September 2025
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which touches on our understanding of consciousness, is on the rise in the news media because of recent disclosures about the U.S. government has hidden from view by elected officials and the public. A hearing with whistleblowers on 9 September was widely covered, albeit generally without references to nonhuman intelligence (NHI).
SCREEN SHOT news.com.au
The hearing, organised by the House Oversight Committee, included whistleblowers like Jeffrey Nuccetelli and Dyland Borland, who revealed, under oath, spectacular UAP sightings at U.S. Air Force bases. What made headlines in the news, however, was a conspicuous video that representative Eric Burlison released during the hearing. The film, leaked by a military whistleblower, allegedly shows how an American Hellfire missile “bounces off” a UAP without causing harm to it. No known human technology is believed to be capable of surviving a direct hit from such a weapon.
Here’s a round-up of how the press is covering this development:
The BBC live-covered the hearing fairly broadly but avoided any mention of NHI. Towards the end, the programme complemented the live stream with two texts that seemed to have the purpose of adding credence to the reporting, one about how signals from space can have a mundane explanation and one about why people get drawn into conspiracy theories.
Fox News focused on the leaked video, as did CBS and ABC. The latter channel speculated whether the unscathed object was an enemy drone; the video is said to have been shot outside the coast of Yemen last autumn.
USA Today highlighted the video, as well, but the newspaper dared to widen the scope of the topic:
“The hearing was the third in as many years in the halls of Congress since fiery testimony in July 2023 reignited public fascination in UFOs – not to mention the possibility that aliens are piloting them. Across the three hearings, several witnesses – including journalists and high-ranking military members – have testified under oath about shadowy military programs to retrieve and study not only interstellar alien craft, but the extraterrestrial pilots themselves,” Eric Lagatta wrote.
In Australia, news.com.au led its story with the unique video and pointed to demands by a special U.S. Congress task force that secret UAP programs be disclosed. The outlet did, briefly, mention that representative Burlison said he was open to the possibility that UAP sightings have to do with extraterrestrial visitors and/or nonhuman intelligence.
Outside the English-speaking world, French newspaper Le Figaro noted that conventional explanations for what seems to happen in the video have been proposed (such as the speculations in the reporting by ABC).
Le Parisien covered the event in a similar way but went further: It included an exchange between Burlison and Borland about the possibility that the U.S. government has technology made by NHI in its possession.
Argentina’s El Clarín reported about the video without references to conventional explanations. The paper noted something not many others did: If the video is real it is a surprising confirmation that U.S. drones are instructed to attack UAPs.
German news magazine Focus had a brief article about the hearing. No referrals to NHI but an acknowledgment that this is about UAPs and that lawmakers demand more openness from the government.
Another recent sign the UAP phenomenon is slowly becoming normalized in mainstream media is a story in the New Yorker on 7 September, headlined “What’s the deal with U.F.O.’s?”.
Reporter Matthew Hutson conducts a fair review of recent developments and research and includes central figures like Avi Loeb and Gary Nolan. The article even suggests that the Pentagon branch assigned to analyse and evaluate UAP sightings — the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) — hasn’t been completely reliable. This is a very different approach than in The Wall Street Journal’s UAP dismissing piece in June, an article that was based on arguably misleading information from the former head of AARO.
However, apart from a brief reference to pilot Ryan Graves, there is no mention of the crucial whistleblowers, which is a significant flaw in an otherwise excellent story.
Written by Anders Bolling
Edited by Liza Horan
