Several Senators, including Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, received a classified briefing about a series of encounters by U.S. Navy planes with unidentified flying objects.
The briefing was classified because it dealt with threat assessments to U.S. military assets and personnel.
The military’s interest in UFOs has been the subject of conspiracy and speculation for decades, but most recently, former Senator Harry Reid asked the Pentagon to look into several reports by Navy aviators about highly advanced aircraft flying in close proximity to U.S. warplanes.
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,” his spokesperson, Rachel Cohen, said in a statement.
The interest in “unidentified aerial phenomenon” has grown since revelations in late 2017 that the Pentagon had set up a program to study the issue at the request of then-Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Officials interviewed multiple current and former sailors and aviators who claim to have encountered highly advanced aircraft that appeared to defy the laws of aerodynamics when they intruded on protected military airspace — some of which were captured on video and made public.
For decades, the military publicly feigned disinterest in UFOs while carrying on an intense study of the phenomenon behind closed doors. The Pentagon still will not admit to the possible extraterrestrial origins of the flying machines, and Navy F-18 pilots, talking to the New York Times in May, haven’t a clue either:
The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who 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.”
What is it our pilots are encountering? Obviously, with the kind of speed and maneuverability the unknown aircraft have shown, they could shoot down our warplanes with ease. That they haven’t may mean nothing — or everything.
Speculation is fun, but useless. Some of the best brains on the planet can’t explain what the pilots are finding up there. They could be extraterrestrials. Perhaps they are visitors from another dimension. Or from the future. Or another universe.
The only incontrovertible fact is that the pilots are seeing something very real up there — flying objects that have a solid, physical form that may or may not be a threat.
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