Though long dismissed as the delusions of science fiction, UFOs have emerged as a serious subject in the nation’s capital. “It’s that anxiety that you get when you’re getting close to the finish line,” he says, “but it’s still not clear it’s a done deal.”
Yet as he watched official Washington finally take the topic seriously, an uneasy feeling struck him. As DC’s first registered UFO lobbyist, he’d spent more than a quarter century pleading for lawmakers and the administration to stop snickering at the issue. Photograph by Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.įor Bassett, this first public congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years was a milestone. But they are real.” Congress recently held a hearing on UFOs after a government report documented 144 sightings of unidentified aircraft. “For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis,” André Carson, the Democratic congressman from Indiana who chairs the House Intelligence subcommittee that had organized the event, told the audience. As the proceedings got underway, one of the Pentagon higher-ups played recently declassified footage showing a mysterious object darting across the sky.
Over the next hour and a half, he stared at his 43-inch LCD monitor and observed stern-faced military officials in a congressional hearing room answer lawmakers’ questions about the unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs-another term for UFOs-that servicemembers had encountered in recent years. On a Tuesday morning in mid-May, Stephen Bassett flipped open his laptop, logged on to YouTube, and watched live-streamed coverage of America’s elected representatives doing something he’d waited years to see.