Infamous UFO incidents witnessed by US Navy pilots were in the news again !

For a subject that governments 
NEVER want to talk about, i
t's odd that the U.S. Navy 
has inadvertently (?)
told the public so much. 

I'll start with the latest news, 
and later provide 
some background information 
from 2017 through 2019, 
since I've never discussed 
the subject on this blog: 

LATEST  NEWS:

Last week, 

classified materials associated with one infamous UFO incident, witnessed by US Navy pilots, were in the news again.

The files are about the 2004 encounter between USS Nimitz aircraft carrier pilots and a series of strange, "Tic Tac" shaped, UFOs.

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by researcher Christian Lambright got this unusually long response from the U.S. Navy:

The Navy told Lambright, 

in a letter, that it had: 

"discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET."

"A review of these materials indicates that are currently and appropriately Marked and Classified TOP SECRET under Executive Order 13526, and the Original Classification Authority has determined that the release of these materials would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States,"  according to the U.S. Navy

"We have also determined that ONI possesses a video classified SECRET that ONI is not the Original Classification Authority for,"  the letter continues.

"The Department of Defense, 

specifically the U.S. Navy, 

has the video."

"As Navy and my office have stated previously, as the investigation of UAP (UFO) sightings is ongoing, we will not publicly discuss individual sighting reports / observations,"  

Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson, told Motherboard. 

"However, I can tell you that the date of the 2004 USS Nimitz video is Nov. 14, 2004. I can also tell you that the length of the video that’s been circulating since 2007 is the same as the length of the source video. We do not expect 
to release this video." 

But the video 
was already released,
and portions shown 
on The History Channel 
( cable TV ). 
and 
screenshots from 
various Navy pilot
videos are below

In November 2019, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that several original witnesses to the Nimitz incident had viewed longer, higher resolution video footage of the UFO encounter. 

According to the PM report, 

"Gary Voorhis, a Petty Officer who served on the Princeton, a ship in Nimitz fleet, told Popular Mechanics that he “definitely saw video that was roughly 8 to 10 minutes long and a lot more clear.” 

"Others, such as Commander David Fravor, have stated that longer videos of the incident probably do not exist. "

Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon staffer, played a key role in making three Navy UFO videos public last year, on his cable TV show "Unidentified" (six one hour episodes).

Elizondo told Motherboard that straightforward messaging does not seem to be the Pentagon’s strong suit. 

When the New York Times ran its 2017 story concerning the Nimitz UFO incident, it also broke the existence of $22 million dollar UFO investigation program called AATIP, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and that Elizondo, a career intelligence officer, ran AATIP.

The Pentagon has repeatedly changed its story since then.

As recently as last month, the Pentagon said that AATIP had nothing to do with UFOs !

Bureaucrats lie as much as politicians do !

“The Pentagon has a long history of sometimes providing inaccurate information to the American people,” Elizondo said. 

“This is true as recently as this week regarding the draft memo involving Iran, and two weeks ago when the press finally received the truth about Afghanistan, despite 18 years of statements to the contrary.” 

- VICE

"As in the case involving UAPs (UFOs), 

I can only hope that the inconsistent message is due to the benign results of a large and cumbersome bureaucracy and not something more nefarious like a cover-up or deliberate misinformation campaign," 

added Elizondo, 

who told VICE that he's 

"not able to comment further on the existence of a longer video due to my obligations involving my Non Disclosure Agreement with the Government and the fact that I am no longer employed with the U.S. Government. However, as I stated before, people should not be surprised by the revelation that other videos exist and at greater length."

The debate about 

the existence 

of alien life 

has the scientific 

community divided.

There is no 97% consensus.

My own conclusion:

Based mainly 
on reports from pilots, 
including 12,600+ 
mandatory 
written reports by 
US Air Force pilots 
from the late 1940s 
to the late 1960s, 
when reporting 
requirements 
were ended:

I have very 
high confidence 
that most UFOs
reported by pilots 
are alien craft. 

My confidence level is 99.9%. 

I can not imagine 
that every one 
of over 15,000 
military and 
commercial 
pilots, were 
hallucinating !  

And 15,000+ is just the pilots willing to report UFOs -- most who see them do NOT report them !

My logical conclusion about UFOs often gets ridiculed, but then so does my conclusion that global warming has been good news for the past 300+ years, and is nothing to fear for the next 100 years !

Ridicule and character attacks come at me from people with nothing of value to say about climate science, or UFOs !

During the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to his colleagues, over lunch:

“Don’t you ever wonder where 

everybody is?”  ( referring to alien life ).

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we could say that was roughly the time it took a "kind of life“  to be capable of space travel. 

Our universe is 

approximately 

13.8 billion years old.

Fermi proposed that during this time, 

the galaxy should have been overrun 

with intelligent, technologically-advanced aliens. 

Yet, we have no evidence of this, despite decades of searching. 

This postulate became known as the Fermi Paradox.

General summary of the Fermi Paradox:

-- There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to our Sun.

-- With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some may have already developed intelligent life.

-- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel.

-- Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years

-- And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, this would seem to provide plenty of time

The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation.

The Drake equation suggests that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations.

In a new study, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, the study’s lead author said:

“Either nobody leaves their planet, 

or we are in fact the only technological civilization in the galaxy.”

Stars orbit the center of the galaxy on different paths at different speeds. 

They occasionally pass each other, 

so aliens could be waiting for their next destination to come closer to them, 

Caroll-Nellenback’s study says.

So far, we’ve detected about 4,000 planets outside of our solar system and none have been shown to host life. 

But we haven’t looked very hard.

Because there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and even more planets, so we have a lot more to explore.

BACKGROUND  

INFORMATION:

U.S. NAVY  UFO  NEWS  

FROM  2018 and 2019:

In 2018 the US military admitted that they have been investigating UFOs through a secret government initiative known as the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

AATIP's existence was first revealed in 2017, when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) claimed to have arranged for the program's $22 million annual funding. 

Reid told the New York Times that it was: "one of the good things I did in my congressional service."

The New York Times emphasized a 33-second DoD video, released by the AATIP, featuring an airborne object being chased off the coast of San Diego by two navy jets in 2004. 

An op-ed written by Christopher Mellon, in The Hill, reported on the fact that since 2015, "dozens of Navy F-18 fighter jets have encountered Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAPs) - once commonly referred to as UFOs - off the East Coast of the United States, some not far from the nation’s capital. Encounters have been reported by other military aircraft and civilian airliners elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, too, including videos shot by airline passengers."

These UFOs do not have wings or rotors.

They have aerodynamic shapes.

They do not make any noise.

They do not emit any heat.

They accelerate instantly.

They can move at incredible speeds, 

change directions incredibly quickly, 

and hover like a helicopter -- 

a silent helicopter.

Some have been tracked 

moving underwater 

at speeds much faster than

any man made submarine.

Their propulsion system 

is unknown to any human 

on this planet.

It is unknown if there are 

any pilots in the UFO.

Their performance

can ONLY 
be explained 

by assuming they 
were not created 
by humans on 
our planet.

The DoD falsely claims it shut down AATIP in 2012, however spokesman Christopher Sherwood told the Post that the department still investigates unidentified aircraft, which is a contradiction.

"The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland," said Sherwood. 

"The department will continue to investigate, through normal procedures, reports of unidentified aircraft encountered by US military aviators in order to ensure defense of the homeland and protection against strategic surprise by our nation’s adversaries." 

Nick Pope secretly investigated UFOs for the British government during the 1990s. 

He said: “Previous official statements were ambiguous and left the door open to the possibility that AATIP was simply concerned with next-generation aviation threats from aircraft, missiles and drones ... "

“This new admission makes it clear that they really did study what the public would call ‘UFOs,”  he said.

“It also shows the British influence, because UAP was the term we used in the Ministry of Defence to get away from the pop culture baggage that came with the term ‘UFO.’ ” 

- New York Post

After upgrading the radar systems 

on F/A-18 fighter jets, 
several Navy pilots operating from the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt began to see unidentified flying objects that 

appeared to defy the laws of physics. 

Between 2014 and 2015, the strange objects, one spinning like a top, appeared almost daily in the skies above the East Coast. 

The crafts had 

"no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes," 

     and 

"could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds" , according to The New York Times, in a March 2018 report. 

Accounts of five pilots who witnessed the UFOs were available in late 2019.

"These things would be out there all day"  said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been in the Navy for a decade. 

Graves reported his sightings 

to the Pentagon and Congress. 

"Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect."

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, 

and an official mishap report was filed. 

Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” 

one pilot exclaims:

“Look at it fly!” 

-New York Times

The sightings were reported to the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)"  

which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts from senior officers aboard the Roosevelt at the time. 

According to military intelligence official Luis Elizondo, who ran the program until resigning in 2017, the sightings are

"a striking series of incidents." 

The program, which began in 2007, and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon.

Mr. Elizondo and other participants say the work continued after 2012, at least until he resigned in 2017, in other forms. 

The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004. 

-New York Times

Lieutenant Graves is still at a loss to describe what he saw in the summer of 2014, when he and Lt. Danny Accoin - another Super Hornet pilot, were part of the "Red Rippers" VFA-11 squadron. 

Operating out of Oceana, VA, they were training for redeployment to the Persian Gulf. 

Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to the Times, while three other pilots spoke on condition of anonymity. 

It all began following an upgrade from their 1980s-era radars to  Raytheon AN/ASQ-228 Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pods - one of the most advanced imaging devices in use by the military which can locate and designate targets at distances over 40 miles. 

One fighter pilot after another began picking up the objects, initially ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks. 

"People have seen strange stuff in military aircraft for decades," said Graves.

"We’re doing this very complex mission, to go from 30,000 feet, diving down. It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there."

Graves added that the objects were an ongoing phenomenon - showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet and even at sea level. 

The craft could "accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds,"  according to the report. 

Lieutenant Accoin said that he had two encounters with the objects - the first of which he tried to intercept the craft's course by flying 1,000 feet below it. 

His radar told him it was there. 

In the second encounter, Accoin says a training missile on his jet locked onto the craft, which his infrared camera picked up as well. 

"I knew I had it, I knew it 

was not a false hit," 

he said.

In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”

“I almost hit one of those things,”  

the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.

The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. 

It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.

 - New York Times

"It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a midair"  (collision). 

What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

“Speed doesn’t kill you,”  

Lieutenant Graves said. 

“Stopping does. 

Or acceleration.”

“We have helicopters that can hover,”  Lieutenant Graves said. 

“We have aircraft that can fly at 30,000 feet and right at the surface.” 

But 

“combine all that in one vehicle of some type with no jet engine, no exhaust plume.” 

- New York Times

The National UFO Reporting Center - which is based in the U.S. and maintains statistics - global UFO sightings have declined steadily since 2014:

There were just over 8,000 reported UFO sightings in 2014.   3,343 in 2018, and 2019 was only 2,371 near year end.

Three videos show encounters between US Navy aircraft and UFOs ( 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' ) on radar. 

It appears the videos were accidentally released to the public, despite the military insisting that they were never cleared.

The video clips were shown on a six one hour episodes of "Unidentified", on The History Channel (cable TV). 

Some pilots and radar operators were interviewed. 

One pilot, a female, was nobviously a jet pilot, based on her words.

But she annoyed me because she would not allow her face to be shown on TV, probably assuming that telling the truth would hurt her career.

It bothers me that the military wants to discourage reporting, when they should be trying to learn as much as possible about UFOs.

The US military started having contacts with UFOs during World War II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_fighter

The Unidentified show was hosted by Luis Elizondo, the former military intelligence officer who had been the director of the Pentagon’s UFO research arm, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.                 ( AATIP )

He had been creating a database about possible aerial threats from UFOs, but quit the Navy in 2017 when he realized they was never going to act on any of the information his team had collected.

There was nothing they could do about UFOs, so the bureaucratic "solution" to keep the public calm was to ignore the subject, and deny everything.

But those pesky radar videos seen on TV were a problem !

The Navy’s Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare Spokesman, Joseph Gradisher, 

confirmed that the videos are genuine, 

but insisted that the government hadn't finished analyzing their contents, which remain unexplained.

He cautioned that the public shouldn't jump to conclusions about the existence of aliens.