Did this ’60 Minutes’ interview just confirm the Pentagon knows UFOs are real?

Is space cool again? Between the 2019 black hole image and the recent flights of the Perseverance Mars rover’s helicopter, news of the final frontier seems trendier than ever. Space news got increasingly more mind-boggling when the Pentagon released videos of UFOs in April of 2020.

Space fans remember when the UFO videos made waves in April of last year, amid the first full month of lockdown after the COVID-19 pandemic had just been announced. However, what do we really know about the Pentagon’s report? Did the U.S. government flat out say, “UFOs are real?”

Unsettling & unexplainable

The latest info on the ongoing discussion of the existence of UFOs comes from CBS’s 60 Minutes. CBS News reported yesterday that this week on 60 Minutes, two former Navy pilots were interviewed about their experience with UFO phenomena, and the two unpacked some truly eye-opening encounters with the unknown. 

The events leading the two pilots to ask themselves whether UFOs are real come from a November 2004 flight they took over the Pacific Ocean, leaving from off the coast of San Diego. The two pilots, Commander Dave Fravor and Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich, say they saw something unsettling & unexplainable during their flight on the fateful November day.

Dietrich & Fravor were training with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, and a ship which was a part of the training group, the USS Princeton, had advanced radar pick up on “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles,” all descending a mind-blowing eighty thousand feet in less an a second (sounds extra-terrestrial to us). The two pilots were asked by their superiors to investigate the mysterious objects.

A closer look

Fravor recounts when the two got closer to the strange object, they managed to get a better idea of what they were looking at. 

Fravor is quoted saying, “we saw this little white Tic-Tac-looking object… and it’s just kind of moving above the whitewater area,” while Deitrich added the Tic-Tac had neither predictable movement nor predictable trajectory, a seemingly extremely uncommon phenomenon considering the massive technical advancements of the U.S. Naval system.

Did the two pilots think the Tic-Tac was a flying saucer and were now convinced UFOs are real? Not exactly – the two wanted to get a closer look at the strange object first. Fravor says upon closer inspection, the object was about the size of his F/A-18F aircraft, but the Tic-Tac had no markings, wings, exhaust plumes, or any other identifiable components to separate the object from the Earthly aircraft we know so well. 

Tracking for days

Fravor tried to cut off the object, perhaps in an attempt to get an even closer look at the mysterious object, but as soon as he did, the Tic-Tac moved away so fast the mysterious object seemed to disappear from view. A few seconds later, the USS Princeton picked up the Tic-Tac on its radar. The object was already sixty miles away.

When Fravor & Dietrich returned to base, they learned other crew members were tracking similar objects and managed to grab an infrared video of one of them, although reports seem to imply the video isn’t exactly an HD depiction in which viewers will know what they’re looking at.

Furthermore, controllers on the USS Princeton told Fravor & Dietrich they’d been tracking similar objects for days, unbeknownst to the two pilots. 

Fravor & Dietrich said their crew roasted them upon recounting their experience, perhaps implying what they saw could mean UFOs are real. However, the joke is on the crew;  last August, Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist approved the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a division that investigates objects like the Tic-Tac.

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Are UFOs real? Well, the U.S. government has implied we can’t identify certain flying objects, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, so yes. The government isn’t saying little green men are inside the mysterious objects zipping around in space, but until we get a hold on the Tic-Tacs of the world, we really can’t say. Have an explanation for the Tic-Tac phenomena? Let us know in the comments!