nNobody expected something special when a squadron of Navy F/A-18 fighter jets headed out for routine air maneuvers off the coast of Virginia Beach one day in 2013. The F/A-18s, the workhorse of the Navy, owned the local airspace . That day, but just so they didn’t.
Suddenly, the aircraft radar picked up a group of six objects flying with it, moving erratically and quite aerobically. At some moments they were tearing side-by-side at speeds exceeding 350 knots — or 402 miles per hour. Then, suddenly, they were standing completely still in winds that were moving at 150 knots (172 mph) — winds that had the planes struggling to maintain their position. Then the objects accelerate again. They had no visible exhaust, no recognizable means of propulsion, and did not actually resemble any aircraft in the country’s civilian or military arsenal.
It ranged in size from 5 to 15 feet, and was “a dark gray or black cube inside a translucent sphere,” former Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who was aloft that day, told TIME magazine. “We almost collided with something; They came within 50 feet of the lead plane, and that’s when we knew we were dealing with something a little abnormal here. There are no aircraft in our inventory that I know of that have the ability to operate at very low speeds, or no speeds, and then accelerate and operate like a fighter.
That wasn’t the last time Unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) – the modern-day term for unidentified flying objects (UFO) – has troubled the Navy. “We saw them in Virginia Beach between 2013 and 2015,” Graves says. “Later, when we conducted training operations on the USS Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, they were either already there or they followed us, because we had more than a dozen incidents, two of which were recorded.” [by the Navy] and Issued by New York times In 2017.”
These videos, popularly known as “Gimbal” After the swinging things move, they’re just some of the eyewitness photos featured in the new PBS documentary “NOVA.”What are unidentified flying objects? It premiered on PBS stations on January 22. And Graves is just one of many people who witnessed them and who provided his accounts. The documentary traces the arc of UFOs and UAPs in American skies, from June 24, 1947, when aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold died It reported the first widely publicized UFO sightings, right up to the present, when accounts of UAPs have exploded, with 801 cases reported to the military since 2023 alone. Among the Pentagon’s $65 billion “black budget” in classified expenditures, an estimated $22 million was spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates drones.
Even before this contemporary program, the US military was keenly interested in the provenance of UFOs and UAPs, as the NOVA film documents. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force ran a secret — though since declassified — program called Project Blue BookWhich achieved 12,618 sightings of flying objects. Of these, 701 remain unidentified. Some of the first reports, from 1947 to 1949, were sightings of military assets that were part of Department of Defense operations. Mughal projectunder which the Air Force launched high-altitude balloons carrying sensitive microphones designed to pick up the acoustic signatures of Soviet nuclear testing. the Initial rumors of extraterrestrial action in Roswell, New Mexico. Stemming from a local rancher collecting debris from a balloon that fell on his land.
In the 21st century, there is a lot of air traffic resulting in more potential false UAP alarms. More than 1,800 weather balloons are launched around the world every day, according to the NOVA documentary FAA reports More than a million registered drones are in private hands in the United States. It is likely that much of what is known to be extraterrestrial has a completely banal Earthly explanation. But sightings like the biaxial are very difficult to interpret, a point proven by another UAP incident known colloquially as Tic Tac.
In 2004, the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group launched off the coast of Southern California. Frequent radar reflections Of flying objects that quickly appear and disappear from tracking screens. During those intervals when they are visible, they fly in a circular path, dive, glide, descend rapidly from 80,000 feet to 20,000 feet, and hover there. Finally, Navy pilot David Fravor and others are sent aloft to investigate and find their quarry –45 feet. Long flying machine Which for all the world resembles in color and shape a Tic Tac mint.
“We all looked down and saw a tic-tac-tac object with a longitudinal axis pointing north-south suddenly moving above the water, like a ping-pong ball,” Fravor said. In 2023 he testified before Congress. “There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces such as wings. The object suddenly changed its longitudinal axis, brought it aligned with my plane and began to climb. When we placed our nose on the object about half a mile away from it, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared.”
Video of the meeting It was issued by the Navy who never gave an idea of what it was.
Like the Tic Tac and the Gimbal, hundreds of other unexplained UAPs continue to puzzle experts. Graves is now the CEO of the company Americans for Safe Aerospacea non-profit organization that collects sightings of UAPs with a focus on helping shape the public conversation about unidentified objects and class airspace. He doesn’t pretend to know what ghosts are, but he’s pretty sure they aren’t.
“I don’t think we see an adversary demonstrating capability beyond our state-of-the-art during these relatively low-reward, high-risk operations,” he says. “To be able to take these technologies that we don’t even realize exist and basically put them right on top of our home, in a position where we can seize them and reverse engineer them… I don’t see that. I don’t see that logic.”
It is equally unlikely that this vehicle is top-secret indigenous technology that has not been reported to much of the military. “These were airborne assets that demonstrated capabilities beyond our state-of-the-art,” Greaves says. “And what I mean by cutting-edge technology is technology that would take more than 10 years to develop in the United States, if it started now.”
That leaves non-terrestrial assets, and Greaves does not speculate on that outcome. “I don’t think we have the right definitions to go down that path,” he says, “without having a better way of determining how to determine if something is really from another star system…[whether] “These things use magical physics that we don’t understand.”
The movie NOVA offers other explanations. Expose the conspiracy Mick Westauthor Escape the rabbit hole, Theories of it It is not the object in the gimbal video that is moving but the camera that has captured the image, creating merely the illusion of movement – although this does not explain what the object, which would be stationary in this case, actually is. In another video – in infrared – in which the object appears to disappear and then reappear, West suggests that the camera may be capturing an image of a bird that has reached thermal equilibrium with the background temperature and thus appeared to simply disappear.
The filmmakers leave viewers with a welcome plethora of questions – which is more or less in keeping with the state of the UAP art. With up to 400 billion stars In the Milky Way it is estimated 200 billion galaxies In the universe, there are countless trillions of planets that could host a high-tech civilization. It is impossible to know whether one of these civilizations would send any of their flying machines to our isolated world, and why they would bother. But the sightings keep coming, even if the answers remain elusive.
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