Three videos appearing to show encounters between US Navy aircraft and UFOs are real, the service has admitted, while insisting the clips merely show so far “unexplained aerial phenomena” and were never cleared for public release.
Three widely-circulated clips depicting military aircraft interacting with UFOs – mysterious objects performing maneuvers not possible using existing aviation technology – were never supposed to be released to the public, the Navy’s Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare spokesman Joseph Gradisher told the Black Vault earlier this month, but the videos are genuine – and their contents can’t be explained.
“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), Gradisher said, explaining that UAP is used instead of UFO as the “basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.”
Translated into English: we don’t know what they are, but there’s no evidence they’re alien in origin.
One clip (“FLIR1”) shows a dark, pill-shaped object hovering for several seconds before scooting sideways extremely fast. Another (“GoFast”) shows the observing aircraft’s sensor lock onto a fast-moving target as the pilots are heard in the background excitedly wondering what exactly they’ve stumbled across. The third (“Gimbal”) shows an oblong object moving steadily before stopping and rotating as the pilots observing it exclaim in surprise.
The videos were released to Luis Elizondo – a former military intelligence officer who claims to have directed the Pentagon’s UFO research arm, Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program – in 2017, for use in a database about aerial threats. While declassified, they were not cleared for general public use.
Since then, the videos have made their way to the New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science, a consortium of former intelligence officers, scientists, and celebrities promoting the investigation of UFOs and other “scientific mysteries.” The Pentagon complained, stating earlier this year that the videos “should still be withheld” as they were “never officially released to the general public,” but it’s a bit too late to put the unidentified flying cat back in the bag.