The biggest question may be whether the Pentagon is being fully transparent with Congress. “Who owns the urgent mission of getting to the bottom of these ‘drone’ swarms plaguing our ships and bases and what are they doing about it?” “There remains a large gap between the intent of Congress and the actions of the Pentagon,” he wrote in a public appeal to the panel on Friday. “Has anyone ever confirmed that actual appropriation funding ever went along” with the recently passed law?Ĭhristopher Mellon, a former top Pentagon intelligence official who has been pressing Congress to take more aggressive steps, said the Biden administration appears to be treating the new effort “as a small office that compiles reports, conducts briefings, and seemingly little else.” “How much funding was actually allocated to the 2022 UAP effort?” asked Colm Kelleher, a biochemist who previously worked as a Pentagon contractor on UAP research. It is also unclear what the budget is for the new Pentagon effort. That is what they were trying to get away with.” “It can’t just be a small operation with a lead and two officials. “To meet the will of Congress you are going to need an analysis team,” the DoD official said. So far, the official said someone has been identified to lead the new Pentagon oversight group and has established two full-time positions for analysts. “I don’t think they have taken it very seriously.” “They really dragged their feet on this,” said the DoD official. The official feels the department is not addressing “the whole tapestry of the multi-tech problem that we have.” “They’re like, you know, five things out of 5,000, we weren’t sure what they were,” said an intelligence official who was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations, adding that his superiors want to treat all UAPs as “all air trash.” Two current officials said they are concerned that the most unusual incidents now being reported are getting lumped in with drones, space debris and other more common occurrences and therefore aren’t being fully investigated. To address the new law, the Pentagon set up the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group to standardize reporting and analyze data collected by representatives from across the military and intelligence community.īut dueling factions in the Pentagon and intelligence agencies are jockeying over how to carry out Congress’ direction and how much to reveal to oversight committees, according to four current and former officials. It comes five months after the National Defense Authorization Act required the military to establish a permanent UFO research office and take a series of other steps to collect and investigate reports. Set to testify are Ronald Moultrie, the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, and Scott Bray, the deputy director of naval intelligence - which has played a prominent role in investigating reports of “drone swarms” dogging Navy pilots flying from aircraft carriers. André Carson (D-Ind.), said in announcing the hearing last week. “It will give the American people an opportunity to learn what there is to know about these incidents,” the panel’s chair, Rep. The public hearing, the first to be held by a congressional committee since 1966, is scheduled for Tuesday before the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation Subcommittee. “These people exist and they are protecting very interesting information,” the official said. The official said there are people with knowledge of the phenomena who have yet to contribute to the oversight effort. “There has to be something to hold people accountable but also give them a chance to come out clean for a period of time,” the official added, noting that in his experience the Pentagon oversight group has been “stonewalled.” “Without forcing peoples’ hand, it is going to be very difficult to uncover legacy ventures and programs that we know about based on oral interviews we dug up,” said a Defense Department official who is involved in the new effort but was not authorized to speak publicly. But there is a tug of war among competing factions inside the national security bureaucracy that will make it difficult for Congress to compel military branches, spy agencies, national laboratories and other organizations to come clean given the longstanding secrecy and stigma surrounding the issue.
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