A video has surfaced of Navy F/A-18 fighter jets encountering an unidentified aircraft off the East Coast in 2015, media reports said.
Fighter jet surveillance video shows it encountered the object roughly four nautical miles away over the ocean, according to reports from USA Today and The Washington Post.
Dayton Daily News left a message with a Defense Department spokesperson Monday for comment.
In December, the Pentagon confirmed to Dayton Daily News and other outlets it investigated service members claims of reported UFO sightings decades after Project Blue Book headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base concluded.
Related: Pentagon has $22 million program to investigate UFOs
In the 1960s, Project Blue Book was an Air Force program that investigated worldwide reports of unidentified flying objects. The investigations, which concluded in 1969, found no threats to national security or evidence of extraterrestrial vehicles, the Air Force has said.
The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program inside the Pentagon ended around 2012, according to the Defense Department.
The $22 million program ran between 2007 to 2012, The New York Times reported late last year. At the time, the Pentagon released two videos of an encounter between Navy F/A-18s and unidentified aircraft off the West Coast in 2004.
Related: Wright-Patt was ground zero for UFO investigation program
To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, a private scientific research organization, released the latest Defense Department declassified video of the 2015 incident, USA Today reported.
Related: One of the Air Force’s original UFO hunters dies at 101
Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in two prior presidential administrations and an adviser to the To the Stars Academy for Arts and Science, called on the Pentagon to take the reports seriously and investigate the cause of the sightings.
"If the origin of these aircraft is a mystery, so is the paralysis of the U.S. government in the face of such evidence," he wrote in a Washington Post Op-Ed column Friday.
About the Author
