We want to believe. Really, we do.

On Tuesday, a House “Intelligence” subcommittee held the nation’s first congressional hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years. The hearing included testimony from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie and Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, two men who’ve no doubt realized their life’s ambition of overseeing the Pentagon’s new task force on UFOs, er, UAPs.

That’s unidentified aerial phenomena to you stuck-in-the-‘90s types. And for those of you with a clean calendar for the next 90 minutes, you can watch the proceedings here.

As it turns out, a database of reports on these flying saucers spaceships UFOs UAPs now includes some 400 incidents, up from just 143 assessed in a report released about a year ago, according to Bray. That’s a serious increase in activity, no? But don’t get too excited. As the government-funded space cadets at NPR report, “The military’s 2021 report said no evidence of aliens had been found. [Bray] told lawmakers that they still haven’t uncovered anything 'nonterrestrial in origin,’ even though there are incidents they can’t explain.”

Asked by Illinois Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi about these close encounters, Bray said, “We have not had a collision. We’ve had at least 11 near misses, though.”

Krishnamoorthi then asked if we’d ever detected communication signals of any kind coming from these UAPs, and Bray said we hadn’t. But he also confirmed that the U.S. has never tried to communicate with them, nor fired upon them.

Bray also said that the UAP Task Force “doesn’t have any wreckage that isn’t explainable” or “consistent with being of terrestrial origin.” But, hey, there’s some wiggle room there, right? Bray said his task force doesn’t have any downed space ships or aliens, but he didn’t say anything about Area 51.

It’s a tired assertion, but it bears repeating now more than ever: The ultimate proof that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that not a single one of the documented objects has attempted to communicate with us — or at least not with American aviators. Indeed, all of the UAPs so far have appeared to be unmanned. Nope, not a single ambassadorial Great Gazoo or Marvin the Martian among them. And, so far as we know, not a single illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator trained on our magnificent planet, ready to produce an earth-shattering kaboom.

This is serious stuff, though. As Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:

At the moment when the public decided aliens from the Fleepgort Star System probably didn’t travel 11 million miles to rummage around in the bodily orifices of National Enquirer readers, the UFO industry went the way of the “Star Trek” convention, and became a laughingstock. Those among us who still cared in the ‘90s continued to get information from a documentary series called “The X-Files,” but otherwise things were pretty quiet on the spaceman beat. Then Adam Schiff ripped off his fake humanoid skull and revealed that he actually has the head of a neon-glowing extraterrestrial salamander. But since this was not surprising it wasn’t reported.

If you stayed with us this long, you deserve a hard-news payoff. So here goes: The hearings were largely an attempt to destigmatize UAP reporting by our aviators, many of whom have been reluctant to report what they’ve seen due to the prospect of being ridiculed. “We also spent considerable efforts engaging directly with our naval aviators to help destigmatize the act of reporting sights and encounters,” Bray said. “The direct results of those efforts have been increased reporting. … The message is now clear: if you see something, you need to report it.”

What to make of all these sightings? Who knows. But our Mark Alexander has fleshed out some plausible explanations, which include DARPA-type R&D programs. In addition, he points out the U.S. military is always on the cutting edge of some mind-bending technologies. This was true when we developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s, and it was true when we produced the first stealth technology aircraft in the 1980s.

And it’s every bit as true today.