U.S. Navy Releases "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena" Videos
“I’m glad the Pentagon is finally releasing this footage, but it only scratches the surface of research and materials available,” he said Monday on Twitter. “The U.S. needs to take a serious, scientific look at this and any potential national security implications. The American people deserve to be informed.”
Last year, referring to the three videos which were leaked in 2007 and 2017, Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said that “The Navy has confirmed that the three videos that are in wide circulation are indeed recordings made by naval aviators…. The Navy has always considered the phenomena observed in those videos as unidentified.”
hat, “after a thorough review,” it had determined the videos did not reveal “any sensitive capabilities or systems,” and did not “impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Scientists say there are potential explanations for what appears in the Navy videos, including atmospheric effects, reflections, and bugs in the code of imaging and display systems of fighter jets.
The Times notes that the U.S. government has periodically looked into reports of unidentified aerial phenomena since at least the 1950s. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower told reporters the Air Force had assured him that flying saucers were not invading the Earth from outer space. For decades, NASA has searched for conditions that could allow life beyond Earth, and for evidence of any life itself. And for at least as long, bands of astronomers, scientists and enthusiasts outside the government have looked for signals in the silence and the noise of space.
Jonathan Marcus, the BBC’s defense correspondent, writes:
The fascination with the unexplained never goes away. And the UFO phenomenon is perhaps one of the most potent of these stories, linking uncertainty about worlds beyond our own to conspiracy theories about government and especially the U.S. government.
Down the centuries people have looked to the sky and tried to explain mysterious lights and objects. But the modern UFO story took root in 1947 when a farmer discovered debris at Roswell, New Mexico, initially described as a flying disc, but now thought to be part of a secretive balloon program to monitor the Soviet Union.
Subsequently the testing base for advanced aircraft, known as Area 51 in Nevada, became the alleged center for UFO research. For the conspiracy theorists this was where the U.S. government sought to harness advanced alien technology.
Over the years many of the most outlandish theories have been debunked. But in 2017, the Pentagon did finally admit that it had a long-standing program, now terminated, investigating alleged UFOs.
Today, the U.S. Navy prefers to call these unexplained sightings “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. But that’s not going to supplant an acronym which has entered into our collective sub-conscious, prompting that fundamental question: are we really alone in the universe?
