Joey Roulette, Steve Gorman

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – Two senior U.S. intelligence officers were scheduled to testify at Capitol Hill Tuesday on what they know about unidentified flying objects. This was the first congressional hearing on UFOs for more than 50 years.

This hearing will be before the U.S. House Intelligence Subcommittee 11 months following a report that documented more than 140 instances of “unidentified air phenomena” (or UAPs) that U.S. military aircraft pilots reported seeing since 2004.

UFO (unidentified flying object) is a more common term that has been associated with alien spacecraft. It was not mentioned in the UAP presentation last June.

The discussion was instead on the possible consequences for U.S. security and aviation safety.

The Pentagon released video footage showing UAPs displaying speed and maneuverability that exceeds known aviation technology. However, this report didn’t include any UAPs.

This hearing would allow for a reexamination of the conclusions of Tuesday’s report. A nine-page preliminary assessment was prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Adam Schiff, chairman of Intelligence Committee said that the American people were entitled to full transparency in his statement last week. This was just announcing these hearings.

The assessments were prepared by defense and intelligence analysts.

In November, the Navy Task Force behind the paper was replaced by a new Defense Department agency, called the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.

Two witnesses were called for Tuesday’s hearing by Ronald Moultrie who is the U.S. defense subsecretary of intelligence and security. Scott Bray (deputy director of naval Intelligence) is the other.

Following the public hearing, both of them were to appear behind closed doors.

Although the report did not reach any conclusions last year, it stated that UAP sightings were likely to be unrelated.

The report states that further analysis and data were required in order to identify whether the images are part of an unusual aerial system devised by the U.S. government, commercial entity, or a foreign power, such as China, Russia or China.

Senior U.S. officials said that intelligence and defense analysts still have not ruled out extraterrestrial origins for UAP cases. However, the paper did not explicitly mention such possibility.

However, this report marks a major turning point for U.S. after many decades of deflecting and debunking observations of unknown flying objects or “flying saucers”, which date back to the 1940s.

This session marks the first congressional open hearing on the topic since Project Blue Book, a UFO codenamed Project Blue Book by the U.S. Air Force in 1969 was ended.

Blue Book has compiled a total of 12,618 UFO sightings over its 17-year history. 701 of these were objects which are still “unidentified” officially. However, the Air Force stated that they did not find any indications of an extraterrestrial threat to national security or evidence of UFOs.

The hearing was held in 1966 by Gerald Ford (the then-USA Representative from Michigan), who was the House Republican Leader at that time. It was in response a number of witnesses reports of mysterious glowing lights at low elevation around Dexter. Michigan. A famous Air Force officer had dismissed it as “swamp gases.”