If you only listened to the congressmen during the May 17 open hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, you would get the impression that this was an historic hearing about a long-standing mystery that has captured the public’s imagination. The representatives spoke about all of the “most fascinating questions” and “tremendous interest” and “hype and speculation” swirling around the topic. There would be no doubt that you were listening to a conversation, at one of the highest levels of government, about alien visitors from outer space. One of these politicians even said so. “It’s a big universe,” Representative Welch said, “people think there must be extraterrestrial life, and it’s not at all beyond the pale that there would be a visit here.”
There would be no doubt that you were listening to a congressional hearing about UFOs.
You would not get that impression at all if you only listened to the two DOD officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, answering the congressmen’s questions. You would think you were hearing a dry, pro-forma status report from some bureaucratic arrangement in an uninteresting, outer-ring office of the Pentagon that had to do with something related to computers. They spoke at length about their “standardized reporting process” and “data integration” and “multi-sensor collections” and “dissemination trains” and “sensor phenomenology.” They showed odd video snippets of indecipherable shapes and colors. They were not there to discuss UFOs at all.
In the worldview of Scott Bray and Ronald Moultrie, there is no such thing as UFOs. There are only “sensor artifacts” and “insufficient data.”
Claims of the stigma’s demise have been greatly exaggerated
The social function of a stigma is to block a taboo topic from being discussed in respectable, public conversation, and to keep certain ideas deemed dangerous or inconvenient from spreading through the body politic. Once a stigma has outlived its usefulness, the antidote for getting rid of it is to engage in free and open discussion of the formerly taboo topic. Once others see that this kind of talk does not transform the speaker into a social pariah, they feel comfortable joining the conversation.
The UFO stigma–open discussion of the possibility that UFOs are alien spaceships visiting the Earth–is dissolving for the public, the media, and the political class. Not so much at the Pentagon. The May 17 hearing is evidence that the UFO stigma is still strong among the military leaders whose job it is to solve the UFO mystery.
One expressed purpose of the hearing was to assure military personnel that they will face no stigma for reporting UAP. Chairman Schiff stated: “UAP reports have been around for decades, and yet we haven’t had an orderly way for them to be reported without stigma and to be investigated. That needs to change.”
Moultrie concurred: “Our goal is to eliminate the stigma by fully incorporating our operators and mission personnel into a standardized data-gathering process.
As did Bray: “The message is now clear, if you see something, you need to report it.”
But ordering military personnel to say something if they see something strange is not the same thing as dismantling the stigma. Just look at how two of those reports were treated in the hearing, when Bray showed the videos made by Navy personnel.
Imagine if you were the airman who became so intrigued or concerned by the silver sphere whipping around his plane that he took out a phone to record it, only to have the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence use that video to demonstrate how “many cases” have a “limited amount of high quality data.” This video, which showed the sphere for only a few frames, was used as a prop to make the point to Congress that most UAP reports are essentially nothing, that they contain “too little data to create a reasonable explanation.”
The airman surely knows there is more to the sighting than that, if only because he saw it with his own eyes for a time before he decided to get his phone out and record. He also knows that there is more actual data on the sphere that Bray chose not to share. Chairman Schiff also knows this to be true, which is why he asked, “is this a situation where it was observed by the pilot and it was also recorded by the aircraft’s instruments?” Bray’s answer: “We’ll talk about the multi-sensor part in a later [closed-door] session.”
Bray is not saying (yet) that this airman misidentified a high-altitude balloon, but he strongly implied it when he explained that pilots express “a lot of different impressions about how quickly something is or isn’t moving.” He explained: “That aircraft is moving quite fast. How fast that object is moving that goes by is probably very slow.”
Hearing all this, does that ariman and his colleagues feel like the stigma has lifted?
Imagine you were the Navy officer who filmed the triangle-shaped UAP through night vision goggles, and you hear Bray explain that you were fooled by a trick of light caught on the SLR camera. Your boss just went on national TV, before the public and some of the most powerful people in the government, and called you a fool.
This does not even account for the reporting of Jeremy Corbell (who was named dropped by Representative Carson in the opening to this very hearing) which suggests the triangles were in fact flying pyramids seen by the naked eye. All of the many military personnel who know they have seen anomalous, inexplicable objects cannot help but take cues from this testimony. What they heard from Moultrie and Bray is a direct order to report, followed by the implication that nine times out of ten they are going to be told that they did not in fact see what they think they saw. This is not conducive to lessening stigma.
UAP are not UFOs
Another indication that the UFO stigma remains strong is the DOD’s allergic avoidance of every aspect of the historical record of UFOs.
The congressmen intentionally couched their hearing in the proper historical context. “UAP reports have been around for decades,” Schiff said. Carson praised citizen ufologists who “have been collecting data on this issue for years.” They repeatedly pointed out this is the first congressional hearing on UFOs in over fifty years, the last of which coincided with the termination of the Air Force’s long-running UFO study programs called Project Blue Book. The congressmen asked about such programs and famous UFO cases.
To Moultrie and Bray, that is all besides the point. Moultrie is merely “familiar with Blue Book.” Bray has “heard stories.” He added, “All I can speak to is what’s within my cognizant at the UAP task force.”
The Pentagon began officially collecting UFO reports as early as January 1947. But as far as Bray is concerned, all this UAP trouble started in “the early 2000s” when there began to be “an increase in the number of new systems such as quadcopters and unmanned aerial systems that are in our airspace.” This is a logical assumption, which will sound like common sense to the public–but only if you don’t know anything about the history of UFO sightings since the 1940s, or you assume all those stories are bunk.
Moultrie even make the argument that paying any attention to classic UFO cases would be a dangerous distraction for the DOD:
“[T]racking what may be in the media that says that something occurred at this time at this place, there are probably be a lot of leads that we would have to follow up on. I don’t think we have the resource to do that right now… And anything that diverts us off of what we have with the resources that have been allocated to us, send us off in these spurious chases and hunts that are just not helpful.”
Translation: we’re not UFO hunters.
Bray also put light-years of distance between his work on the UAP Task Force and UFOs. In his opening statement he said, “This is a popular topic in our nation with various theories as to what these objects may be and where they originate.” He then spent the rest of his testimony suggesting that those popular theories were almost certainly wrong. Squashing the idea that UAP might be interplanetary craft, he said, “we have no material, we have detected no emanations within the UAP task force that would suggest it’s anything non-terrestrial in origin.”
UAP are not alien
The little green men stigma is also in evidence during the hearing.
Despite assurances that no conclusions have been drawn and every option is on the table, Moultrie and Bray do not talk as though they really mean it. This is especially true about the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
Congressman Welch asked point blank about alien visitors. He framed the question by saying, “It’s a big universe… it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there is some exploration coming here, and that underlies a lot of the reports you get.” Then he asked, “How do you separate your responsibilities, where you get all these reports from folks who may be in good faith, maybe not, believe that you should be investigating every possible report of a extraterrestrial incident?”
Moultrie’s answer was to place responsibility for the extraterrestrial question on other agencies, such as NASA: “There are elements in our government that are engaged in looking for life in other places, and they have been doing that for decades. They’ve been searching for extraterrestrial life. There are astrobiologists who have been doing this too.”
Moultrie justified passing the buck in this way when he reiterated to Welch that he is only concerned about “what may be out there… from a defense perspective, any national security implications or ramifications.” He added that DOD would “work with organizations as appropriate. If it’s a weather phenomenology, with NOAA. If it’s a potential for extraterrestrial life, or an indication of extraterrestrial life, with someone like NASA.”
The blase way he tossed out these two options suggests that he believes UAP are just as likely to be weather phenomena as aliens, and it’s all the same to the DOD so long as they mitigate the security threat.
Note well this tendency to invoke NASA, astrobiologists in particular, whenever the topic of UFO occupants comes up. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines made a similar move last year when she said the Intelligence Community would defer to “Bill [Nelson]’s science work” to explain what UAP actually were. Even the NASA team who just announced a UAP study tacked this odd statement onto the bottom of their press release:
“Although unrelated to this new study, NASA has an active astrobiology program that focuses on the origins, evolution, and distribution of life beyond Earth…. Learn more about NASA’s astrobiology program online at: https://www.nasa.gov/astrobiology/“
If unrelated, why mention it? Astrobiologists look for alien life millions or trillions of miles above and beyond Earth’s skies where UAP are currently being observed. They get dragooned into this conversation because they work in a respectable field of science, free of stigma. It is a way for government officials to signal that they’re not espousing cooky ideas, and they know the proper way to talk about aliens.
Swapping out the term UFO with UAP, and subtracting out the alien question at least temporarily, was supposed to help grease the skids for disclosure by providing an entry point into the topic for people otherwise worried about the stigma. Many disclosure advocates adopted the new terms. One drawback of this is that it allows people like Moultrie and Bray to memory-hole 80 years of UFO history and evidence. Those are all just ghost stories, not useful data for their new “data-driven approach.”
The fact that DOD officials cannot even discuss the pertinent UFO history is proof that that era is still dripping with stigma. The conceit that UAP should should not be stigmatized because they have somehow been walled off and detached from UFOs and little green men won’t wash with the public, however. This two-step might help them get through a congressional hearing without saying much of substance, but beyond that narrow goal it defies common sense. As more comes about about UAP, it will simply be obvious to the public that they are related to the flying saucers of nearly a century ago. And no one is going to want to hear what an astrobiologist thinks about microbes on Mars.
Some kind of star trek?
Online critics of Moultrie and Bray’s performance have depicted them as hapless patsies who were intentionally not “read into” DOD UFO reports so that they could not reveal any secrets. But both men are highly trained intelligence officers. Moultrie was in the CIA. Their minds are conditioned to exert exquisite control over the words that come out of their mouths, for they understand the power that language, grammar, and tone have on the ability to craft a narrative.
This skillset was on display early in the hearing when Representative Carson tried to offer Moultrie an opportunity to break the ice, to humanize what was going to be a bloodless, robotic persona. It produced one of the weirdest moments of the hearing, where the UFO stigma was on full display. Here is the full exchange:
Carson: “It’s fair to say that you are a science fiction fan, is that correct?”
Moultrie: “It’s fair to say that I am an inquisitive mind who has spent 40 years in the intelligence field and has focused on both science and science fiction. That is fair.
“Yeah. Well, look, my generation grew up looking at space sagas and the Apollo program, so all of us who grew up in the ’60s were just thrilled by watching our first astronaut land on the moon. That was a momentous occasion to people who were of different generations. Some of them didn’t believe that happened. I still have relatives and friends who don’t believe it happened. Right? Science fiction to them. But to us, it was, ‘No, that’s the progress that we’ve made.’ And so, I was enthralled by that and I’ve taken that to heart. I enjoy the challenge of what may be out there.
“I have mentioned to you that, yes, I have followed science fiction. I have gone to conventions. Even I’ll say it on the record. Got to break the ice somehow. But I have done that. Right? But there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t necessarily dress up. But I do believe that it’s important to show that the Department of Defense has… We have character, and we’re people just like you, just like the American people. We have our inquisitiveness, we have our questions. We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there. We get the questions not just from you, we get it from family members and we get them night and day, not just in committee hearings. So, finding what’s out there is important, but first, and foremost, it’s important for us to do that so that we can ensure that our people, our personnel, our aviators, our bases and installations are safe. And then that curiosity factor is something else that we just want to know because that’s the human race. It’s just that insatiable desire to know.“
This is revealing on several levels. It is the only time in the hearing where Moultrie acknowledges that they’re not there just to talk about sensor glitches. He allows us to almost imagine a Moultrie-family cookout where amid the burgers and beers his relatives prod him to give up the real dirt on UFOs.
Yet even this human moment was weirdly unspecific and stripped of any content and context. He copped to wanting “to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there.” A desire to know what, exactly? Out where? He wouldn’t even tell us the name of his favorite science-fiction show.
As a life-long Star Trek nerd, I know one when I see one. There is only one franchise that was around in the 1960s for which Moultrie could have attended conventions later in life.
Star Trek is about exploring space, and “the challenge of what may be out there.” But it’s also about aliens–lots and lots of aliens–and how they interact with one another across galactic neighborhoods.
If Moultrie was truly unaffected by the stigma of UFOs and aliens, he might have said something like this in response to Carson’s question:
Yeah, I have watched countless hours of Star Trek. One of the things that always happens in Star Trek, no matter which series you watch, is the Starfleet crew visits a planet that is home to a less advanced civilization, people like us who don’t know there is life out in the galaxy. Sometimes the crew initiates first contact, and sometimes the crew visits the planet in disguise to avoid frightening the native population. In some episodes the crew is studying the planet on an anthropological mission and their ship crashes. Scott Bray here doesn’t have this in his database, but there is even a Star Trek episode about the Roswell crash being caused by some time-traveling Ferengi. Is that what is behind UAP? We don’t know. But that’s the beautiful thing about science fiction. It helps us think about these possibilities.
A stigma is like a bully. It cannot be defeated by pretending it doesn’t exist. The only way is to stare it in the face and openly deny its power over you. Whatever Moultrie and Bray did in their performance, it was not that. The only question is whether they personally feel the stigma, or if they only want to keep it alive for the rest of us.