Video shown Tuesday during a House committee hearing on “unidentified anomalous phenomena” purported to show a missile being fired at an object, which a congressman called an “orb,” off the coast of Yemen in 2024.
The video was played at a Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets hearing that focused on “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” also known as UAP, which are unexplained objects seen in the sky.
Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said that the video was taken on Oct. 30, 2024, and shows an unknown object being tracked by an MQ-9 drone, also known as a Reaper.
A second MQ-9 drone not seen in the video fired a Hellfire missile at the object, Burlison said.
The video appears to show a speeding image, apparently the missile, enter from the left of the screen and make contact with the object, which continues but deforms and tumbles, and smaller objects (one of them very faint) come off the back.
“It kept going, and it looked like the debris was taken with it,” Burlison said. “I’m not going to speculate what it is, but the question is why are we being blocked from this information?”
Burlison said the video came from a whistleblower and that an independent review was ongoing.
The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets was formed by the House Oversight Committee in February and was tasked “to examine the declassification of materials in the public interest,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer said at the time.
Tuesday’s hearing was titled “Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection.”
The existence of UAPs, which in pop culture have also been called UFOs, has long captivated the public as potential evidence of extraterrestrial life or secret programs, although there has never been concrete evidence for either explanation.
In November 2024, the Pentagon released an annual report about UAPs and said that some of the reports of possible sightings turned out to be balloons, birds and unmanned aerial systems.
Some cases were closed because there wasn’t enough evidence to conduct an analysis and 21 were deemed worthy of more analysis, the report said. The Defense Department’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is leading the effort to collect and analyze UAP reports.
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology,” the report said.
The report also stated that “none of these resolved cases substantiated advanced foreign adversarial capabilities or breakthrough aerospace technologies.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said at Tuesday’s hearing that skepticism over the issue of UAPs has led to hasty conclusions.
“For too long, the issue of unidentified anomalous phenomena — commonly known as UAPs — has been shrouded in secrecy, stigma, and in some cases outright dismissal,” she said. “Today, I want to state clearly: This is not science fiction or creating speculation.”
She said the issue was about national security and “the American people’s right to the truth,” and that she has spoken to a number of what she called whistleblowers from the military.
U.S. Air Force veteran Dylan Borland told the hearing Tuesday that he saw a UAP, which he believes involved the U.S. government, in 2012, when he was stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
Borland, who was a geospatial intelligence specialist, said he had returned to his barracks and at around 1:30 a.m. he saw “an approximately 100-foot-long 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,” he said. “I was under this triangular craft for a few minutes, and then it rapidly ascended to commercial jet-level in seconds, displaying zero kinetic disturbance, sound or wind displacement.”
It was not clear from Tuesday’s hearing what the object was off the coast of Yemen in which the missile was allegedly fired.
Luna told NBC News Tuesday night that she doesn’t know what the object seen the video is, but that the public deserves answers and that videos like it have been over-classified by the government.
“I don’t know any balloons that can be split and then stay together like this particular thing did,” she said.
“But what I will tell you is, in the name of science and in the name of national security, we should be getting answers to these questions and we should be taking this seriously,” she said.
Military tensions around Yemen have been high, after Houthi rebels attacked commercial ships there in November 2023. The Iran-backed militants said the actions were aimed at supporting Hamas and against Israel over the war in Gaza.
