The subject is taken seriously. The Pentagon acknowledged on May 18 that a “increasing number” unidentified objects had been spotted in the sky for twenty years. This statement came during the first public hearing in the US Congress devoted to “unidentified aerial phenomena” (whose acronym is PAN, in French). Scott Bray, Deputy Director of Intelligence for the US Navy, says nothing was detected “which may suggest a non-terrestrial origin”. However, he also did not definitively rule out this possibility.
To illustrate these observations and try to better understand them, franceinfo returns to three videos declassified by the Pentagon. The three documents can be downloaded from the official website of the American administration (in English)which spoke in 2020 of publications “historical” (in English)even though they had circulated before and the US Navy had already confirmed their authenticity the previous year.
What do these videos show?
The documents named “Flir”, “Gimbal” and “Go fast” are in black and white. The first video was recorded on November 14, 2004 off San Diego (California). Called Flir, this event is also known as the “USS Nimitz encounter”. The other two are from January 2015. The three videos were taken “by US Navy pilots, thanks to infrared cameras installed in fighter planes”explained in March 2020 Roger Baldacchino, then head of the Group for studies and information on unidentified aerospace phenomena (Geipan), attached to the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes).
In the video of the phenomenon called “Flir”, it is possible to distinguish an elongated shape, which some commentators have nicknamed “Tic Tac”, after the brand of candy. Once spotted by the US Navy device, the mysterious shape disappears on the left of the image after a sudden acceleration. The 1 minute 17 video is particularly silent, as can be seen below.
In the video of the phenomenon called “Gimbal”, an oval-shaped object is moving with a sea of clouds in the background. Unlike the previous video, the comments of the pilots are audible. “There’s a whole swarm of them (…) Dammit, they’re all going against the wind! A westerly wind of 120 knots!” one of them shoots, before another points out that the object, which has no wings, is spinning, just before the end of the video which is only 35 seconds long .
In the video of the phenomenon called “Go fast”, which only lasts 34 seconds, a small dot visible above the water is moving at very high speed. After successfully locking his sight on it on the third attempt, a pilot happily shouts “Wow, got it!” “What is that thing ?” asks another.
What are the notable elements?
For “Flir”, the story is rich. David Fravor, one of the pilots who made the sighting, spoke in many media. “At first it had no wings, so we thought it was a helicopter, but there was no rotor wash on the water, no rotor”he reported on CNN (in English) from 2017.
“It’s easy to doubt what we can’t explain” – Commander David Fravor, a former US Navy pilot, encountered an unknown flying object, calling it “something I had never seen in my life” https://t.co/SiPTYb2xM1 pic.twitter.com/mpaiudlnVL
— OutFrontCNN (@OutFrontCNN) December 20, 2017
“It was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball bouncing off a wall and changing direction, also highlighted David Fravor. And its ability to hover above water and then pick up vertically again from 0 to over 12,000 feet and then accelerate in less than 2 seconds and disappear is something I haven’t never seen in my life.” The object “was moving very quickly and very erratically and we couldn’t anticipate the direction it was going or how it was maneuvering”also said former pilot Alex Dietrich, who also witnessed the scene, as reported by the BBC.
“I believe, like the other witnesses who saw the object that day, that it is something that does not come from our world.”
David Fravor, pilot who witnessed the sighting titled “FLIR”on CNN
For the two other events, “Gimbal” and “Go Fast”, no pilot present on site testified. It is impossible to know more about the context of these observations. But in general, Andrea Themely, a former pilot in the American army, reports to the specialized magazine Wired that these phenomena have no wings and that no means of propulsion is visible, in any case no means of propulsion known until now, because they appear cold to the infrared camera. In addition, they visibly move at an extremely high speed. According to radar data from the aircraft carrier USS Princeton, the Tic Tac was able to reach the speed of 74,000 km/h, or Mach 60, that is to say 60 times the speed of sound. For comparison, among French army fighter jets, the Rafale can reach Mach 1.8 and the Mirage 2000 can move up to Mach 2.1.
The displacements of these phenomena raise questions insofar as they seem to defy what is physically possible. For “Gimbal”, for example, “the pilots’ comment attests to their surprise at a change in attitude that defies the laws of flight mechanics, since placing the object orthogonally to the aerodynamic flow”analyzed the Aeronautical and Astronautical Association of France (3AF) in its letter of October 2020. However, the association is cautious, judging “plausible” “a defect in the intermediate focal plane of the pod’s optical system [l’équipement installé sur l’avion]“.
What conclusions can be drawn ?
Not much, according to the Aeronautical and Astronautical Association of France. For her, the videos of the “Flir” and “Gimbal” events “are of one too poor quality to hope to extract information from it”. Only that of “Go fast”, of better quality, “can provide relevant information”. But this is still limited. Even for this video, “it is impossible to draw the slightest conclusion because we do not know where the plane is. You have in the field of the camera a certain number of indications (…) but we do not know at all where the plane is plane”decided Luc Dini, president of the SIGMA2 technical commission of 3AF, with the Figaro in July 2021.
Beyond the quality of the videos, the lack of precise information on these three documents represents a major obstacle to their analysis. On “Flir”, for example, Luc Dini said on the YouTube channel Maybe Planet, after the hearing in the US Congress: “There is no relation [public] which makes it possible to detail what happened, what was seen by such and such a platform, such and such a radar, where the F-18 was, at what probable distance…” Before insisting: “We don’t really see any data on these cases that would allow us to better understand what was seen or not. That’s what’s annoying.”
If no conclusion can be drawn, the field of questions remains open. Were these machines which seem to escape gravitation secretly developed by other countries such as Russia or China? Alain Juillet, the former director of intelligence at the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), does not believe it. “If any country in the world had made such a discovery, we would know it. No progress of this magnitude can remain secret”he judged in the columns of Paris Match in 2020. “One way or another, there would have been leaks, an indiscretion of the scientists working on it… Since there was absolutely nothing, it is something else and it escapes to the earth dimension”he suggests.
Is the hypothesis of machines made by a non-human intelligence on the rise? The US Congress does not favor it nor does it rule it out. “Unidentified aerial phenomena constitute a potential threat to national security (…) And they must be treated as such”, according to the elected Democrat André Carson, head of the parliamentary committee at the origin of the hearing. The principle to keep in mind remains that unexplained does not mean unexplainable. In France, Geipan methodically collects and verifies reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. After investigation, only 3.3% of cases (98 out of 2,978 cases studied) are classified as unidentified.