The Truth About The US Navy's 'UFO' Videos

The funny thing about the acronym 'UFO' is that so many people treat the 'U' like an 'I' by trying to identify flying objects as extraterrestrial vessels. Really, though, how would anyone know they were looking at one if they can't identify what it is? If someone saw a saucer-shaped object hover in the sky and then vanish with baffling speed, what's to stop someone from claiming that it's teen pranksters from the future using time machines to mess with their human ancestors, and laughing about it thousands of years later? How would you begin to disprove it? By insisting that space aliens are more likely that time travel?

Inconsistencies aside, that's the fun side of uncertainty: The ability to fill the blanks in one's knowledge with the scenario they find most satisfying. However, it might not have been fun for the US Navy. In 2017 and 2018, To the Stars Academy, which was founded by Blink-182 singer Tom Delonge, published footage of UFOs recorded by naval pilots. Filmed in 2004 and 2015, a total of three videos showed what Space.com describes as "airborne enigmas." Navy pilot Lt. Danny Accoin said the objects possessed "no distinct wing, no distinct tail, no distinct exhaust plume." They zipped through the air at "hypersonic speeds, fueling the confusion. Pilots clearly drew a blank on how to explain this thing, but some members of the public didn't.

As the Guardian describes, and even babies might have guessed, some citizens thought thought the aircraft belonged to space aliens. Once the cat was out of the bag, there was no re-bagging it, and in 2020, the Pentagon declassified the videos. That's kind of like unlocking a door that's already open. By the Pentagon's own admission, the videos were in the public domain already. So, what was the point?

The Pentagon issued a statement, explaining its decision: The agency aimed "to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos." So the military officially acknowledged that the videos are real, but that doesn't clarify what's really captured in them. Do Pentagon officials even know what they're seeing? The odds are, even if they did know, they would leave the answer to that question blank.