Pentagon UFO videos
On 14 November 2004, fighter pilot Commander David Fravor of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group investigated radar indications of a possible target off the coast of southern California.
[11][12] On 16 December 2017, The New York Times reported on the incidents, and published two videos, termed "FLIR" and "GIMBAL", purporting to show encounters by jets from Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt with unusually shaped, fast-moving aircraft.
[14] The videos, featuring cockpit display data and infrared imagery, along with audio of communications between the pursuing pilots, were initially provided to the press by Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
[16] In September 2019, Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokeswoman, confirmed that the released videos were made by naval aviators, and that they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years".
[21][22][23][24] In April 2021, Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough confirmed that publicly-available video footage of what appeared to be an unidentified triangular object in the sky had been taken by Navy personnel aboard USS Russell in 2019.
[25][26] Science writer and skeptical investigator Mick West suggested the image was the result of an optical effect called a bokeh, which can make out of focus light sources appear triangular or pyramidal due to the shape of the aperture of some camera lenses.
The video, recorded on 15 July 2019, aboard the USS Omaha, purportedly shows a spherical object flying over the ocean as seen through an infrared camera at night, moving rapidly across the screen before stopping and easing down into the water.
Sean M. Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, briefed a Senate Armed Services subcommittee that it resembled a small "metallic orb".
[41][42] Widespread media attention to these events has motivated theories and speculations from private individuals and groups about the underlying explanation(s), including those focused upon pseudoscientific topics such as ufology.
[3] Mundane, skeptical explanations include instrument or software malfunction, anomaly or artifact,[43][44] human observational illusion (e.g., parallax) or interpretive error,[11][45][46][47] or common aircraft (e.g., a passenger airliner) or aerial device (e.g., weather balloon).
[49][41][42][3] Writing in The New York Times, author and astrophysicist Adam Frank stated that with respect to claims of "evidence of extraterrestrial technology that can defy the laws of physics", the pilot's reports and cockpit instrumentation videos "doesn't amount to much".
[50] Frank speculated that it was possible the UFOs in the videos are "drones deployed by rivals like Russia and China to examine our defenses — luring our pilots into turning on their radar and other detectors, thus revealing our electronic intelligence capabilities".
[52] Retired Admiral Gary Roughead, who commanded both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets before serving as Chief of Naval Operations from 2007 to 2011, said in 2020 that in his time, "most of the assessments were inconclusive" as to what these videos showed.
[57] In 2023, David Fravor, the pilot who reported the USS Nimitz sighting from the FLIR video, gave testimony under oath regarding the incident in a United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing.
The report came to no conclusion about what the UAPs were, based on a "lack [of] sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects observed by military pilots — including whether they are advanced earthly technologies, atmospherics, or of an extraterrestrial nature",[60] though in a limited number of incidents, UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics, including high velocity,[61] breaking the sound barrier without producing a sonic boom,[62] high maneuverability not able to be replicated otherwise,[63] long-duration flight,[64] and an ability to submerge into the water.
[67] The report indicated that, in most cases, the UAP recordings probably were of physical objects, and not false readings, as individual instances had been detected by different sensor mechanisms, including visual observation.
