by VGNNavy Confirms UFO Videos Are Real and Show Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
The U.S. Navy has confirmed that three F-18 gun-camera videos first released by The New York Times and a UFO research organization show “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAPs—a more formal term for UFOs that doesn’t have all the little-green-men baggage.
The Times originally released two of the videos in a December 2017 article revealing that the Pentagon had operated a secret UFO investigatory project, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). All three videos were published on the website of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a UFO research organization founded by former Blink-182 singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge.
Tom DeLonge formed To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science in 2017. The organization included an elite team of former government and defense-contractor insiders who would work behind the scenes to broaden awareness of the topic and persuade the government to reveal what it knows about UFOs.
HISTORY
VIEW: Declassified: UFOs Captured on Video by U.S. Fighter Pilots
The news that the Navy considers the three videos—unofficially known as “FLIR1,” “Gimbal” and “GoFast”—as examples of UAPs first appeared on The Black Vault, a web site that specializes in declassified government documents. “FLIR1” is from November 14, 2004, and “Gimbal” and “GoFast” are from January 21, 2015. Joseph Gradisher, official spokesperson for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, emphasized to HISTORY that these videos represent only some of the UAP sightings the Navy is investigating.
“Those three videos are just part of a larger effort by the U.S. Navy to try and investigate a series of incursions into our training ranges by phenomena that we’re calling unidentified aerial phenomena,” says Gradisher, who declined to say how many sightings there have been. “Our aviators train as they fight. So when they’re out there training, if there’s an incursion by any kind of aerial vehicle phenomena, whatever, it puts the safety of our aviators at risk as well as the security of our training operations.”
To be clear, the Navy is not saying that these videos show evidence of alien life. Rather, the Navy is saying it can’t identify the phenomena in the videos. The Navy considers UAPs like these a national security and safety problem because they are not authorized to be in U.S. airspace. After a series of classified briefings featuring Navy pilots and lawmakers this summer, the Navy announced it had formalized its process for pilots and other personnel to report UAPs so that records of these sightings are more consistent, and therefore easier to investigate.
Gradisher told HISTORY the Navy is trying to reduce the stigma of reporting UAPs, which in the past pilots may have been disparaged—or ignored—for reporting. “We want to get beyond that stigma, and encourage our aviators to report anything that they’re seeing out there.”
READ MORE: When Top Gun Pilots Tangled With a Tic-Tac-Shaped UFO
