The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) issued a statement yesterday authorizing the release of three unclassified videos that have been circulating within the UFO community for years.

According to the release,

The Department of Defense has authorized the release of three unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, which have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorized releases in 2007 and 2017. The U.S. Navy previously acknowledged that these videos circulating in the public domain were indeed Navy videos. After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized 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. DOD is releasing the videos in order 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. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as "unidentified."

The released videos can be found at the Naval Air Systems Command FOIA Reading Room: https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/documents.

The three videos are also available below.

The video labeled FLIR reportedly came from an incident that occurred between approximately November 10th and 16th, 2004. The USS Princeton "on several occasions detected multiple Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs) operating in and around the vicinity of the CSG" as the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group (CSG) was preparing for deployment, according to a report acquired by journalist George Knapp in early 2019. Servicemen from both the Princeton and the Nimitz have since come forward to corroborate the incident.

GIMBAL and GOFAST both reportedly came from a series of encounters had by Navy pilots who were part of the VFA-11 "Red Rippers" squadron out of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia. The pilots said that incidents involving unidentified flying objects were an “almost daily” occurrence from the summer of 2014 through March 2015.

The Pentagon has waffled significantly in its position regarding UFOs and the government’s involvement in their study following the chain of information slowly released through To the Stars…Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) and government sources since 2017, when news broke of the Pentagon’s purported secretive UFO project.

In a recent article for Popular Mechanics, Tim McMillan traced a path through a byzantine maze of government documents and insider testimony that show the Pentagon’s Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP) was interested in studying UFOs, despite the recent denials by Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough.

According to McMillan’s research, the Pentagon’s denial is part of a campaign of confusion involving “a dizzying shell game that’s entirely consistent with how black budget intelligence programs are run.”

“What you’re dealing with is the very core of government secrecy and how things they absolutely don’t ever want to discuss are kept hidden away,” said one former AATIP contractor.

Documents retrieved from Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, LLC (BAASS), along with the testimony of former AATIP contractors, show that the company was contracted by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to produce technical reports on "exotic and potential 'game-changing' aerospace technologies, and the manner of determining what areas these radical airborne breakthroughs might emerge was through the research of UFOs."

The Pentagon sidestepped the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by outsourcing the research to a private company. Because the information contained in the reports generated by BAASS "is proprietary and cannot be disseminated or used without prior written consent from the Operating Manager of BAASS," government officials were afforded the ability to deny any and all connection between themselves and the research performed by the company.

According to McMillan, "The DIA may have had extensive access to the UFO materials, but because all of the data technically belonged to BAASS, under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, disclosing or releasing proprietary materials provided to the government in confidence is a federal crime."

As a result, the Pentagon is able to maintain that the AATIP did not investigate UFOs, because that duty was largely outsourced to BAASS.

This makes the government denial a technicality, rather than an explanation offered in good faith.

The Pentagon’s narrative has long been strongly contradicted by Luis Elizondo—a former DoD intelligence officer who claims to have been program head for the AATIP, and who currently serves as the Director of Global Security and Special Programs for TTSA—along with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, both of whom maintain that the AATIP’s primary focus was the investigation of UFOs.

Elizondo insisted that the “AATIP itself spent its entire time on UFOs,” while former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a statement that “AATIP was my program. One can say whatever, but the truth is it was for only one purpose—to study UFOs.”

In May of 2019, five former Navy servicemen came forward to participate in an interview with McMillan, again for Popular Mechanics, regarding the now-famous 2004 Nimitz UFO encounters. It’s claimed in the interview that, following one of the Nimitz UFO incidents, two “unknown individuals” confiscated all data collected from the encounter.

TTSA also announced in October of 2019 that it will be partnering with the U.S. Army to “advance materiel and technology innovations.” Prior to that, Luis Elizondo told the New York Times that the results of any studies done on the “metamaterials” which TTSA announced were in their possession last July are still pending, due to the employment of the “scientific method.”

A few months prior to news of the reportedly acquired “metamaterials,” two of the pilots involved in the UFO encounters near Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia, 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 TTSA. The pilots’ testimony prompted several senators to request and receive private briefings on the encounters. In response to questions regarding the pilots’ reports, President Trump has gone on record as saying that he does “not particularly” believe that Navy pilots are seeing UFOs.

It is unclear at this time if the president’s statements reflect anything other than a general disinterest in the subject.

The narrative built from those accounts is not without controversy in the UFO community, having received some pushback from researchers. That argument stems mostly from the seemingly cyclical nature of the government’s public interest in UFOs, and the disinformation associated therewith—exacerbated by the presence within TTSA of former intelligence agency personnel in prominent positions. Those long-festering doubts of TTSA’s trustworthiness due to the corporation’s association with the U.S. government are now compounded following the public benefit corporation’s new agreement with the Army.

John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault has done significant fact checking on claims made by TTSA and its representatives, having published a series of statements in September of 2019 that show the U.S. Navy had never cleared for public release three UFO videos distributed by Elizondo and TTSA, despite arguments to the contrary, although the Navy did acknowledge that the objects within the videos—featured above—were “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The DoD’s statement issued yesterday represents the first official permission for their release.

Given these discrepancies in TTSA’s statements and their now apparent partnership with the U.S. Army, more people within the UFO community are expressing concerns that the public benefit corporation was created as a massive spin operation to control the narrative surrounding unidentified flying objects. However, the disagreement between TTSA and the Pentagon regarding the AATIP’s activities complicates that opinion, calling into question how much cooperation exists between the public benefit corporation and the U.S. military.

Regardless, as more former and current military personnel come forward to relate their experiences with UFOs, there is little doubt within the community that, if nothing else, the cases being presented have merit.

Neither the Navy nor the Pentagon has issued any statement denying what these servicemen said they witnessed, and the statement released yesterday would seem to confirm that they were, in fact, UFOs.

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