With a terse public statement, the Navy on Monday officially released three videos of unidentified flying objects. Or what it calls "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena."

It's a welcome development, but the Navy and Defense Department should provide greater disclosure. It's in their interest that they do so, because the issue is active, and it's not going away.

So what's going on with Monday's release?

Well, these videos have been in the public domain for the past three years, released by UFO research group, To the Stars Academy. Two of the videos were recorded by the USS Theodore Roosevelt's Carrier Air Wing off the East Coast in January 2015. The other video was recorded by the USS Nimitz's Carrier Air Wing off the West Coast in November 2004. But there are two key points here that the Navy is leaving out of its statement:

First, its assessment that the reason the carrier strike groups keep seeing UFOs is because the UFOs have some interest in the carriers' nuclear reactors. Second, its assessment that the UFOs are not secret aircraft from Area 51, China, Russia, or Elon Musk. These aircraft — they are machines — operate in ways that are beyond the known technological capacity of any Earth nation. And far in advance of our, China, and Russia's most advanced airframes under development.

And as former Sen. Harry Reid notes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Reid, who led Senate efforts to push for greater military research of the phenomena, knows that there are many more multisensor platform data recordings involving other UFO sightings in other locales proximate to critical national infrastructure. He also knows that the days when the military could blame every UFO sighting on weather, misidentification, or a weather balloon (check out the National Security Agency's Freedom of Information Act logs) are long gone.

Of course, the Navy also knows this.

Which is why its press statement on Monday includes the subtle reference to "subsequent investigations" of UFO incidents. That's the Navy's way of admitting that this is an active issue. But the Navy and Pentagon should take Reid's advice here. They should get ahead of the curve by making public more of what they know.

Because even as the military drags its feet on freedom of information requests and journalistic inquiries, much more is eventually going to leak about the UFO issue. Partly because the military is too big to act with coordinated secrecy but mainly because too many military personnel have seen UFOs with their own eyes, gun cameras, satellite and ballistic missile sensors, sonar, and radar platforms. In short, too much data exists from too many sources who are more willing than ever to come forward.

But where, as now, the Pentagon's impulse is to hide as much as it can, it fosters the ill-conceived notion that it is involved in a malicious conspiracy against the public interest. And I don't think that's the case. The reality is that the military doesn't want to alarm people by saying that it knows a lot less than we might assume about these UFOs. It also wants to avoid any risk that China or Russia might learn from its UFO analysis as to how they can track U.S. nuclear reactors at or under the sea. Neither does the military want to share data that would give China and Russia a means of gauging America's ability to track their most advanced platforms such as hypersonic glide vehicles, for example. Considering the strategic challenge faced by China in particular, that latter concern is justified.

Still, the Pentagon can and should release more assessments on UFO incidents, even as it protects the sources and methods by which the associated data in those incidents was recorded. As I say, the top line here is quite simple: This issue is big, it isn't going away, and there is a compelling public interest for greater transparency.

We are, after all, a democracy.