Why is America’s Congress being briefed on UFOs?

AMERICA’S SPIESUFOUFOUAPUFOUFO brief the country’s lawmakers on sober topics. In 2023 they gave classified briefings on , , Russian and Chinese misinformation, and —in other words, on the biggest stories on Earth. But on January 12th, according to , a news website, members of Congress will hear from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about an altogether otherworldly subject: s, or “unidentified flying objects”. Why?s (which the government calls s, or “unidentified anomalous phenomena”, a broader term used, in part, to avoid the familiar, loaded acronym) are getting more attention from the political establishment. In 2017 the revealed that the Department of Defence had, from 2007 to 2012, funded a small programme to investigate military reports of sightings; similar programmes followed. Footage of unexplained encounters between Navy jets and objects travelling at high speeds accompanied the ’sstory. A follow-up article quoted a former Navy pilot who described his encounter over the Pacific Ocean in 2004 with an aircraft that accelerated “like nothing I’d ever seen”. Congress became interested: in 2020 the Senate’s Intelligence Committee asked the Pentagon to track data on s and report on its findings. The resulting document did not draw many conclusions.