One grainy video, with no audio, was recorded by the USS Nimitz in 2004 and is less clear than the other two, from 2015.
The 2004 incident was documented by two airmen in the New York Times three years ago, when they described the object as 40 feet (12.19m) long and oval in shape.
The videos became public after unauthorized leaks in 2007 and 2017, and the Navy previously verified their authenticity.
“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems,” said Gough in a statement, “and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.”
The Navy videos were first released between December 2017 and March 2018 by To The Stars Academy of Arts & Sciences, a company co-founded by former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge that says it studies information about unidentified aerial phenomena.
In 2017, one of the pilots who saw one of the unidentified objects in 2004 told CNN that it moved in ways he couldn’t explain:
“As I got close to it … it rapidly accelerated to the south, and disappeared in less than two seconds,” said retired US Navy pilot David Fravor. “This was extremely abrupt, like a ping pong ball, bouncing off a wall. It would hit and go the other way.”
It said it was officially sharing images now to end speculation amid the world’s ongoing fascination with UFOs and the way the Pentagon handles them.
“DOD is releasing the videos in order 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 aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterised as ‘unidentified'”, a Department of Defense statement said.
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Anomalies
