Between December 2017 and March 2018, To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences—a foundation headed by Tom Delonge of Blink-182 fame that’s dedicated to investigating alien life—posted some strange videos of UFOs captured by the military. And, according to the US Navy, those videos are real, they’re confidential, and they never should have been released.
(If you need a moment to cross ‘pop-punk frontman outs military for potentially withholding information about aliens’ off your 2019 New Headline Bingo Card, we understand.)
It took a hell of a long time for anyone in the military to finally get around to confirming the legitimacy of the videos, but Navy spokesperson Joe Gradisher finally admitted as much to CNN. You can see them below:
The Navy, importantly, doesn’t refer to the strange objects in the clips as UFOs—they are instead ‘unidentified aerial phenomena,’ or UAPs. The point of pilots filming and sharing these videos with the Navy is to reinforce safety. It is kind of important to understand and investigate potential hazards.
According to Gradisher, these three videos are only a tiny fraction of UAPs that Navy trainees report seeing in training ranges. They just don’t all make it to the media—and the current news explosion and alien theories popping up now pretty much show why.
That said, just because an object is unidentified doesn’t mean that it’s actually aliens. (It also doesn’t mean that it’s not aliens—the U in both UAP and UFO stands for unidentified after all.) When the Navy says these UFOs are legitimate, that just means that they have yet to identify the aircraft in question.
Possibly the most hilarious part of this Navy admission is the timing. That whole Storm Area 51 thing—the Facebook event that went viral, spawning memes and apparently even a legitimate festival—is supposed to occur this weekend.
Just when you think the alien hype is dying down, the Navy goes and stokes the fire just before the biggest alien event of the year.
Correction: The headline originally indicated DeLonge is the frontman of Blink-182; he was dismissed from the group in 2015. We regret the error.