Overview
On 17 May 2022, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation held a public hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The witnesses were Ronald S. Moultrie, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and Scott W. Bray, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence and a senior figure in the UAP Task Force. The open session was followed by a closed classified hearing. U.S. House of Representatives — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 17 May 2022
The Intelligence Committee later described it as the first public congressional UAP hearing in more than half a century. That wording is more precise than saying Congress had shown no interest in the subject since Project Blue Book. UFO-related material had reached congressional committees in different forms over the intervening decades, but the May 2022 session represented the return of a dedicated, open hearing in which senior defence officials were questioned publicly about the government's current UAP programme. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — 2023 IAA statement
The hearing was consequential for several reasons.
Bray said that the government's UAP database had grown from the 144 reports considered in the June 2021 ODNI Preliminary Assessment to approximately 400 reports. He attributed part of that increase to reduced stigma and better reporting procedures rather than assuming that the underlying incidence of UAP had risen by the same amount. He also showed two types of public evidence: a brief F/A-18 cockpit video containing an unresolved spherical-looking object during a fleeting pass, and night-vision imagery in which apparent triangular objects were assessed with reasonable confidence as unmanned aerial systems whose shape was produced by the imaging configuration. House hearing transcript DVIDS — Navy 2021 Flyby video DVIDS — Navy 2019 West Coast video
This combination is important. The hearing did not present “UAP” as a single category of extraordinary objects. It showed an unresolved observation with too little data for attribution and a second class of observations that had become less mysterious after similar encounters supplied additional context.
Officials also acknowledged a small number of reports containing flight or signature characteristics they could not explain with the data available. At the same time, Bray stated that the UAP Task Force possessed no material inconsistent with terrestrial origin and had detected no emanations that suggested a non-terrestrial source. House hearing transcript
The hearing therefore did neither of the things sometimes attributed to it in later debate. It did not reveal government proof of extraordinary technology, and it did not announce that every UAP had a conventional explanation.
Its central public finding was more difficult: government reporting had increased, a number of incidents remained unresolved for very different reasons, and the Department still lacked a mature institutional system capable of handling the full problem consistently.
Hearing context
Congressional oversight
The hearing followed several years of institutional change.
The U.S. Navy had formalised UAP reporting procedures beginning in 2019. The Department of Defense established the Navy-led UAP Task Force in August 2020. In June 2021, ODNI released its Preliminary Assessment, which reviewed 144 reports and found that limited high-quality data prevented firm conclusions about the nature or intent of most observations. ODNI — Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
Congress subsequently enacted a wider statutory framework in the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act.
The legislation required an office capable of standardising UAP collection and reporting, maintaining a central repository, coordinating scientific and intelligence analysis, arranging field investigations, assessing potential foreign-adversary involvement and improving data access across the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. Public Law 117-81, §1683
The Department had already created the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG) in November 2021 as the planned successor to the UAP Task Force. By May 2022, however, congressional members were concerned about how quickly the new organisation was becoming operational.
Chairman André Carson opened the hearing by noting that the statutory implementation deadline was approaching while AOIMSG still did not have a publicly named director. He also criticised the historical stigma surrounding UAP reporting and asked the witnesses to demonstrate that investigators would follow evidence rather than concentrate only upon easily explained cases. House hearing transcript
This is important context for interpreting the proceeding. Congress was not simply asking what are UFOs?
It was examining whether the executive branch had created an investigative structure capable of answering narrower questions reliably: how reports were collected, whether personnel were willing to submit them, what technical data existed, whether relevant agencies shared information and how unresolved observations were separated from identified ones.
The institutional process was itself a major subject of oversight.
AOIMSG
Moultrie's testimony provides unusually clear evidence of the state of the programme in May 2022.
He said the Department was establishing an office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and that, during that week, it had selected a director. Space had been identified and personnel across the Department and Intelligence Community were working on a standardised methodology for receiving, analysing and reporting data. Moultrie also told the committee that the name AOIMSG would “likely change.” House hearing transcript
Two months later, that prediction was realised.
On 15 July 2022, Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks formally expanded and renamed AOIMSG as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in order to meet the broader requirements Congress had enacted. DoD publicly announced the change on 20 July. Department of Defense — establishment of AARO
The May hearing is therefore a useful snapshot of an organisation between institutional forms. The UAP Task Force was still supplying much of the operational case infrastructure. AOIMSG existed formally but was still being staffed and organised. The statutory office required by Congress had not yet reached its final AARO structure. This explains why some questions asked during the hearing exposed gaps that later AARO authorities were specifically designed to address.
Report count
One of the most widely reported statements from the hearing was Bray's announcement that the UAP database had grown to approximately 400 reports. The figure represented a major increase from the 144 reports described in the June 2021 Preliminary Assessment. It should not be read as a precise final case count.
Bray described it as the database figure available during the May hearing. The subsequent 2022 Annual Report, with an information cut-off of 30 August, documented 510 total reports: the original 144, another 247 reports received after the earlier assessment's cut-off, and 119 older events subsequently discovered or reported. ODNI — 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
The later accounting demonstrates why the May number should remain approximate. The database was actively changing. It also supports the explanation Bray gave for the increase. He said reduced stigma had encouraged personnel to report both new incidents and older narrative cases that previously had not entered the formal system. This has an important statistical consequence. A rapid rise in reports does not necessarily indicate a rapid rise in UAP activity. A reporting system that becomes easier to use and less professionally risky should be expected to capture observations that an earlier system missed. Bray's testimony therefore treats increasing report volume partly as evidence that the collection process was changing. That interpretation was later repeated in ODNI's annual report.
Data-driven process
Bray described the UAP Task Force's main objective as moving from an anecdotal or narrative-based approach toward a science, technology and engineering-focused study.
He said the Task Force had worked directly with Navy aviators, standardised reporting mechanisms, reduced stigma and provided additional equipment for recording encounters. By May 2022, Navy and Air Force crews had step-by-step UAP procedures available in cockpit kneeboard material and post-flight debrief processes. House hearing transcript
This is one of the hearing's more important statements because it identifies the relationship between reporting culture and evidence quality. A pilot may observe something unusual without having enough time to collect data deliberately. A reporting system can improve what happens immediately afterwards: preserve timestamps, identify relevant sensors, retrieve radar or imagery, record viewing geometry and locate other witnesses before information disappears. Reducing stigma can increase the number of reports. Standardisation can increase their comparability. Neither guarantees that the object will be identified. The fleeting F/A-18 video shown during the hearing demonstrates why.
Hearing evidence
F/A-18 flyby
Bray's first visual example was a short video recorded from the cockpit of a U.S. Navy fighter aircraft.
The government-released version is labelled “Navy 2021 Flyby video.” DVIDS describes it as an encounter with an unknown object during a fleeting pass and says the video demonstrates the typical speed at which military aircraft may approach an unknown object. DVIDS — Navy 2021 Flyby video
During the hearing, the object was difficult even to freeze on the presentation screen. Bray described it as a spherical and somewhat reflective-looking object that passed rapidly by the aircraft. He told Representative Adam Schiff that he did not have an explanation for the specific object. House hearing transcript The visual impression is potentially striking. The evidential content is limited.
A rapid apparent pass does not establish the object's own velocity because the F/A-18 itself was moving at high speed. Without known range, object dimensions, precise relative geometry and additional sensor information, the short clip does not allow a reliable physical-speed calculation.
Bray presented the video for almost the opposite reason. He used it to show how little information an investigator may sometimes receive. This is therefore a useful example of an unresolved but data-poor observation rather than evidence that the hearing demonstrated extreme performance. The object may have been unusual. The public clip alone cannot establish how unusual.
Triangular imagery
Bray's second example was intended to demonstrate how additional information can change an interpretation.
He showed Navy material in which lights appeared triangular through night-vision goggles and a single-lens-reflex camera. An earlier West Coast event had remained unresolved for years. Similar later observations occurred while other Navy assets also detected unmanned aerial systems nearby.
Bray said the Task Force was consequently reasonably confident that the apparent triangles correlated with UAS and that the triangular appearance resulted from the optical path through the night-vision system and camera. House hearing transcript
The officially released 2019 West Coast video describes the objects as initially identified as UAP and later reclassified as unmanned aerial systems based upon additional information and data from other sightings. DVIDS — Navy 2019 West Coast video
This example is analytically valuable because it demonstrates several things at once. An apparently geometric shape in an imaging system does not necessarily represent the object's physical outline. A case can remain unresolved for years and later become more understandable when a similar event provides better contextual data. And resolution need not come from one decisive measurement; it can emerge through comparison across incidents. The hearing did not claim that every Navy triangle report was thereby solved. It presented the example as evidence of how a initially puzzling observation could be reinterpreted when enough data accumulated.
Unexplained cases
Representative Jim Himes pressed Bray on what officials meant when they said a case was unexplained. Bray's answer is among the most useful statements in the hearing.
He said there was a large amount of information similar to the flyby video where too little data existed to create a reasonable explanation. Separately, there was a small handful of cases where more data existed but analysts still could not fully reconstruct what happened; those were the cases containing indications of flight characteristics or signature management that differed from expectations. House hearing transcript
This distinction should govern interpretation of the entire case catalogue. “Unresolved” is not one evidential category. One case may remain unresolved because it is recorded for only a fraction of a second. Another may have multiple sensors and still resist attribution. The second is potentially more significant. The public hearing did not quantify precisely how many cases belonged in each evidential subgroup beyond referring to a “small handful” with more substantial anomalous indications. This is why the total number of unresolved reports cannot serve as a proxy for the number of extraordinary observations. Case quality matters more than case count.
2021 report cases
Schiff returned to the 2021 Preliminary Assessment's statement that 18 incidents, represented by 21 reports, involved apparently unusual movement patterns or flight characteristics. The earlier report had described objects appearing stationary in winds aloft, moving against the wind, manoeuvring abruptly or travelling at considerable speed without discernible means of propulsion. ODNI — Preliminary Assessment During the hearing, Bray said the United States was not aware of a foreign adversary capable of moving an object without discernible means of propulsion. He immediately qualified the significance of that statement.
In some cases, he said, sensor artefacts might be hiding a conventional propulsion system. He referred to a small number of events involving apparent flight characteristics or signature management that investigators could not explain with the available data. House hearing transcript
That wording is considerably more cautious than saying the government had confirmed craft flying without propulsion. The observation was that propulsion was not discernible in the available data. Those are not equivalent propositions. A low-resolution infrared image, distant visual observation or radar track may fail to reveal propulsion that is physically present. The cases remain scientifically interesting if apparently unusual characteristics survive such possibilities, but the hearing did not provide sufficient public technical data to establish that result independently.
Sensor assumptions
Bray described one of the Task Force's basic analytical assumptions: generally speaking, military sensors operate as designed. He justified that working assumption partly because many incidents involved more than one sensor. He also said the Task Force made no assumption about origin and attempted to calibrate its analytical assumptions in order to avoid technological surprise. House hearing transcript This is a sensible starting point but not a conclusion that every sensor output is correct. Sensors can operate normally while producing images that are counterintuitive to human viewers. Optics, tracking behaviour, compression, radar propagation, filtering and platform motion can all influence how an ordinary object appears. The triangular UAS example shown in the same hearing demonstrates precisely this.
The instrument did not need to be “broken” for the displayed shape to be misleading. The stronger analytical practice is therefore to assume systems generally function as designed while still modelling how their design transforms the observed scene. That is different from treating the sensor display as a direct photograph of physical reality.
Physical objects and artefacts
Another line of questioning concerned the 2021 assessment's statement that most UAP probably represented physical objects. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi asked whether investigators could say this with complete certainty. Bray answered that a number of cases certainly represented physical objects, while some reports could involve meteorological phenomena or sensor anomalies. House hearing transcript This again shows why broad public summaries can become misleading. The government was not saying that every entry in the UAP database represented a solid craft.
It was saying that the available evidence supported a physical-object interpretation for many observations, especially where multiple sensors or direct visual observations existed, while leaving room for non-object effects in other cases.
This mixed model is methodologically more plausible than assuming a single cause across hundreds of reports. It also means that the UAP category is heterogeneous by design.
Flight safety
Krishnamoorthi asked whether a U.S. aircraft had collided with a UAP. Bray said no collision had occurred but that the Task Force had recorded at least 11 near misses. House hearing transcript This is one of the hearing's firmer operational findings. An unidentified object can create a flight-safety problem even if its origin is mundane. A balloon, drone or aircraft occupying military training airspace without coordination may force an aviator to manoeuvre or create collision risk. The near-miss count should therefore not be treated as evidence of hostile intent. It demonstrates that unresolved identification can itself have safety consequences. This safety framing had already appeared in Navy reporting reforms and the 2021 ODNI assessment and would remain one of AARO's central missions.
Wreckage and communications
The hearing also produced a useful series of negative statements about the holdings of the UAP Task Force. Bray said investigators had not detected communications signals emanating from the observed objects in the sense Krishnamoorthi asked about and had not attempted to communicate with them. He said the United States had not discharged weapons against a UAP within the context being discussed. Asked about wreckage, Bray stated that the Task Force did not have wreckage that was unexplained or inconsistent with terrestrial origin. House hearing transcript These answers are important, but their institutional scope should be preserved. Bray was speaking about the UAP Task Force's holdings and knowledge. He was not giving a logically universal statement about every programme or office that had ever existed within the U.S. government.
That distinction became particularly important a year later when David Grusch publicly alleged that other programmes had possessed recovered non-human technology. The May 2022 testimony establishes the position of the UAP Task Force at that time. It does not independently adjudicate later claims about programmes allegedly outside the Task Force's holdings.
Task Force holdings
Himes asked Bray to clarify the spectrum of cases described as unexplained.
Bray answered that the Task Force had no material suggesting non-terrestrial origin and had detected no emanations that would suggest such an origin. He again stressed that unresolved reports ranged from cases with too little information to a small number containing more puzzling characteristics. House hearing transcript
This statement is stronger than simply saying officials had no opinion. It records the Task Force's evidential position after examining its holdings. It should remain proportionate to those holdings. The testimony does not establish that non-terrestrial origin had been disproved as a universal hypothesis. It says that the evidence held and analysed by the Task Force had not provided material or emissions indicating it. That is an important negative finding without becoming an unlimited one.
Historical coverage
Representative Mike Gallagher asked about reports that UFOs had been associated with a 1967 missile shutdown at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
Bray said that the relevant data were not within the UAP Task Force's holdings and that the Task Force had not investigated the incident. Moultrie said the Department would look at the matter if it were formally brought to its attention but acknowledged that the organisation was not resourced to pursue every claim existing in the public domain. House hearing transcript
This exchange is historically significant for a reason separate from the merits of the Malmstrom claim itself. It exposed the narrow historical reach of the contemporary Task Force. An organisation created principally to analyse recent military UAP reporting did not automatically possess or investigate important historical cases simply because they were prominent within UFO literature. Congress addressed this problem later in 2022 by requiring AARO to produce a historical record of government involvement with UAP dating back to 1945. The hearing therefore helped reveal a gap between current incident analysis and historical allegation review. It did not resolve the Malmstrom incident.
Wilson-Davis document
Gallagher also asked Moultrie and Bray whether they knew of a document commonly called the Wilson-Davis memo or “EW Notes.” Both said they were not personally aware of it. Gallagher then requested unanimous consent to enter the material into the hearing record, and Carson agreed. House hearing transcript The procedural significance of this moment is often overstated. A document entered into a congressional hearing record is not thereby authenticated by Congress. Gallagher himself explicitly said he was not commenting upon its veracity and had raised it in the hope that the witnesses could help determine what it was. Their response was that they did not know it. The episode is historically relevant because material associated with alleged hidden programmes had now entered an official public hearing.
Its evidential status remained unresolved. The distinction between included in the congressional record and validated by Congress should be maintained wherever the document is discussed.
Radio-frequency evidence
Schiff also returned to the 2021 Preliminary Assessment's statement that military aircraft systems had processed radio-frequency energy associated with some UAP observations. He asked whether those cases overlapped with the 18 incidents displaying apparently unusual flight characteristics. Bray said he would need to check the Task Force data and suggested that at least some RF detections were associated with objects that were not otherwise behaving unusually. House hearing transcript Moultrie and Bray then explained that RF energy could have several meanings. It could be relevant to sensor jamming. It could also be communications or control signals associated with a conventional unmanned platform. This exchange is useful because “radio-frequency emission” can sound inherently exotic when removed from operational context. It is not.
Radio-controlled drones, aircraft systems, radar and electronic-warfare devices all involve RF energy. The significance depends upon frequency, waveform, direction, timing and relationship to the observed object. Those details were reserved for the classified session or not supplied publicly. The hearing therefore established that RF detections existed in some cases but did not establish an extraordinary electromagnetic signature.
Institutional legacy
Closed session
The public hearing was followed by a classified session.
Ranking Member Rick Crawford made the rationale explicit in his opening statement: investigating UAP inevitably intersects with classified information concerning U.S. and foreign systems, and classification should protect national-security capabilities rather than conceal the truth for its own sake. House hearing transcript
Moultrie similarly said the Department was trying to balance transparency against protection of sources and methods. Several public questions were deferred to the closed session, including aspects of underwater detection and more detailed sensor information. This creates an unavoidable limitation in assessing the hearing. The public record shows which questions officials considered too sensitive for open discussion. It does not reveal their classified answers. The existence of a closed session should not be treated as evidence that extraordinary information was disclosed there. Neither should the absence of public answers be mistaken for evidence that no relevant information existed. Classification establishes an access boundary. It does not establish what lies on the other side of it.
Transparency
Despite those limits, the open session represented a genuine increase in transparency compared with the previous few years. Senior defence and naval-intelligence officials answered questions in public. The government released previously unseen UAP imagery.
Officials discussed approximate case numbers, reporting procedures, unresolved cases, optical artefacts, near misses, possible sensor anomalies, apparent signature management, material holdings and the limits of historical coverage.
The complete hearing was also released as official public video and transcript. DVIDS — full House UAP hearing Congress.gov — official transcript That does not mean the hearing achieved full transparency. Many of the most technically useful details remained classified. The flyby video lacked enough public context for strong analysis. The Task Force could not address some prominent historical allegations. The organisational successor was still being constructed. The gain was therefore procedural transparency about the state of the investigation, rather than public release of a complete evidential archive.
Subsequent change
The hearing was followed by substantial institutional and legislative development. In July, DoD replaced AOIMSG with AARO, explicitly broadening the mission beyond the earlier airborne/Special Use Airspace framework. DoD — AARO establishment
The House Intelligence Committee then highlighted the May hearing while advancing its FY2023 Intelligence Authorization Act proposals, stating that the committee had delivered the first public UAP hearing in more than half a century and was pursuing legislation to illuminate historical government UAP information. House Intelligence Committee — July 2022 IAA statement
The final FY2023 intelligence legislation strengthened AARO, created new historical-review requirements and expanded protected reporting mechanisms. The committee later described those provisions as part of the continuing effort to improve congressional oversight of the subject. House Intelligence Committee — final 2023 IAA statement
It would be too strong to say that all of these changes were caused by the May hearing. Legislative work was already underway. The hearing did, however, make several weaknesses public at exactly the time Congress was deciding how the successor office should operate. Its influence is therefore best understood as part of a feedback process between oversight, testimony and legislation.
Later report count
The January 2023 ODNI annual report provides a useful retrospective check on Bray's approximately 400 cases. By 30 August 2022, the catalogue stood at 510.
Of 366 reports added to the original 144-case dataset, 163 were initially characterised as balloons or balloon-like objects, 26 as UAS or UAS-like objects and six as clutter. Another 171 remained uncharacterised and unattributed. ODNI stressed that initial characterisation was not equivalent to positive identification. ODNI — 2022 Annual Report
This later distribution supports one of the hearing's main methodological themes. Better reporting produces more data, but a larger UAP total does not imply a larger extraordinary residue. Some new reports can be placed into familiar categories. Some remain unresolved because they lack information. A smaller subset may contain characteristics requiring deeper analysis. The hearing's distinction between the unresolved flyby and the increasingly understood triangular UAS imagery anticipated exactly this more differentiated model.
Historical significance
The 2022 hearing marked the point at which modern UAP oversight became unmistakably public. The 2021 ODNI assessment had already established that the government possessed a significant unresolved-report dataset. The May hearing put senior officials before elected legislators and required them to explain, in public, what the government knew, what it did not know and how it intended to improve the process. The answers were often less dramatic than the questions. The database was growing partly because reporting had improved. Some apparently strange imagery could be explained through sensors and UAS activity. Some observations remained unresolved because too little information existed. A smaller group appeared more difficult and warranted continued technical attention.
No non-terrestrial material had been identified within the Task Force's holdings. Historical claims were not yet being examined comprehensively. These points did not close the subject. They helped define the structure of the next phase.
AARO's later all-domain remit, historical investigation and protected reporting mechanism addressed several weaknesses visible during the hearing. Subsequent congressional sessions in 2023 and 2024 moved beyond the question of whether UAP deserved oversight and concentrated increasingly upon transparency, whistleblower allegations, historical programmes and the quality of AARO's work.
In that sense, May 2022 was a bridge. The government had moved beyond the period in which UAP investigation itself was largely hidden from public view. It had not yet reached the later period in which Congress was openly debating alleged recovery programmes and historical concealment. The hearing established the principle that the executive branch would be expected to explain its UAP work publicly where classification allowed. That change in accountability is its clearest historical legacy.
Evidence assessment
The 17 May 2022 hearing was historically important, but its evidential contribution was more disciplined than the surrounding publicity sometimes suggests. Its strongest achievement was to make the state of the government investigation visible.
Congress established publicly that the case inventory was growing rapidly, reporting stigma had been reduced, the UAP Task Force had developed more standardised procedures and the Department was still struggling to build its successor organisation.
The hearing also demonstrated two different outcomes of UAP investigation. The F/A-18 flyby remained unidentified because the public evidence was extremely limited. The triangular Navy imagery had become more understandable through comparison with later UAS encounters and imaging geometry. That contrast is scientifically useful. It shows why the category unidentified should not be interpreted as a stable property of an object. It is an investigative status that can persist, change or disappear as evidence improves. The hearing's discussion of apparently anomalous performance requires the same care.
Bray acknowledged a small handful of cases containing flight characteristics or signature-management indications the Task Force could not explain. He also acknowledged that sensor artefacts could obscure conventional propulsion and declined to infer origin from the observations.
The public session therefore supports the conclusion that some reports remained analytically interesting after initial review. It does not provide enough case-level technical information to establish extraordinary kinematics independently. The negative findings are similarly bounded. The Task Force had no wreckage inconsistent with terrestrial origin and no detected emissions suggesting a non-terrestrial source. Those are meaningful statements about the Task Force's holdings in May 2022. They are not universal findings about every alleged historical government programme. The Malmstrom exchange exposed this limitation directly: an important historical allegation was simply not within the Task Force's dataset.
The Wilson-Davis document produced a different kind of caution. Its inclusion in the hearing record is historically notable, but the witnesses did not recognise it and Gallagher expressly declined to assert its authenticity. Congressional inclusion therefore should not be transformed into congressional validation.
The hearing's enduring contribution was consequently procedural. It made clear that Congress expected UAP investigation to be standardised, destigmatised, scientifically defensible and subject to continuing oversight. It also showed that the organisation responsible for meeting that expectation was not yet fully built. Two months later, AOIMSG became AARO.
Source library
U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 17 May 2022
The principal source for this deep dive. The official transcript contains the opening statements, testimony of Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, discussion of the approximately 400-report database, the flyby and triangular Navy imagery, flight and signature characteristics, near misses, Task Force material holdings, Malmstrom, the Wilson-Davis document, RF emissions and the transition to the successor organisation.
Read the official hearing transcript
Department of Defense / DVIDS — Full 17 May 2022 UAP hearing
Official public-domain video of the open congressional hearing. Useful for reviewing the presentation of the videos and testimony in their original public context.
Watch the official hearing video
U.S. Navy / DVIDS — “Navy 2021 Flyby video”
Official government release of the brief cockpit video shown at the hearing. DVIDS describes it as a fleeting encounter with an unknown object and notes that the clip demonstrates the speed at which a military aircraft may pass an unknown object. The video does not provide the range and geometry required for an independent physical-speed calculation.
View the official flyby video
U.S. Navy / DVIDS — 2019 West Coast UAP video
Official release of the night-vision imagery discussed by Bray. The Navy states that objects initially treated as UAP were later reclassified as unmanned aerial systems based upon additional observations and data.
View the official 2019 West Coast video
U.S. Navy / DVIDS — East Coast triangular UAP image
Official Navy image used in the same comparison. The government description states that the image was captured through night-vision goggles and an SLR camera and that the apparent UAP was subsequently reclassified as UAS based upon additional information.
View the official East Coast image
Office of the Director of National Intelligence — Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, 25 June 2021
The principal background intelligence assessment referenced repeatedly during the hearing. It established the original 144-report dataset, 80 multi-sensor reports, 18 incidents containing apparently unusual flight characteristics, 11 near misses and the five broad explanatory categories.
Read the ODNI Preliminary Assessment
Public Law 117-81 — FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act, §1683
The statutory framework underlying congressional questions about the successor UAP office. It required standardised reporting, centralised data, field investigation, scientific analysis, intelligence collection and recurring congressional reporting.
Read the FY2022 NDAA
Department of Defense — AOIMSG establishment memorandum and announcement, November 2021
Primary institutional material for the organisation being discussed during the hearing. AOIMSG had been created as the planned successor to the UAP Task Force but was still being staffed and organised in May 2022.
Read the AOIMSG establishment memorandum
Department of Defense — establishment of AARO, July 2022
Primary follow-up source. Two months after the hearing, DoD formally expanded and renamed AOIMSG as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to meet the broader FY2022 statutory requirements.
Read the DoD AARO announcement
Office of the Director of National Intelligence — 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
The key follow-up to Bray's approximate 400-case figure. By 30 August 2022, the government catalogue contained 510 reports. The report is also important for distinguishing initial characterisation of balloon/UAS/clutter cases from positive final identification.
Read the ODNI 2022 Annual Report
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — FY2023 Intelligence Authorization Act statement, 20 July 2022
Official committee statement describing the May proceeding as the first public UAP hearing in more than half a century and linking continuing congressional work to historical UAP information and national-security oversight.
Read the House Intelligence Committee statement
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — final FY2023 Intelligence Authorization Act statement, 8 December 2022
Primary congressional follow-up describing the strengthening of AARO and the continuation of UAP oversight after the May hearing.
Read the committee's final IAA statement
Research category: Congressional oversight / public intelligence hearing
Hearing date: 17 May 2022
Committee: House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation
Witnesses: Ronald S. Moultrie and Scott W. Bray
Database figure given publicly: approximately 400 reports
Later official catalogue total: 510 reports as of 30 August 2022
Public evidence shown: Navy 2021 flyby video and comparative Navy night-vision UAS/triangle imagery
Review date: Evidence assessed through 26 August 2026
Research status: Historical — the hearing helped establish continuing public congressional oversight and exposed institutional gaps that were addressed in part by AARO's creation and later statutory expansion.