Mysterious Footage of UFO Encounter Released by Pentagon, Amid Admittance of Secret Program

The Pentagon, headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, taken from an airplane in January 2008. (David B. Gleason/Wikimedia Commons)

Mysterious footage showing an encounter with an unidentified flying object (UFO) back in 2004 was released—amid the Pentagon’s acknowledgment over the existence of a program that investigated extraterrestrial life.

Two navy pilots, Commander David Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Jim Slaight were on a routine training mission in their F/A-18F fighter jets when a radio operator asked Fravor to investigate a mysterious object hovering off the coast on San Diego.

In an interview with the New York Times, Fravor said he saw a “whitish” aircraft of some kind that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. He said it was jumping around erratically and hovering over the ocean, adding that it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.

But as he descended to get a closer look, the UFO quickly peeled away.

“It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he told the New York Times, adding that he was “pretty weirded out.” The flying object “had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s,” he recalled telling another pilot later in the day.

“It’s a *expletive* drone, bro,” one of the pilots can be heard saying in the video.

“There’s a whole fleet of them,” the other said before exclaiming “It’s rotating!”

The two pilots were then told to confer at another point 60 miles away, called the cap point.

“Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator told him “but that thing is at your cap point.”

“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, told the New York Times.

Flavor told his colleagues about the incident but his superiors did not investigate further into it. He resumed working on his military career.

The eerie account comes hot on the heels of another Times report, where the Defense Department acknowledged that a secret government program titled the “Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program” did indeed exist.

The department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program. However, the program’s backers told the Times that while the funding at that time officially ended, the program remains in existence.

The program was reportedly established in 2007 at the request of then Nevada Sen. Harry Reid. The program spent $22 million between the periods of 2008 and 2012 for the management, research, and assessments of threats posed by UFO’s.

Stephen Basset, the first and only UFO lobbyist told the Washington Post in 2015 that even if he spent his whole life researching alien abductions, it would never make a difference in the White House.

“It occurred to me that it wasn’t a scientific problem, but a political one,” Basset told the Washington Post.

“I get down there, and I file” the lobbyist papers, he recalled. “I’m the first one. Nineteen years later, I’m still the only one. I could have taken my time.”

Last Saturday, Dec. 16, Basset tweeted about the recent account, stating that “This is significant.”