Bill Whitaker is a CBS News correspondent and co-producer, working alongside Graham Messick, of a May 2021 60 Minutes segment titled “Navy Pilots Describe Encounters with UFOs.” According to author Luis Elizondo, the segment became the first-ever UAP story broadcast by 60 Minutes and went on to become its number one episode.1
The 2021 segment presented a wide-ranging account of US government involvement in UAP investigation. Whitaker reported that the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a USD $22 million programme buried within the Pentagon, had been sponsored by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.2 Luis Elizondo had not given UAPs serious consideration until 2008, when he was asked to join AATIP, and took over its leadership in 2010, focusing on the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by US service members.3 AATIP was described as a loose-knit mix of scientists, electro-optical engineers, avionics experts, and intelligence analysts, often working part-time.4 Its funding was eliminated in 2012, though Elizondo and a handful of others continued the mission informally.5 Frustrated with internal resistance, Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon in 2017, having first obtained declassification of three UAP videos.6
Whitaker’s segment also covered the now widely documented 2004 USS Nimitz encounter. He reported that in 2004-11, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training approximately 160 kilometres southwest of San Diego when the advanced radar aboard USS Princeton detected multiple anomalous aerial vehicles (AAVs) over the horizon, descending from approximately 24,000 metres in less than a second.7 On 2004-11-14, pilots David Fravor and Alex Dietrich were diverted to investigate, observing a tic-tac-shaped object with no markings, no wings, and no exhaust plumes, approximately the size of an F/A-18 aircraft.8 Seconds after the object disappeared, USS Princeton reacquired it approximately 97 kilometres away.9 Whitaker noted that after the encounter, aircrew filed reports but nothing was officially said or done for five years.10
Beyond the Nimitz case, the segment addressed ongoing sightings by active-duty naval aviators. Whitaker reported that from 2014, Lieutenant Ryan Graves’ F/A-18 squadron began observing UAPs hovering over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach, sightings made possible after their aircraft’s radar was upgraded, enabling infrared targeting camera lock-on.11 UAPs in the area were confirmed by both radar and infrared sensor returns simultaneously.12 In 2019, photographs of UAPs in the same area were taken, and the Pentagon confirmed these were images of objects it could not identify.13
Whitaker also investigated Australian UAP matters. He reported that Bill Chalker interviewed former Westall student Victor Zakry, who claimed to have seen the object associated with the Westall UFO Sighting at ground level, close enough to touch it, and whose drawings portrayed a metallic saucer-shaped craft.14 Additionally, Chalker speculated that the North West Cape 1973 UAP Sighting may be referred to in a heavily redacted National Security Agency document describing a purported UFO sighting in 1973.15