At a Congressional hearing on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) held last month, senior US Naval Intelligence officials testified that the database of UFO sightings includes 400 incidents, up from 143 recorded the previous year.
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According to the military’s report from 2021, no evidence of aliens was discovered. Though there are events that couldn’t be explained, Scott W. Bray, the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, told legislators that they did not find anything “non-terrestrial in origin.”
Bray was speaking at a House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counter-proliferation Subcommittee hearing on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”, or UAP.
The senior Naval Intelligence official stated that the incidents in the 2021 report were based on both sensor data as well as sightings by military aviators, NPR reported.
Strange objects observed in the sky, often known as UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), have become a genuine national security concern.
Even as UFO sightings have come under the scrutiny of American intelligence officials, a sailor on board an aircraft carrier who witnessed a ‘UFO incident’ in 2004 shared his experience exclusively with The Sun.
According to the witness, a UFO flew over US Navy vessels faster than any known aircraft in a mass sighting that was allegedly witnessed by others on the ship.
USS Ronald Reagan Encounter of 2004
Patrick Gokey became the third eyewitness to the mysterious incidents that took place on ‘USS Ronald Reagan’ in 2004, The Sun Online reported. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was allegedly shadowed for up to four hours by a 40-foot ‘ball of fire’ which was witnessed by dozens of crew members.
Gokey claimed to have seen the object twice that night, once while on the starboard forward watch by the bridge and once when he was rotated to the station at the massive vessel’s stern, known as “the fantail”.
The sailor said that the mysterious thing, which he described as a “bright orange ball”, moved in ways and at speeds that he had never seen before. He claimed that the object was “wavy” and flew in three half-circle patterns before jetting away.
The object was called “the blob” or “the creature” by the crew on board the carrier. However, nobody paid much attention to the otherwordly event that they witnessed.
Gokey is the third eyewitness to narrate his account after his fellow crewmen Karol Olesiak and Derek Smith. A popular documentary maker Dave C. Beaty produced a film called ‘The Nimitz Encounters’ in 2019 about the iconic incident from the night of mysterious sightings.
Incidentally, Pentagon officials took the rare step of confirming three remarkable recordings depicting US contacts with UFOs last year. The “Tic-Tac” film, which showed an unidentified object being followed by fighter planes, was perhaps the most striking of the declassified videos.
A US Navy pilot who flew the F/A-18 Super Hornet jet that captured the infamous “tic-tac” UFO footage explained last year how his weapons system was deactivated during the strange encounter. Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood said he saw “strobe lines” on his cockpit radar when he tried to monitor the “object of interest”.
Several leaked UFO videos and photographs that were submitted to the Task Force for inquiry have now similarly been validated by defense chiefs. French fighter pilots have also narrated similar incidents over time.
In another incident of an eyewitness narrating his account, a former US Homeland Security official recently spoke out about the weird things he witnessed while working on the Mexican-American border, including what he believes were UFOs.
According to the Debrief, newly disclosed footage and testimony from a former Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent indicated repeated encounters with “aerial objects” that maneuvered “far beyond the capabilities of a conventional aircraft.”
This makes one thing very clear: the UFO incidents that have been overwhelmingly reported by several media channels are not isolated events and are just a few of the many that have been witnessed by sensors and humans alike. However, it is only now that the US is showing urgency in tracking and uncovering the pattern behind these sightings.
Going after UFOs
On February 14, the US Air Force scrambled its F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets to identify an object floating in the air off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, as previously reported by EurAsian Times.
Pacific Air Forces sent tactical aircraft to intercept and identify the object following homeland defense procedures, visually verifying an unmanned balloon with no visible identification markers. Locals also confirmed that the military employed Raptors in the incident, which they describe as a UFO sighting.
There has been no conclusive finding of the nature of the object, as has been the case with all the incidents recorded so far. However, the officials in the US security establishment seem to be going after this recurring phenomenon of UFO sightings.
Unidentified flying objects, also known as unexplained aerial phenomena or UAPs by the military, have been on the rise, according to Bray. He attributed the increase to improved sensors, an increase in drones and other non-military unmanned aerial systems, and “aerial clutter” like Mylar balloons.
“Navy and air force crews now have step-by-step procedures for reporting UAPs on their kneeboard, in the cockpit,” Bray said.
The United States also earlier verified the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon UFO research program that was terminated in 2017. After a decision by the US Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2020, it was replaced by the UAP Task Force.
Several leaked UFO videos and photographs that were submitted to the Task Force for inquiry have now been validated by defense chiefs. The many latest entries recorded do not have sensor data and are just stories from people coming forward with older stories that they could not reveal at the time, said Bray.
Having said that, the renewed effort by the US means that it is wary of the threat posed by these objects that haven’t been decoded yet. Going forward, as the process of narrating stories of UFO sightings becomes easier and more videos get declassified, many more interesting and mysterious stories could make their way to the public.
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