Is the truth really out there? Why we need to talk about UFOs and the secrecy that surrounds them

On an afternoon off the California coast almost 19 years ago, US Navy pilot David Fravor saw something that would challenge everything he ever believed.

While leading a routine training mission with a squadron of F/A-18 Hornets, he spotted something unusual in the sky. It was a number of Tic Tac-shaped objects about the size of his own plane but with the ability to move in a way that countered the laws of physics as we understand them. Some had reportedly moved from 80,000 to 20,000 feet at a blink of an eye, and as Fravor got closer, one of the objects sped away, “faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life,” he said in an interview years later.

Fravor was not the only pilot to spot the objects. Another crew even managed to get video of one of the Tic Tacs, which became a focal point of a largely secret five-year US government research programme, and a topic of discussion during a historic 26 July hearing in the Congress on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

“The sheer number of reports, whistleblowers and stories of unidentified anomalous phenomena should raise real questions and warrant investigation and oversight,” US lawmaker Robert Garcia said in his opening remarks at the subcommittee hearing. “And that’s why we are here today.”

We need to talk about UFOs, or in the updated parlance of the US government, UAP – unexplained aerial phenomena. For many decades, tales of mysterious ships roaming the skies were the domain of science fiction or eccentrics obsessed about what was going on in a mysterious southwest American desert military base called Area 51.

But in recent years, serious questions have arisen from top officials. From 2007 to 2012, the Pentagon ran a secret $22 million programme to investigate such UAP. Even former US president Barack Obama, after leaving the White House, conceded that there was evidence of mysteries roaming the skies. “We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” he said two years ago.

The congressional subcommittee hearing last month would have warmed the heart of fictional FBI investigator Fox Mulder of The X-Files. A group of former US military officials, including Fravor, made shocking revelations.

Among them there were claims made under penalty of perjury that the US government was in possession of UAPs and keeping them secret; that secretly funded programmes were tasked with keeping the UAPs under wraps; that people had been harmed or injured in efforts to hide and reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology; and that the remains of “non-human” pilots had been recovered from crash sites.

At one moment, David Grusch, a former US intelligence officer, was asked whether the government had made contact with alien life forms. “That’s something I can’t discuss in a public setting,” he said, as stunned lawmakers looked on.

In response to the Grusch revelations, both NASA and the Department of Defence have denied that there is evidence of extraterrestrial life or technology that is being covered up. But it is hard to trust a US government that has a counterproductive tendency to go much too far in classifying information as secret or compartmentalising intelligence to provide officials with plausible deniability. In any case, even the public testimony was alarming.

Ordinarily hostile Democrats and Republicans on the subcommittee appeared equally engaged by the revelations and welcoming of the witnesses, who had suffered career repercussions for their outspokenness.

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez asked tough questions about the use of secretive private-sector contractors not subject to ordinary rules of public accountability.

“If you were me, where would you look?” Ocasio-Cortez asked the witnesses.

Claims of mysterious flying saucers in the night sky have been with us for decades. But the latest claims merit attention. Both witnesses and lawmakers agreed that the stigma against reporting mysterious objects was leading to dangers and pressures for both commercial and military pilots worried that they will be labelled nutjobs. If a pilot spots something anomalous, better to keep quiet rather than suffer career consequences by reporting it.

“There has to be a safe and transparent reporting process for pilots both on the commercial side and the military side to be able to report UAPs," lawmaker Garcia said.

The potential dangers are real. The witnesses at the hearing agreed that the phenomena that they had spotted or learned about could pose a threat to humanity. They affirmed one lawmaker’s assessment that some of the objects encountered could be reconnaissance probes attempting to glean intelligence. The evidence, they said, suggests a potential “existential” threat that could be difficult to counter.

“The technology that we faced was far superior to anything that we had,” Fravor said of the 2004 Tic-Tac close encounter.

Grusch, a decorated US air force officer, appears more a military wunderkind than conspiratorial kook. He served in combat in Afghanistan and then went on to work in a highly sensitive Pentagon programme on UAPs. He quickly learned to trust no one. He retained a lawyer and sought whistleblower protection before coming out in public with his revelations in June. He said he had been warned by colleagues within the military establishment of dire consequences that befell others who had sought to go public.

The lawmakers claimed they were denied access to a secure room by military officials to discuss classified information and faced tremendous resistance to forming the subcommittee and launching the hearing in the first place. “It’s been an uphill battle, every step of the way,” lawmaker Tim Burchett said.

They insisted the 26 July hearing was the first of many by the subcommittee. It remains uncertain as to whether the hearings could unlock the secret of whether we are alone in the universe. But perhaps the hearings could crack open the gratuitous walls of secrecy that surround the US government on matters both cosmic and earthly.