We still don’t fully know what these videos depict, and at
UFOs are real. That’s
the easy part. Now
here’s the hard part.
The epic tale of how Pentagon officials
and Blink-182’s guitarist helped take
UFO videos mainstream.
Vox
Dylan Matthews Jun 18, 2021, 10:00am EDT
All of a sudden, serious people are starting to take UFOs
— unidentified flying objects — seriously.
“There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that
— we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain
how they moved, their trajectory,” former President
Barack Obama told CBS’s James Corden.
Many in Congress are curious, too, and this month the
body is set to receive a report originating from a Pentagon
task force detailing its investigations into unidentified
aerial phenomena (UAPs), the preferred term for UFOs
among specialists. The Pentagon Office of the Inspector
General is also evaluating the government’s approach to
UAPs with an eye to strengthening its monitoring and
response. The highest levels of the American government
are very, very interested in what’s up there in the sky.
When I was growing up, UFOs were the province of late-
night talk radio and The X-Files. They had a roughly
similar level of respectability to theories that the 9/11
attacks were an inside job, or that the CIA killed John F.
Kennedy.
That stigma appears to be fading somewhat. In 1996,
Gallup found that only 47 percent of Americans thought
people reporting UFO sightings were seeing something
real, and not imagining it. In 2019, when Gallup polled
again, a majority, 56 percent, thought UFO observers
were seeing something real.
Interestingly, the share of Americans saying the
government “knows more about UFOs than it’s telling
us” fell very slightly from 1996 to 2019. That may reflect
the fact that the government has confirmed the reality of
some of the most prominent UFO videos.
In a somewhat surprising development that helped kick-
start the current round of UFO fascination, the
government confirmed the authenticity of two videos
featured in a 2017 New York Times story and a third one
leaked a few months later, each of which depicts US
Navy fighter pilots observing a strange object whose
nature appears baffling to them.
the risk of disappointing some readers, there’s no
evidence that they depict alien aircraft. But it’s hard to
overstate just how much these videos have changed the
way the public, the government, and the mainstream press
(most notably the New York Times) think and talk about
UFOs — to the point where people may have
misconceptions about what exactly we know given the
available evidence.
Here’s a closer look at what these videos actually depict
(and what they do not), how they came to light, and
whether the resurgence of interest in UFOs should make
us reassess what we think we know about UFOs and life
beyond Earth.
The three canonical UFO videos behind the
current wave of interest
The resurgence in interest in UFOs — or UAPs, the
preferred term in the Defense Department — can
generally be credited to three specific videos captured by
the US Navy. The first two were leaked to the New York
Times and written about on the front page in the
December 17, 2017, print edition of the paper, while the
third was leaked a few months later.
The first of these incidents, and probably the most
important, is what’s called the USS Nimitz encounter,
named after the supercarrier from which the jet pilot who
observed the UFO took off.
In November 2004, about 100 miles off the coast of San
Diego, Cmdr. David Fravor and the pilot on his wing, Lt.
Cmdr. Amy Dietrich, reported seeing what Fravor called a
“white tic-tac looking object” the size of an F/A-18 with
no wings, markings, or exhaust plumes, that, when
approached, “turns abruptly and starts mimicking me.”
Eventually, Fravor told 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker, it
simply “disappeared.”
The USS Princeton, a cruiser in the area that had asked
Fravor and Dietrich to investigate anomalous aerial
phenomena, reacquired the target “seconds later,”
Whitaker reports, “60 miles away.” Another flight crew
took a video of the object using their forward-looking
infrared camera (FLIR), leading the video to be dubbed
the “FLIR1 video”:
An important note here: While Fravor and Dietrich
believe that the object they reported seeing and the one in
the FLIR1 video are one and the same, it’s hard to be sure
of that identification. And, lacking such certainty, we also
cannot be sure the object flew some 60 miles in a matter
of seconds, a feat that explains much of why the object
seemed so strange and impressive.
The second video, labeled “GIMBAL,” was taken by a
fighter jet from the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt,
flying by the coast of Florida in 2015. “This is a fucking
drone, bro,” one pilot is recorded saying. “There’s a
whole fleet of them,” another adds.
The third video, “GOFAST,” also recorded in 2015 and
first publicly released a few months after the other videos,
in March 2018, features audio of laughing, audibly
excited pilots observing a small white object appearing to
fly over water at an extremely rapid pace:
These three videos set off the current wave of interest in
UFOs/UAPs, but they’ve been followed by at least a
couple more. This year, Pentagon spokesperson Susan
Gough confirmed that two recently leaked videos were
taken by Navy pilots.
The first, taken above the USS Russell destroyer near San
Diego in July 2019, depicts a “pyramid-like” object:
The other, taken that same month and in that same
geographic area by the USS Omaha combat ship, shows
what appears in the infrared camera to be a spherical
object. Both videos were brought to light by filmmaker
and reporter Jeremy Corbell, an enthusiastic believer in
the extraterrestrial hypothesis (the theory that UFO
sightings reflect contact with alien civilizations) and an
advocate for greater UFO disclosure:
How a group of UFO enthusiasts helped
mainstream UFOs
The story of how Navy videos depicting UFOs landed on
the Times’s front page is its own fascinating saga. The
best single account I’ve seen is Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s in
the New Yorker, but here’s a summary.
The story begins in 2007, at the instigation of Robert
Bigelow, a Nevada businessman with a fortune from
extended-stay hotels, an aerospace firm, and a deep,
abiding interest in UFOs. That year, Bigelow worked with
Sen. Harry Reid — a campaign donation recipient — to
secure $22 million in “black budget” money (that is,
appropriated by Congress outside public committees) for
the DOD to investigate UFO sightings.
The Bigelow-centric phase of the investigation, by all
accounts, was fairly conspiratorial, producing documents
like a report with a “photo of a supposed tracking device
that supposed aliens had supposedly implanted in a
supposed abductee,” as Lewis-Kraus, who saw the
document, describes it.
Enter veteran DOD counterintelligence officer Luis
Elizondo, who in 2010 took over the effort, rechristened
as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
(AATIP). AATIP studied videos and encounters like the
Nimitz incident, the GIMBAL video, and the GOFAST
video, and convinced Elizondo that something bizarre and
worthy of exploration was taking place. But Elizondo
found himself frustrated by the lack of departmental buy-
in.
This is where Blink-182 comes in. Tom DeLonge, the
lead vocalist and guitarist behind such classics as “First
Date,” “All the Small Things,” and, of course, “Aliens
Exist,” has had a longstanding interest in the paranormal.
According to an extensive 2018 profile in the Fader by
Kelsey McKinney, DeLonge has “consistently claimed to
believe” that “UFOs are real, aliens are real and they visit
us episodically, the U.S. government has known about
alien life for decades … and the U.S. government has a
real live alien species locked up somewhere” — among
other things.
To that end, DeLonge began putting together To The
Stars Academy, which in his vision would become a
leading source of UFO-related expertise and of related
media projects. In that role, he became an important
convener of ex-government officials with an interest in
UFOs — starting with Luis Elizondo, who left the DOD
in 2017, and the man who would become his main partner
in UFO evangelism, Christopher Mellon.
Mellon, a member of the prominent Mellon family of
Pittsburgh who served as deputy assistant secretary of
defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W.
Bush administrations, had a longstanding interest in
UFOs, and began giving interviews arguing for increased
disclosure around 2016.
“Tom [DeLonge] called me out of the blue one day,”
Mellon recalls. “He saw an article I’d written. … He was
starting this organization and was wondering if I would
want to get involved.” DeLonge connected him with
Elizondo, and both joined To The Stars as advisers.
Mellon had been outside of government for many years at
this point, but still had sources in the Pentagon, which is
how he and To The Stars got access to the three videos
above.
“Somebody met me in the parking lot and passed [the
videos] off. It had documentation stating it was approved
for public release. It was unclassified,” Mellon told
Lewis-Kraus. To the best of my knowledge, the person
inside the Pentagon who leaked to Mellon is still
unknown.
The To The Stars team then looped in a journalist with an
interest in the subject, Leslie Kean.
The New York Times and the mainstreaming
of UFO speculation
Kean, like Mellon a scion of a Northeast political dynasty
(her uncle, Thomas Kean, served two terms as governor
of New Jersey and chaired the 9/11 Commission), had
been interested in aliens and UFOs for years.
In 2010, she had published a book compiling firsthand
UFO sightings from what she considered credible
sources; John Podesta, the former White House chief of
staff under Clinton and a huge UFO fan, wrote the
foreword.
“To approach UFOs rationally, we must maintain the
agnostic position regarding their nature or origin, because
we simply don’t know the answers yet,” Kean writes in
the book’s introduction.
This is indicative of Kean’s broader approach: She is
clearly sympathetic to arguments for extraterrestrial or
paranormal explanations of mysterious phenomena, but
focuses on cases she views as credible and supportable
with empirical evidence, which could be more persuasive
to people on the fence.
This is true not just about aliens. Kean’s follow-up to her
UFO book was Surviving Death, a decidedly non-agnostic
argument (later adapted into a Netflix miniseries) for the
reality of an afterlife, reincarnation, and telepathy.
“Human beings have extraordinary mental abilities that
science cannot explain,” Kean writes in the book’s
introduction, abilities that “may be controversial” but
“have been documented by legitimate scientists for many
years,” known as “psi” or extrasensory perception (ESP).
Kean’s efforts to the contrary, parapsychological claims
like this are not widely accepted in psychology. When a
Cornell scientist purported to have conducted lab
experiments showing psi is real, the main response in the
field was that because psi is obviously fake, the finding
meant that prevailing methods in psychology were totally
broken.
In any case, Kean continued to maintain a steady interest
in UFOs, serving with Mellon on the board of the
nonprofit UFODATA, which supports scientific, agnostic
investigations in UFOs. Per Lewis-Kraus, Mellon and To
The Stars offered her the UFO videos and supporting
documentation on the condition that Kean place the story
in the New York Times. Kean told me she wasn’t sure the
offer was so explicitly conditional, but that the goal was
always to place a story in the Times.
Kean worked with Ralph Blumenthal, a 45-year veteran
of the paper who had retired in 2009. Blumenthal was
then working on a biography, now released, of John
Mack, a Harvard Medical School professor who became
convinced that the purported alien abductees he was
interviewing were telling the truth, despite the lack of
physical evidence for their claims and the possibility that
the experiences they described were simply sleep
paralysis.
“I believe … that Mack was onto something,” Blumenthal
told one interviewer. He added to me, “I went very
carefully over [Mack’s] research, and I must say that the
so-called skeptics, who are very quick to debunk a lot of
this field from the simplest UFO sightings to alien
encounters, have not done the research that people in the
field have done.”
Blumenthal was, naturally, intrigued by what Kean was
offering, and they set off to pitch a science story to the
editor of the New York Times. Blumenthal told me, and
documented in a “Times Insider” column for the paper,
that he took the story directly to Dean Baquet, the
Times’s top editor.
“I want to make a clear distinction between the material in
my book, which is about alien encounters reported by
people, and UFOs,” Blumenthal clarified to me. “It is
much easier to interest people at the Times in a story
about UFOs than about alien encounters.”
On UFOs, he had Navy pilot testimony and videos to lend
the story credibility. “Maybe [alien encounters] will
become part of the dialogue at some point,” Kean told me,
“but it’s not going to become part of the mainstream
dialogue at this stage. We’re just not there yet.”
Blumenthal and Kean’s effort culminated in two pieces
posted online on December 16, 2017, for the next day’s
print edition: the front-page, A1 story revealing the
existence of AATIP and the contents of the FLIR1 and
GIMBAL videos, and a story deeper in the paper
interviewing Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Jim Slaight, also in an
F/A-18 during the Nimitz encounter, about what they saw.
The latter piece was preceded by the following
disclaimer:
The following recounts an incident in 2004 that advocates
of research into U.F.O.s have said is the kind of event
worthy of more investigation, and that was studied by a
Pentagon program that investigated U.F.O.s. Experts
caution that earthly explanations often exist for such
incidents, and that not knowing the explanation does not
mean that the event has interstellar origins.
It took years, but eventually in September 2019 the
Pentagon confirmed that the two videos in the Times, as
well as GOFAST which was released a few months later
by To The Stars, were authentic. On April 27, 2020, it
formally released them itself.
Beyond the initial disclosure of the Navy videos, the
Times’s coverage has ventured into somewhat more
speculative territory.
In that December 2017 story, it repeated claims that a
Bigelow facility was “modified” to house “metal alloys
and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program
contractors said had been recovered from unidentified
aerial phenomena,” alloys that Blumenthal told MSNBC
government researchers were struggling to identify. That
claim earned immediate pushback from chemists who
found the notion of the Pentagon recovering
unclassifiable mystery alloys implausible.
In a July 2020 story, Kean and Blumenthal passed along a
claim from astrophysicist and contractor Eric W. Davis
that “he gave a classified briefing to a Defense
Department agency as recently as March about retrievals
from ‘off-world vehicles not made on this earth.’”
Davis is a bit of a perennial figure in stories about offbeat
Pentagon investigations. In 2004, he received $7.5 million
from the Air Force to study “psychic teleportation,” or the
ability to transport yourself between locations with the
power of your mind. The US military has long paid for
long-shot investigations into alleged paranormal activity
(see Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats for
a longer history).
By passing along Davis’s claims without verifying them,
the Times’s July 2020 story effectively suggested that
alien civilizations have reached earth with “off-world
vehicles” that the Pentagon has retrieved, a truly
extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence.
The story did note, “No crash artifacts have been publicly
produced for independent verification,” and
acknowledged that astrophysicists contend that “Even
lacking a plausible terrestrial explanation does not make
an extraterrestrial one the most likely.”
I asked Blumenthal about the choice to pass along the
news of Davis’s briefings without further verification of
his claims — after all, the Times spent years on a story
looking into whether Donald Trump cheated on his taxes,
so it seems reasonable that a claim suggesting alien
materials here on Earth would receive similar vetting.
Blumenthal defended the inclusion by noting the piece
stopped “short of saying that we have verified information
that material was recovered. We just said that
congressional staff was shown a briefing slide that
referenced these materials. It was very carefully worded,
because we didn’t want to get ahead of the information
we had. … But we thought it was quite an advance to get
that into the paper.”
Kean told me she confirmed with numerous sources that
such vehicles have been discussed in high-level briefings
by Davis. She also went a bit further in vouching for the
substance of Davis’s claim. “I absolutely think Eric Davis
is a respectable, credible person,” she told me, adding
later, “The fact that a government agency has been
briefing congressmen on that topic, and briefing many
other people at high levels, for many years, is highly
suggestive that there’s something to it.”
The prevailing explanations of the videos
No one knows with a high level of confidence what the
Navy videos are depicting, or if they are even depicting
the same thing. But explanations generally fall into one of
four categories:
• Natural or non-military phenomena (like a
pelican or civilian aircraft or camera error)
• Secret US government aviation technology
• Secret aviation technology from the military of
another country, most likely Russia or China
• Aliens
The main expositor of the first hypothesis is Mick West, a
British video game programmer known for his work on
the Tony Hawk skateboarding series, who now devotes
his time to his website Metabunk and the broader project
of debunking what he regards as conspiracy theories,
including “chemtrails” and extraterrestrial explanations of
UFOs.
West had laid out his theory of the three videos in many
places, but the below video is to my mind the most
helpful summary:
The FLIR1 video is “entirely consistent with being a
plane that’s very far away,” West says. “Radar’s great if
you know where to look, but if you’re looking in sector A
and it’s in sector Q” you’re going to miss it — which is
what he thinks happened in the Nimitz case.
West believes the GIMBAL video is most likely the glare
of a jet’s engine; he says he has replicated this kind of
image using his own infrared cameras. Its apparent
rotation, he says, is due to a limitation in the camera’s
ability to move and track the object. GOFAST, he thinks,
is a lost weather balloon (or perhaps a pelican), which —
because it’s midway between the jet observing it and the
water — appears (misleadingly) to be going as fast as the
plane itself when it’s really staying still.
So that’s number one, the naturalistic explanation.
Elizondo, Mellon, Fravor, and other UFO disclosure
advocates and ex-pilots do not just dispute this argument
but are actively infuriated by it.
“I don’t know why people even take [Mick West]
seriously,” Mellon told me. “He knows nothing about
these sensor systems, he deliberately excludes 90 percent
of the pertinent information and in the process maligns
our military personnel. ‘Oh, Dave Fravor doesn’t know
what he’s looking at. Oh, those guys don’t know how to
operate those infrared systems.’ Who the hell does he
think he is? These guys are the real deal. He’s a desk
jockey sitting in front of a monitor.”
West, for his part, told me, “I don’t ignore the pilots. I try
to engage with them to resolve issues like this. I respect
their skills and experience but recognize (as they
themselves have said) that they are human, not perfect.”
Elizondo is sometimes more charitable to the skeptics,
even giving an hour-long interview to West on his
YouTube channel. In general, his response was to argue
that West was looking just at videos and not at the totality
of information that’s available to researchers in the
Pentagon. On Nimitz/FLIR1, he told West, “Based on my
experience in the AATIP program, there is certainly
additional information that is very, very compelling.
People are going to say, ‘Well, what is it, Lue, why don’t
you tell us? We want to know.’ Well, I can’t” — it’s still
classified. But, Elizondo advised, this corroborating
information might start to trickle out soon.
As a layperson, I’m sort of at a loss of what to make of
these disputes. West’s explanations seem plausible, but I
haven’t been in a physics class since 2007, I have never
flown a fighter jet, and I have no expertise with infrared
cameras.
It also seems perfectly plausible that Elizondo and Mellon
are right and there is private government data proving the
skeptical explanations wrong — but it’s impossible to
evaluate that without access to such data.
In any case, “it’s a weather balloon” strikes me as more
plausible than “it’s aliens,” at least until we see the
disconfirming evidence to which Elizondo is alluding.
The other two non-extraterrestrial explanations — that it’s
secret US military aircraft, or secret foreign military
aircraft — are even tougher to nail down. The DOD is not
in the habit of blabbing about secretive air tests,
especially ones that (in this scenario) it would be hiding
from Navy fighter pilots operating in the same airspace.
The Russian and Chinese militaries are really not in the
habit of disclosing trade secrets.
Mellon has said that he’s confident the vehicles aren’t
ours, because he has a high enough security clearance that
he would have heard about them in that case.
Maybe! But I imagine there were many people with high
security clearances who, say, did not know that in the
1950s and ’60s the CIA was secretly dosing people with
LSD to see if it could be used to coerce confessions. The
US government is a vast, sprawling behemoth that’s
doing any number of strange things at any given time, so
Mellon’s point — while plausible — doesn’t strike me as
dispositive. That said, the Times’s Cooper and Julian
Barnes have reported that the UAP Task Force report will
conclude that the UAPs in the videos were not US
military aircraft, which would back up Mellon’s claim
considerably.
What about the Russian and Chinese militaries? That’s a
common theory among pilots. Pilot Lt. Ryan Graves told
60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker, that “The highest probability
is that it’s a threat observation program,” perhaps from
Russia or China.
The best argument for this possibility I’ve seen comes
from Tyler Rogoway of the War Zone, a publication
focused on defense issues. As Rogoway notes, there is a
huge amount of precedent for this kind of aerial
surveillance: The US engaged in this activity extensively
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and tests of surveillance
aircraft in locations like Roswell, New Mexico, and Area
51, Nevada, have generated many past UFO reports.
The adversarial drone explanation would also help
explain why pilots and ships, in particular, are seeing so
many of these objects: Why wouldn’t the Russian or
Chinese militaries want to learn more about the US
military this way? At the same time, Rogoway concedes
that there are some incidents that are difficult to explain in
this framework.
But a crucial point he makes is that there’s very little in
the video evidence, including the three blockbuster UFO
videos detailed above, that suggests vehicles with abilities
unknown to humankind, writing, “Beyond the so-called
‘Tic-Tac’ video that just looked like a blurry little Tic
Tac, I have seen nothing in any government ‘UAP’ videos
that supposedly show unexplainable capabilities or craft
that actually portray that. In fact, quite the opposite.”
In other words, they’re probably not from an advanced
alien civilization — which is probably the most common
misconception I’ve found in talking to friends and
families about the resurgence of UFO talk. Just so we’re
clear: These videos do not amount to the Pentagon or the
government admitting that the extraterrestrial hypothesis
is true.
Kean, for her part, while open to the extraterrestrial
hypothesis, also expressed openness to the foreign
military aircraft hypothesis, telling me, “I think Tyler
Rogoway does great work … it’s an open question.”
So what is true? I’m personally left agnostic by all the
evidence. I’m certainly not persuaded these are alien
aircraft, but the evidence for skeptical explanations like
weather balloons or civilian airplanes or foreign drones is
incomplete as well.
The only sure thing is something odd is happening — and
that we’ve just started trying to understand what it is.
Clarification, 6 pm: This piece has been updated to
clarify our summary of the reporting in a December 16,
2017, New York Times story. That story passed along
claims from Luis Elizondo and others that materials from
UAP had been recovered, and that a Bigelow facility was
being modified to be able to store them, but the Times
story did not claim that the Bigelow facility was actually
storing these materials.