation you always assume that you don’t have enough proof until you get a positive answer. I don’t think that we had a positive answer—yet.” 

This high-minded scientific dogma is all well and good, but it has a flaw. What if the most likely answer is deemed by the analysts to be impossible, for reasons of personal psychology or department policy? If one answer is off the table, forbidden, then you’re never going to find enough evidence no matter how much of it falls in your lap. 

For seventy years, this was the challenge faced by all the people who sat in the chairs Moultrie and Bray now occupy. Let’s take a look at how they view the challenge posed by UAP evidence in 2022.   

Four Conventional Answers, and “Other”

In his opening statement, Moultrie defined UAP: 

“UAP are airborne objects that when encountered cannot be immediately identified. However, it is the department’s contention that by combining appropriately structured collected data with rigorous scientific analysis any object that we encounter can likely be as isolated, characterized, identified, and if necessary mitigated… Our effort will include the thorough examination of adversarial platforms and potential breakthrough technologies, US government or commercial platforms, allied or partner systems and other natural phenomenon.”

Here Moultrie repeated all the explanatory categories established in the 2021 report, except for one–the “other” category, reserved for when a UAP cannot be explained by any known origin. Note Moultrie’s confidence that if given just a little more time to think on it, DOD will have no trouble identifying and mitigating any UAP. It’s as though he does not expect there to ever be an ‘other’ in his UAP reports. This assumption would continue to be the subtext of the rest of the testimony.    

Bray’s opening statement did acknowledge ‘other’ and expanded on its definition: “a holding bin of difficult cases [that have] the possibility of surprise and potential scientific discovery.” What that surprise and discovery might entail was never addressed the rest of the hearing. 

Both men acknowledged that the UAP office’s main job will be to take the now 400 UAP cases and filter them into the five categories. Recall that as of June 2021, this had been done with exactly one case, the UAP that was identified as a balloon and thus categorized as airborne clutter. Presumably the ‘Pyramid UFO’ case (first released by Jeremy Corbell on Mystery Wire in April 2021) was one of the initial 144 UAP cases and has now been ‘resolved.’ According to Bray, “we’re now reasonably confident that these triangles correlate to unmanned aerial systems in the area,” meaning either US government, comercial, or adversarial drones.   

Exactly how many of the 400 UAP that have been ‘resolved’ will hopefully be enumerated in future briefings and reports. But take note: the term ‘unidentified’, which Ruppelt put into common use for Blue Book cases that could not be explained, is now ‘unresolved.’ 

What will it take to ‘resolve’ or identify a UAP? More importantly, what will it take to ‘resolve’ a UAP as an ‘other’, which is what everyone really wants to know? Moultrie and Bray were very clear on this: just like Rupplet before them, they don’t have good enough data.  

Responding to a question about why some UAP cases cannot be explained, Bray said this: 

When I say we can’t explain, I mean, exactly as you described there, that 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. …So when I say unexplained, I mean everything from too little data to the data that we have doesn’t point us towards an explanation. 

Moultrie chimed in to footstomp the point, using the words “insufficient data” three times in three sentences, like a verbal tic: 

“…it’s insufficient data. I mean, that’s one of the challenges we have. Insufficient data either on the event itself, the object itself, or insufficient data or plugin with some other organization or agency that may have had something in that space at that time. So it’s a data issue…” 

The hearing showcased several ways this excuse helps DOD escape from having to explain the hard-to-explain UAP cases. 

The 2021 report went further than any official government statement ever has by suggesting that some “UAP demonstrates breakthrough aerospace capabilities,” namely due to “unusual UAP movement patterns or flight characteristics…without discernible means of propulsion.”

By using this language, the initial report conceded what pilots have been saying not just since 2004 but since the 1940s: these craft do not fly like conventional airplanes.

Chairman Schiff twice asked Moultire and Bray to elaborate on this shocking assertion. Bray’s answer to Chairman Schiff suggests that DOD may be trying to walk it back: 

“The question then becomes in many of these cases where we don’t have a discernible means of propulsion in the data that we have, in some cases, there is likely sensor artifacts that may be hiding some of that. There’s certainly some degree of something that looks like signature management that we have seen from some of these UAP, but I would caution, I would simply say that there are a number of events in which we do not have an explanation…”

In other words Bray is suggesting that UAP likely have conventional means of propulsion, and we only fail to see it because 1) there is a gap in the sensor data, or 2) the UAP is actively concealing that data. 

Schiff asked a follow up, trying to use Bray’s framing to pin him down on the big question of UAP origins: “Can you provide us a specific example of an object that can’t be explained as having been human made or natural?

The answer was a definitive no: “I can’t point to something that definitively was not manmade, but I can point to a number of examples and which remain unresolved.”

Bray includes the famous 2004 Tic-Tac UAP, observed from the USS Princeton, in the list of UAP for which no definitive conclusions can be drawn due to lack of data: “We have data on that, and it simply remains unresolved.” Earlier in the hearing, Bray seems to have alluded to the Tic-Tac encounter when he said, “[a] narrative report from the early 2000s if it just had a little bit of information on it, it would be in our database and it would be unresolved.” Yes, some airmen told us some stories, but that’s not sufficient evidence.  

What Bray did not say is that one of the reasons the 2004 case lacks data is because, as Chris Mellon has asserted, the Air Force confiscated AEGIS radar data from the USS Princeton shortly after the sightings occurred. One of Mellon’s question suggestions for this very hearing, posted on his blog, was: “Does the Air Force know the whereabouts of the missing USS Princeton deck logs from November 2004?”

If Mellon’s question had been asked, presumably Bray would have replied the same way as when he was asked about another famous UFO case: “That data is not within the holdings of the UAP task force. I have heard stories. I have not seen the official data on that.”

No data, no conclusions. Sorry, not sorry. 

Sustainable Secrecy 

This framework–missing or incomplete data explains why UAP appear to be anomalous–will be a reliable way to stop any speculation about UAP origins in its tracks. 

As soon as the flying saucer era began, the DOD needed some magic words to repeat that would assure the public and the press that nothing unusual was happening in our skies. The old chestnut of hallucinations, hoaxes, and misidentified conventional objects did just that, even though it blatantly contradicted hard evidence of many UFO cases. This official line maintained UFO secrecy for seven decades, not to mention built a powerful stigma.       

But in 2021, the DOD and IC appeared to be trying out some new lines that were more honest. For the first time, their analytic framework included a category reserved for genuinely anomalous UAP–the mysterious ‘other’. For these cases, the 2021 report stated that analysts would “require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize… pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them.”

This line was repeated publicly by the Director of National Intelligence herself in response to a question about whether the Earth is being observed by alien visitors: 

“it doesn’t mean that we are definitely going to be able to tell if we are being observed under the circumstance. I mean I think there’s a lot of different ways that might be revealed…we’re going to have to wait for Bill’s [NASA’s] science work I think to actually reveal some of these additional possibilities. Not to mention some of the other people [Avi Loeb and Jeff Bezos]”

While this was not any more revealing about what the government thinks UAP are, it was more honest. It acknowledged that some UAP might be entirely unknown to science, for which extraterrestrial is one possibility. 

That level of candor coming from the head of the IC was refreshing, but the possibility that the government would throw up its hands in ignorance and pass the buck to others was always going to be a problem. This approach would put them in a position to have to say something like this: “Yes, UAP are zipping through our airspace at Warp 2. We have no idea what they are, and we hope that private scientists can get back to us in the coming decades with a clear answer. You have my email.” If words like these were ever spoken aloud by a government official, it would be clear to all that they were not working from a rational strategy, let alone a sustainable public message. 

So, in May 2022, enter Scott Bray with the walkback. The intended message of his presentation during the hearing was that UAP are not anomalous, nor are they unexplainable. There are only ‘unresolved’ cases. UAP that appear anomalous simply lack better data. What someone might think is breakthrough technology is merely a “sensor artifact.”

And what about available data that would point to anomalous or breakthrough technology? It’s clear by now that such data will never see the light of day. In response to Representative Carson’s request for “a clear and repeatable process for considering public release” of information, Bray said this:

“when it does not involve sources and methods, and when we can, with a reasonable degree of confidence, determine that it does not pose a foreign intelligence or national security threat, and it’s within my authority to do so, I commit to declassifying that.” 

Since we now know that even words that describe general shapes of UAP are redacted, it is safe to assume that almost every detail locked up in Bray’s database will remain classified.  

Until DOD shifts to a policy of genuine openness and curiosity about what UAP actually are, there is never going to be a UAP ‘resolved’ as ‘other.’ We may never see the words “breakthrough aerospace capabilities” on a government UAP report again. 

DOD’s new, sustainable public message is this: “We’re very sorry, but we simply do not have enough data to make a determination.” Barring more public and congressional pressure, they can repeat this forever.   

They also control the evidence, and they can set the proof point wherever they want. 

Is this going to keep the public from learning the truth? Maybe not, but as Moultrie and Bray certainly know, it has worked like a charm for seventy years.