The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the
wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in
the skies 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.
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an
F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years and who
reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft
in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we
observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the
objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents
were captured on video, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early
2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question
what they are watching.
“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were
extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can
generally be found for such incidents. Graves and four other Navy pilots,
who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in
2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the
aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their
provenance. But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which
this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the
military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.
Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of
instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt
incidents.
“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have
been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s
doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the
message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures
for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”
The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known
Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar
data, video footage, and accounts provided by senior officers from the
Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the
program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series
of incidents.”
The program, which began in 2007, was officially shut down in 2012 when the
money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it
investigates military reports of UFOs, and Elizondo and other participants
say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other
forms. The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object
described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane,
encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so
unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane
explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs
in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and
reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed
flight.”
Graves still cannot explain what he saw. In the summer of 2014, he and
Lieutenant Danny Accoin, another Super Hornet pilot, were part of a
squadron, the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va.,
that was training for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.
Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three
other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but
declined to be named.
The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was
upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got
the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects but ignoring what they
thought were false radar tracks.
But Graves said the objects persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000
feet, even sea level. Then pilots began seeing the objects.
What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects
accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous
turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.
Asked what they thought the objects were, the pilots refused to speculate.