n November 2019, Popular Mechanics revealed previously unheard eyewitness accounts of the U.S. Navy’s encounters with UFOs while conducting training off the coast of San Diego in the fall of 2004. These are now known as the Nimitz encounters, so named for the fighter pilots of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group who spotted the strange flying objects.

Some of the Nimitz witnesses told Popular Mechanics that the brief “Flir1” video—released for public viewing by the UFO research group To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science and included below—is merely a small piece of a much longer video that the government is keeping a secret. According to these Navy veterans, the video they saw showed many more details of an unknown aircraft seeming to defy the known laws of physics as it effortlessly evaded some of the world’s best fighter jets. In December 2019, Chad Underwood, the former F/A-18 pilot who originally filmed the UFO encounter, told New York magazine that Flir1 is indeed a “little video cut” of his original recording.


To read more, click here.