A newly leaked Navy video appears to show an unidentified flying object disappearing into the water off California, according to a clip obtained by a documentary filmmaker and shared with NBC News.
The video was captured in July 2019 by Navy aircraft and recorded in the USS Omaha's Combat Information Center, according to the filmmaker, Jeremy Corbell.
The clip appears to show a spherical object flying above the water for a few minutes near San Diego before it vanishes.
"It splashed," military personnel can be heard saying in the video.
The Defense Department confirmed that the clip was recorded by Navy personnel and said it will be reviewed by the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a panel established last year to "gain insight" into the "nature and origins" of such objects.
The video was published a few days before "60 Minutes" aired an interview with two former Navy pilots who recalled having been dispatched to investigate "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" that descended 80,000 feet in less than a second. The incident also occurred off San Diego in 2004.
One of the pilots, Cmdr. Dave Fravor, told "60 Minutes" that personnel found a "little white Tic-Tac-looking object" moving above the water before it disappeared. Seconds later, his ship — the USS Princeton — said the object reappeared on its radar 60 miles away.
Christopher Mellon, a top defense official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said in an interview that there was "a lot of continuity" between recent reports of unidentified objects and reports dating back decades.
"What we're seeing are a number of distinct and different things," he said. "Sometimes we're seeing a 50-foot object that can travel at hypersonic speeds and seemingly go into orbit or come down from altitudes of potentially above 100,000 feet."
Mellon said the stigma associated with reporting such phenomena has long kept witnesses quiet — a sentiment echoed by Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, one of the Navy pilots interviewed by "60 Minutes."
"Over beers we've said, 'Hey man, if I saw this solo, I don't know that I would have come back and said anything,'" Dietrich said. "Because it sounds so crazy when I say it."
A lengthy story in The New Yorker titled "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously" examined the work of journalist Leslie Kean last month. Kean co-wrote an article in The New York Times four years ago reporting that the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars on a threat identification program to examine unidentified aircraft that moved at high velocities with no apparent signs of propulsion.