This year’s World UFO Day comes at a time of heightened interest in the decades-long search to solve the mystery of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) thanks to the Navy’s recent declassification of videos that show what it called “unexplained aerial phenomena,” but it’s not just UFO enthusiasts who are excited. Congress also wants to see what the Pentagon and the nation’s intelligence agencies know about UFOs, not because extraterrestrials are involved, but because of concerns they might represent advanced technological threats from foreign adversaries.
The Navy declassified three previously leaked top-secret U.S. Navy videos in late April in an effort “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that had been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos,” said Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson.
“The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified,'” the spokesperson added.
First published by the New York Times in 2017, the videos captured what Navy F/A-18 fighter pilots saw on their video sensors during training flights in 2004 and 2015 off the coast of California. Even more compelling was the audio of the pilots’ reactions to the fast-moving objects and maneuvers they saw on their screens.