World UFO Day: 3 Mind-Blowing Pentagon/CIA-Released Reports of UFOs

World UFO Day is celebrated annually on July 2 to bring awareness to mysterious objects in the sky. It may raise more than a few eyebrows, but don’t be so quick to dismiss this annual event: Last year, reports revealed that the United States government had run a secret program to investigate unidentified flying objects for years.

The partially declassified program to investigate UFOs, called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), existed from at least 2007-2012 but may still be active in some way, shape, or form. The Central Intelligence Agency’s website lists pages and pages of information on UFO reports from the 1940s through the early 1990s alone.

Remember, however, that unidentified flying objects still amount to just that: objects we can’t name but could have any number of non-extraterrestrial origins (sorry, alien stans). In honor of the occasion, Inverse dug through reports of unidentified flying objects from the Pentagon and the CIA to bring to light three of the weirdest discoveries.

Navy Pilots Encounter UFOs

In 2017, the government released two videos that documented Navy pilots’ encounters with unidentified objects, and Pentagon officials acknowledged the existence of the AATIP, according to The New York Times at the time. And although defense officials were tight-lipped about details like the location and date of the videos, they were confirmed as the real deal.

Navy Airmen Make a Strange Encounter

Then in March 2018, a new “purported military video” of an unidentified aircraft was made public, according to CNN at the time. And while the Pentagon declined to comment about the footage when CNN reported on it, the To The Stars Academy — the independent research company behind the video’s release — claimed multiple government organizations reviewed the video for release.

Of course, as with most UFO footage, it’s not clear what the object is. The objects shown in the videos could be foreign aircraft or any number of other phenomena, nothing more. Regardless, the government seemingly cared enough to look into the incidents.

CIA Reports

As further evidence that the US government does take sightings of UFOs seriously, the CIA has 13 pages of information on the subject.

The agency’s data on its “UFOs: Fact or Fiction?” section from years of documents on the topic boasts everything from flying saucers to unusual wire recordings to interviews on the topic of UFOs collected over the years.

One such report from July 2, 1957 about an unidentified flying object observed on the Iran/USSR border described the UFO in question as a ball traveling at a high speed, and only visible for a few seconds.

Some of these may read like science fiction, but these UFO reports are the real deal (even though we’ve yet to figure out the objects’ origin). So, if you’re looking for a way to observe World UFO Day that doesn’t involve binging The X-Files, look no further than the CIA.