Director of Pentagon's AARO to testify to Congress about UFOs: How to watch hearing

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Less than a week ago, whistleblowers in Congress rekindled the notion that high levels of government are concealing evidence of nonhuman intelligent beings and the mystifying vehicles they pilot.

Now, the leader of the Pentagon's office to investigate UFOs is set to provide congressional testimony of his own.

That agency, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO,) came under heavy fire last Wednesday when a quartet of witnesses appeared before a House committee for its latest foray into the topic of UFOs.

Many sightings AARO has historically investigated are reported by military fighter pilots, some of whom have captured footage on jets' cockpit gun cameras of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. The acronym has come to be the government's preferred term for what is still largely known among the public as UFOs, both because it's less stigmatized and because it includes objects seen in not just the air, but the water.

But despite the Pentagon's recent shows of transparency, some of those who spoke out last week lambasted the military and intelligence agencies for what they see as unnecessary – and even dangerous – secrecy shrouding what is known about UAP. The hearing was rife with both criticisms of AARO's March UFO report, as well as accusations that the agency engages in disinformation campaigns to discredit sightings and those in the military who report them.

On the heels of that hearing, Jon T. Kosloski, the newly-appointed director of AARO, will testify Tuesday before a Senate subcommittee.

Here's what to know about the hearing, and how to watch it.

UFO hearing: Here are the biggest revelations Congress heard

When is the Senate UFO hearing? How to watch

Kosloski will appear at 4:30 p.m. EST Tuesday to testify before a subcommittee of the Armed Services committee.

Information on the nature of the hearing is vague, indicating only that Senate subcommittee members will "receive testimony on the activities of" AARO.

Video of the hearing will be available on the committee's website.

House heard from UFO whistleblowers last week

News of the upcoming Senate hearing comes amid the latest round of testimony last week in the halls of Congress about unexplained objects violating U.S. airspace and shadowy programs to recover and study downed craft.

Former military members and others have for years described witnessing or recording baffling objects in both the skies and waters maneuvering in ways they believed to be beyond known human technology.

Last Wednesday, journalist Michael Shellenberger testified that sources had informed him that intelligence communities are in possession of numerous high-resolution photos and videos of the craft unlike any of the grainy imagery that has so far been declassified.

One witness, Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence official, described a decades-long international arms race to obtain and reverse-engineer the strange vehicles so governments can bolster their own technology. In corroborating much of the testimony Pentagon intelligence official David Grusch offered in July 2023, Elizondo also accused the Department of Defense of hiding its UFO programs from Congress while misappropriating funds to operate them.

Elizondo lambasted the intelligence community for its decades of "excessive secrecy" around UAP reports – "all to hide the fact that we are not alone in the cosmos," he said.

"I believe we as Americans can handle the truth and I also believe the world deserves the truth," he said.

Legislators have spent the past year pushing for new laws that would boost UAP transparency, with one seeking to create a civilian reporting mechanism, and one directing the executive branch to declassify certain records. But elected officials and UAP transparency advocates say it hasn't been enough.

What is AARO? Pentagon reports have found no evidence of aliens

As Elizondo made clear last week, laws regarding classified information constrained him and Grusch from publicly presenting hard evidence to support claims of a crash retrieval program, which the Pentagon has repeatedly denied exists.

For its part, the Pentagon has overseen AARO since its creation in 2022 and created a website in 2023 for the public to access declassified UFO information.

AARO has also released a series of reports with findings on various UFO sightings, all of which end with the same conclusion: That no evidence has been found to suggest that unexplained sightings are extraterrestrial in nature.

Astrophysicists, as well, have long cautioned that the absence of obvious natural explanations for UFOs doesn't make otherworldly ones likely.

In its most recent report released Thursday, a day after the congressional UFO hearing, AARO studied 757 reports of UAP between May 1, 2023 to June 1, 2024.

"There are definitely anomalies," Kosloski admitted at a briefing last week, adding, "we have not been able to draw the link to extraterrestrial."

Contributing: Anthony Robledo, Paste BN

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for Paste BN. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com