
At a recent congressional hearing, the public fixated on a leaked video appearing to show a U.S. missile striking an unidentified object off Yemen in 2024. Whatever the object was, one pressing question is why it took a leak — rather than government disclosure — for the public to see it.
I spent more than 30 years inside the U.S. intelligence community, including serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and later as a consultant to the military. During those years, I witnessed a troubling pattern: Incidents of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP (formerly known as unidentified flying objects), were detected by cutting-edge radar and other systems but routinely dismissed, buried or classified beyond justification. In 2017, I helped bring footage of three UAP encounters to the public. Those clips, recorded on advanced infrared cameras by Navy aviators, forced the Pentagon to admit that UAP are real.












