Pentagon officially release US Navy video of three UFO incidents ‘to clear up any misconceptions’

Barely four months into 2020 the year is gearing up to be an absolute doozy, and the US government has now given us another thing to worry about: aliens.The year began with fears of World War Three kicking off following a US air strike that killed an Iranian army general.
That simmering feud got put on the back burner as those two countries, and indeed the world, were brought to their knees by the coronavirus pandemic we’re still dealing with.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, on Monday the Pentagon (the US’ defence headquarters) has officially released videos of “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP), colloquially known as UFOs.
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The videos were originally leaked last year by a private company started by former CIA senior intelligence officer Jim Semivan, engineer and parapsychologist (someone who studies “psychic phenomena”) Harold E. Puthoff, and Blink-182 guitarist and co-lead vocalist Tom DeLonge.
The To the Stars … Academy of Arts & Sciences maintains the “Virtual Analytics UA[P] Learning Tool” (VAULT), a database of UFO sightings (among other projects).
Over a period in 2017 and 2018, three short videos captured by US navy pilots were released showing UFOs.
The videos were confirmed as authentic in September last year by the Pentagon, but it’s now officially released the videos “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”.
“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorised 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 Department of Defense said in a statement announcing the release.
One of the videos had already been circulating since 2007, showing a 2004 incident where a UFO was encountered by jet pilots.
Pilots in two F/A-18 Super Hornets from the USS Nimitz carrier reported seeing the UFO, which was also detected on radar, during a training exercise off California.
Two other incidents from around 2015 have also been released officially.
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Those incidents involved pilots on the USS Theodore Roosevelt encountering UFOs off the east coast of the US.
They were the subject of a New York Times investigation last year, in which pilots from the program reported seeing the objects regularly.
None of the pilots or the department told the Times they thought the objects had originated anywhere other than Earth.
Despite investigating and releasing the videos, the DoD still doesn’t know what they depict.
“The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterised as “unidentified”,” the department said.
The Pentagon used to spend around $US22 million of its $US600 billion annual budget on a small program called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program that investigated reports of what are now officially called “unidentified aerial phenomena”.
That program stopped officially being funded in 2012, but the Times reported that former figures within the program said parts of the program continued.
The program was originally funded in 2007 after a push from former Nevada Senator Harry Reid.
Mr Reid took to Twitter on the news of the latest release to say “it only scratches the surface of research and materials available”.