- [Narrator] The Pentagon's report on UFOs or UAPs,
unidentified aerial phenomenon,
was released to Congress;
and a big takeaway is many of the anomalous objects
that appear in the report remain unidentified.
To understand why, experts and pilots remain baffled.
We spoke to veteran pilot, Andrea Themely.
- I am currently a pilot for a major airline flying 737s,
and I was previously a colonel in the Air Force.
I flew the F-15C Eagle, T-38 Talon, and a T-6 Texan II.
And I was an instructor in all three of those airframes.
Ultimately, pilots seem to be the ones who are seeing a lot
of these objects because they are out over the ocean flying.
[radio noise]
I can't imagine being in their shoes
and seeing what they saw.
I think it would be terrifying
to not know what this object was.
[radio noise]
- [Narrator] Colonel Themely is going
to walk us through videos of unidentified aerial phenomenon
and explain the traits that make them unidentifiable
from a physics and aerodynamics perspective.
Let's unpack the first trait, anti-gravity.
- The acorn shape, pyramid shape, and the spherical shape,
they seem to overcome gravity without any visible propulsion
or any air foils that provide lift
or what we would traditionally call a weight
Since the dawn of aviation on earth,
which has been about 120 years now,
normally lift is produced when an aircraft increases speed,
the air goes over the top of the wing,
and the bottom of the wing,
and meets at the end of the wing at the same time.
But because the top of the wing is a different size
than the bottom, it's going to create a negative pressure
because it's traveling faster
and it essentially sucks the wing and the rest
of the aircraft into that negative pressure area.
And that's what we refer to as lift.
- [Narrator] Okay, so the unidentified aerial phenomenon
don't appear to have recognizable wings for lift,
but what about their propulsion?
[radio noise]
- I'm watching the Gimbal video, this was filmed in 2015.
And as you can see, at the top
it's using the infrared sensor
and that is depicted by the IR
at the top of the screen there.
The pod has multiple sensors.
It has both an electro optical sensor
and an infrared sensor to detect targets.
What's noticeable is that there's no visible
infrared exhaust plume coming from this object.
And that indicates no source of propulsion as we know it.
You see WHT, which stands for white hot.
So the cooler heat signatures will appear as black
and the hottest targets are going to be displayed as white.
A normal fighter size target will have a heat signature
that can be detected approximately
10 nautical miles away with an infrared sensor.
The skin friction of an aircraft enough,
flying through the air, is going to be able
to give it heat signature
so that a targeting pod will be able to detect it.
- [Narrator] These objects don't seem to generate exhaust.
So it's difficult
to understand how they're creating propulsion.
This leads to the second unidentifiable trait.
They fly at hyper speed.
[radio noises]
- It's showing 180 knots right now
that is the actual closing velocity of that target
to the post-owned ship, the F-18 that's carrying the pod.
From the bottom there on the left-hand side
you see the F-18's airspeed 258 nautical miles per hour
or Mach 0.62.
And you can roughly tell if you do some rough math
that that object is going approximately 500 miles per hour
without any visible propulsion
or any air foils that provide lift.
- [Narrator] That's fast, but not supersonic fast.
So let's consider the video taken
during the 2004 USS Nimitz encounter.
- You can see at the very end, the video here
this aircraft just scoots off the screen very quickly.
Based on that, based on the testimony
of the USS Princeton operators
that found that object 60 miles away
several seconds later, it's clear that this object
was traveling at very high rates of speed
with a lot of acceleration.
- [Narrator] According to the calculations
of the USS Princeton radar team,
the so-called tic-tac UAP would have reached a maximum speed
of about 46,000 miles per hour during a descent,
or 60 times the speed of sound.
As a point of comparison, the fastest manned aircraft
that the US Air Force has ever operationally produced
is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird,
which flew at Mach 3.2,
or three times the speed of sound,
the experimental North American X-15
which flew about Mach 6.7 or 4,500 miles per hour in 1967.
But what about present day tech?
- It's no secret that the United States
as well as multiple other countries are working
on hypersonic technology.
And hypersonic means anywhere from five times the speed
of sound, to 10 times the speed of sound, it's pretty quick.
So the Boeing X-51 Waverider is one of those such vehicles.
This is an unmanned vehicle that's capable
of flying up to 70,000 feet and up to Mach five.
Other countries that have this technology or are working
on it include India, Russia, and China, for example.
- [Narrator] Another attribute of UAPs
that make them tricky to observe is stealth.
- Most of these images are infrared sensors that are just
capturing the heat signature of the aircraft.
This video is using night vision video on the deck
of a US Navy destroyer.
And the shape itself is unusual.
It's similar to our B-2, which has stealth technology
but it's not quite the same shape.
It's possible that the pyramid shape
is flat irregular surfaces
that would deflect radar energy
and not let it return to the host.
It's possible that that is a stealth technology
and that's why operators have had trouble
capturing this on their radars.
- [Narrator] Stealth crafts work to scramble radar
in two ways.
First, with irregular flat surfaces, like the B-2 bomber
that will not easily return the radar beam.
And second, by using radar absorbing materials
on the craft's exterior.
- It's unclear why it is flashing,
but some of it might have to do with the quality
of the camera or the night vision video that they have.
It's really tough to tell what the actual colors are
or if it is metallic or silver.
- [Narrator] And yet, the U S doesn't have a monopoly
on planes that confuse radar.
- The Chinese have the J-20, the Russians fly the SU-57
and then Japan, South Korea, Indonesia,
they all have fairly advanced stealth technology programs.
- [Narrator] Another anomalous trait UAPs seem to have
is that they are transmedium.
- [Voice on Radio] Splash, splash.
- Transmedium just means
that these objects are moving easily
between different environments, such as space,
our atmosphere, and even underwater.
This video was taken from off the coast of San Diego.
And the most notable feature is the ability to fly both
in air and underwater.
As soon as the object nears the water,
they are waiting to mark the coordinates, the bearing,
and range of where this object went down.
And they're, I don't know, I'm not sure.
This video, I was like, I don't know that I can really,
cause there's nothing we have, that's even remotely close
to this, so I don't even really know what to say about it.
It looks like it did go into the water.
You'd think that the object has crashed.
However, when submarines went to go look for the object,
there was no trace of its remains.
What's significant about that is that it probably
has the capabilities to also travel under the water.
We have nothing here, in the United States anyway,
that can operate as both an aircraft and a submarine.
- [Narrator] A recently leaked video
of what is allegedly the radar screen
aboard the USS Omaha,
might support the jaw-dropping assertion
that this UAP dropped into the water and swam away.
As investigators sift through the mountain of data connected
to the UAP report, Colonel Themely will keep an open mind
and her eyes on the sky.
- There are possibilities that some
of these aircraft could be foreign adversarial aircraft
that are coming here to collect intelligence.
There's possibilities that there are individuals
within the United States that are creating this technology.
We don't know what this is
and there are a lot of unanswered questions still.
They seem to defy every law of physics
and aerodynamics that we know.
I'm excited that these questions are going
to start being answered.
Again, I'm a skeptic, I want proof,
I want to be able to see and believe something.
So I'm glad that the Pentagon is doing investigation
so we can actually figure out what these objects are.