Are we alone? Have alien spacecraft been buzzing across Earth's skies? Those are the questions being asked in the U.S. government's new report on unexplained aerial phenomena — its preferred term for what many of us call unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.
So far, it looks like the answers in the report will leave UFO spotters and conspiracy theorists unsatisfied. U.S. officials and analysts who examined video footage from U.S. Navy planes and other records say the evidence doesn't point to alien technology — but they also say they can't explain the unusual phenomena.
The report's release is still pending; after The New York Times first reported news of its findings Thursday night, a senior U.S. official confirmed to NPR that details in the newspaper's story are accurate.
One of the report's only substantial conclusions is that the craft encountered by the military — objects that showed unusual flight capabilities — were not created by classified programs run by the U.S. government or the Pentagon.
That finding jibes with statements previously made by Luis Elizondo, the former leader of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. He spoke to NPR in 2017 after the release of a previously classified video taken by a camera aboard a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet.
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