Pilot witness in Washington, DC

STATEMENT OF MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER FOUNDER PUBLIC Mr. SHELLENBERGER. Chairwoman Mace, Chairman Grothman, Ranking Member Connolly, Ranking Member Garcia, Members of the Subcommittees, thank you for inviting my testimony. One of Congress’ most important responsibilities is oversight of the executive branch, in general, and the military and intelligence community in particular. Unfortunately, there is a growing body of evidence that the U.S. Government is not being transparent about what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena and that 14 elements within the military and the IC are in violation of their constitutional duty to notify Congress of their operations. President-elect Donald Trump and former President Barrack Obama have both said that the government has information about UAPs that it has not released. There are other explanations for UAPs, that they represent a new form of life or nonhuman life. Current dominant alternative theories, including those put forward by AARO, are that UAPs are some kind of natural phenomenon we do not yet understand, like ball lighting or plasma. They could also be part of some new U.S. or foreign government weapons program, such as drones, aircraft, balloons, CGI hoaxes, or birds. Whatever UAPs are, Congress must be informed, as must the people of the United States. We have a right to know what UAPs are, no matter what they are. However, we now have existing and former U.S. Government officials who have told Congress that AARO and the Pentagon have broken the law by not revealing a significant body of information about UAPs, including military intelligence data bases that have evidence of their existence as physical craft. One of those individuals is a current or former U.S. Government official acting as a UAP whistleblower. This person has written a report. This is the report that says the executive branch has been managing UAP/NHI issues without congressional knowledge, oversight, or authorization for some time, quite possibly decades. Furthermore, these individuals have revealed the name of an active and highly secretive DoD unacknowledged special access program, or USAP. The source of that document told Public, me, that the USAP is a strategic intelligence program that is part of the U.S. military family of longstanding, highly sensitive programs dealing with various aspects of the UAP problem. The new UAP whistleblower claims that the U.S. military and IC data base includes videos and images taken using infrared, forward-looking infrared, full motion video, and still photography. The report that was just shared with Congress says Immaculate Constellation serves as a central or parent USAP that consolidates observations of UAPs by both tasked and untasked collection platforms. Immaculate Constellation includes high-quality imagery intelligence and measurement and signature intelligence of UAPs, the whistleblower’s report adds. The sources of this intelligence are a blend of directed and incidental collection capacities, capabilities, position in low Earth orbit, the upper atmosphere, as well as military and civilian aviation altitudes and maritime environments. The report to Congress details in detail various UAPs, including spheres/orbs, discs/saucers, ovals, triangles, boomerang/arrowhead, and irregular/organic. The report describes various incidents found in the human intelligence data bases. One involved orbs surrounding and forcing an F–22 out of its patrol area. In another incident, the crew of a Navy aircraft carrier watched a small orange/red sphere rapidly descend from a high altitude of 100 to 200 yards directly above the flight deck of the CVN aircraft carrier. 15 And, since my reporting on this Immaculate Constellation last month, another source came forward who told me that they saw a roughly 13-minute long, high-definition, full-color video of a white orb UAP coming out of the ocean approximately 20 miles off the coast of Kuwait. It was filmed from a helicopter. Then, halfway through the video, the person said the orb is joined by another orb that briefly comes into the frame from the left before rapidly moving again out of the frame. The person discovered the video on SIPR, the Secure Internet Protocol Router Network, which the DoD uses to transmit classified information. A leading UAP researcher who utilizes the Freedom of Information Act to find out what the government knows, John Greenewald, told me last year that the U.S. Government had been increasingly denying his request for UAP information. He has been doing FOIA requests for 27 years and has an archive of 3 million pages. The government has for decades denied any interest in UFOs. He told me that the documents that he has assembled showed that behind the scenes, it was a completely different story. Contrary to the hopes of many advocates of transparency, the government has been restricting more information since the leak of three UAP videos in 2017. The DoD organization, AARO, has been labeling many documents with a B7 exemption, which Greenewald says does not make any sense. They are stating that anything AARO does is involved in a law enforcement investigation, which allows AARO to not release it. Greenewald says that DoD has denied the existence of UAP and AATIP-related records on multiple occasions, only to acknowledge them after an appeal was filed. He added that the Naval Air Systems Command in March 2022 stated they found no additional UAP videos. It seems strange that they had three and only those three, but other requests have been filed by The Black Vault—that is John Greenewald’s group—to seek out more places UAPs might be hiding. Then, in September 2022, the Navy admitted that the UAP-related videos and photographs existed but denied the request in full for their release saying that the requested videos contain sensitive information that are classified and exempt from disclosure. The DoD will ‘‘deny things on a Monday and then admit to it on a Friday,’’ said Greenewald. He said the government can and does release videos that protect secret methods of capturing it. They fall back on the sensitive platform excuse a lot, he said. However, the on-screen information can be blurred and scrubbed. The metadata can be removed. I will show you this example here. This is a presentation from the UAP task force. This is completely absurd. It is nuts, this level of censorship, of redaction on a document. It shows the redaction of how many reports they have collected for how many years. Two of the three potential explanations are blacked out. The Pentagon, the intelligence community is treating us like children. It is time for us to know the truth about this. I think that we can handle it. Thank you very much.