From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is a daily.

Today, after years of secretly investigating UFOs, US intelligence officials have released

an unclassified report summarizing everything they found.

Kevin Rus spoke with our colleague, National Security Reporter Julian Barnes, about what we now know and whether this report settles anything.

It's Wednesday, June 30th.

Julian, greetings fellow Earthling. Greetings. Greetings from planet Earth.

Last week, we got this long-awaited government report about UFOs.

We're going to get into the report because I have a lot of questions about it.

First, I just want to acknowledge how strange and exciting it is that I'm here talking to you, a reporter who covers US intelligence agencies about unidentified flying objects.

Yeah, things have come a long way, but one little correction, Kevin, we don't call them UFOs anymore.

They're now called UAPs, which stands for unidentified aerial phenomena.

Very fancy.

Very fancy.

But I actually don't quite understand why this report really exists. Why was this published and why was it published last week?

Well, back in 2017, my colleagues at the New York Times published an article that revealed the existence of a secret government program collecting and analyzing information involving UFO sightings.

The New York Times reported this weekend that the Pentagon has finally acknowledged the existence of a special program that investigated reports of UFOs.

The project was called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program.

The program began in 2007 and ended five years later, but it's not only did the times expose the existence of the shadowy program, but it also ultimately published three leaked videos of actual sightings by Navy pilots.

The video from 2015 shows an encounter between US Navy pilots and some kind of unidentified flying objects.

The first one was back from 2004, and it shows an object that's white and oval, and it's flying low over the ocean.

It churns the water, and creates a disturbance.

The next set of videos come from this tour of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which in 2014 and 2015 was off the coast of Virginia and Florida, and there were a series of encounters between Navy pilots and a possible object.

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