In yet another confession of having footage of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), the U.S. Navy said in a statement on Monday that releasing such material would be "dangerous for national security."
The announcement was made in the aftermath of a two-year legal battle between the U.S. Navy and a website called "The Black Vault," which aims to cast light on the secrets kept under wraps by the U.S. government through the use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
"The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities," Gregory Cason, deputy director of the Navy's FOIA office, said in a statement after a FOIA request was made for the release of the footage.
The stigma surrounding the probable existence of extraterrestrial life was intact as any claim regarding UFO sightings was quickly labeled as "fringe conspiracy theory" – but that all changed in 2017 when the U.S. government, and the Navy in particular, published striking UFO footage and admitted for the first time in history that their warplanes’ radar systems indeed spotted aerial vehicles, which were recorded doing maneuvers apparently incompatible with the rules of physics we know of today, unbeknownst to mankind.
The videos were previously published in a 2017 New York Times expose about the Pentagon's UFO research program and by a public interest group co-founded by Tom DeLonge, the lead singer of Blink 182, an American rock group.
The videos feature grainy footage taken from U.S. military jets from 2004 to 2015.
In one clip from 2015, labeled GOFAST.wmv by the Navy, an unidentified object is being tracked by an F-18 Super Hornet jet flying over the ocean as pilots exclaim their amazement.
"Wow! What is that man?" says one pilot. "Look at that flying!" says another.
Another video taken in 2004 from an F-18 jet shows an object moving rapidly out of the jet's tracker system.
The Department of Defense released the videos "in order 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," Sue Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson said in a statement.
Last year, a U.S. intelligence assessment released to Congress also confirmed that military pilots over the years had observed, and in some cases recorded, more than 100 instances of high-speed craft whose origin could not be traced or identified.
The nine-page report, titled a preliminary assessment, is the first official U.S. government recognition of the sightings of unidentified flying objects after decades of speculation and fascination among believers of UFOs and ridicule by others who dismissed the notion of alien spacecraft visiting Earth.
The highly anticipated report said its findings were drawn from 144 reports compiled from multiple U.S. government sources.
Of those, 80 observations were drawn using multiple sensors, the report said. The assessment could neither explain the origins of the flying objects nor eliminate the possibility that the craft was of alien origin.
In May, the Pentagon also vowed to take encounters with unidentified flying objects (UFOs) seriously in the first public congressional hearing on the matter in five decades.
The United States Defense Department wants to remove the stigma around reporting such incidents so that it can better investigate them, starting with military personnel, Pentagon officials told members of the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing.
"We want to know what's out there as much as you want to know what's out there," testified Ronald Moultrie, a top Defense Department intelligence official. "Our goal is not to potentially cover up something, if we were to find something. It's to understand what may be out there, examine what it may mean for us."