Navy pilots describe encounters with UFOs

“Navy pilots describe encounters with UFOs” is a segment broadcast by 60 Minutes on 2021-05-17, correspondent Bill Whitaker reporting. The segment aired against a backdrop of shifting official posture: the United States government had by that point grudgingly acknowledged the existence of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) after what Whitaker characterised as decades of public denial,¹ and the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Secretary of Defense to deliver a report on UAP sightings.² The segment drew together testimony from former intelligence officials, serving and former naval aviators, and a sitting senator, presenting the most concentrated public accounting of the UAP issue to that date.

A central figure in the segment is Luis Elizondo, who spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide before being asked to join a Pentagon programme in 2008.³⁴ That programme, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), was established to collect and analyse information involving anomalous aerial vehicles (AAV), known in common parlance as UFOs.⁵ AATIP was part of a $22 million programme sponsored by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid,⁶ and Elizondo took over its leadership in 2010, focusing on the national security implications of UAP documented by US service members.⁷ The programme was staffed by a loose-knit mix of scientists, electro-optical engineers, avionics and intelligence experts, often working part-time.¹³ Elizondo described the UAP under investigation as capable of performing manoeuvres of 600 to 700 G-forces⁸ and flying at approximately 21,000 kilometres per hour,⁹ while also being able to evade radar,¹⁰ traverse air, water, and possibly space,¹¹ and exhibiting no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, and no control surfaces.¹² AATIP investigated alternative explanations, including new Chinese cruise missile technology and high-altitude reconnaissance balloons, before concluding the phenomenon was real and present in US airspace.¹⁴ Funding for AATIP was eliminated in 2012, though Elizondo and a small group continued the mission;³⁵ he ultimately resigned from the Pentagon in 2017, having first secured the declassification of three Navy UAP videos.³⁶

The segment features Ryan Graves, a former United States Navy Lieutenant,¹⁵ who described UAP encounters off the US Atlantic coast near Virginia Beach. His F/A-18 squadron began seeing UAP hovering over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014, after their jets’ radar was updated to enable targeting with infrared cameras.¹⁶ Graves noted that the dual detection of UAP by both radar and infrared is hard to spoof.¹⁷ Pilots training in the area observed UAP every day for at least a couple of years.¹⁸ Graves himself observed no exhaust plume on the objects.¹⁹ In 2015, a UAP was also captured on a targeting camera off the coast of Florida Jacksonville,²⁰ where the object appeared to be rotating and moving against the wind, which was approximately 220 kilometres per hour.²¹ Graves considered the most probable explanation to be a foreign threat observation programme, with Russian or Chinese technology as possible candidates, and expressed concern that the objects were being ignored despite appearing to surveil US operations daily.

The segment gives extended coverage to the 2004 USS Nimitz UAP encounter, an incident off Southern California documented by radar, camera, and four naval aviators.²² David Fravor, a graduate of the Top Gun Naval Flight School and commander of the F/A-18 squadron aboard the USS Nimitz,²³ and Alex Dietrich, who was flying at Fravor’s wing and had not previously spoken publicly about the encounter,²⁴ both gave first-hand testimony. In November 2004, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was training approximately 160 kilometres southwest of San Diego,²⁵ while the advanced radar of the USS Princeton had for a week been detecting what operators described as multiple anomalous aerial vehicles (AAV) over the horizon, descending approximately 24,000 metres in less than a second.²⁶ On 2004-11-14, Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapons system officer in the back seat, were diverted to investigate.²⁷ They found an area of roiling white water in an otherwise calm sea, above which Fravor observed a small white object resembling a Tic Tac.²⁸ As Fravor spiralled down towards it, the object turned abruptly and began mirroring his movements.²⁹ The object was approximately the size of an F/A-18, with no markings, no wings, and no exhaust plumes.³⁰ All four aviators in the two aircraft watched the object for roughly five minutes³¹ before it disappeared; the USS Princeton reacquired the target approximately 97 kilometres away seconds later, and another crew briefly locked onto it before it departed again.³² Dietrich described initially attempting to categorise the object as a helicopter or drone. After the aircrew filed reports, nothing was done officially for five years until Elizondo encountered the case and investigated it through AATIP.³³ AATIP found such pilot sightings compelling because they were corroborated by electro-optical data, including gun-camera footage, and by radar.³⁴

The segment also features Christopher Mellon, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush³⁷ and who stated with high confidence that the observed UAP are not US technology, given the positions he held within the United States Department of Defense (DoD).³⁸ Mellon described working with Elizondo to elevate the issue within the DoD, and outlined a deliberate strategy of first engaging the public to generate interest, then pressing United States Congress, before returning to the Defense Department to compel action.³⁹ In August 2020 the Pentagon resurrected the UAP investigation function as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAP Task Force), with service members now encouraged to report encounters.⁴⁰ Senator Marco Rubio, who had received classified briefings on UAP, is also interviewed; in December 2020, while still heading the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he had formally requested that the ODNI and the Pentagon present Congress with an unclassified report on the subject.⁴¹ The segment noted that the US government had publicly ignored UFOs since closing its Project Blue Book investigation in 1969,⁴² and that the ODNI and DoD unclassified report on UAP (2021) represented a significant departure from that posture. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) and the accounts of Fravor, Dietrich, and Graves are also discussed in reporting by The New York Times and covered in History Channel programming relating to the same period of UAP disclosure activity.