Update, March 12, 2018: To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the private UFO research company, has released a third video of a military jet's encounter with an object moving at extremely high speed over the ocean. According to To the Stars, "This footage was captured by a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet… that was being operated by a highly trained aerial observer and weapons system operator whom the government has spent millions of dollars to train." In the video, a pilot can be heard marveling at the object and asking, "What the [expletive] is that thing?" and "What is that, man?" The encounter occurred in 2015 somewhere off the East Coast.

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Previously, December 18, 2017: Over the weekend, the New York Times and Politico unveiled ​the existence of a secret $22 million Pentagon program to research unidentified flying objects, or "unidentified aerial phenomena" in military parlance, between 2007 and 2012. The program, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, looked into incidents in which military personnel witnessed mysterious aircraft with unusual behavior — some of which were captured on video.

Though the Pentagon's project is officially over, officials reportedly continue to investigate UFO sightings. What's more, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program has now joined a private UFO research company called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has released two military videos showing unexplained aircraft. Here's what we know.

The Former Head Of The Pentagon's Secret UFO Program Pushed To Publicize Footage Of Mysterious Crafts

Luis Elizondo, who ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, resigned in October to protest the secrecy surrounding the Pentagon's UFO research and institutional resistance to supporting the research. Before he left, he pushed the Defense Department to release videos of three military sightings of unexplained aircraft.

Just before leaving his Defense Department job two months ago, intelligence officer Luis Elizondo quietly arranged to secure the release of three of the most unusual videos in the Pentagon's secret vaults: raw footage from encounters between fighter jets and "anomalous aerial vehicles" — military jargon for UFOs. The videos, all taken from cockpit cameras, show pilots struggling to lock their radars on oval-shaped vessels that, on screen, look vaguely like giant flying Tic Tacs. The strange aircraft — no claims are made about their possible origins or makeup — appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots.

[The Washington Post]

So far, two of the three videos have been publicized by To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the private UFO-research firm that Elizondo now works for. But Elizondo told Politico that the three videos represent only a fraction of "scores" of similar sightings.



The "unidentified aerial phenomena" claimed to have been seen by pilots and other military personnel appeared vastly more advanced than those in American or foreign arsenals. In some cases they maneuvered so unusually and so fast that they seemed to defy the laws of physics, according to multiple sources directly involved in or briefed on the effort and a review of unclassified Defense Department and congressional documents… He described scores of unexplained sightings by Navy pilots and other observers of aircraft with capabilities far beyond what is currently considered aerodynamically possible. The sightings, Elizondo told POLITICO, were often reported in the vicinity of nuclear facilities, either ships at sea or power plants. "We had never seen anything like it."

[Politico]

The 'Nimitz Incident' Involved A Mysterious Craft Hovering Over Churning Water Then Lurching Away

One of the videos that has been released was taken off the coast of San Diego in 2004 by two Navy fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz. In a detailed report of the Nimitz incident, the New York Times recounts how the pilots, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight, received unexpected instructions from an operations officer on the USS Princeton, a Navy cruiser, regarding some mysterious objects.

For two weeks, the operator said, the Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.