UFO Sightings In NYC Gain Legitimacy After '60 Minutes' Interview

NEW YORK — A groundbreaking CBS News’ “60 Minutes” report that claimed intelligence officials are increasingly concerned about UFOs in U.S. airspace - including an interview with a former pilot who said he saw strange crafts every day for two years – has reopened debate about what's out there.

Correspondent Bill Whitaker reported last weekend that the Pentagon has walked back decades of public denial about the existence of spacecraft. The director of national intelligence and secretary of defense are to deliver a report ordered by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee next month that could shed more light.

Whitaker interviewed former military pilots and intelligence officials. One – the former Navy pilot – told the CBS correspondent he saw UFOs that outperformed U.S. military aircraft “every day for at least a couple of years.”

Lue Elizondo, who spent 20 years running military intelligence operations and served in the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, told Whitaker there are simple explanations for some of the things people are seeing in the sky. But, for other, “there are not,” he said.

“We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, ‘Oh, that's a UAP [unidentified aerial phenomena] out there.’ We're going through our due diligence,” Elizondo said.

“Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance?

“Ultimately, when you have exhausted all those what-ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic.”

Read the entire “60 Minutes” interview transcript.

More than 5,500 UFO reports from around the world have been made to the National UFO Reporting Center in the last 15 years.

In New York, 3,815 reports of mysterious sightings in the sky have been made to the organization, which crowdsources reports from residents of the state. In NYC, 57 were reported last year, though only five reports have been made so far in 2021.

As Elizondo pointed out, some UFO sightings are easily explained, but some inspire a deeper curiosity.

This year, the first report made in NYC was made in Manhattan and came with the note: "So no alcohol or drugs were involved. I've never reported anything like this."

The sighting involved a white object with no lights and an unusual shape.

"It seemed to be reflecting the lights from the streets or it was glowing," the reporter wrote. "It had a light grey coloring. It was moving so fast from south to north. I knew it wasn't a bird or plane because of its speed. It had the shape of a butter knife."

Another observer — a self-described skeptical person — reported seeing a cylindrical object in the sky above Brooklyn on Feb. 9.

"The object I saw was clearly lower than air traffic in my area, and also moving in the opposite direction of the air traffic flow of my area," the observer wrote. "I was walking up the block, and as I was nearing the end of the block, and object moved over my head, and disappeared over the buildings. I moved up the block to get a better view, but there was nothing in the trajectory in which the object was moving. My best description of the object is that it was cylindrical, and had a light in front, with almost like a fog in front like it was passing through clouds."

Those interviewed by “60 Minutes” included retired Naval Cmdr. David Fravor, who was conducting a training mission off the coast of California in 2004 when he saw an oblong craft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defies accepted principles of aerodynamics. Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying.

He called it “otherworldly.”

Fravor told Whitaker the wingless, approximately 40-foot-long object shaped like a Tic Tac was about the size of his F/A-18F and mimicked its moves. He wanted to get closer to the craft as it continued to gain altitude, “and when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears.”

“So your mind tries to make sense of it,” added Lt. Alex Dietrich, who spoke publicly for the first time in the “60 Minutes” interview about what she had encountered. “I’m gonna categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone. And when it disappeared. I mean, it was just …."

UFO hunting has been a popular pursuit in the United States since the mid-20th century, when Kenneth Arnold, a businessman piloting a small plane, filed the first well-known report in 1947 of a UFO over Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold claimed he saw nine high-speed, crescent-shaped objects zooming along at several thousand miles per hour “like saucers skipping on water.”

Although the objects Arnold claimed to see weren’t saucer-shaped at all, his analogy led to the popularization of the term “flying saucers.” And since then, Americans have been more or less obsessed with the idea that alien life is among us.

It may be easy to scoff at some of the eyewitness accounts on the National UFO Reporting Center, but the idea of intergalactic travel got a boost when information emerged from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a $22 million, multi-year program that began in 2007 to investigate "unidentified aerial phenomena," according to reports by The New York Times and Politico.

Former Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid slipped in an earmark for the program into the Pentagon budget. Nevada, of course, is the home of a U.S. Air Force facility known as Area 51, the source of multiple alien conspiracy theories, including claims that interstellar visitors are held there; that the 1947 Roswell crash wasn't a weather balloon at all but a Soviet aircraft piloted by mutated midgets; and that the 1969 moon landing was filmed by the U.S. government in one of the Area 51 hangars.

The Pentagon program was defunded in 2012. A report released in late 2017 included Fravor’s account of the wingless object, about 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac, which he described to ABC News in 2017 as “not from this world.”

“I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking,” he said at the time. “It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

In the “60 Minutes” interview, former Navy pilot Ryan Graves, whose F/A-18F squadron began seeing UAPs over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014, told Whitaker that pilots speculate on whether the UAPs are the result of secret U.S. technology, an adversary’s spy vehicle or something otherworldly.

Of those, he said, “the highest probability is it’s a threat observation program,” possibly using Russian or Chinese technology.

“I am worried, frankly,” he said. “You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin' out up there, it would be a massive issue. But because it looks slightly different, we're not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.”