WASHINGTON -- American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft -- but they can't deny a link either.
They still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report.
The report determines that the vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades -- which often unsettled Navy pilots -- did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said. That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.
But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said.
And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.
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The tantalizing prospect of top government agencies finally weighing in -- after decades of conspiracy theories, TV shows, movies and winking jokes by presidents -- will instead yield a more mundane reality that's not likely to change many minds on any side of the issue.
The report examines unexplained sightings from recent years that in some cases have been captured on video of pilots exclaiming about objects flying in front of them. It also examined incidents involving foreign militaries over the past two decades.
Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could be experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China, and the report doesn't rule out that what U.S. pilots have seen may be new technologies developed by other countries.
One senior official briefed on the information said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could have been experimenting with hypersonic technology.
He and other officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the classified findings in the report.
Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers the ability to evade American missile-defense technology. China also has developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers' hypersonic research has far outpaced American military development.
The report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge. One possible explanation -- that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons -- does not hold up in all cases, the officials said, because of changes in wind speed at the times of some of the interactions.
STRANGE OBJECTS
In one Navy encounter, strange objects -- one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind -- appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who was with the Navy for 10 years, told The New York Times in an interview, "These things would be out there all day." With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, "12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near-collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. An incident recorded by a plane's camera in early 2015 shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
Officials briefed on the report said it also examined video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
In that incident, the pilots reported an interaction with the craft that lasted for several minutes. At one point, the object peeled away, one of the pilots, Cmdr. David Fravor, later said in an interview with the Times. "It accelerated like nothing I've ever seen," he said.
The report studies that incident, including the video that accompanied the interaction. The provenance of the object, the officials said, is still unknown.
Congress in December required the director of national intelligence to summarize and report on the U.S. government's knowledge of unidentified aerial phenomena -- better known to the public as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. The effort has included a Defense Department task force established last year. The expected public release of an unclassified version of the report this month will amount to a status report, not the final word, according to one official.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Sue Gough, on Friday declined to comment on news stories about the intelligence report. She said the Pentagon's task force is "actively working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on the report, and DNI will provide the findings to Congress."
White House press secretary Jen Psaki, when asked about the report, said of the question at first, "It's always a little wacky on Fridays." But she added, "I will say that we take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft -- identified or unidentified -- very seriously, and investigate each one."
The Pentagon and the CIA have for decades looked into reports of aircraft or other objects in the sky flying at inexplicable speeds or trajectories.
The U.S. government takes unidentified aerial phenomena seriously given the potential national-security risk of an adversary flying novel technology over a military base or another sensitive site, or the prospect of a Russian or Chinese development exceeding current U.S. capabilities. This also is seen by the U.S. military as a security and safety issue, given that in many cases the pilots who reported seeing unexplained aerial phenomena were conducting combat training flights.
A NEED TO KNOW
The report's lack of firm conclusions likely will disappoint people anticipating the report, given many Americans' long-standing fascination with UFOs and the prospect of aliens having reached humankind. A recent story on CBS' "60 Minutes" further bolstered interest in the government report.
Former President Barack Obama also stoked interest when he was asked about the incidents last month on "The Late Late Show with James Corden" on CBS.
"What is true, and I'm actually being serious here," Obama said, "is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are."
The final report will include a classified annex, the officials said. While it will not contain any evidence concluding that the phenomena are alien spacecraft, the officials acknowledged that the fact that it will remain off-limits to the public is likely to further fuel speculation that the government has secret data about alien visitations to Earth.
Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, said the claim that there was no indicated link to secret U.S. programs would be significant. But he called on the government to be fully transparent.
"I think that our tax dollars paid for information and data involving UFOs," Elizondo said. "And I think it is the U.S. government's obligation to provide those results to the American people."
But skeptics caution that the videos and reported sightings have plausible Earth-bound explanations. Mick West, an author, investigator and longtime skeptic of UFO sightings, said he supported the military looking into any possible incursion of U.S. airspace, especially by an adversary.
"People are conflating this issue with the idea that these UFOs demonstrate amazing physics and possibly even aliens," West said. "The idea that this is some kind of secret warp drive or it's defying physics as we know it, there really isn't any good evidence for that."
The Pentagon last year announced a task force to investigate the issue, and the Navy in recent years created a protocol for its pilots to report any possible sightings. And lawmakers in recent years have pushed for more public disclosure.
"There's a stigma on Capitol Hill," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told "60 Minutes" in May. "I mean, some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kind of, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don't think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question."
John Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, said this spring that there were many more sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena than were publicly known.
"We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don't have the technology for or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom," he told Fox News.
Information for this article was contributed by Nomaan Merchant and Robert Burns of The Associated Press; by Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper of The New York Times; and by Missy Ryan, Alex Horton and Mike Rosenwald of The Washington Post.
