A subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives will be holding an open congressional hearing next week about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) for the first time in more than 50 years.

Andre Carson, a Democratic representative from Indiana, said that the House Intelligence Committee will be leading the charge, Vice reported.

He said, “Congress hasn’t held a public hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena (UFO's) in over 50 years. That will change next week when I lead a hearing in @HouseIntel on this topic & the national security risk it poses. Americans need to know more about these unexplained occurrences.”

The hearing is currently scheduled for Tuesday, May 17, and it will take place in front of a subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee that is currently chaired California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

Schiff said that the committee is holding the series of hearings to explore “one of the great mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”

At the time of writing, two officials currently serving in the Pentagon are scheduled to testify at the hearing.

After the New York Times published a 2017 article about the existence of a project called “the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)” in the Pentagon that was focused on the identification of UFOs, official government disclosures about UFOs have come with increasingly rapidity.

In 2021, the Pentagon released a report about its UFO program that detailed more than 140 sightings of aerial objects that could not be explained between 2004 and 2021. The report was considered to be relatively underwhelming at the time, because much of the information had already been disclosed and much of the report was simply concerned with securing additional funding for the Pentagon.

The Black Vault, a government transparency organization, was able to obtain a classified version of this report earlier this year. Reportedly, this version of the report contains more fascinating details but still has considerable parts of it redacted.

Since the 2021 report was released, various outlets have obtained hundreds of pages of reports and research on futuristic technology funded by the government under the auspices of the AATIP and a sister program called the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program.

The Barack Obama Presidential Library has also said that it has thousands of pages of documents pertaining to UFOs.