we have tackled many strange stories on 60 minutes but perhaps none like this
it's the story of the u.s government's grudging acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena
uap more commonly known as ufos after decades of public denial the pentagon now admits
there's something out there and the u.s senate wants to know what it is
the intelligence committee has ordered the director of national intelligence and the
secretary of defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings by next month
the story will continue in a moment so what you're telling me is that ufos unidentified flying
objects are real bill i think we're beyond that already the government has already stated for the
record that they're real i'm not telling you that the united states government is telling you that
luis elizando spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide
in afghanistan the middle east and guantanamo he hadn't given ufos a second thought until 2008
that's when he was asked to join something at the pentagon called the advanced aerospace threat
identification program or atip the mission of atip was quite simple it was to collect and
analyze information involving anomalous uh aerial vehicles uh what i guess in the vernacular you
call them ufos we call them uaps you know how this sounds it sounds nutty wacky look
bill i'm not i'm not telling you that that it doesn't sound wacky what i'm telling you it's real
the question is what is it what are its intentions what are its capabilities
buried away in the pentagon atip was part of a 22 million dollar program sponsored by then senate
majority leader harry reid to investigate ufos when elizondo took over in 2010 he focused on
the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by u.s service members
imagine a technology that can do six to seven hundred g forces that can fly at thirteen thousand
miles an hour that it can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space and
oh by the way has no obvious signs of propulsion no wings no control surfaces and yet still can
defy the natural effects of earth's gravity that's precisely what we're seeing elizondo tells us atip
was a loose-knit mix of scientists electro-optical engineers avionics and intelligence experts
often working part-time they comb through data and records and analyzed videos like this
a navy air crew struggles to lock onto
a fast-moving object off the u.s atlantic coast in 2015.
recently released images may not convince ufo skeptics but the pentagon admits it doesn't know
what in the world this is or this or this so what do you say to the skeptics it's refracted light
weather balloons a rocket being launched venus in some cases there are are simple
explanations for what people are witnessing but there are some that that are not we're not just
simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying oh that's a uap out there we're going through
our due diligence is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that china has developed
is it some sort of high altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance ultimately when you
have exhausted all those what-ifs and you're still left with with the fact that this is in
our airspace and it's real that's when it becomes compelling and that's when it becomes problematic
former navy pilot lieutenant ryan graves calls whatever is out there a security risk
he told us his f-18 squadron began seeing uaps hovering over restricted airspace southeast of
virginia beach in 2014 when they updated their jets radar making it possible to zero in with
infrared targeting cameras so you're seeing it both with the radar and with the infrared and that
tells you that there is something out there pretty hard to spoof that these photographs were taken
in 2019 in the same area the pentagon confirms these are images of objects it can't identify
lieutenant graves told us pilots training off the atlantic coast see things like that all the time
every day every day for at least a couple years wait a minute every day for a couple of years
you know i don't see an exhaust pool including this one off the coast of
jacksonville florida in 2015 captured on a targeting camera by members of graves squadron
it's rotating oh my gosh
they're all going against the wind the wind's 120 out of the west you can sort of hear a surprise
in their voices you certainly can they seem to have broke character a bit uh and we're just kind
of amazed at what they were seeing what do you think when you see something like this this is
a difficult one to explain you have rotation you have high altitudes you have propulsion right i
don't know i don't know what it is frankly he told us pilots speculate they are one of three things
secret u.s technology an adversary spy vehicle or something otherworldly i'd say you know the
highest probability is it's a threat observation program could it be russian or chinese technology
i don't see why not are you alarmed i i am worried uh frankly you know if these
were tactical jets from another country that were hanging out up there it would be a massive issue
but because it looks slightly different we're not willing to actually look at the problem in
the face uh we're we're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there watching us
every day the government has ignored it at least publicly since closing its project
blue book investigation in 1969 but that began to change after an incident off southern california
in 2004 which was documented by radar by camera and four naval aviators
we spoke to two of them david fravor a graduate of the top gun naval flight school and commander of
the f-18 squadron on the uss nimitz and flying at his wing lieutenant alex dietrich who has
never spoken publicly about the encounter i never wanted to be on national tv no offense
so why are you doing this because i was in a government aircraft because i was on
the clock and so i feel a responsibility to to share what i can and it is unclassified
it was november 2004 and the uss nimitz carrier strike group was training about
100 miles southwest of san diego for a week the advanced new radar on a nearby ship
the uss princeton had detected what operators called multiple anomalous aerial vehicles over
the horizon descending 80 000 feet in less than a second on november 14 fravor and dietrich
each with a weapon system officer in the back seat were diverted to investigate they found an
area of roiling white water the size of a 737 in an otherwise calm blue sea
so as we're looking at this her backseater says hey skipper do you and about that got out i said
dude do you do you see that thing down there and we saw this little white tic-tac-looking object
and it's just kind of moving above the white water area as dietrich circled above
fravor went in for a closer look sort of spiraling down the tic-tacs don't point north-south it goes
and just turns abruptly and starts mirroring me so as i'm coming down it starts coming up
so it's it's mimicking your moves yeah it was aware we were there he said it was about the
size of his f-18 with no markings no wings no exhaust plumes too i'll see how close i can get
so i go like this and it's climbing still and when it gets right in front of me it just disappears
disappears disappears like gone it had sped off what are you thinking so your mind tries
to make sense of it i'm going to categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone
and when it disappeared i mean it was just did your backseaters see this too yeah oh yeah
there was four of us in the airplanes literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes
seconds later the princeton reacquired the target 60 miles away another crew managed to
briefly lock onto it with a targeting camera before it zipped off again you know i think
that over beers we've sort of said hey man if i saw this solo i don't know that i would have
come back and said anything because it sounds so crazy when i say it you understand that reaction
i do you've had some people tell me you know when you say that you can sound crazy
i'll be i'm not a ufo guy but from what i hear you guys saying there's something
yes oh there's there's definitely something that i don't know who's building it
who's got the technology who's got the brains but there's there's something out there that
was better in our airplane the air crew filed reports then like the mysterious flying object
the nimitz encounter disappeared nothing was said or done officially for five years
until lou elizondo came across the story and investigated we spend millions of dollars in
training these these pilots and they are seeing something that they can't explain furthermore
that information is being backed up on electro optical data like gun camera footage and by
radar data now to me that's compelling inside the pentagon his findings were met with skepticism
atip's funding was eliminated in 2012 but elizondo says he and a handful of others kept the mission
alive until finally frustrated he quit the pentagon in 2017 but not before getting these
three videos declassified and then things took a stranger turn i tried to help my colleague
lou elizondo elevate the issue in the department and actually get it to the secretary of defense
christopher millen served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence for
presidents clinton and george w bush and had access to top secret government programs
so it's not us that's one thing we know we know that i could say that with very high degree of
confidence in part because of the positions i held in the department and i know the process mellon
says he grew concerned nothing was being done about uaps so he decided to do something in 2017
as a private citizen he surreptitiously acquired the three navy videos elizondo had declassified
and leaked them to the new york times it's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do
something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda he joined forces
with now civilian lou elizondo and they started to tell their story to anybody who would listen
to newspapers the history channel to members of congress we knew and understood that you had to
go to the public get the public interested to get congress interested to then circle back
to the defense department and get them to start taking a look at it and now it is this past august
the pentagon resurrected atip it's now called the uap task force service members now are encouraged
to report strange encounters and the senate wants answers anything that enters an airspace
that's not supposed to be there is a threat after receiving classified briefings on uaps
senator marco rubio called for a detailed analysis this past december while he was still head of the
intelligence committee he asked the director of national intelligence and the pentagon to present
congress an unclassified report by next month this is a bizarre issue the pentagon and other
branches of the military have a long history of sort of dismissing this what makes you think that
this time is going to be different i mean we're going to find out when we get that report you know
there's a stigma on capitol hill i mean some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and
some kind of you know giggle when you when you bring it up but i i don't think we can
allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question what do
you want us to do about this i want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously
i want us to have a process to analyze the data every time it comes in that there be a place where
this is cataloged and constantly analyzed until we get some answers maybe it has a very simple answer
maybe it doesn't for more on the nimitz encounter i felt the vulnerability of
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