Source: Newsweek

In a follow-up published by the Post on Monday, the same official said that the U.S. Navy will not share any more information regarding what they call “unexplained aerial phenomena” with the public, despite drafting formal procedures to document UFO sightings on an ongoing basis.

“There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air spaces in recent years,” the Navy said in a statement released to Politico, who first reported on the new approach. “The Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in drafts.”

The new processes come in response to multiple sightings of small, rounded objects spotted and tracked on infrared cameras, including footage of a so-called “Tic-Tac” UFO craft released by The New York Times in 2017. During the 2004 incident, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group tracked multiple UFOs off California’s Baja Peninsula, with pilots, radar technicians and other military officials confirming the mysterious technology.

“At a certain point, there ended up being multiple objects that we were tracking,” Petty Officer Gary Voorhis, stationed aboard the Princeton missile cruiser escorting the USS Nimitz, testified. “They all generally zoomed around at ridiculous speeds, and angles and trajectories and then eventually they all bugged out faster than our radars.”

The vehicles buzzing military installations are described as having no air intake, no exhaust and no other indication of a power source or known method of generating thrust.

Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, described multiple recorded sightings per month to The Washington Post, but emphasized that any further information will likely remain classified. Congress may see reports with broad statistics regarding the number of sightings and conclusions taken from follow-up investigations.

But while the Navy plans to keep its UFO sightings out of the public eye, the politician who helped fund the Pentagon’s shuttered UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), says UFO sightings are far more common in military circles than previously revealed.

Speaking with CBS affiliate KLAS in Las Vegas, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described widespread sightings on military bases. “You can’t just hide your head and say these things are not happening,” Reid, who has previously described a UFO arms race between the United States and competing countries, told the I-Team’s George Knapp. “We have military installations where hundreds and hundreds of people who are there see these things.”