The U.S. Navy has confirmed a collection of UFO videos, one of which was released by Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge, are indeed authentic and do show off unidentified flying objects.
The videos in question were leaked over the past two years, and the Navy is now saying that the footage is authentic, and that they don’t know what the flying objects seen in the video are. That said, this doesn’t mean the videos show authentic proof of alien life on Earth.
“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP),” Joseph Gradisher, spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, originally told the Black Vault, a website with information and research on government secrets. Motherboard later confirmed this same statement. We’ve reached out to the U.S. Navy to see if they could provide additional details, and will update this story if we hear back.
UAP has become the Navy’s preferred terminology over UFO for unidentified objects found in the air — likely because of the extraterrestrial stigma around the former. Again, this doesn’t mean the government is confirming the existence of aliens, they’re just saying that whatever is flying in these videos cannot be identified. The objects could be anything.
Gradisher told the Black Vault that UAP is preferred because “it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges.”
He also said that the three videos depicting UAP were never cleared for public release. The New York Times and DeLonge’s UFO research organization, To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA), released the videos between December 2017 to March 2018. TTSA’s website said that the footage “demonstrate flight characteristics of advanced technologies unlike anything we currently know, understand, or can duplicate with current technologies.”
The three videos were captured by Navy seals in 2004 and 2015 using the Raytheon ATFLIR Pod while on a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet.
The confirmation that DeLonge’s UFO videos are indeed real is a major victory for his organization. Whether or not TTSA or the U.S. government will ever identify the unidentified flying objects is another question entirely.
