Three videos appearing to show encounters between US Navy aircraft and what the military terms "UAPs" - so-called 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" - have accidentally been released to the public despite the military insisting that they were never cleared.

According to RT, the clips, which have at this point been widely circulated, depict American aircraft interacting with the unidentified flying objects. Several of these mysterious dark figures demonstrated aerial maneuvers that were far beyond the capabilities of human technology.

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

The videos were released to Luis Elizondo, a former military intelligence officer who claims to have been a director of the Pentagon’s UFO research arm, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (or AATIP). He intended to use them in a database about possible aerial threats.

In the first video, titled "FLIR1", a strange pill-shaped object can be seen sitting on the horizon before darting sideways extremely fast.

In the second video, a US aircraft's sensor has locked on to an object flying swiftly across the water. The pilot and his teammates can be heard expressing their surprise at the object's speed.

In the third, an oblong object can be seen moving steadily before stopping and turning around and darting away.

The Pentagon complained about the release of the videos, saying they "should still be withheld" as they were "never officially released to the general public." But it’s a bit too late to put the UFO back in the back.

These videos have been in circulation for months, ever since the Pentagon released files from AATIP, which had been a secret government initiative that "did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena." The Pentagon has admitted that it shut down the AATIP in 2012, however there have been reports claiming that the department still investigates potential alien aircraft sightings.

Interviews with several pilots who encountered UFOs can be jarring. The pilots describe encountering vessels that accelerate to hypersonic speeds while making stops and turns - maneuvers that no human ship could pull off. Some pilots described the objects as an ongoing phenomenon. At first, one squad thought they were part of some top-secret drone program, but the pilots soon ruled this out.

AATIP's existence was revealed in 2017, when former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed to have arranged for the program's $22 million annual funding. It was founded at Reid's behest back in 2007 after Navy airmen had repeatedly captured footage of UAPs.