The New York Times revealed a five-year Pentagon program<\/a> to investigate UFOs. The Pentagon subsequently released videos, leaked earlier, of military pilots encountering shadowy objects they couldn\u2019t identify. <\/p>\n\n\n\nOne was the video clip of the aviators tracking the blob above the ocean off the U.S. coast in 2015, dubbed Gofast. In another from that year, labeled Gimbal, an unexplained object is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole fleet of them,\u201d one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. \u201cIt\u2019s rotating.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2019, the Navy announced it would create a formal process for its pilots to report unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. Last August, the Defense Department created a task force dedicated to the matter. The mission was to \u201cdetect, analyze and catalog UAPs\u201d that could endanger the U.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an era of increasingly sophisticated drone aircraft, now seen as a risk to sensitive domestic military sites such as nuclear missile bases, the focus has been more on foreign rivals than on any supposed visitors from another planet. Yet the formation of the task force stood as a rare acknowledgment from the government that UFOs posed a potential national security concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More recently, a story on CBS\u2019 \u201c60 Minutes\u201d featured the declassified videos and raised questions about what intelligence the U.S. government has. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rubio, top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and its former chairman, said it is important for investigators to follow up on the reports of its pilots and make the findings public. \u201cI am going off what our military men and their radars and their eyesight is telling them,\u201d Rubio said. \u201cThere are multiple highly trained, highly competent people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet things in the sky are very often not what they seem. Shermer rattles off examples of how phenomena that appear otherworldly may be tediously of this Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNinety to 95% of all UFO sightings,\u201d he said, \u201ccan be explained as weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorite space junk, satellites, swamp gas … ball lightning, ice crystals reflecting light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, punch clouds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor any of these things to be real, we need something more than these grainy videos and blurry photographs,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe need really some hard evidence, extraordinary evidence, because this would be one of the most extraordinary claims ever if it was true.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Associated Press video journalists Dan Huff and Nathan Ellgren and AP National Security Writer Robert Burns contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n