It’s getting harder to laugh off the idea of UFOs

When the late-night talk-show host James Corden asked Barack Obama about UFOs last month, there was as usual an air of nervous joviality surrounding the subject. Bandleader Reggie Watts pressed him as well and Obama, as if relenting, admitted two things. Firstly, that he could not divulge all that he knew on air; and secondly, that the slew of footage released by the Pentagon in the past two years showing UAP — ‘unidentified aerial phenomena’ — is in fact real. As if overnight, the fringe conspiracy air that has hung over the topic of UFOs for 70 years has seemed to vanish, and this month the Director of National Intelligence is delivering a report to Congress on the troubling phenomena alluded to by Obama — there are objects appearing in our air space for which we have no explanation. The difference today is that they have been filmed.

On 10 November 2004 US Navy F-18 jets operating from USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego near San Clemente Island were asked to investigate groups of five to ten objects which were behaving strangely on Nimitz’s radars. At 28,000 feet they were too high to be birds and too slow to be aircraft. Two Super Hornets intercepted one of them. The four pilots saw a so-called ‘tic tac’ white object moving at seemingly impossible rates of climb and descent. They then observed it for about five minutes as it fell from 60,000 feet to 50 feet above the water. More importantly, it was caught on the aircrafts’ FLIR thermal imaging cameras.

The footage remained secret until the New York Times published it in 2017, but the Times also published two other videos of separate incidents. One, now known as the GOFAST video, shows an object skimming across the water as the airmen whoop with astonishment, while the other, dubbed the GIMBAL video, shows footage captured by jets from the USS Theodore Roosevelt tracking an object which, to the pilots’ amazement, rotates at a seeming standstill.