Following the Department of Defense's official publishing of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) footage that was previously made public by Tom DeLonge's company To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), hazard reports detailing the U.S. Navy's encounters with unknown aircraft have been made available to the public.
The reports, first put in the spotlight by The Drive and later obtained by CNN, consist of documents marked "unclassified" and "for official use only. "The eight reports were first obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Naval Safety Center, with seven reports involving F/A-18E/F Super Hornets in incidents between 2013 and 2014 in the W-72 warning area airspace off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina. The eighth, meanwhile, stems from 2019 and involves an EA-18G Growler in the airspace known as the W-386 warning area off the coast of Maryland.
Among the highlights of this batch of reports—which Drive says were described by an FOIA officer as "the only eight reports in the Web-Enabled Safety System (WESS) Aviation Mishap and Hazard Reporting System (WAMHRS)" centered on naval aviation encounters of this kind—are an aircraft description from the pilot of a Navy pilot in November 2013.
"The aircraft had an approximately 5-foot wingspan and was colored white with no other distinguishable features," the pilot, who tracked the craft for roughly an hour, is quoted as saying in the report. That same report says this particular incident ultimately saw the Navy presenting the theory that the craft in question was an unmanned aerial system (UAS), though the Navy was not able to determine its operator.
While this specific example could be interpreted as officials having come to the conclusion a drone of some sort was involved, the fact that no determination was able to be made about who was operating it is no small detail. Furthermore, this fact builds on comments made by TTSA regarding the potential defense implications of UAP encounters, drone or not.
Read the incident reports here.
Late last month, the Department of Defense shared a statement announcing it had authorized the official release of three unclassified Navy videos, all of which were originally given a mainstream platform thanks to TTSA, co-founded by former blink-182 singer/guitarist (and current Angels & Airwaves frontman) Tom DeLonge. The three unclassified Navy videos included an incident that occurred in November 2004, as well as two from January 2015.
