The US Navy has acknowledged that it has classified documents as well as video footage of a 2004 encounter with an unknown flying object (UFO) and warned that releasing the sensitive material would threaten national security, according to a report published by VICE.
US Navy admits possession of footage
The Navy confirmed that it was in possession of several top-secret documents and at least one classified video of the infamous encounter in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by John Greenwald, author and curator of The Black Vault, the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents.
According to a spokesperson for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), these documents were either labelled "SECRET" or "TOP SECRET" by the agencies that provided them, and that releasing the information to the public "would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States."
USS Nimitz UFO incident
On Nov. 14 2004, several U.S. Navy fighter pilots stationed on board the USS Nimitz couldn't believe their eyes when they saw a mysterious flying object flying over the Pacific Ocean and appeared to defy the laws of physics. The Navy dubbed the UFO as an "unidentified aerial phenomenon," but have since remained silent about what exactly that phenomenon could've been.
In December 2017, The New York Times ran a story about Navy pilots who intercepted a strange object off the coast of San Diego on November 14, 2004, along with a one-minute video clip of the pilots' encounter with the UFO, which they manager to shoot with their F-18's infrared fun camera. Check out the video below:
Now, the Navy's admittance has confirmed that they know more than they're letting on. Experts believe that the Navy could be in possession of the full-length, unedited copy of the video footage as some witnesses claimed they saw a longer, high-resolution version.
Other UFO Encounters caught on tape
The USS Nimitz UFO encounter wasn't the first one to be captured on camera by US pilots. A separate video, taken on Jan 21, 2015, shows footage of another mysterious flying object as the pilots comments on how strange the spacecraft is over their communications system.
Months later, former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge's UFO research organization, To the Stars Academy, released another video of a strange object flying over the surface of water. This video, was also recorded on Jan. 21, 2015, leading many to believe that the "UFO" in both videos is the same.
