Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2022

18 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING thing significant to what was al- ready known about UAPs. However, as revealed at the end of 2017 by the New York Times and Politico , the AATIP continued its activity even after the scheduled deadline thanks to funding from the Pentagon, an arrangement officially confirmed only in June 2020 when the investi- gation program was rebranded as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) and it had its management transferred to the Of- fice of Naval Intelligence. The aims of this “new” program were the usual ones: to deepen the knowl- edge of the UAP phenomenon and understand the nature and origin of the sightings, all for the benefit of national security. The UAPTF pro- gram continued until November 2021, after which it was replaced by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), overseen by a group of experts from the military and intelligence communities. In April 2020, to silence imaginative rumors, the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of three videos recorded by US Navy pilots, showing encounters with what appear to be unusual aircraft. The videos had been previously released by some T he three famous videos recorded in 2004 and 2015 by US Navy pi- lots aboard planes that took off from the aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt. The videos, called “FLIR”, “GIMBAL” and “GO- FAST”, show nothing that transcend our current knowledge of physics. According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, maybe the objects framed in the videos are “drones deployed by rivals like Russia and China to exam- ine our defenses — luring our pilots into turning on their radar and other detectors, thus revealing our elec- tronic intelligence capabilities.” [United States Navy]