The Truth About the 2017 UAP Videos, Part I

A March 2024 poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov revealed that 32% of Americans believed that UFOs might be signs of extraterrestrials visiting our planet, while only 32% responded that such UFOs or UAPs, “unidentified aerial phenomena,” always have terrestrial or astronomical explanations. The number that believe UFOs are visiting aliens has increased from only 20% in 1996, an increase of more than 50%. 

Even more stunning is that the same 2024 poll reported that 63% of Americans believe that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling the public. That comes on the heels of a March 2024 Pentagon report that claimed the government has no knowledge whatsoever of aliens or alien technology.

How can we explain away such a disparity between what the Government says it knows, or in this case “doesn’t know,” and the public being so certain that they do know something, and that they are unwilling to share it? We could go back to the time of Watergate and how the office of the President lied to the American public, beginning an erosion of public trust that has only grown since then. We could go back a decade before that and see that a vast number of Americans have lost trust in the U.S. government, and believe there are still secrets about the Kennedy assassination that our government refuses to reveal.

But there are even more recent and concrete examples that display clear evidence that the U.S. government is not only not sharing what it knows about UFOs and UAPs, but is deliberately using such obfuscation to, at its base, spoof America’s military adversaries.

These following events cover multiple years, and will require several articles to completely tell the story in full. But by the end of this series, those with an open mind will probably agree that it appears the U.S. government has been lying to the public in order to both muddy the waters of real UFO investigations, while also using such evidence for a much darker purpose.

Much of the recent interest in UFOs was stoked in 2017, when a pair of UFO/UAP videos were released to the public.These were first given to the UFO-supportive group To The Stars Academy during the summer of 2017, and then reported on by the New York Times on December 16th, 2017. They were known by the nicknames FLIR (for Forward-Looking Infrared Radar, the device used by the pilots to record the phenomena) and GIMBAL (for the gimbal-mounted camera used by a different aircraft). These videos were not officially acknowledged as official at the time, but the Pentagon in 2019 did admit that they were filmed by U.S. military personnel using military equipment.

The FLIR video was reported to have been recorded in 2004 by an F/A-18 Super Hornet flying from the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego. This video was used to bolster the testimony of fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who claimed that he, his weapons officer, and another F/A-18 and its two personnel witnessed a 40-foot-long oval craft below them, hovering above a disturbance in the ocean. His testimony included the claim that the white oval craft spiraled up to meet their two planes, mirrored their plane’s movements, then took off at incredible speed. Because his plane was unarmed, he did not have the necessary equipment onboard to record any sensory data, so no recording of this event exists.

However, about an hour or so later, a second group of fighters from the Nimitz were sent aloft to do further investigations. In that group was weapons systems officer Lieutenant Commander Chad Underwood, whose F/A-18 was equipped with the FLIR equipment that captured the video. It was Underwood who suggested the object appeared like a “Tic-Tac,” basing the term on a joke from the 1980 film “Airplane.” However, Lt. Cmmdr. Underwood admitted in a 2019 interview that he didn’t see the object with his own eyes, and was focused instead on trying to capture as much information through his FLIR equipment.

There are problems with the chain of custody for this video, since it appears it was first hosted online in 2007 by Visions Unlimited, a video production company, which does not lend credence to the video’s authenticity. 

The GIMBAL video was reported by the Pentagon as having been recorded on January 21st, 2015, by another FA-18 Super Hornet aircraft assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt carrier battle group, operating off the eastern coast of Florida. The GIMBAL video shows an infrared target glowing hot, that appears to rotate left, leaving the pilots in awe. It was night time, however, so again, the aviators didn’t see anything with their own eyes.

 As with the FLIR video, this video first caught the public’s attention when it was posted by To The Stars Academy, who had apparently received both videos from Christopher K. Mellon, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who had himself received them (and a third video, discussed next) from an undisclosed source in a Pentagon parking lot, according to Mellon’s own admission in the UFO documentary, “The Phenomena.”

Additionally, the Washington Post reported in March, 2018, on a video of a similar encounter, nicknamed GOFAST, also supposedly filmed on January 21, 2015, again by an F/A-18 aircraft from the Roosevelt carrier battle group, and also having occurred off the coast of Florida. In this video, an object appears to be moving at incredible speeds over the ocean, and the aviators laugh and cheer as they’re finally able to get a lock on the object. As with the other two previous videos, this recording was made by the same FLIR system, and again, this video has a frustratingly short duration.

There has been a storm of controversy over these three videos, as well as a few other videos that were released subsequent to these, which we’ll cover in the next article.