The Truth About the 2017 UAP Videos, Part III

In 2021, two more videos were released to the public and later admitted by the Pentagon to be “official,” at least as both were filmed by U.S. Navy personnel. But neither of these were filmed from F/A-18s, nor were they captured by the craft’s infrared sensors, as the first three videos from 2017 and 2018 were.

Both of the newly released videos were supposedly filmed in July of 2019 on ships at sea off the coast of San Diego, and both were released to only one source: Jeremy Corbell, a film producer with an interest in UFOs, and who previously made a name for himself by recording a video with Bob Lazar, whose claims about working at Area 51 have been widely disputed.

In July of  2019, the  video known as SPLASHDOWN was reportedly filmed onboard the USS Omaha in its Command Information Center (CIC). This video includes the voices of several off-screen U.S. naval officers discussing multiple objects being visually observed, though only a single object is seen in the video. This object is a blurry circular craft, seemingly flying over the ocean. The video itself is extremely fuzzy, as, according to one report, the video was made by a cell phone recording a display on one of the ship’s monitors. This result provides much less clarity than any of the previous FLIR videos. 

Near the end, one of the offscreen personnel calls a “splashdown” of an object into the water. Science writer and current UFO researcher Mick West shows that this was most likely not a splashdown. He goes on to explain that the video has several flaws in it, besides the very poor resolution. The first problem is that according to the timecode on the monitor, six minutes of footage of the round object descending towards the water’s surface is missing, thus making its descent appear faster than it normally would seem. 

West also explains the apparently rapid left-right movement of the object is due to the camera itself moving left and right. He supports that interpretation by showing how the movement of the waves are comparable to the movement of the object. He further explains if the object fell directly into the water, the object would disappear at once. Intead, what the video shows is a brief series of what appear to be the tops of waves obscuring the bottom half of the object, which is what one would see if a bright object, like the engine exhaust of a distant jet plane, were seen dropping below the horizon of a large body of water. 

West shows later in the same video how the “shrinking” effect of the object dropping below the horizon indicates it’s a hot, flaring heat source, larger than the object itself, and most likely an engine exhaust.

Interestingly, Jeremy Corbell claims to have seen a classified briefing document regarding this event that says there were up to 100 solid objects, each traveling between 46 and 158 mph, surrounding Omaha during the incident. Since this video’s release in 2021, there has been no evidence to support these claims.

At approximately the same date and time as the SPLASHDOWN video was recorded, a fifth video was recorded, since known as the TRIANGLE video.This event was supposed to have been filmed aboard the USS Russell, also in the ocean off the coast of San Diego. This video contains night vision images of dozens of triangular objects in a dark sky. Jeremy Corbell immediately claimed this was “proof” that triangular or pyramidal shapes were flying around our skies, and that their close proximity to U.S. naval ships proved a serious military matter. This warning was shared by oceanographer and retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who said at a 2024 Congressional hearing that our inability to identify such objects "jeopardizes U.S. maritime security, which is already weakened by our relative ignorance about the global ocean."

However, even a cursory examination of this video shows that it’s merely a recording of regular airplane traffic, including the telltale strobe effect of flashing FAA avoidance lights, as well as normal astronomical objects like stars and the planet Jupiter in the background. 

As with the SPLASHDOWN video, this video appears to have been recorded with a cell phone using an inexpensive “night vision” attachment, and is not made with military-grade night optics. The recording artifact of an object being out of focus and showing instead the triangular arms of the shutter is called “bokeh” (pronounced bo-kay), and can be easily duplicated, as Mick West himself does with both a standard camera lens and one covered by duct tape. It’s also clear that the primary object is flashing standard navigation warning lights, as a normal aircraft would be expected to, surrounded by objects in the night sky like stars and the planet Jupiter.

These two additional videos beg the question: why would the Navy and the Pentagon not be able to discern immediately that these two videos were not “unexplainable,” as the term UAP, for “unidentified aerial phenomena,” would suggest? Indeed, in connection with the SPLASHDOWN video, wouldn’t the experienced naval personnel manning the Command Information Center on the Omaha not be able to tell immediately that there was in fact no “splashdown”? Not only that, why would naval personnel be allowed to record military displays with a private cell phone? And why would a video with six minutes edited from it not carry the disclaimer that it’s been edited, making the apparent movement of the object being filmed appear highly distorted in time?

These questions lead an objective observer to ask the question: is there something going on behind these five videos that suggest the Pentagon is deliberately using these videos to perform some important task, and that the U.S. naval personnel are themselves performing a role in this mission? If highly trained and experienced military personnel are complicit in the release of easily explainable prosaic events, using clipped and edited videos, while not releasing the entire videos, are they all part of a larger plan, one that they believe is important for the national security of the country they’ve sworn to protect?

In the next article in this series, we’ll present an event that happened at the same time as the original three videos, in late 2017, an event that was largely ignored by the national media, but one that goes a long way in explaining what may really be going on behind these events.