The US Navy has confirmed that unsettling footage of UFOs that emerged over the last few years is real, and that they never meant for the video to be seen by the public.

Footage first appearing online in 2017, picked up by the New York Times, showed several unidentified flying objects, or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) as they are officially called, which appeared to be recorded by the US Navy. Three videos (one from 2004, two 2015), released to the New York Times by former Blink 182 Tom DeLonge's organization To The Stars Academy, show as yet unidentified flying objects, described by one of the trained fighter pilots as unlike anything he had ever seen in his life.

^{Footage captured by US pilots on January 21, 2015.}

^{Footage also captured on January 21, 2015, by different US pilots, suggesting it's the same object.}

"I can tell you, I think it was not from this world. I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. [...] After 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close," retired Commander David Fravor told ABC News of the unidentified object he saw back in 2004.

"I have never seen anything in my life, in my history of flying that has the performance, the acceleration. Keep in mind this thing had no wings." 

A leaked report “prepared by and for the military” in 2018 detailed how the 13.7-meter-long (45-foot-long) Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) with "no visible means to generate lift" was seen by several US naval ships, as well as the F-18 jet Commander Fravor was in.

“The AAVs would descend ‘very rapidly’ from approximately 60,000 feet [18,300 meters] down to approximately 50 feet [15 meters] in a matter of seconds,” the report reads, adding that a pilot noticed that the object, which resembled a Tic-Tac, disturbed the water causing “frothy waves and foam” beneath it, making it appear as if the ocean was "boiling”.

^{Footage captured by a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet on November 14, 2004, off the coast of San Diego.}

The report on UAPs flying in US airspace had not been confirmed by the military until now. As first reported by Motherboard, a US Navy spokesperson told The Black Vault –  the largest civilian archive of declassified government documents – that the footage does show "unidentified aerial phenomena" that had been filmed by the Navy, and that "the Navy has not released the videos to the general public," it was the result of a leak.

“The Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena,” Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare Joseph Gradisher told The Black Vault. "The 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' terminology is used because it provides the basic descriptor for the sightings/observations of unauthorized/unidentified aircraft/objects that have been observed entering/operating in the airspace of various military-controlled training ranges."

Of course, this doesn't mean that it's confirmed as aliens, just that – as yet – the government doesn't have an official explanation for what happened in the videos. 

“The Navy has not publicly released characterizations or descriptions, nor released any hypothesis or conclusions, in regard to the objects contained in the referenced videos," Gradisher said.

However, we do know the US government takes these sightings seriously. Between 2008 and 2011 it spent nearly $22 million covertly investigating UFOs. In fact, UAP sightings have become so frequent in the last few years, the Navy recently drafted new guidelines for how to report them.