UFOs challenge gravity, gain mainstream attention, and prompt government investigation.

UFOs: The U.S. Government’s Response – Part 1

For decades, the term UFO – or unidentified flying object – has conjured images of crazed conspiracy theorists, with conversations on the topic typically relegated to fringe corners of the internet. But that stigma has begun to collapse in recent years as it’s become clear that something unexplained is in our skies. Hundreds of credible, documented UFO cases have perplexed our leading scientists and military officials and prompted action from Congress and the Pentagon, which have deemed the issue a serious national security threat.

Now, after years of denying the legitimacy of UFOs, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged a decades-long effort to investigate and explain the phenomena.

Out Of The Shadows

UFOs have long held a unique place in American culture, with countless stories of strange craft in our skies told by those convinced they’d seen something unexplainable. But those tales were often backed up, at best, by grainy camcorder footage or blurry polaroid pictures, and, at worst, by the word of eyewitnesses.

For decades, the federal government led the American people to believe they were staying out of the matter, lending credibility to those who believed stories of UFOs were nothing more than urban legend. But behind the scenes, officials at the highest levels of government had spent decades – and hundreds of millions of dollars – investigating the phenomena in secret.

• Project Blue Book, a top secret Air Force initiative that investigated thousands of UFO reports from 1947 to 1969. According to internal documents, the project concluded most of the sightings involved conventional aircraft or spy planes, but 701 incidents were classified as “unexplained.”
• A modern-day Pentagon UFO program called AATIP — Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. AATIP was tasked with compiling evidence of what they deemed UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) and attempting to investigate and, more importantly, explain their origins.

According to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who for years pushed for UFO research behind the scenes, much of the funding for AATIP came from “black money” programs to keep it from the public.

Evidence Mounts

According to Pentagon officials, AATIP and other similar programs have turned their focus toward UFOs reported near military bases, studying service members who say they’d suffered physical effects after encounters with unidentified craft, and according to the New York Times, analyzing “metal alloys and other materials … recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.”

Perhaps most notably, the government also began gathering video recordings and radar data from reported UFO incidents, including footage captured by military planes and ships. While the vast majority of those videos remain classified, some have leaked to the general public.

• Three such videos, which leaked in 2017 and 2018, show U.S. pilots tracking craft that behaved in unusual ways, accelerating at incredible speeds and bewildering pilots in pursuit.

As the videos circulated online there were questions about their legitimacy, but in 2020, the Pentagon confirmed they were authentic cases of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

In one of the videos from 2015, a craft moving at high speed is recorded flying into strong winds while spinning like a top in a way that pilots say seemed to defy the laws of known physics.

Another video, which garnered the most attention, came from a UFO incident off the coast of San Diego. It was 2004 and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was conducting training operations 100 miles off the coast when advanced radar systems began picking up “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” operating over the horizon.

Those craft were observed on multiple tracking systems descending 80,000 feet in seconds and hovering at 20,000 feet for hours on end before shooting back up into the sky and disappearing from radar.

Navy Commander David Fravor oversaw the F-18 Squadron on the Nimitz and was dispatched with his co-pilot and another F-18 to investigate. When they arrived, Commander Fravor said the ocean was smooth, but there was a patch of “roiling whitewater” where waves were breaking on a large object that appeared to be just below the ocean surface.

Above that object was a smaller, 40-foot long “tic-tac shaped craft” darting back and forth erratically at high speed. According to Fravor, the craft had no wings, no markings, and no visible signs of propulsion.

When Fravor descended to get closer to the object, it began ascending towards them, mimicking their flight pattern until it was within a short distance of the F-18. Then, according to Fravor and his co-pilot, it vanished.

According to Navy Senior Chief Kevin Day, an operations specialist aboard the USS Princeton, the craft at one point descended 28,000 feet in .78 seconds, meaning it was traveling around 24,000 miles per hour. Despite its incredible rate of speed, Day says the object produced “no sonic booms.”

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