UFOs are very real, 60 Minutes reports, they're still unidentified, and they aren't American

"We have tackled many strange stories on 60 Minutes, but perhaps none like this," CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker said on Sunday night's show. "It's the story of the U.S. government's grudging acknowledgment of unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP, more commonly known as UFOs. After decades of public denial, the Pentagon now admits there's something out there, and the U.S. Senate wants to know what it is."

A declassified report from the directorate of national intelligence and the Pentagon is due to be handed over to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June. Whitaker offered a preview, speaking with some familiar voices in the UAP sphere — Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP); retired Navy Cmdr. Dave Fravor, whose F/A-18F squadron encountered a UPA off California in 2004; Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence — and some new ones, like Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, who viewed the UAP with Fravor.

60 Minutes showed some declassified footage previously leaked to The New York Times by Mellon and Elizondo. "It's bizarre and unfortunate that someone like myself has to do something like that to get a national security issue like this on the agenda," Mellon said. Everyone Whitaker spoke with underscored that unidentified means just that, not yet identified, there's no evidence these phenomena are extraterrestrial, and they are a potential national security risk no matter who created them because the technology seems far beyond what the U.S. can currently produce.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Mellon said the UFOs are not secret U.S. government technology, and "I can say that with a very high degree of confidence in part because of the positions I held in the department, and I know the process."

Former Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves told Whitaker that fellow pilots began seeing UAPs hovering over restricted airspace off Virginia Beach in 2014, after upgrades to their radar, and continued seeing UAP's off the Atlantic Coast "every day for at least a couple years."

60 Minutes Overtime had more of the interview with Fravor and Dietrich, and you can watch that below.