A recently declassified video from 2015 may depict U.S. navy pilots encountering an unidentified flying object (UFOs).
“What the f— is that thing?” one pilot can be heard saying in the video. “Wow, what is that, man?” the pilot adds. “Look at that flying!”
The footage was recorded on a Raytheon ATFLIR pod — a targeting pod mounted underneath an aircraft and equipped with a camera with a laser rangefinder and a laser spot tracker — two years ago, off the east coast of the United States in 2015.
According to reports from ABC News, the video was released Friday by the private scientific research and media group, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA). The group is led by Dr. Hal Puthoff, a NASA and U.S. Department of Defense adviser and James Semivan, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency service member.
This most recent clip has been released just a few months after the New York Times published two other declassified videos of alleged UFO sightings.
According to USA Today, pilots David Fravor and Commander Jim Slaight said of one of those encounters that they’d seen an oval-shaped object flying over the sea. Both men were flying off the Southern California coast in F/A-18F Super Hornets.
While the Department of Defence has declined to comment on the latest video, the agency did confirm to ABC News that the U.S. government had run a program for investigating reports of UFOs until 2012.
“The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ended in the 2012 time frame. It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” the statement read. “The DoD takes seriously all threats and potential threats to our people, our assets, and our mission and takes action whenever credible information is developed.”
The event has resurrected calls for UFO sightings to be taken seriously by the U.S. government. Chris Mellon, an adviser to TTSA and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday arguing that more attention needs to be directed to the issue, or the U.S. risks being “technologically leap-frogged by Russia or China.”
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