For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has been secretly recording and examining dozens of strange incidents involving ships and fighter aircraft colliding with or being tailgated by unexplained flying objects, the vast majority involving the U.S. Navy.

Beginning in 2017, videos and eyewitness accounts of these strange sightings made their way to the public. This prompted Congress to demand that the Pentagon produce a report summarising everything the U.S. government knows about so-called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP (a term with significantly less stigma than "UFOs").

Study IQ/ Youtube | A video released by the U.S. Department of Defense showing an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object

The declassified version of the study was produced by the UAP Task Force at the Pentagon. In conjunction with the establishment of the task group, the Department of Defense issued a statement justifying its existence. "The safety and security of our people and activities are of the utmost importance.

The Department of Defense and the military departments take any intrusions by illegal aircraft into our training ranges or designated airspace extremely seriously and thoroughly investigate each incident. This includes analyses of intrusions initially reported as UAP when the observer is unable to identify the object observed instantly."

The first time authorities addressed public assumptions

Inviting top government officials to testify, legislators want to "bring out of the shadows" a Defense Department group that has been documenting the sightings. This initiative, which was made public in 2017, collected eyewitness reports, including those of navy aviators who claimed to have observed flying objects that had any discernible propulsion mechanism and defied human understanding of aerodynamics and physics.

Chris Moss/ Virgin | Pentagon now reports about 400 UFO encounters

The session was the first time in more than half a century that U.S. authorities testified publicly regarding their UFO inquiry. Project Blue Book, the Air Force's investigation into the matter, was concluded in 1970.

The announcement coincides with a rise in institutional interest in UFOs. NASA said last month that it would fund a pilot UFO investigation, months after Congress ordered the Pentagon to establish a UFO office and generate yearly reports. Avi Loeb, a renowned astrophysicist from Harvard University, has raised millions of dollars for the Galileo Project, which will monitor the sky for UFOs. Loeb and Taylor appeared together at a "UFO Disclosure conference" in Utah last month when they analyzed and discussed multiple UFO footages.

Dailing back years into the past

Chris Moss/ Virgin | The Pentagon's new push to investigate reports of UFOs has so far not yielded any evidence to suggest that aliens have visited Earth

Kenneth Arnold, a civilian pilot, may be traced back to the beginning of the current interest. On June 24, 1947, while flying his tiny airplane near Mount Rainier in Washington, Arnold reported seeing nine blue, luminous objects flying in a "V" configuration at an estimated 1,700 miles per hour.

It was just two years after World War II and the first year of the Cold War, so he assumed the objects were new military aircraft. However, the military verified that no tests were being done near Mount Rainier that day. When Arnold compared the craft's motion to "a saucer skipping across water," the media invented the now-common moniker "flying saucer."

A prospector on Mount Adams and the crew of a commercial airplane in Idaho were among the first to report seeing a group of nine UFOs in the region. Government officials never provided a plausible explanation for the sightings. It only asserted that Arnold saw a mirage or was hallucinating. But UFO hysteria had taken hold, and only a few weeks later, the notorious Roswell incident would fuel the obsession.