The 2025 House Oversight UAP Hearing

Theoretical Alignment

This file substitutes "Institutional / Testimonial" for the Psycho-Social/Mundane category because the hearing itself is a confirmed, well-documented institutional event with multiple independent witnesses testifying under oath, several of whom (Nuccetelli, Wiggins) described corroborated multi-person sensor and radar detections rather than lone perceptual accounts. It assigns meaningful weight to Extraterrestrial because the testimony includes specific, detailed claims of unconventional performance (no propulsion signature, an apparent emergence from the ocean that the witness himself could not confirm) from a currently serving military witness. It withholds a higher ETH weighting because the hearing's single strongest piece of physical evidence — the Yemen missile-strike video — has a specific, technically argued rival explanation (a Houthi drone) that has not been rebutted or resolved.

The Institutional / Testimonial weighting also reflects a structural feature of this case that distinguishes it from most files in this archive: the primary evidentiary record is not a sighting report, a physical artifact, or a sensor log filed after the fact, but a sworn Congressional proceeding with its own chain of institutional accountability — a published witness list, archived video, an official transcript entered into the Congressional record via the Government Publishing Office, and a committee record that can, in principle, be subpoenaed and cross-examined in ways a private sighting report cannot. That institutional weight cuts in two directions at once. It raises the floor of credibility on the claim that the hearing happened as described and that the named witnesses said what the record shows they said; it does not, by itself, raise the floor on whether the underlying phenomena those witnesses described were genuinely anomalous, since sworn testimony establishes that a person believes and is willing to legally attest to an account, not that the account is correct. This file treats those as two separate credibility questions and scores them separately throughout: the hearing's occurrence and content are effectively certain, while the anomalous nature of the events described within it remains genuinely disputed.

Background

The hearing was the first UAP-focused session convened by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. It was the Oversight Committee's third UAP hearing, following the July 2023 hearing featuring David Grusch, Ryan Graves, and David Fravor, and a November 2024 hearing featuring Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo and Michael Gold, both of which Rep. Burlison recalled from the dais. It was framed explicitly around whistleblower protection: examining whether military personnel who report UAP encounters face retaliation, and whether AARO's reporting channels adequately capture and act on those reports.

The Task Force itself was announced on February 11, 2025, by Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who tapped Rep. Luna to lead it in the wake of a Trump administration order directing federal agencies to declassify records related to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Task Force's mandate, as announced, extended well beyond those assassination files to a cluster of other long-classified or under-scrutinized subjects: unidentified anomalous phenomena and unidentified submerged objects, the Jeffrey Epstein case files, the September 11, 2001 attacks, and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its Republican membership included Reps. Nancy Mace (SC), Tim Burchett (TN), Lauren Boebert (CO), Eric Burlison (MO), Eli Crane (AZ), and Brandon Gill (TX); Democratic members included Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL), Summer Lee (PA), Jasmine Crockett (TX), and Dave Min (CA). The Task Force convened its first hearing on the JFK files before turning, on September 9, 2025, to its first hearing focused specifically on UAP.

By the time of this hearing, the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) had been the government's designated UAP clearinghouse for roughly three years. Congress created AARO's predecessor structures in the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, consolidating earlier, narrower efforts — including the Navy-led Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the subsequent Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group — into a single office housed within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. AARO was established in July 2022 under its first director, physicist Sean Kirkpatrick, who left the post in December 2023; Jon Kosloski, a career National Security Agency official, became director in 2024 and was serving at the time of this hearing. AARO's stated mission is to synchronize UAP-related reporting and investigative efforts across the military services and intelligence community and to serve as the government's central intake point for service-member reports — the very function several of this hearing's witnesses testified had failed them personally.

AARO's public record going into the hearing was itself contested. Volume 1 of its historical record report, begun under Kirkpatrick and released in March 2024, concluded it had found no verifiable evidence that the U.S. government or private industry possessed extraterrestrial technology or was reverse-engineering non-human craft — a conclusion the office has continued to stand behind under Kosloski. Critics, including former Senate and Pentagon intelligence official Christopher Mellon, have separately argued that AARO's methodology and public reporting have been inconsistent and, at times, dismissive of credible witness accounts — a criticism Chairwoman Luna echoed from the dais at this hearing, quoting Mellon's description of the report as "the most error-ridden and unsatisfactory government report I can recall reading after decades of government service." Separately, Rep. Burlison had in March 2025 hired former Air Force intelligence officer and 2023 hearing witness David Grusch as a special adviser on UAP matters, an initial four-month arrangement approved by the House Ethics Committee after the Oversight Committee declined to hire him as committee staff; at the hearing Rep. Crane entered a letter he had sent the Defense Department on Grusch's behalf, citing the removal of his clearance, denial of promotion and loss of medical retirement. Rep. Burchett, for his part, told the hearing he had recently introduced a UAP Whistleblower Protection Act for federal personnel.

That legislative push sits on top of an existing but, according to this hearing's witnesses, imperfectly functioning framework. Successive annual defense authorization acts since 2022 have layered additional UAP-reporting requirements onto the Department of Defense and intelligence community, including confidential channels intended to let current and former government personnel, contractors, and their attorneys report historical UAP-related programs to Congress and to AARO without first securing agency pre-clearance. In principle, that framework was designed to make exactly the kind of testimony offered at this hearing routine and low-risk; in practice, Nuccetelli and Borland testified that reporting had produced silence, intimidation or worse, and Wiggins, while saying he had faced no pushback at all and that the Navy had approved his testimony, said no one had ever followed up on his report or conducted an after-action review. Spielberger's testimony, addressed to whistleblower protection as a general principle rather than to UAP specifically, was in that sense directly responsive to the gap between the framework's stated intent and these witnesses' lived experience of it.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
Oct. 14, 2003 – 2005	At Vandenberg AFB, during National Reconnaissance Office launches, Boeing contractors report a glowing red square over two missile defense sites; later that night guards report a silent triangle larger than a football field; Air Force police officer Jeffrey Nuccetelli later sees a 30-foot sphere of light over his house. He told the hearing no electromagnetic or equipment effects were documented.
Summer 2012	At about 1:30 a.m., Dylan Borland sees a silent, 100-foot equilateral triangular object at Langley Air Force Base — the subject of this site's Langley AFB UAP Incursions file.
Feb. 15, 2023, ~19:15 PST	Aboard USS Jackson in the W-291 warning area off Southern California, Alexandro Wiggins tracks a contact on radar, sees a self-luminous "tic-tac" object rise from the horizon or the sea, and watches it join three others on the ship's SAFIRE sensor before all four depart together.
Oct. 30, 2024	An MQ-9 Reaper drone reportedly fires an AGM-114 Hellfire missile at a fast-moving object off the coast of Yemen; the missile appears to strike without destroying the object.
Sept. 9, 2025, 10:05 a.m.	In Room HVC-210 of the Capitol Visitor Center, the House Oversight Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets holds "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection"; all five witnesses testify under oath, and Rep. Burlison plays the Yemen video publicly for the first time.
Sept. 9–10, 2025	National outlets including ABC News and NBC News report on the hearing and the missile-strike video; The War Zone notes it may be the first known MQ-9 engagement of an aerial target.
Sept. 11, 2025	Astrophysicist Avi Loeb publishes "Did a Hellfire Missile Hit a Samad Drone Launched by the Houthis on October 30, 2024?" on his blog, arguing the object's size and speed fit a Houthi Samad drone.

The Testimony

Opening Statements

The hearing opened at 10:05 a.m. in Room HVC-210 of the Capitol Visitor Center. Chairwoman Anna Paulina Luna framed it in institutional terms: "this is not science fiction or creating speculation. This is about national security, government accountability, and the American people's right to the truth." She described following up, with Rep. Burchett and former Rep. Matt Gaetz, on whistleblower reports from Air Force pilots about UAP activity at Eglin Air Force Base, and said that the former AARO director, Sean Kirkpatrick, had "attacked our witnesses and members on this Committee. It should be noted that he is a documented liar." She also complained that the Defense Department had told the committee that only members of the Armed Services Committee and the defense appropriations subcommittee could be read in to the special access programs holding UAP videos and files. Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett struck a more measured tone: "There is good reason to believe that most UAPs have origins far closer to home. Currently, NASA has not found any evidence that any UAPs have an extraterrestrial origin." She nonetheless joined Luna in stressing that whistleblowers deserve protection, and noted that some reports have "perfectly normal explanations—satellites, consumer drones, weather balloons, even pranks."

Jeffrey Nuccetelli — Vandenberg, 2003–2005

Jeffrey Nuccetelli, a former military police officer with sixteen years of active-duty Air Force service and, in Luna's introduction, more than twenty years of federal service, testified about five UAP incidents at Vandenberg Air Force Base between 2003 and 2005, when the base was conducting launches the National Reconnaissance Office called the most important in twenty-five years and hosted the National Missile Defense Project. "Each incident was witnessed by multiple personnel, documented, investigated, and reported up the chain of command," he said; "we sent information up, but we got no guidance down." He personally witnessed one and investigated others, and said six other service members had given him information. On October 14, 2003, Boeing contractors reported "a massive glowing red square silently hovering over two missile defense sites" that drifted east over the base and vanished; later that night guards at a launch site reported a bright object approaching fast over the ocean, and Nuccetelli, responding, found five shaken witnesses who described a triangle "larger than a football field" that hovered silently over their entry control point for about 45 seconds (his written statement calls it "a massive rectangular craft," and in questioning he spoke of "two square objects"). About a week later a patrol saw a light over the ocean descend and land or hover on the flightline before leaving; those witnesses, he said, "were threatened and intimidated afterward." In 2005 a patrol reported a silent triangle larger than a C-130, and Nuccetelli, off duty in his backyard with two other police officers, watched a pulsing light maneuver and reappear about 200 feet over his house as "a 30-foot diameter sphere of light." He called the security forces command center, which reported no balloons, aircraft or radar returns, and the witnesses filed written statements. Asked by Rep. Biggs whether any electromagnetic interference or equipment disruption was documented in the 2003–2005 incidents, he answered, "Not to my knowledge, no." He said AARO had contacted him at least twice, telling him the Air Force's police records had been destroyed on its routine three-year schedule, and that the documentation he kept had gone to AARO and the FBI. Describing the large objects, he said, "We are talking like flying buildings." His three requests to Congress were to fund independent research, to end secrecy and over-classification ("Transparency is the foundation of truth. Without it, witnesses like us are dismissed"), and to protect witnesses.

Dylan Borland — Langley AFB, 2012, and a Decade of Retaliation

Dylan Borland, an Air Force geospatial intelligence specialist on active duty from 2010 to 2013 and later a senior analyst for BAE Systems and Intrepid Solutions, testified that in the summer of 2012, at about 1:30 a.m. at Langley Air Force Base, he saw "an approximately 100-foot equilateral triangle take off from near the NASA hangar on the base. The craft interfered with my telephone, did not have any sound, and the material it was made of appeared fluid or dynamic." Under questioning he described a white light that crossed the flightline toward him, with a triangle seeming to "manifest" around it; it stopped about 100 feet above him, his phone grew hot and froze, the black surface was covered by "this gold, lava, plasma, some type of fluid," and after two or three minutes it shot up to airliner height, leaving him with a feeling of static electricity and a smell like a summer thunderstorm. The whole episode, he said, lasted about fifteen minutes, and to his knowledge no one else saw it. He testified that he was later exposed, through a special access program, to classified information about a "UAP legacy crash retrieval program"; that he became a whistleblower in March 2023, meeting AARO staff (not Kirkpatrick) that month and the Intelligence Community Inspector General in August 2023; and that since then he had faced clearance manipulation, phishing attempts to learn what he had told the Inspector General, and blacklisting that left him unemployed. Asked by Rep. Nancy Mace whether the craft was U.S. technology, he answered: "I did once upon a time, but knowing what I know now, I will have to answer that question in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) probably." He told Mace he did not think it was a foreign government's; asked later by Rep. Scott Perry whether he thought what he saw involved the U.S. government, he said, "That is 100 percent my opinion then and now." Many whistleblowers, he said, "feel discarded, isolated, hopeless, separated from the country they serve."

Alexandro Wiggins — USS Jackson, February 15, 2023

Alexandro Wiggins, an active-duty Navy senior chief operations specialist with almost twenty-four years of service, testified in his personal capacity, with the Navy's approval — the first currently serving witness at these hearings, as Rep. Burlison noted. At about 19:15 PST on February 15, 2023, in the Whiskey-291 warning area off Southern California aboard USS Jackson, he said, "A self-luminous tic-tac-shaped object emerged from the ocean before linking up with three other similar objects. The four then disappeared simultaneously with a high-synchronized, near-instantaneous acceleration." He observed "no sonic boom and no conventional propulsion signatures, no exhaust plume, no control surface articulation" on the ship's SAFIRE imaging system, and radar tracks dropped after the departure. Under questioning he added detail and some caution. He saw the contact on radar first, then went to the port bridge wing; it was about seven to eight nautical miles away; it rose slowly to perhaps 3,000–4,000 feet before speeding up, at what he guessed was "1, 2 Mach"; and the whole encounter lasted five to seven minutes. Because it was night and the object was distant, he said, "I do not have visual evidence showing exactly, you know, that it did, in fact, come from the water." He did not bring the video to Congress: he recognized his own voice on footage that had been published by journalists and then contacted Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet. Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz whether anyone in government had offered an explanation, he said, "No one," and added that he had had "no pushback at all." Asked by Rep. Lauren Boebert whether any known technology could explain it, he said, "It cannot, no," and that no agency had debriefed him: "No one has, no, ma'am." No after-action report was made, to his knowledge. His recommendations were standardized sensor-capture checklists, chain of custody for recordings, and confidential channels, because "sailors need to know that reporting UAP encounters will not harm their careers."

George Knapp — Four Decades of Reporting

George Knapp, chief investigative reporter at KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, who began covering the subject in 1987, testified that witnesses and whistleblowers who step forward "are routinely insulted, belittled, or worse." What convinced him was "the paper trail," documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in which military and intelligence personnel "admit that 'These things are real.'" He described his 1989 reporting on Bob Lazar, the DIA's AAWSAP program initiated by James Lacatski, and said he had "confirmed on the record" that Robert Bigelow and a colleague negotiated with senior Lockheed Martin executives for Bigelow's company, BAASS, to receive "a quantity of unusual material that had been stashed away and protected at a facility in California. That material was not made here." He described trips to Russia in the early 1990s, where defense officials told him "Russia had been doing the same thing that the United States had been doing, that is, secretly studying UFOs while publicly saying something completely different," and the Soviet "Thread III" analysis program under Colonel Boris Sokolov. Asked by Rep. Tim Burchett how he got classified documents out, he said the Russians "only stamped the top pages," so "I just removed them," adding, "if they had caught me, I would be in a gulag still." He recounted an October 1982 incident at a Soviet ICBM base in which UFOs maneuvered for about four hours and the launch control system activated on its own, saying "we were a couple of seconds away from World War III starting." Asked which contractors held material, he named Lockheed, adding that contractors "have lied about this because that is what they are supposed to do." He also described AARO's handling of witnesses such as Bob Jacobs and Robert Salas as so dismissive that "it almost looks like AARO operated as a counterintelligence operation." When Burlison played the Yemen video, Knapp said he had heard of the event and discussed it with Jeremy Corbell, and offered the line most quoted afterward: "that is a hellfire missile smacking into that UFO and just bounced right off, and it kept going."

Joe Spielberger — The Minority Witness

Joe Spielberger, senior policy counsel at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), testified as the minority witness and was the only participant not offering a UAP account. "Whistleblowers are the first line of defense to root out waste, fraud, abuse of power, and corruption in our government," he said, and retaliation "can instill a chilling effect across an agency, fostering a climate of fear and distrust, quieting dissent and free speech." POGO, he said, advises members of both parties "to focus on the evidence, not the individual." Questioned by Crockett, he cited the 9/11 Commission's finding that over-classification contributed to the failure to prevent the attacks, and urged a general policy favoring disclosure, with classification reserved for legitimate national security and privacy concerns. Asked by Boebert whether national security whistleblowers have any external appeal, he said they are "forced to rely on protection from the same agencies and people who they are alleging retaliated against them." Questioned by Rep. Summer Lee, he discussed the 2014 VA waitlist scandal and the firing of inspectors general under the current administration.

Reading the Testimony as a Whole

Taken together, the five witnesses offered three kinds of evidence that this file does not collapse into a single narrative: first-person accounts from veterans of events ten to twenty years old (Nuccetelli, Borland); a first-person account from an active-duty witness of an event two and a half years old, backed by sensor video already in public circulation (Wiggins); and sourcing-based testimony from a journalist and a policy specialist, neither of whom claimed a sighting. None of the accounts corroborates another in the sense of describing the same event. What unifies them is a theme of institutional failure to receive, investigate or protect people who report these encounters — though even here the witnesses differed, with Wiggins reporting fair treatment and Nuccetelli and Borland reporting intimidation and reprisal.

The Yemen Missile-Strike Video

The hearing's most widely covered moment came when Rep. Eric Burlison played footage he said he had been given, describing it as taken on October 30, 2024: "This video is of an MQ-9 drone tracking an orb, or this object, off the coast of Yemen. You will see that another MQ-9 launched a hellfire missile. You cannot see that drone. And I am not going to explain it to you." The clip shows a bright, fast-moving object traveling steadily above open water; a Hellfire missile strikes it, small pieces fly off, and the object continues on its course until the camera zooms out and the clip ends. "It kept going," Burlison said, "And it looks like the debris was taken with it," before asking: "why are we being blocked from this information consistently?" He said he was not going to speculate about what it was.

The War Zone's Joseph Trevithick, writing the same day, cautioned that the footage and its circumstances were otherwise unconfirmed. He noted that at times the object looked, "at least how the sensor interprets it, more cylindrical than orb-shaped," that the on-screen "LRD LASE DES" text would point to one MQ-9 laser-designating the target for the other ("buddy lasing"), and that the missile appeared to strike a grazing blow and deflect without detonating, which would suggest the Hellfire's fuze had not been modified for use against aerial targets. The use of a laser-guided Hellfire, he wrote, "might indicate a more impromptu engagement against a target of opportunity," and it remained unknown whether the Reapers had been tasked with an air-to-air mission at all.

If authentic and correctly described, the engagement would itself be notable: The War Zone called it "the first known instance of a Reaper engaging an aerial target of any kind in an operational setting," Reapers having previously downed a target drone with an AIM-9X only in a 2017 test. The operational backdrop is the Red Sea campaign: by late 2024 the Houthis had been contesting U.S. operations off Yemen for a year and had claimed to have shot down dozens of MQ-9s, before a U.S.–Houthi ceasefire was announced in May 2025. Asked about the video, a U.S. defense official told The War Zone, "We do not have anything to provide on this." AARO has not commented on the incident.

Key Figures

The Five Observables Assessment

Applying the Five Observables framework to the testimony and video evidence:

Assessment: This case's observables come from two sources of very different weight: sworn but uncorroborated testimony, and one piece of video. The testimony describes striking performance, but each claim rests on a single witness's impression, and the strongest-sounding of them carries the witness's own caveat: Wiggins said that at night and at seven or eight nautical miles he could not tell whether the object came from the water or from the horizon. The video is real and measurable in principle, but its most notable feature — an object continuing after a missile strike — is also the element with specific conventional readings. The two tracks do not overlap: no witness described a missile engagement, and the Yemen object was never claimed to be trans-medium. Nuccetelli's Vandenberg accounts and Borland's Langley account likewise stand on their own, sharing only a general morphology (luminous or dark craft, silent, high apparent performance). This file therefore treats the case as a bundle of separately evaluated claims joined by a single hearing, without letting strength in one track inflate confidence in another.

Evidence Assessment

Why "Disputed"

This case is rated Disputed because it combines a confirmed institutional event — a formal Congressional hearing with sworn testimony, including from an active-duty service member — with a central piece of video evidence that has specific, unresolved conventional readings. The hearing itself is not in dispute; what remains disputed is whether the claims and footage presented in it depict anomalous phenomena or conventional military, drone or balloon activity.

This file does not rate the case higher because the Yemen video's leading analysis engages its physical parameters directly (size, relative speed, timing with announced Houthi attacks), and because several of the hearing's most striking claims rest on single-witness testimony with no released corroborating data. Nor does it rate it lower, because the testimony is detailed, sworn and in two cases multi-witness, and the Yemen video's provenance, while unconfirmed, has not been disputed by the Defense Department.

The rating is also complicated by the hearing's dual character as an evidentiary event and a political one. The Task Force was formed with an institutional interest in showing that federal secrecy has gone too far across several unrelated subjects, and its chair was openly adversarial toward AARO's former director before any witness spoke. That does not mean the testimony was coached or the video staged — this file has found no evidence of either — but the hearing's framing cannot be treated as a neutral filter. Conversely, the minority witness pointedly declined to endorse any UAP claim, the Ranking Member cautioned against extraterrestrial interpretations, and Rep. Summer Lee urged colleagues not to be "distracted by sensational stories," so skepticism was represented in the record.

"Disputed" does different work across the case's two tracks. For the personal testimony, the dispute is whether to credit detailed, sworn first-person accounts from military witnesses in the absence of independent data — a hard epistemic question this archive does not claim to resolve. For the Yemen video, the dispute is narrower and more tractable: the footage exists, its parameters are measurable, and specific conventional explanations have been proposed. That sub-claim is resolvable in principle but currently unresolved, because neither the Pentagon nor anyone with the original data has published an identification.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

The hearing offers an unusually strong formal credibility profile: five witnesses under oath, including an active-duty senior chief petty officer, two Air Force veterans, a journalist with decades on the subject, and a policy specialist from a nonpartisan watchdog. The sworn, on-the-record nature of the testimony is the case's strongest credibility element, tempered by the fact that testimony is not independently verifiable evidence.

Broken down further: Nuccetelli and Borland are veterans describing events ten to twenty years old from memory. Nuccetelli's accounts are multi-witness, and he says he kept contemporaneous documentation, now with AARO and the FBI; Borland's sighting, by his own account, had no other witness. Wiggins is the strongest single witness in this file's assessment: an active-duty senior noncommissioned officer describing a recent, multi-sensor incident under his own name, with Navy approval, who was careful to separate what he saw from what he inferred. Knapp's credibility rests on decades of sourcing and document-gathering rather than personal observation, and several of his most dramatic claims (the Lockheed material, the 1982 Soviet launch-code incident, the Lacatski craft) are reports of what others told him or showed him. Spielberger's testimony stayed agnostic on UAP questions and should not be read as corroboration of any sighting.

AARO's credibility is a separate and unresolved question. Luna's statement that Kirkpatrick is "a documented liar" is a serious allegation from a committee chair, but it was made without a response from Kirkpatrick in the same record, and this file has not located an adjudicated finding either way. Kirkpatrick's historical-record conclusions, and Kosloski's adherence to them, remain part of the public record.

The hearing also lacked some voices. No AARO official, no Pentagon witness and no independent missile or sensor engineer testified, so the single most measurable piece of evidence — the video — received no expert technical testimony within the hearing record. The analyses that exist, by Loeb, The War Zone and skeptics such as Mick West, came afterward and from outside.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

This hearing follows the House Oversight Committee's July 2023 UAP hearing featuring David Grusch, Ryan Graves and David Fravor, and its November 2024 hearing featuring Tim Gallaudet, Luis Elizondo and Michael Gold, and it directly expands this site's Langley AFB UAP Incursions file through Dylan Borland's testimony. Borland's reference to a "legacy" crash-retrieval program echoes Grusch's 2023 claims without overlapping them in detail; this file treats the two accounts as parallel rather than mutually corroborating.

Nuccetelli's Vandenberg testimony sits beside another case in this archive at the same installation: the Vandenberg AFB Missile Disabling Incident of 1964, whose central witness, Robert Jacobs, Knapp named at this hearing as one of the witnesses he said AARO had dismissed. Knapp also named Robert Salas, a witness in this site's Malmstrom AFB Missile Shutdowns file. The two Vandenberg cases share no witnesses and are separated by four decades; this file notes the recurrence of reports from missile installations as a pattern worth flagging, without asserting any connection, since such bases are heavily staffed, closely watched and likely to generate documented multi-witness reports.

The hearing fits a recognizable pattern in Congress's post-2017 UAP engagement: dramatic testimony and coverage, followed by the responsible executive office declining to confirm or deny the specific claims, leaving the case open. The 2023 and 2024 hearings followed the same arc.

Knapp's testimony about Robert Bigelow connects the hearing to an older, documented thread. Bigelow's company, BAASS, ran the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the late 2000s, a program publicly disclosed in 2017 and associated with research at Skinwalker Ranch. Knapp said the DIA has still not released 95 percent of what the program produced. His specific claim of a negotiation with Lockheed Martin over recovered material rests on his own reporting and was not independently corroborated in this file's research.

Material Analysis

The case's physical evidence consists of the MQ-9 sensor video shown during the hearing, Wiggins's USS Jackson video (already public, and provided to Congress in full resolution, he said), and the official hearing record. No recovered material, radar data or chain-of-custody documentation for the Yemen video has been made public. This is a thinner material record than files in this archive involving recovered debris or laboratory samples: what exists is documentary and testimonial evidence of high formal weight.

The written record is nonetheless substantial. Witnesses submitted written statements in advance, members entered further documents (Knapp's Soviet "Thread III" files, Rep. Crane's letter on Grusch, and testimony from additional witnesses supplied by Steven Greer), and the full proceeding was published by the Government Publishing Office as Serial No. 119-44. A transcript records faithfully what a witness said; it does not establish whether what the witness saw was correctly interpreted.

The Conventional Explanation Candidate: A Houthi Samad-Series Drone

The leading conventional candidate for the Yemen video is that the object was a Houthi Samad-series drone, a one-way attack and reconnaissance drone that, per Loeb's figures, weighs about 200 kilograms and flies at up to about 70 meters per second. Houthi forces used such drones extensively in the Red Sea campaign, and on October 29, 2024, the day before the video's date, the Houthis announced that they had attacked southern Israel with multiple drones.

Avi Loeb's Technical Analysis

In a blog essay published on September 11, 2025, astrophysicist Avi Loeb used the Hellfire missile as a scale reference: a cylinder about 1.6 meters long, travelling at about 440 meters per second before impact. From the frames, he estimated the object at "a few meters" across and judged that the missile was moving about six times faster than the target in the video's projection, which puts the target's speed in the range of a Samad drone. He noted that the Samad, at about 200 kilograms, is roughly 4.4 times the mass of the 45-kilogram Hellfire, and argued that the missile only scraped off a few pieces because its warhead failed to detonate. His broader methodological point is that a well-documented munition passing alongside an unidentified object in the same frame offers a rare chance to turn a visual impression into a measurement.

Matching Against the Samad Airframe

Taken at face value, the drone reading accounts for the size, the speed, the date and the place. It also accounts for the apparent "bounce": a Hellfire with an unmodified, impact-triggered fuze that grazed a light airframe would deflect without exploding, as The War Zone observed, and a drone hit that way could keep flying with pieces missing. What it does not supply is direct confirmation: neither Loeb's measurements nor the Samad's published specifications come from this engagement, and no wreckage, transponder data or official identification has been released.

A Balloon, and Video Artifacts

A second family of explanations treats the object as a balloon or similar slow, soft target. Retired F-16 pilot Chris Lehto called it "obviously a balloon," and skeptic Mick West suggested "something like a balloon." In this reading, compiled on the Metabunk forum, the missile passes through or grazes a soft target and fragments it, and the apparent bounce and the bright pieces trailing the object are artifacts of low-resolution infrared imaging and hot debris in the missile's wake. This reading fits the absence of a detonation as well as the drone reading does, but sits less easily with the object's steady, fast track over the water before the strike, which Loeb's speed estimate puts well above wind speed. Neither reading has been tested against the original, full-resolution sensor data.

The Countervailing Military Novelty

The War Zone treated the footage as significant precisely because MQ-9s are not known to engage aerial targets operationally. The video's newsworthiness therefore does not depend on the object being anomalous: an MQ-9 laser-designating and unsuccessfully striking a Houthi drone would itself be a notable, previously undisclosed piece of military history. That weakens, without eliminating, any argument that the footage was withheld because the object was unconventional rather than because the tactic, target or source was operationally sensitive.

What Remains Unresolved

Neither the Pentagon nor AARO has published an identification of the Yemen object; a defense official told The War Zone, "We do not have anything to provide on this." Burlison himself presented the footage as evidence the public was being denied, not as proof of anomalous technology. This file's plausibility rating reflects that state of the record: specific, technically argued conventional explanations exist and have not been rebutted, but none has been officially confirmed, and the original video, sensor logs and any engagement report remain out of public view.

A Houthi Samad-Series Drone — Plausibility Rating: PLAUSIBLE BUT UNCONFIRMED

Related Cases

Further Reading — Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

Sources

• "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection," U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Read online →
• "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection" (Official Hearing Transcript, Serial No. 119-44), U.S. Government Publishing Office / govinfo.gov. Read online →
• "Up Next on Congress' Transparency List: UFOs," Roll Call. Read online →
• "Lawmakers Accuse Pentagon Officials of 'Lack of Transparency' Over UFO Sightings by Military Personnel," Stars and Stripes. Read online →
• "House Witness Testifies UFOs Nearly Activated Russian Nuclear Missiles During 1982 Incident," Fox News. Read online →
• "UFO Whistleblower David Grusch Hired to Advise Rep. Burlison," NewsNation. Read online →
• "Military Whistleblowers Share New Evidence of Alleged UAP at Transparency Hearing," DefenseScoop. Read online →
• "Congressman Shows Never-Before-Seen Video at Military UFO Hearing," ABC News. Read online →
• "Video Shown at House UAP Hearing Appears to Show Missile Fired at Object Off Yemen," NBC News. Read online →
• "Revelation That MQ-9 Reapers Are Now Engaging Aerial Targets Comes From UAP Hearing," The War Zone. Read online →
• "Did a Hellfire Missile Hit a Samad Drone Launched by the Houthis on October 30, 2024?" Avi Loeb, Medium. Read online →
• "D-day (Disclosure Day)? Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP)," LeonardDavid.com. Read online →
• "Video Shows UFO-Like Object Absorb US Hellfire Missile and Vanish," Interesting Engineering. Read online →
• "Video Shows UFO Get Hit by Hellfire Missile, Continues Flying Unobstructed," TMZ. Read online →
• "Task Force Hears Veterans' Testimony About Unexplained Flying Objects," Spectrum Local News. Read online →
• "Witness List for the UAP September 9, 2025 House Oversight Committee Hearing," Unidentified Phenomena. Read online →
• Graff, Garrett M. UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There. Avid Reader Press, 2023.
• Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Harmony Books, 2010.
• Greenewald, John, Jr. Inside The Black Vault: The Government's UFO Secrets Revealed. Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
• Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Da Capo Press, 1998 (orig. 1972).
• Peebles, Curtis. Watch the Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
• Metabunk, "UAP Hearing New Video – Yemen Orb" (forum thread compiling analyses, including Mick West's and Chris Lehto's balloon readings). metabunk.org
• "Hellfire missile hit a UFO over Yemen? Scientist suggests what it really was," WION, September 2025 (summary of Loeb's figures). wionews.com
• Nuccetelli and Borland written testimony, House Oversight Committee, September 2025. Nuccetelli; Borland
• "File: United States Capitol dome daylight.jpg," public domain, U.S. federal government work. View file →

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check against the official hearing transcript (GPO Serial No. 119-44), the witnesses' written statements, The War Zone's report and Avi Loeb's essay found that the earlier version of this page misdescribed several pieces of testimony and attributed to witnesses words that are not in the record. Nuccetelli's Vandenberg object was a glowing red square, not a "red glowing disc," and he testified that no electromagnetic or equipment effects were documented, so the claim that it "disabled electronics" was removed. Wiggins's statement said "The four then disappeared," not "The orb then disappeared"; the "Checkmate" quotation and the story of comparing an airliner's radar return could not be found in the transcript and were removed; and he testified that he faced "no pushback at all," that the Navy approved his testimony, and that he could not confirm the object came from the water, so the page no longer groups him with witnesses reporting reprisal, and Trans-Medium Travel and Low Observability are now rated Speculative rather than Present. Borland's sighting had no other known witness by his own account.

Following this review, the rating was changed from Disputed 52 to Disputed 48 (October 27, 2026), because the higher rating had rested partly on claims corrected or removed above.

Other corrections: this was the Oversight Committee's third UAP hearing (after July 2023 and November 2024), not its second; Sean Kirkpatrick left AARO in December 2023, not December 2024; the claim that Grusch's adviser post "restored" his security clearance was not supported (Rep. Crane entered a letter citing its removal); the "peripheral hit" wording attributed to Loeb and The War Zone was replaced with their actual descriptions; the Houthis claimed "dozens" of MQ-9 shootdowns, not "close to twenty"; Loeb's essay appeared on September 11, 2025, not "late 2025"; the hearing began at 10:05 a.m. in Room HVC-210; and an unsourced pre-hearing quotation from Spielberger was removed. Balloon readings of the Yemen video by Mick West and Chris Lehto were added alongside Loeb's drone analysis, as were Wiggins's own caveats, Nuccetelli's account of the destroyed police records, Knapp's references to the Robert Jacobs and Robert Salas cases, and Rep. Summer Lee's remarks. Computed lunar, airport and weather fields for Washington were removed as irrelevant to a hearing.