- The U.S. Navy says three videos showing reported encounters between Navy aircraft and UFOs are real.
- But a Navy spokesperson says the clips show “unexplained aerial phenomena,” which is not to say that they’re piloted by aliens.
- While the videos are unclassified, the Navy says they were never cleared for release.
The U.S. Navy has confirmed that three online videos purportedly showing UFOs are genuine. The service says the videos, taken by Navy pilots, show “unexplained aerial phenomena,” but also states that the clips should have never been released to the public in the first place.
The three videos in question are titled "FLIR1," "Gimbal," and "GoFast." They show two separate encounters between Navy aircraft and UFOs.
One video was taken in 2015 off the East Coast by a F/A-18F fighter jet using the aircraft's onboard Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) Pod. The other clip, also recorded with a Super Hornet ATFLIR pod, was taken off the coast of California in 2004 by pilots flying from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. In the videos, air crews loudly debate what the objects are and where they came from.
The videos were released for public viewing by The New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a UFO research group from former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge.
In each case, the objects in the videos undertook aerial maneuvers that aren't possible with current aviation technology. In the 2004 incident, according to The New York Times, the objects "appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."
Joseph Gradisher, official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, told The Black Vault, an online repository of secret and otherwise classified documents, that the Navy "designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena."
That terminology is important. "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" provides "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," Gradisher told The Black Vault.
In other words, the Pentagon says the aerial objects in the videos are simply unidentified, and for now, unexplained. The Navy is pointedly not saying the objects are flying saucers or otherwise controlled by aliens.
Earlier this year, the Department of Defense told The Black Vault that the videos were unclassified, but never cleared for public release, and that there had been no review process within the Pentagon for releasing them.
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Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.
