The U.S. Navy has updated its guidelines for reporting UFO sightings, The New York Times reports, following a string of sightings in 2014 and 2015.
Over the past few years, the federal government, the military, in particular, has been considerably more transparent and forthcoming when it comes to UFOs and UFO sightings after decades of stonewalling, obfuscating, and foot-dragging. In particular, the military has released previously-classified reports and videos of UFO sightings, even releasing grainy footage from cameras on board military aircraft.
Those reports, that footage, and other archival data will be the basis for an upcoming History Channel series, Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation . That series will include, among other things, interviews with Navy pilots who witnessed UFOs off the East Coast in 2014 and 2015.
As Fox News reports, during that time period, the Navy was conducting training exercises along the eastern seaboard on board the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt . Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, reports what he and his colleagues saw.
Graves says that he and other pilots noticed “strange objects” that, unlike aircraft, had no visible exhaust plumes and didn’t leave an infrared (heat) signature. They appeared to fly at about 30,000 feet, according to the pilots’ estimations and stayed in the air for 10-12 hours. That’s impossible, says Graves, considering the amount of energy aircraft require to stay aloft.
Maintaining #NavyReadiness in the #US6thFleet area of operations ? Machinist’s Mate Fireman Kitiara Fiske conducts aft steering checks aboard the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer #USSRoosevelt . pic.twitter.com/OjDjsqrcid
— U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet (@USNavyEurope) May 21, 2019
What’s more, says Graves, the objects were performing maneuvers well beyond the capabilities of any pilots or modern aircraft, such as making sudden, sharp turns as well as accelerating instantly to hypersonic speeds and coming to sudden stops.
There’s even video of an encounter between a Roosevelt pilot and an unidentified flying object. You can watch the video below.
And in a 2014 incident, Lt. Danny Accoin said he almost hit an unidentified flying object, resulting in him filing an incident report. He describes the craft as “a sphere encasing a cube,” and said that, though the object was visible on his radar and on his infrared camera, he couldn’t see it on his helmet camera.
Though the military is being comparatively open about its members’ alleged UFO sightings, none of this is to suggest that the Defense Department is openly admitting that alien spacecraft are in our midst. Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher said that, in some cases anyway, the pilots could have been observing commercial drones. However, he admits that other cases remain unsolved. For those reasons, he said, the Navy has updated its guidelines for reporting unidentified craft.
