The Navy Has No Idea What Is Going on With These UFOs

Naval officers keep seeing what they call “unexplained aerial phenomena,” more commonly known to regular folk as UFOs. And now the Navy is officially getting around to looking into what’s going on with all that. Cue the Mark Snow instrumentals.

Since 2014, there’s been an uptick in sightings of weird aircraft in military-designated airspace, as many as multiple sightings a month. And by weird, well here, this is from The Washington Post:

“In some cases, pilots — many of whom are engineers and academy graduates — claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac-shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.”

Unsurprisingly, in the past, there’s been a bit of reluctance to report suspicious Tic Tac-shaped flying apparatuses, but sightings have become so common the Navy has recently put formal procedures into place for docmenting these sightings in hopes that better documentation will help officials get to the bottom of what the fuck is happening:

“We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again” Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for the office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told the Post.

The more formal reporting process is not only intended to help officials gather data on the sightings but also to remove the stigma against reporting them, since UFOs defying the laws of physics could very well be a threat to national security.

Here is a reassuring quote from Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a secret organization the Pentagon only confirmed the existence of in 2017:

“If I came to you and said, ‘There are these things that can fly over our country with impunity, defying the laws of physics, and within moments could deploy a nuclear device at will,’ that would be a matter of national security…This type of activity is very alarming and people are recognizing there are things in our aerospace that lie beyond our understanding.”

Could someone get Scully to give me a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this? I know Mulder’s completely nonsensical theory will end up being correct, but right now I just need Scully to roll her eyes and say “Tic Tacs don’t just defy physics and deploy nuclear weapons, Mulder.”