The Navy isn't hiding it: Those purported UFO videos seen in recent years really do show unidentified flying objects, the Washington Post reports. "The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena," Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher told the Black Vault blog last week in the first official acknowledgment of the footage. Three Navy clips, published in 2017 and 2018, seem to show oblong entities moving quickly through the air; in one, unknown objects suddenly plunge 20,000 feet, hover, and either zip away or vanish. But Gradisher prefers "unidentified aerial phenomena" to "unidentified flying objects" because of the latter's extra-terrestrial stigma—which might prevent pilots from reporting them.
"For many years, our aviators didn't report these incursions because of the stigma attached to previous terminology and theories about what may or may not be in those videos," he tells
CNN. He also notes that "frequent incursions into our training ranges by UAPs" present "a safety hazard to the safe flight of our aviators." What's more, the three clips apparently represent a tiny percentage of the incursions spotted by Navy training ranges. Earlier this year, the Navy updated its guidelines for reporting UAPs in the hope more pilots would mention them. Click to see the videos—
"FLIR1," "Gimbal," and
"GoFast"—which were never cleared for public release, per the Black Vault. (Three senators were
briefed on the Navy encounters.)
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