TextSearch

SAN DIEGO — An exposé on 60 Minutes. A 12,000-word treatise in the New Yorker. Breathless cable-news coverage of alien craft. UFO enthusiasts are having their moment ahead of the release of a congressionally mandated…

News Those amazing Navy UFO videos may have down-to-earth explanations, skeptics contend The truth may be out there … or right here at home, in the form of camera quirks and other less sexy phenomenonShare this: Share on X (Opens in new window) X Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Print (Opens in new window) Print Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit By Andrew DyerPUBLISHED: May 29, 2021 at 8:00 AM PDT | UPDATED: June 4, 2021 at 3:21 AM PDTGetting your Trinity Audio player ready...SAN DIEGOSAN DIEGO — An exposé on 60 Minutes. A 12,000-word treatise in the New Yorker. Breathless cable-news coverage of alien craft. UFO enthusiasts are having their moment ahead of the release of a congressionally mandated report on what the Pentagon calls “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” The coverage of Navy videos purporting to show evidence of strange, unknown aircraft has featured the voices of so-called ufologists — UFO researchers — and Navy pilots who say they’ve seen mysterious objects in the skies off San Diego and the East Coast. Crews on Navy warships have reported seeing unidentified aircraft similar to those captured on video. Other accounts detail mysterious drone sightings by the crews of Navy destroyers west of San Clemente Island. The island serves as a training base and ship to shore gun range for the Navy. But as the videos revived decades-old theories of extraterrestrial visitation, the frenzy has been frustrating for those who specialize in debunking hoaxes and conspiracy theories. These skeptics point to more down-to-earth explanations. “There’s nothing new here, it’s the same grainy videos we’re used to seeing,” said Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. In August, the Defense department established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force after Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., added language into the Defense Intelligence Authorization Act that called on the Pentagon to produce a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon within 180 days. When former President Donald Trump signed the massive government stimulus and appropriations bill on Dec. 27, the defense intelligence bill was included, and the clock started ticking. The Pentagon will deliver its UAP report to Congress in June. The UAP Task Force’s examination of unidentified phenomenon is ongoing, a Pentagon spokesman said last week. Those amazing Navy UFO videos may have down-to-earth explanationsRetired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, one of the Navy fighter pilots who said she saw an unidentified aircraft near San Diego in 2004, told the Union-Tribune’s Kristy Totten on her News Fix podcast recently she is wary of the UFO community’s jumping to conclusions. “Just because I’m saying that we saw this unusual thing in 2004 I am in no way implying that it was extraterrestrial or alien technology or anything like that,” Dietrich said. She also said she doesn’t expect the Pentagon report to provide the kind of answers many are looking for. “I think that the report’s going to be a huge letdown,” Dietrich said. “I don’t think that it’s going to reveal any fantastic new insight.” Navy acknowledges videos Three of the most well-known videos were taken by Navy F/A-18s over both the Pacific and Atlantic. The three — known as “Gimbal,” “Go Fast” and “Flir1” — were filmed by Navy Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared, or ATFLIR, pods which attach to the fuselage of the aircraft. Flir1, which was filmed off the coast of San Diego in 2004, was published anonymously on a UFO website in 2007, according to a 2020 Popular Mechanics report on the history of the video. In 2017, it received renewed attention when it was published by the New York Times. Flir1 and two additional videos were published by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge’s “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science” website in 2019. After the release of the videos, the Navy acknowledged they were real, calling the objects in the videos “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” In 2020, the Pentagon released the three videos itself. In a statement, it said it did so “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.” The Pentagon said at the time the phenomena observed in the videos remained characterized as “unidentified.” The Nimitz encounter Mick West, a former video-game designer, is one of the best-known skeptics pushing back on the claims of UFO enthusiasts. On his website, Metabunk.org, and on his YouTube channel, West experiments with cameras to show how light and motion can deceive viewers. The three videos released by the Navy were filmed by infrared cameras. FLIR1 was captured off the coast of San Diego in 2004 by a fighter operating off the aircraft carrier Nimitz, while Go Fast and Gimbal were captured by an F/A-18 operating off the carrier Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida in 2...