The fighter pilot who came face to face with the infamous 'Gimbal' UFO thought it was a 'simulated enemy'.
In 2017, America’s very own X-Files-esque team was revealed by The New York Times: up until 2012, $22 million in defence funding went to the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
Three years later, amid leaks and speculation, the Pentagon officially released three declassified videos of UFOs – no aliens, but aerial phenomena with an emphasis on ‘unidentified’ (UAP). Since then, the US released a huge report, and it's remained a source of constant investigation.
The Gimbal footage is arguably the most notable of the declassified clips, showing a UFO encounter from aboard a Navy fighter jet from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
The video, filmed off the eastern seaboard, near the Florida coast, shows a mysterious object moving erratically and swivelling on its axis.
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John Greenewald Jr. operates The Black Vault, a UFO-tracking website that has steadily amassed millions of pages of declassified government documents.
The site recently obtained documents indicating the unnamed Weapons Systems Officer (WSO) who encountered the unknown aircraft may have briefed Senate staffers on the event in 2019.
One part of the report reads: "Towards the end of one of the night flights [redacted] was conducting during the at-sea period, he and his pilot detected an air contact via [redacted] coming from the east and heading towards the ship.
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"Initially thinking it may be a simulated advisory aircraft as well part of the COMPTUEX scenario, he took a [redacted] lock to investigate further."
COMPTUEX, or Composite Training Unit Exercise, is essentially a rehearsal carried out prior to deployment.
Greenewald recently submitted a request to the Barack Obama Library regarding the findings of the AATIP during his presidency - in response, he was told there are 3,440 pages and 26,271 electronic files which pertain to his request, and it could take years to dig them all out.
It's also important to remember that in the earlier government report, US intelligence agencies didn't rule out extraterrestrial life being connected to UAP sightings, and Obama himself hasn't avoided the topic of UFOs.
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"When it comes to aliens, there are some things I just can’t tell you on air," he said during an earlier appearance on The Late Show with James Corden.
"But what is true is that there is footage and records of objects in the sky that we don’t know exactly what they are. How they move, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. So I think that people still take that seriously and try to figure out what that is."
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Cameron Frew