According to a new report, American intelligence officials found no evidence that the unidentified flying objects witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft.
While this may be disappointing for all alien-lovers, they still cannot explain the unusual movements, so they can’t rule out the idea just yet.
The highly anticipated report determined that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past 20 years did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology. This debunks the possibility that the Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained objects just encountered secret government programs, per the New York Times.
While an unclassified version of the report is expected to be released to Congress by June 25, it will present few other firm conclusions.
Americans have long been infatuated with the idea of aliens, further perpetuated by books and movies. What’s more, Obama stoked further interest when he was asked last month about the sightings.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious,” Obama said, “is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.”
One senior official said there was worry among military and intelligence officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology, which would explain the unidentified objects.
Navy pilots were often unsettled by what they saw. In one instance, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost every day from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the sky over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who was with the Navy for 10 years, told the New York Times in an interview, “These things would be out there all day.” With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
One thing is for certain, if there are other forms of life out there, they seem to be itching to make their presence known.