

In February 2020, the United States Navy confirmed that, in response to inquiries, intelligence briefings presented by naval intelligence officials have been provided to members of Congress. On April 27, 2020, the Pentagon formally released the three videos. In September 2019, a Pentagon spokeswoman confirmed that the released videos were made by naval aviators, and that they are "part of a larger issue of an increased number of training range incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena in recent years". According to Wired magazine, a copy of one of the videos had been online, in a UFO forum, since at least 2007. Around the same time, Luis Elizondo, the director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, had resigned from the Pentagon in October 2017 to protest government secrecy and opposition to the investigation, stating in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis that the program was not being taken seriously. The videos, featuring cockpit display data and infrared imagery, along with audio of communications between the pursuing pilots, were initially provided to the press by Christopher Mellon, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Instead, the coverage has, for the most part, taken a quizzical, mysterious frame that plays off the catchy 'UFO' tag in the headline". According to Kloor, "Cursory attention has been given to the most likely, prosaic explanations. Those stories have been criticized by journalism professor Keith Kloor as "a curious narrative that appears to be driven by thinly-sourced and slanted reporting". The reports became subject to "fevered speculation by UFO investigators". Additionally, the Washington Post published a video of a similar encounter, titled "GOFAST". On December 16, 2017, The New York Times reported on the incidents, and published two videos, termed "FLIR" and "GIMBAL", purporting to show encounters by jets from Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt with unusually shaped, fast-moving aircraft. ĭuring 2014–2015, fighter pilots associated with the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group were operating off the East Coast of the United States when they recorded the GIMBAL and GOFAST videos while reporting instrument detections of unknown aerial objects which the pilots were unable to identify. Underwood recorded the FLIR video, and coined the description "Tic Tac" to describe the infrared image, but did not himself see any unusual object. Unlike Fravor, Underwood's fighter was equipped with an advanced infrared camera (FLIR). A second wave of fighters, including pilot Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, took off from Nimitz to investigate. Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared. Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet (12 m) long. Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. The aircraft would appear at 80,000 feet (24,000 m) before descending rapidly toward the sea, and stopping at 20,000 feet (6,100 m) and hovering. Fravor said the operator had told him that the USS Princeton (CG-59), part of the strike group, had been tracking unusual aircraft for two weeks prior to the incident. On November 14, 2004, fighter pilot Commander David Fravor of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group claims to have investigated radar indications of a possible target off the coast of southern California. Publicity surrounding the videos has prompted a number of explanations, including drones or unidentified terrestrial aircraft, anomalous or artefactual instrument readings, physical observational phenomena (e.g., parallax), human observational and interpretive error, and, as is typical in the context of such incidents, extraordinary speculations of alien spacecraft.

The Pentagon later addressed and officially released the first three videos of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in 2020, and confirmed the provenance of the leaked 2019 videos in two statements made in 2021. The four grainy, monochromic videos, widely characterized as officially documenting UFOs, have received extensive coverage in the media since 2017.
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The Pentagon UFO videos are selected visual recordings of cockpit instrumentation displays from United States Navy fighter jets based aboard aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2004, 20, with additional footage taken by other Navy personnel in 2019.
