The US’ obsession with aliens is speculated to have begun with the Roswell incident in July 1947. A rancher named Mac Brazel found a mess of metallic sticks, foil reflectors, chunks of plastics, and scraps of paper-like material in his sheep pasture. Brazel contacted the sheriff who then called officials at the Roswell Army Air Force base. This became one of the top stories at the time, as many people referred to this aircrafts as a “flying saucer.” The Air Force went on to claim this “flying saucer” was only a crashed weather balloon, but many people strongly doubted the Air Force’s claim. However, in 1994 the Pentagon revealed the debris found in Roswell, New Mexico was of a project referred to as Project Mogul. Project Mogul was a high-altitude balloon with a sound system that could be used to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which was a highly classified project at the time of the Roswell incident. The cover up story of the “weather balloon” threw off so many Americans that they turned to conspiracy theories of what the “flying saucer” could have been, the most popular being aliens.
The image to the left displays reported UFO sightings worldwide. “Maybe aliens only speak English,” my dad joked as my mom showed my family the image over summer. When I imagined all these reports being made, I envisioned crazy Americans running around with tinfoil hats. That is the image most of us think of when we think of UFO believers and people interested in studying them. That is why I was shocked to find out that the US Government was starting a task force to study UFOs. I was certain the US government was officially losing their mind, but what if they are not? What if we have been looking at UFOs the wrong way this whole time?
The Tic Tac Incident of 2004
On November 14th, 2004, about one hundred miles off the coast of San Diego, a USS Nimitz prepared for departure to go to the Persian Gulf. However, radar technicians noticed multiple objects descending from around 60,000 ft in the air to 50 ft in a matter of seconds. For reference, commercial airplanes fly at around 36,000 ft. The technicians thought the radar was messed up, so they recalibrated it, but the signal of this object remained. The Navy proceeded to send two F/A-18s to investigate.
One of the pilots, David Fravor, later went on an episode of CBS’ 60 minutes to share his experience, saying “We saw this little white Tic Tac looking object, and it was just moving above the white-water area.” A navy report from that day describes said object as resembling “an elongated egg or a Tic Tac… (which) was uniformly white… with no edges… approximately 46 feet in length.” The pilots proceeded to get closer to the Tic Tac shaped object, and Fravor stated in the Lex Friedman Podcast, “It’s like it becomes aware of us and it just goes bloop, and it kind of points out toward the west and starts coming up… it accelerates in less than… half a second and it’s gone.” Their radar then detected the object again, 60 miles away.
The two navy pilots returned to the USS Nimitz and sent another jet to investigate, this time with an infrared camera attached to it. The infrared camera was able to capture the video below. Infrared cameras usually detect heat signatures or some energy that shows how an aircraft is being propelled. However, this cannot be seen at all with the aircraft in the video, there is not any energy being exerted to keep it flying in the air.
Navy pilots describe encounters with UFOs – YouTube (9:09-9:20)
In 2007, the video above was leaked and ten years later, the pentagon confirmed it was real. This incident among others is what led the pentagon to create a secret program called Unidentified Aeriel Phenomena.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena
It is nothing new that the government is researching UFOs. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings. One of these studies was called Project Bluebook which concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, and conventional aircraft/spy planes, but 701 sightings remained unexplained. These studies ended in 1969 as Robert C. Seamans Jr., secretary of the Air Force at the time, announced that Project Blue Book “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
In 2007, the pentagon began investigating reports of UFOs again at the request of Harry Ried, a Nevada democratic senator at the time. This program was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo. This program lived a short life, as the pentagon stopped funding it only five years later in 2012. Thomas Crosson, a spokesperson for the Pentagon stated in an email, “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the Department of Defense to make a change.” Despite the program had ended, Luis Elizondo and others continued studying the phenomena discovered. A few years later Elizondo resigned and stated in his resignation letter that more attention needed to be put on “the many accounts from the navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond next generation capabilities.”
Constant Sightings
A navy jet was chasing a fleet of strange objects on the east coast when they noticed one of them rotating.
Why the US government changed its mind on UFOs (youtube.com) (7:05-7:17)
In the same location in 2015, another navy jet noticed a small round object traveling at what seemed like a very high speed over water.
Why the US government changed its mind on UFOs – YouTube (7:26-7:45)
In 2019, Navy sailors were abord a destroyer in the night when they pointed their camera through their night vision goggles and saw a triangle shaped object.
Why the US government changed its mind on UFOs – YouTube (7:55-7:57)
A weapons officer captured photos of a “metallic blimp, a sphere, and an acorn” in 2019.
In 2021, a navy pilot was filming with a phone and caught an object flying in the sky extremely quickly.
Each example above was filmed by navy pilots and has been confirmed by the US government to be real. These are just a few of hundreds of sightings under investigation by the navy, many of which remained classified for national security reasons.
In summer of 2014, two navy pilots were flying by the coast of Virginia when they noticed a strange object on their radar. This had been happening often because their radar from the 1980s had just been upgraded. When they landed, one of them reported to former navy lieutenant Ryan Graves that they “almost hit one of those things” (New York Times). Graves told the New York Times, “It turned from a potentially classified drone program to a safety issue”. During this summer, they came across unidentified objects on multiple occasions. On the Lex Friedman podcast, Graves stated, “At this point maybe 80-90% of our squadron has probably seen one of these things on the radar at this point. Everyone was aware of it.” This isn’t simply a few random people running around thinking shooting stars are aliens, these are appointed officials coming across objects on multiple occasions that they can’t identify.
Not Everything is as it Seems…
Through all these crazy stories, it can be easy to fill in the blanks of our knowledge with our own narratives, but it is important to remember the facts that we do have:
- The US government has observed things in the sky that we cannot explain
- As of the 2023 report, there are 801 total UAP sightings reported (800 from the navy, 1 from the marine)
- The majority of UAP reports were seen with “multiple sensors” (radars, cameras, human eyes, etc.)
- The Department of Defense is making a serious effort to study the various UAP sightings
The fact that the government is making an active effort to find out what is happening in our airspace is a good thing. As journalist Johnny Harris puts it “real answers only come when you have real inquiry with real tools to measure and analyze real data from the real world.” Simply speculating what could be causing the over 800 UAP sightings won’t get us anywhere. We need to fund research so we can find real answers to what is happening. Throughout the past two years the government has been analyzing these sightings, and they’ve found some new information which changes the narrative.
The video with the object in the sky rotating is simply a result of the way the governments’ camera technology worked (Mick West has a very interesting video deep diving how this happened but I won’t dive down that rabbit hole right now). The video displaying a fast-moving object with pilots freaking out in the background has been proven to be an optical illusion. In reality, the object is likely only moving at around 30 mph but the angle in which the video was taken makes it seem much faster. The video of a camera through night vision goggles which displayed a triangular shaped object in the sky wasn’t actually a triangle. Light passing through the camera and night vision goggles caused the triangular appearance. However, many UAP sightings “remain technically unresolved because of a lack of data” (2023 UAP Report), including the 2004 tic tac incident.
The first step in learning more about these unidentified objects in our sky is to separate the idea of UFOs and UAP. Scott Bray stated in the 2022 UAP hearing, “There is often limited amount of high-quality data and reporting, hamper(ing) our ability to draw firm conclusion about the nature or intent of UAP”. The stigma around alien speculation prevents reporting which prevents access to more data that we can analyze to actually draw conclusions. If UAPs are “always out there” like Ryan Graves and many other navy pilots have claimed, then we should study them to figure out what they are. Not just for our safety but also out of scientific interest.
Maybe we are the intelligent life forms making scientific discoveries that “defy the laws of physics”. There have been many patents assigned to the US navy which include concepts like “high-temperature superconductors, gravitational wave generators, compact fusion reactors, and high-energy electromagnetic field generators.” The U.S. Naval Aviation Enterprise has confirmed this to be true. To put it in simpler terms, there are many new discoveries being made that could completely change how we approach air travel and provide justifiable explanation for the “physically impossible” phenomena observed in some of these UAP sightings.
The whole point of this article is to propose a new outlook on UFOs. There is certainly not enough plausible evidence confirming aliens as the cause of the UAP, although it is fun to entertain. However, we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are hundreds of validated reportings of unidentified objects over our skies. The only way we can move past the speculation and misinformation surrounding these UAPs is to research them for the safety of our navy pilots and our citizens, and maybe even to make new discoveries.
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