Senators Receive Classified Briefings on Navy Pilots' Encounters with UFOs

Several senators—including Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—have received briefings on encounters between Navy pilots and UFOs, reported Politico on Wednesday.

The briefings, held on June 19th, came in part as a result of concern regarding the safety of military pilots.

“If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that’s a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of,” said Sen. Warner's spokesperson, Rachel Cohen, in a statement

"If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them at risk, then Senator Warner wants answers. It doesn't matter if it's weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely—we can't ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily," she added in a later statement to CNN.

This senatorial interest came in the wake of a June 15th interview for ABC News in which President Trump told George Stephanopoulos that he does “not particularly” believe that Navy pilots are seeing UFOs.

During the interview, Stephanopoulos asked President Trump if he’d been briefed on the recent reports released by Navy pilots who say they’ve seen UFOs while serving in the military.

“I have,” the president responded. “I think it’s probably…I want them to think whatever they think. They do say, I mean I’ve seen and I’ve read and I’ve heard, and I did have one very brief meeting on it, but people are saying they’re seeing UFOs. Do I believe it? Not particularly.”

When asked if he’d know whether or not there was evidence of extraterrestrials, President Trump responded “I think my great…our great pilots would know.”

“Some of them see things that are a little bit different than in the past,” he continued. “So we’re gonna see. But we’ll watch it; you’ll be the first to know.”

So far no details of the secret sessions have been made available, and the Navy has yet to issue a statement regarding the briefings.

Interest in disclosure of government knowledge surrounding UFOs has been on the rise since 2017, when news broke of the Pentagon’s secretive UFO project—known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Most recently, five Navy pilots reportedly told the New York Times that unidentified flying objects were an “almost daily” occurrence from the summer of 2014 through March 2015; two of the pilots, Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin agreed to go on record about their experiences with both the New York Times and for the History Channel UFO docuseries Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation—a project created in tandem with To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), a public benefit corporation created in 2017 to study UFOs.

The narrative built from those accounts is not without controversy, having received some pushback from researchers in the UFO community. That argument stems mostly from the seemingly cyclical nature of the government’s public interest in UFOs, and the associated disinformation therewith.

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