Andre Carson

“Last year Congress rewrote the charter for that organization, now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, or AOIMSG for short.”

“The last time Congress had a hearing on UAPs was half a century ago. I hope that it does not take 50 more years for Congress to hold another because transparency is desperately needed.”

“In 2017, we learned for the first time that the Department of Defense had quietly restarted a similar organization, tracking what we now call unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.”

“We are mindful today that AOIMSG is not starting from scratch. This is the third version of this task force in DOD, and civil society groups like the Mutual UFO Network, Mr. Corbell, and others have been collecting data on this issue for years.”

“More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Government ended Project Blue Book, an effort to catalogue and understand sightings of objects in the air that could not otherwise be explained.”

“For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis. Pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did.”

“For more than 20 years, that project had treated unidentified anomalies in our airspace as a national security threat to be monitored and investigated.”

“How are you all liaising with space command? Specifically, how are you partnering with the parts of the U.S. base command responsible for space domain awareness? And how, if at all, are you partnering with the Space Force to analyze UAPs?”

“And, thirdly, when your staff cannot be read on, are your questions to those who are read on even being answered?”

“Secondly, does the AOIMSG staff have the clearances and read-ons that they need to investigate all of these incidents?”