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The Pentagon’s task force investigating UFO sightings has received hundreds more reports since last year, a top naval intelligence official told lawmakers Tuesday — adding that officials are still baffled about “what is out there.”

Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray made the disclosure before a House Intelligence subcommittee during the first open congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years. The public session lasted approximately 90 minutes, after which lawmakers and witnesses retreated behind closed doors for a classified briefing.

During the hearing, Bray shared two declassified videos of strange encounters. One video showed flashing triangle-shaped objects that were later determined to be visual artifacts of light passing through night-vision goggles.The second video showed a shiny, spherical object zipping past the cockpit window of a military aircraft. “I do not have an explanation for what this specific object is,” Bray admitted to the House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence and Counterproliferation, known as C3.

A report released last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Navy-led Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, found that 144 UFO sightings had been reported by government sources since 2004. However, since the report was released, Bray said, “the UAP Task Force database has now grown to contain approximately 400 reports.”

That number includes “at least 11 near-misses” involving US assets, according to Bray, who added that sightings are “frequent and continuing.”

Bray went on to suggest that the increased number of reports were in part because “the stigma has been reduced” and American servicemembers no longer fear being labeled conspiracy theorists or mentally unstable. 

Most of the reported sightings can likely be attributed to “airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, US government or US industry developmental programs or foreign-adversary systems,” according to Bray. 

However, he added, “there are a number of other events in which we do not have an explanation … Those are obviously the ones that are of most interest to us.”

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Bray insisted that the task force was not hiding any “material” or “emanations” that would suggest “anything nonterrestrial in origin,” nor “any wreckage that isn’t explainable, that isn’t consistent with being a terrestrial origin.”

“We’ll go wherever the data takes us,” he added, stressing that the Defense Department has “made no assumptions about what this is or isn’t.”

Ronald Moultrie, who oversees the task force as US defense undersecretary for intelligence and security, acknowledged an “insatiable desire” to get to the truth behind the sightings. “We want to know what’s out there as much as you want to know what’s out there,” he told lawmakers.

“Our goal is not to potentially cover up something if we were to find something — it’s to understand what may be out there,” Moultrie added, noting that because the objects “pose potential flight safety and general security risks, we are committed to a focused effort to determine their origins.”

Subcommittee chairman Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) said he hoped the hearing would bring the task force’s work “out of the shadows.”

“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena are a potential national security threat and they need to be treated that way,” he said in his opening statement, using the official term for UFOs.

“UAPs are unexplained, it’s true, but they are real. They need to be investigated, and any threats they pose need to be mitigated,” Carson added.

Some of the lawmakers made clear they were more alarmed at the possibility that the sightings were of advanced technologies from other countries rather than possible alien life.

“Despite the serious nature of this topic, I have to say I’m more interested in our understanding of Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapon development or understanding why this administration was so slow to share actionable intelligence with the Ukrainians,” ranking member Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.) said in his opening remarks. “However, inasmuch as this topic may help us better understand unknown activities of Russia, China, I am on board [with this hearing]. The intelligence community has a serious duty to our taxpayers to prevent potential adversaries such as China and Russia from surprising us with unforeseen technologies.”

“It’s obviously really very serious,” agreed Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), “because should one of our adversaries have developed a technology that we don’t know about, we need to know about it yesterday.”

According to an Economist/YouGov poll taken last year shortly before the report’s release, 61% of Americans believe there definitely or probably is intelligent life on other planets while just 17% say there definitely or probably is not. The poll also found that 65% of Americans believe the government knows more about UFOs than it has revealed publicly.