‘We may not be alone.’ Pentagon releases videos of UFOs. What does this mean?
The Pentagon released three videos Monday showing mysterious unidentified flying objects that were leaked in 2007 and again in 2017, according to the United States Department of Defense.
Two Navy pilots flying fighter jets during training spotted the “whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane” in November 2004 over San Diego, according to The New York Times. The other two videos released were taken in 2015.
You can hear one of the pilots say in the 2004 video, “There’s a whole fleet of them. Look at that thing, dude.”
The department said it is “releasing the videos in order 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.”
The Pentagon has “declassified” the videos, meaning they have officially removed its status as a secret.
But a retired commander who flew one of those jets that night thinks there’s more to it.
“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” David Fravor told ABC News in 2017. “I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying that has the performance, the acceleration — keep in mind this thing had no wings.”
Fravor told the outlet that in 18 years of flying, he’s never seen anything that has come close to what he observed that fall night.
He also told CNN that the objects were rotating, moving quickly and changing direction.
The release of the videos also comes after UFO researcher Christian Lambright sent a request in October through the Freedom of Information Act that was directly related to “a series of videos showing Navy pilots baffled by mysterious, fast objects in the sky,” Business Insider reported in January.
In response to this request, a Navy representative said they had “discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET,” according to Vice.
The representative said that at least one of the videos was classified as “SECRET,” and that if released, the information “could cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States,” Business Insider said.
It remains unclear which video the Navy was referring to, and if that video is one of the three released this week.
“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,” the recent DOD statement said.
The UFOs “remain characterized as ‘unidentified,’ ” the statement said.
A mysterious program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program responsible for tracking UFOs closed in 2012, but “backers” say even though funding dried up, the program continued, The New York Times reported.
It was funded mostly “at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena,” the outlet said.
An astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told The New York Times that not knowing the origin of an object doesn’t imply its from outer space. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” Sara Seager said. “But what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”
However, a former Pentagon UFO official who led the program said he saw evidence that made him believe in the possibility that aliens have visited Earth.
“There is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” Luis Elizondo told CNN in 2017. “These aircraft — we’ll call them aircraft — are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the U.S. inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of.”
“We found a lot,” he added.
This story was originally published April 28, 2020 at 12:37 PM with the headline "‘We may not be alone.’ Pentagon releases videos of UFOs. What does this mean?."
