US Navy UAP Reporting Policy — Formal Acknowledgment of Videos

On April 23, 2019, the US Navy announced a new formal reporting policy requiring pilots to document and report UAP encounters through official military channels without career consequences. The Navy's spokesman said the service was 'updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities.' The policy was a direct response to continued UAP encounters by fleet pilots and the recognition that the informal culture discouraging reports was suppressing potentially significant intelligence. On September 18, 2019, the US Navy formally confirmed that three videos — Nimitz/FLIR1 (2004), Gimbal (2015), and GoFast (2015) — were genuine US Navy footage of unidentified aerial phenomena. This was the Navy's first official acknowledgment of the videos' authenticity after two years of them circulating publicly. On April 27, 2020, the Pentagon officially declassified and released all three videos, stating they were released 'in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real.' The series of acts — April 2019 reporting policy, September 2019 video confirmation, April 2020 official declassification — constituted the most significant sequential official UAP acknowledgment by the US military in the modern era, directly leading to the UAP Task Force establishment in August 2020.