Members of Congress and their staffs were given classified briefings on unidentified flying objects by the U.S. Navy with a focus on the potential threats to humans, a Navy spokesperson said Thursday. The briefings, held on Wednesday, reviewed “efforts to understand and identify these threats to the safety and security of our aviators,” Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told HuffPost in an email. “Navy officials will continue to keep interested Congressional members and staff informed,” Gradisher continued. Follow-up discussions with “other interested staffers” were scheduled for later Thursday. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was among those briefed, his office confirmed.

SOPA Images via Getty Images Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) was among those briefed by the U.S. Navy on Wednesday about confidential UFO sightings.

“If pilots at Oceana or elsewhere are reporting flight hazards that interfere with training or put them in danger, then Senator Warner wants answers,” Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for his office, said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s weather balloons, little green men, or something else entirely — we can’t ask our pilots to put their lives at risk unnecessarily.” The Navy in April revised its rules on how military pilots report encounters with unidentified aircraft. Rather than dismissing the observations, the Navy now acknowledges there have been sightings of unauthorized and unidentified aircraft entering military-controlled ranges and airspace in recent years, Gradisher previously told Politico. Whether any of the sightings involve extraterrestrials remains up in the air. It’s only been in recent years that the government has begun publicly acknowledging investigations into reported UFOs.

Department of Defense An encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object is pictured after its video was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2017.