Navy Formally Releases Footage of Pilots Encountering “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”

The truth might be out there after all

US Navy video of a UFO
Officially released footage from the Navy shows a literal UFO.
Department of Defense

Readers with a penchant for all things UFO-related — or perhaps all things Tom DeLonge-related — may recall that the onetime Blink-182 member posted videos of Navy pilots encountering bizarre flying devices in midair. Last year, the Navy subsequently confirmed those videos as genuine. And now they’ve gone another step, making the videos available to the general public.

To put it more simply: the Navy just released a trio of videos featuring bona fide UFOs — encounters which took place in 2004 and 2015. The precise term they used, as per this CBS News report, is “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Department of Defense spokesperson Sue Gough commented that “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.”

Also contributing to the discourse was onetime Senator Harry Reid, who has long discussed UFOs and public policy. Following the formal release of the footage by the Pentagon, Reid commented on Twitter and suggested that there was a lot more where that came from.

Writing at Forbes, Jack Brewster placed the videos’ formal release into a wider context.

“The release of the videos and the Times report on the experiences of the Navy pilots who encountered the objects comes as government officials have sought to investigate and lend more transparency to the subject in recent years,” he wrote.

Given that the military’s history regarding UFOs has largely been the opposite of verbose, this shift represents a welcome change — and one that could lead to some unexpected destinations.

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