164: UFO Hearings with Special Guest Mark O'Connell

On Tuesday, May 17, A House Intelligence subcommittee held the first congressional hearing in more than 50 years to focus on military reports of unexplained aerial phenomena (UFOs and UAPs)! This rare event included documents, discussions, videos and testimonies from Pentagon officials, pilots and others- along with the formation of a new organization called, AOIMSG….and YOU KNOW wherever there's a long space acronym, an episode of Casual Space is sure to follow!!! Join Beth, Chad and special guest Author, podcast host and UFO researcher AND friend of the show Mark O'Connell!

From the official congressional transcripts, this is how the hearing opened: "In 2017, we learned for the first time that the Department of defense had quietly restarted a similar organization tracking what we now call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAPs. Last year, Congress rewrote the charter for that organization now called the Airborne Object Identification and Management. Synchronization Group or AOIMSG for short. Today, we will bring that organization out of the shadows. This hearing and oversight work has a simple idea at its core. Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat, and they need to be treated that way. For too long the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good intelligence analysis, pilots avoided reporting or were laughed at when they did. It's true, but they are real. They need to be investigated. And many threats they pose need to be mitigated."

Here's a great article by Axios to get you all caught-up: https://www.axios.com/2022/05/17/congress-pentagon-ufo-uap-hearing

and here are the actual transcripts of the congressional hearing if you really want to dig in: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/congress-holds-historic-open-hearing-on-ufos-5-17-22-transcript

About Mark: Mark O'Connell bio: Mark O'Connell got his start in television writing for Trek: The Next Generation" ("Timescape") and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" ("Second Sight," "Meridian," "For the Cause" and fan favorite "Who Mourns for Morn?"). Since then, he has had feature screenplays optioned and placed in development at Ruddy-Morgan Productions, DreamWorks Animation, and Disney. His comedy screenplay Doug and Dave was in development at Disney with the late Bill Paxton attached to direct. Mark's first book is The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOS, a biography of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, famed UFO researcher and inspiration behind Steven Spielberg's epic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Close Encounters Man was published by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. Mark is currently Co-Executive Producer and on-camera expert on UFO Witness, a reality show now streaming on the Discoveryplus streaming service. The second season of UFO Witness is currently in production. Mark is also on the screenwriting faculty of the College of Computing & Digital Media at DePaul University.

Follow Mark on Twitter: @markoconnell_1

And be sure to listen to him on his Far-Fetched podcast: https://ococonnell.podbean.com/

GET THE BOOK: Get your copy of The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOS, a biography of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, https://www.amazon.com/Close-Encounters-Man-World-Believe/dp/0062484176/ref=asc_df_0062484176/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312090128349&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15632495319288089556&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=