The Navy is reportedly drafting new guidelines for pilots to report encounters with "unidentified aircraft," an important new step to create a formal process for collecting, analyzing -- and destigmatizing -- UFOs.
The move comes after a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, Politico first reported Tuesday.
“We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is,” Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told the Washington Post. “We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”
He also vowed to “investigate each and every report.”
The mysterious sightings in some cases have been reported by pilots who’ve claimed to see small spherical objects flying in formation, the Post reported; others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. None had any air intake, wind or exhaust, according to the Post.
“It’s very mysterious, and they still seem to exceed our aircraft in speed,” Chris Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Post, calling it “truly radical technology.”
Lawmakers’ growing curiosity and concerns also appeared to have coaxed action out of the Navy, the Post reported, adding the sheer number of military personnel in the Air Force and Navy describing the same observations couldn’t be ignored.
Luis Elizondo, a former senior intelligence officer, called the move “the single greatest decision the Navy has made in decades.”
“This type of activity is very alarming,” Elizondo said, “and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”