Watch: UFO spotted? US Department of Defense video goes viral

WION Web Team

New Delhi, Delhi, IndiaUpdated: Mar 13, 2018, 07:34 AM IST

The unidentified vehicle appears as a white oval shape moving at high speed from top right to lower left of the screen flying very low over the water. Photograph:(WION)

The US government has released a video showing an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) moving at high speed below a US Navy jet, in a brief encounter recorded with a high-tech military camera in 2015.

The footage was released Friday by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), a private scientific research and media group. It is headed by Dr Hal Puthoff, a NASA and US Department of Defense adviser and James Semivan, a former US Central Intelligence Agency service member.

The clip is said to be "an authentic DoD video that captures the high-speed flight of an unidentified aircraft at low altitude" and "reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015," according to a statement from TTSA.

The video shows an unknown object moving rapidly at a distance from the US Navy F/A-18 Hornet, which is flying at 25,000 feet above sea level. Data imprinted in the footage shows the jet is moving at Mach 0.61, and that the UFO is keeping pace below it and to the left.

The unidentified vehicle appears as a white oval shape moving at high speed from top right to lower left of the screen flying very low over the water. The incident was captured through a high-tech camera pod called a Raytheon Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking, or ATFLIR, sensor.

The object does not appear to have obvious wings or a tail and there is no exhaust plume from the object, To The Stars researchers note in an analysis posted on their website.

This is the third declassified video which was released by To The Starts Academy of Arts and Science. In December, the Defense Department declassified two videos showing encounters between US Navy F-18 fighters and unidentified aircraft.

The first video viewed multiple pilots observing and discussing a strange, movement, egg-shaped object, apparently one of a “fleet” of such objects, according to cockpit audio. The second shows a similar incident involving an F-18 attached to the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004.