The Pentagon has officially released three videos of U.S. Navy pilots encountering UFOs, The Guardian reported. Although they had previously been leaked, the Navy acknowledged they were real in September, and now, they’ve decided to make their declassification and release formal.
The three videos first gained a wide public audience in 2017.
The videos show two different encounters, one in 2004 and the other in 2015. Although the first was leaked online in 2007, the videos didn’t gain much of an audience until two were published by the New York Times in 2017, and the other was released by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science, a group co-founded by former Blink 182 frontman Tom DeLonge.
While unidentified flying objects, or as the Navy prefers, “unexplained aerial phenomena,” don’t necessarily equate to aliens, the encounters caught on video certainly raise some questions.
In the 2004 incident, two pilots encountered an oblong object during a training flight over the Pacific Ocean.
One of the pilots, David Fravor, told CNN that the object moved in ways he couldn’t explain. “As I got close to it … it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds,” he recalled. “This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way.”
The other two videos document the 2015 encounter.
In the videos, the pilots can be heard reacting with incredulity at what they were seeing: multiple objects moving at high speeds and one rotating in mid-air.
“They’re all going against the wind. The wind’s 120 knots to the west. Look at that thing, dude!” says one pilot.
Between 2007 and 2012, the Pentagon had a team dedicated to investigating such encounters.
The program was ended due to conflicting budget priorities, but the program’s former head, Luis Elizondo, told CNN that “there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.
“These aircraft — we’ll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.”
Despite already acknowledging the veracity of the videos, the Pentagon felt it was time to officially release the videos themselves.
A statement explained that the Pentagon sought to “clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos.
“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”
On Twitter, former Senator Harry Reid welcomed the Pentagon’s release of the videos.
However, at the same time, he also invited considerable speculation as he suggested that the videos “only scratched the surface of research and materials available.”
The leaks of the videos have also prompted a review of the Navy’s guidelines for reporting UFO encounters.
“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace in recent years,” explained Joseph Gradisher, spokesperson for Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, according to ABC News .
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“For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the USAF take these reports very seriously and investigate each and every report.”
h/t: CNN , The Guardian , ABC News
