The Navy admitted it has a lot more footage of UFOs — but won't share them
anytime soon.
The U.S. Navy holds unseen videos of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or
unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), as the Department of Defense (DOD)
prefers to call them — but will not release the footage publicly because it
would "harm national security," a
Navy spokesperson wrote
Wednesday (Sept. 7).
The admission came in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request filed by the government transparency site The Black Vault, which has
previously shared thousands of pages of UFO-related documents received via
FOIA requests to the CIA and other government agencies. The Black Vault
filed the FOIA request to the U.S. Navy in April 2020 — just one day after
the Navy declassified three now-infamous videos shot by Navy pilots showing
high-tech aircraft moving in seemingly impossible ways. The Black Vault
requested that the Navy now turn over any and all other videos related to
UAP.
More than two years later, the government responded with a letter that both
confirmed that more UAP videos exist and denied the request to turn them
over due to national security concerns.
"The release of this information will harm national security as it may
provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of
Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities," Gregory
Cason, deputy director of the Navy's FOIA office, wrote in a response
letter. "No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."
Cason added that the Navy was able to declassify the three UAP videos
released in April 2020 only because the videos had been previously leaked to
the media and had already been "discussed extensively in the public domain."
The Navy deemed it possible to officially release the footage "without
further damage to national security," Cason wrote.
Interestingly, in its response to The Black Vault's request, the Navy did
not make any attempts to conceal the existence of additional UAP videos.
There are clearly more videos of inexplicable UFO encounters in the Navy's
archives, but how many and what they depict will have to remain a mystery
for now.
It's clear, however, that the U.S. military takes the potential threat of
UAP very seriously. In May 2022, the DOD held its first public hearing on
UFOs since the 1960s. The hearing primarily discussed a June 2021 Pentagon
report that revealed U.S. Navy pilots had reported 144 UAP sightings since
2004. More recently, the DOD announced that it will receive federal funding
to open a new office focused exclusively on managing reports of UFO
sightings by the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force.
Originally published on
Live Science.