Fighter pilots for the U.S. Navy claimed to have seen UFOs off the East Coast during training missions in 2014 and 2015. A new report from the New York Times says the pilots reported the unusual sightings to their superior officers and in one instance almost collided with the strange aircraft. In some cases, the unidentified aircraft performed maneuvers that were "beyond the physical limits of a human crew."
The pilots reported that the U.F.O.s lacked visible engines, had no exhaust plume and were hitting supersonic speeds while making instantaneous turns.
"These things would be out there all day," Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for ten years told the New York Times. "Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we'd expect."
Some of the encounters were recorded on video, including one which was recently declassified showing the unidentified aircraft crossing the flight path of an F/A-18 Super Hornet.
The Pentagon has confirmed the sightings but does not believe they are extraterrestrial in origin.
Navy spokesman Joseph Gradisher suggested that the UFOs could have been commercial drones or other experimental aircraft. He added that they were not able to determine the source of the all the UFOs, saying that "we don't know who's doing this, we don't have enough data to track this."
The pilots interviewed by the Times will be speaking about their strange encounters on the upcoming six-part History Channel series, Unidentified: Inside America's U.F.O. Investigation, which will begin airing on Friday (May 31).