House panel to hold highly anticipated public hearing on UFOs - CNN

The event marked the first congressional public hearing on UFOs in decades, a high-profile moment for a controversial topic that has long been relegated to the fringes of public policy.

For many lawmakers and intelligence and military personnel working on unexplained aerial phenomena, the bigger concern with the episodes is not that alien life is visiting Earth, but rather that a foreign adversary like Russia or China might be fielding some kind of next-generation technology in American airspace that the United States doesn't know about.

Democratic Rep.

André Carson of Indiana, the chairman of the panel holding the hearing, warned in his opening remarks, "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat.

The hearing featured testimony from top government officials and the display of images and video of unidentified aerial phenomena.

Following the conclusion of the public hearing, the panel will hold a closed-door, classified briefing Tuesday afternoon.

During his testimony, Ronald Moultrie, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, argued there is a need to balance transparency with the protection of sensitive intelligence information, saying there is an "obligation to protect sensitive sources and methods."

"Our goal is to strike that delicate balance, one that enables us to maintain the public's trust while preserving those capabilities that are vital to the support of our service personnel," he said.

"This committee has an obligation to understand what you are doing to determine whether any UAPs are new technologies or not -- and if they are, where are they coming from?"

The hearing was convened by the House Intelligence Committee's Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation subcommittee.

It follows the release last year by the US intelligence community of a long-awaited report on mysterious flying objects that have been seen moving through restricted military airspace over the last several decades.

The report examined 144 reports of what the government terms "unidentified aerial phenomenon" -- only one of which investigators were able to explain by the end of the study.