The U.S. Navy is holding back the release of footage of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) - or, as the Department of Defense (DOD) prefers to call them, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
The acknowledgment was made in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by The Black Vault, a government transparency website that has previously disclosed thousands of pages of UFO-related data obtained through FOIA requests to the CIA and other government agencies.
The Navy, however, will not make the footage public because it would "harm national security," according to a representative.
The FOIA request was submitted to the U.S. Navy by The Black Vault in April 2020, just one day after the Navy declassified three videos recorded by Navy pilots showing high-tech aircraft moving in seemingly inconceivable ways.
The Navy has been asked to supply Black Vault with all additional videos pertaining to UAP.
More than two years after the initial request, the government responded with a letter confirming the existence of further UAP recordings while also declining the request to turn them over due to national security considerations.
"The release of this information will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities," Gregory Cason, deputy director of the Navy's FOIA office, wrote in a response letter. "No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."
According to Cason, the Navy determined that the footage could be publicly released "without further damage to national security,"
It's interesting that the Navy made no attempt to hide the existence of additional UAP videos in its response to The Black Vault's request.
There are undoubtedly more videos of puzzling UFO encounters in the Navy's archives, but for the time being, it is unknown how many there are and what they show.
The three UAP videos that were released in April 2020, according to Cason, were only able to be declassified by the Navy because they had already been extensively discussed in the public domain and had already been leaked to the media.
But it's obvious that the U.S. military takes the possibility of a UAP threat very seriously.
The DOD convened its first public hearing on UFOs since the 1960s in May 2022. The hearing focused mostly on a June 2021 Pentagon report revealing that US Navy pilots have recorded 144 UAP sightings since 2004.
Recently, the DOD announced that it will get federal funding to establish a new agency solely dedicated to managing reports of UFO encounters by the Navy, Air Force, and the U.S. Army.
