The best single account I’ve seen is Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s in the New Yorker, but here’s a summary. The story of how Navy videos depicting UFOs landed on the Times’s front page is its own fascinating saga. How a group of UFO enthusiasts helped mainstream UFOs

Amy Dietrich, reported seeing what Fravor called a “white tic-tac looking object” the size of an F/A-18 with no wings, markings, or exhaust plumes, that, when approached, “turns abruptly and starts mimicking me.” Eventually, Fravor told 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker, it simply “disappeared.” David Fravor and the pilot on his wing, Lt. In November 2004, about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, Cmdr. The first of these incidents, and probably the most important, is what’s called the USS Nimitz encounter, named after the supercarrier from which the jet pilot who observed the UFO took off. The first two were leaked to the New York Times and written about on the front page in the December 17, 2017, print edition of the paper, while the third was leaked a few months later. The resurgence in interest in UFOs - or UAPs, the preferred term in the Defense Department - can generally be credited to three specific videos captured by the US Navy. The three canonical UFO videos behind the current wave of interest Here’s a closer look at what these videos actually depict (and what they do not), how they came to light, and whether the resurgence of interest in UFOs should make us reassess what we think we know about UFOs and life beyond Earth. But it’s hard to overstate just how much these videos have changed the way the public, the government, and the mainstream press (most notably the New York Times) think and talk about UFOs - to the point where people may have misconceptions about what exactly we know given the available evidence. We still don’t fully know what these videos depict, and at the risk of disappointing some readers, there’s no evidence that they depict alien aircraft. In a somewhat surprising development that helped kick-start the current round of UFO fascination, the government confirmed the authenticity of two videos featured in a 2017 New York Times story and a third one leaked a few months later, each of which depicts US Navy fighter pilots observing a strange object whose nature appears baffling to them. That may reflect the fact that the government has confirmed the reality of some of the most prominent UFO videos. Interestingly, the share of Americans saying the government “knows more about UFOs than it’s telling us” fell very slightly from 1996 to 2019. The truth, and I cannot stress this enough, is out there. In 2019, when Gallup polled again, a majority, 56 percent, thought UFO observers were seeing something real. In 1996, Gallup found that only 47 percent of Americans thought people reporting UFO sightings were seeing something real, and not imagining it. That stigma appears to be fading somewhat. They had a roughly similar level of respectability to theories that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, or that the CIA killed John F. When I was growing up, UFOs were the province of late-night talk radio and The X-Files. The highest levels of the American government are very, very interested in what’s up there in the sky. The Pentagon Office of the Inspector General is also evaluating the government’s approach to UAPs with an eye to strengthening its monitoring and response.

Many in Congress are curious, too, and this month the body is set to receive a report originating from a Pentagon task force detailing its investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), the preferred term for UFOs among specialists.

“There’s footage and records of objects in the skies that - we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory,” former President Barack Obama told CBS’s James Corden. All of a sudden, serious people are starting to take UFOs - unidentified flying objects - seriously.

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