The chairman of a House subcommittee referred to UFOs as a "potential" threat to national security in the historic first congressional hearing on the subject in over 50 years.

Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN), chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation, said in his opening remarks on Tuesday, "This hearing and our oversight work has a simple idea at its core: Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat. And they need to be treated that way."

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Congress is holding a public hearing on UFOs, a topic of public fascination, for the first time in decades. Ronald Moultrie, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security, and Scott Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, testified in front of the committee.

"Today, we know better. UAPs are unexplained, it's true. But they are real. They need to be investigated. And any threats they pose need to be mitigated," Carson added, and he spoke about the "stigma associated" with the reporting of unidentified aerial objects.

"For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis," he explained. "Pilots avoided reporting, or were laughed at when they did. DOD officials relegated the issue to the back room, or swept it under the rug entirely, fearful of a skeptical national security community."

The hearing comes nearly a year after the office of the Director of National Intelligence released a highly anticipated assessment of 144 reports of UFOs originating from U.S. government sources between 2004 and 2021. Eighty were observed with multiple sensors, they found, and most reports described the UFOs as objects that interrupted pre-planned military training or other military operations.

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Last November, the DOD announced the formation of the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, which was designed to “synchronize efforts across the Department and with other Federal departments and agencies to detect, identify and attribute objects of interests in SUA, and to assess and as appropriate, mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security,” according to a memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.