A newly leaked Navy video appears to show an unidentified flying object disappearing into the water off the California coast, according a clip obtained by a documentary filmmaker and shared with NBC News.
The video was captured in July 2019 by U.S. Navy aircraft and recorded in the USS Omaha’s Combat Information Center, according to the filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.
The clip appears to show a spherical object flying above the water for a few minutes near San Diego before suddenly vanishing.
“It splashed,” military personnel could be heard saying in the video.
The Pentagon confirmed that the clip was recorded by Navy personnel and will be reviewed by the department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a panel established last year to “gain insight” into the “nature and origins” of such objects.
The video was published days before “60 Minutes” aired an interview with two former U.S. Navy pilots who recalled being dispatched to investigate “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” that descended 80,000 feet in less than a second. The incident also occurred off the San Diego coast in 2004.
One of the pilots, Cmdr. Dave Fravor, told “60 Minutes” that they found a “little white Tic-Tac looking object” moving above the water before it disappeared. Seconds later, their ship — the USS Princeton — said the object reappeared on their radar 60 miles away.
Christopher Mellon, a former top defense official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said in an interview that there was “a lot of continuity” between recent reports of unidentified objects and reports dating back decades.
“What we’re seeing are a number of distinct and different things,” he said. “Sometimes we’re seeing a 50-foot object that can travel at hypersonic speeds and seemingly go into orbit or come down from altitudes of potentially above 100,000 feet.”
Mellon added that the stigma associated with reporting such phenomena has long kept witnesses quiet — a sentiment echoed by one of the U.S. Navy pilots interviewed by “60 Minutes.”
“Over beers we’ve said, ‘Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don’t know that I would have come back and said anything,’” Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich said. “Because it sounds so crazy when I say it.”
The reports come weeks after a lengthy story in The New Yorker called “How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously” examined the work of journalist Leslie Kean.
Reporting four years ago in The New York Times, Kean co-authored a scoop about how the U.S. Defense Department was spending millions on a threat identification program that examined unidentified aircraft that moved at high velocities with no apparent signs of propulsion.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
