By Tim Binnall
The Department of Defense has officially released the three videos of unidentified flying objects which have captivated the UFO research community and generated considerable media attention for the last two years. The tantalizing clips, which include the now-iconic 'Tic Tac video' (shown above), largely first came to light back in December of 2017 and March of 2018 by way of the landmark New York Times times piece on the Pentagon's secret UFO program and Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy. Since that time, something of a saga surrounding the videos has unfolded.
UFO enthusiasts and skeptics alike debated the nature of the oddities seen in the footage, while conspiracy theorists argued over how and why the clips ever saw the proverbial the light of day. As all this was going on, the videos and witness accounts accompanying them captured the imagination of a public which usually doesn't pay all much attention to the phenomenon. In the spring of 2019, this led to the Navy changing their reporting guidelines on UFOs, members of Congress expressing interest in the enigma, and even President Trump was asked about the matter.
Speculation surrounding the origin of the videos came to an end in September of 2019 when the Pentagon finally confirmed that the footage was genuine and had come from Navy jets. And so today's development appears to be more of a formality as the Department of Defense announced that they were officially authorizing the release of the clips after they had been circulating widely online for the last few years. No doubt due to the considerable impact that has been made by the footage, the Pentagon dubbed them "historical Navy videos."
Accompanying the release of the videos, the DoD issued a statement indicating that "after a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena." They went on to explain that their reasoning for this action was to "clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos."
The statement concluded by reiterating their stance from last year, saying that "the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified.'" Although the decision to officially release the videos does not necessarily provide any new material for UFO enthusiasts to pore over, one imagines that they'll parse the official announcement from the Pentagon for potential clues such as the disappointing inference that there is no additional 'lost' footage from these particular sightings and the intriguing indication that there are ongoing investigations into unidentified craft violating our air space.