Three Years of UAP Hearings: When the Officials Spoke, and When the Pilots Did

Between 2021 and 2023, the United States held its first public UFO hearings in half a century. The sequence matters: first came an intelligence assessment written by officials, then a hearing of officials, and only in 2023 did the pilots who actually flew the encounters testify under oath. Public memory has fused those events into one “congressional testimony” moment, and the fusion hides what each stage could and could not establish.

The file

2021: an assessment without a hearing

The modern era began with paper. On 25 June 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the Preliminary Assessment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, covering 144 reports made by military sources between 2004 and 2021. Of those, one was explained — a deflating balloon — and the rest stayed unexplained, with the report stressing that unusual or unexplained did not mean extraterrestrial. No hearing accompanied it. The document was a status report, not testimony, and its restraint set the tone officials would hold for the next two years.

2022: officials answer questions

The first public congressional hearing came on 17 May 2022, before a House Intelligence subcommittee — and the witnesses were bureaucrats. Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Ronald Moultrie and Navy intelligence official Scott Bray described the Pentagon’s then-new effort to catalogue UAP reports, showed a handful of declassified clips, and repeatedly declined to endorse any extraordinary interpretation. Bray demonstrated how sensor artifacts could mimic objects. The hearing established the review’s existence and nothing more, which is why its most memorable moments are two officials explaining video artifacts at a dais.

2023: the pilots take the oath

On 26 July 2023, the House Oversight subcommittee heard the people the public had been waiting for: Commander David Fravor, who flew the 2004 Nimitz encounter, and Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 pilot who described routine sightings off the Atlantic coast, plus David Grusch, a former intelligence officer who had made explosive claims through intermediaries rather than at a press conference. The hearing produced sworn statements, published in advance, including Fravor’s account of the Tic Tac encounter and Graves’s description of repeated unidentified contacts during training flights.

Grusch, who had filed a whistleblower disclosure, testified under oath that he had been told of secret programmes holding retrieved nonhuman craft — while stating he could not discuss specifics in open session and had never personally seen such material. The distinction between sworn claims and evidence was the hearing’s central tension, and the transcript preserves both sides of it line by line.

What three years of hearings add up to

The record supports a short list: military sensors and trained observers did report phenomena the government could not identify; the government established review offices and said so publicly; and named witnesses swore to extraordinary claims that the hearings did not convert into evidence. The Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, established in July 2022, later reported that it had found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial craft — the sort of unglamorous conclusion the hearing format is poorly suited to broadcast.

The archive files this sequence as the moment official attention and public attention briefly aligned, and as a lesson in the difference between a hearing and a finding. The pilots’ testimony is real, documented and sworn; what it documents is what they experienced and believe, which is where the record currently rests. Our header shows a committee room with model wings on the witness table; it reconstructs the setting, not the verdict.