Inside Capitol Hill's latest UFO hearings

AMERICANS HAD A PANDEMIC ON THEIR MINDS IN 2020 when then President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion COVID-19 relief bill.

- JEFFREY KLUGER

Tucked inside the legislation was another bit of business entirely-a provision requiring the Pentagon to investigate more than 120 sightings by military pilots of what used to be known as UFOs, and now go by the more decorous-sounding "unidentified anomalous phenomena" (UAP). Lawmakers wrote the requirement into the must-pass law in the hope that it might help explain cockpit footage that the Navy had declassified earlier that year.

The Department of Defense released the mandated report in 2021, analyzing both the video evidence and eyewitness accounts of flying objects moving in all manner of ways that defy conventional aeronautics-loop-the-looping and changing directions with a nimbleness no existing technology could manage. The military's verdict? A shrug. The objects weren't domestic, but whether they belonged to a hostile foreign power-terrestrial or otherwise was impossible to say.

Inauguration Day for Trump's second term is more than two months away, but when the once-and-future President returns to Washington, he'll find the mystery of UAPS again there waiting for him.