The US Navy has confirmed that the 2004 video footage of UFO encounters, popularly known as the Nimitz Encounters, are genuine.
In both events, dubbed the Nimitz Encounters, “unknown individuals” appeared and confiscated the tapes, ordering staff to destroy all their copies.
It all started around Nov. 14, 2004, aboard the USS Princeton missile cruiser some 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, when several crew members spotted irregularities on the radar system.
The Princeton crew had experienced these anomalies on radar for about a week by this time—a plethora of lights and what appeared to be a tic-tac shaped glowing craft that could descend from about 60,000 feet to 50 feet with incredible speed and accuracy.
E-2 Hawkeye aircraft were sent from an aircraft carrier a few hundred miles away to investigate the object that seemed to defy physics and were flying in U.S. airspace. One of the jets managed to catch a jittery glimpse of the tic-tac shaped vessel and record the hazy, black-and-white encounter. The footage can be seen in the Nimitz Encounters documentary video.
Several witnesses of the Nimitz Encounters stated they did not have much time to process what they experienced. Shortly after the encounter, all data was confiscated by a pair of anonymous officers.
“They were not on the ship earlier, and I didn’t see them come on. I’m not sure how they got there,” said Petty Officer Patrick “P.J.” Hughes, an aviation technician who was in charge of securing the Hawkeye’s hard drives, told Popular Mechanics.
According to Hughes, his commanding officer told him to turn over the recently secured hard drives. “We put them in the bags, he took them, then he and the two anonymous officers left,” Hughes said.
Aboard the USS Princeton, Radar technician Gary Voorhis, the ship’s only system technician for the state-of-the-art Cooperative Engagement Capability and AEGIS Combat System, had a similar experience.
“These two guys show up on a helicopter, which wasn’t uncommon, but shortly after they arrived, maybe 20 minutes, I was told by my chain of command to turn over all the data recordings for the AEGIS system.”
Voorhis added, “They even told me to erase everything that’s in the shop—even the blank tapes.”
The Nimitz UFO sightings marked the first time the U.S. Navy publicly acknowledged on record that the three UFO videos released by the New York Times and To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science (TTSA) were real “unidentified” objects. The Navy admitted that the videos referred to as the “FLIR1,” “Gimbal,” and “Gofast” were “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs).
Two of the three UFO videos were released in December of 2017, and the “GoFast” video was released in March of 2018.
The first video of the unidentified object was taken by an F-18 gun camera on Nov. 14, 2004. The second and third videos were taken on Jan. 21, 2015, but it is still unclear whether the two videos display the same object.
U.S. Navy Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault, a website dedicated to declassified government documents, “the navy considers the phenomena contained/depicted in those three videos as unidentified.”
Josh Greenwald, who publishes The Black Vault, told Motherboard: “I very much expected that when the U.S. military addressed the videos, they would coincide with language we see on official documents that have now been released, and they would label them as ‘drones’ or ‘balloons.’”
“However, they did not. They went on the record stating the ‘phenomena’ depicted in those videos, is ‘unidentified.’ That really made me surprised, intrigued, excited and motivated to push harder for the truth,” he added.
NTD Reporter Zusmee Byamba contributed to this report
