White House says UAPs have impacted military training, readiness 

The White House said Wednesday that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have impacted the military’s training and readiness.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reiterated at a press briefing Wednesday that the White House is taking the issue of UAPs seriously. His comments came just after the House Oversight subcommittee on national security spent the morning hearing from three witnesses who called for more transparency in how the government handles UAP reports.

“I would just say what I said last week when I got asked about this: We obviously take the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena seriously,” Kirby said.

“There is a whole office at the Pentagon that is stood up to analyze the data, collect reports, collate those reports, and forward them up appropriately,” he added. “And that’s, I think, testament of the fact that — that we know that in some cases, these phenomena have impacted military training, have then impacted military readiness.”

When asked if President Biden believes the witnesses’ claims about UAPs warrant a further investigation, Kirby said that the “work is ongoing.”

“If the President didn’t believe that the sightings by pilots were serious enough to be — to be considered, he wouldn’t have wanted the Pentagon to stand up an office to — to look at this, to analyze the data, to collect reports, and provide a system by which we can collate the information and better figure out what we’ve got here,” he said.

All three witnesses — former fighter pilot Ryan Graves of Americans for Safe Aerospace, former intelligence official David Grusch and former Navy pilot David Fravor — said during the hearing that UAPs “potentially” pose a national security risk. Both lawmakers and the witnesses at the hearing called for a more centralized reporting system for UAP encounters.

“If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety,” Graves said.