WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.
“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.
“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”
No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.
But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.
By Robin Stein, Caroline Kim, Malachy Browne and Whitney Hurst
Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects. One was captured by a plane’s camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015. That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind. A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. The second video was taken a few weeks later.CreditCreditU.S. Department of Defense
Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.
“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”
The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”
Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The squadron began noticing strange objects just after the Navy upgraded the radar systems on its F/A-18 fighter planes.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times
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Navy pilots from the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. The squadron began noticing strange objects just after the Navy upgraded the radar systems on its F/A-18 fighter planes.CreditAdam Ferguson for The New York Times
The program, which began in 2007 and was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time, was officially shut down in 2012 when the money dried up, according to the Pentagon. But the Navy recently said it currently investigates military reports of U.F.O.s, and Mr. Elizondo and other participants say the program — parts of it remain classified — has continued in other forms. The program has also studied video that shows a whitish oval object described as a giant Tic Tac, about the size of a commercial plane, encountered by two Navy fighter jets off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”
Google suffered major outages with its Cloud Platform on Sunday, causing widespread access issues with both its own services and third party apps ranging from Snapchat to Discord.
As of early Sunday evening, issues had persisted for hours; according to the Google Cloud Status Dashboard, the outages began at roughly 3:25 p.m. ET and were related to “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA.” Outage-tracking service Down Detector indicated that access to YouTube was severely disrupted across the country, with the northeastern U.S. particularly having a rough go of it. Finally, the G Suite Status Dashboard listed virtually every one of its cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools—including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Hangouts, and Voice—as experiencing service outages. Amazingly enough, largely defunct social network Google+ was listed as experiencing no issues.
As the Verge noted, third-party services Discord, Snapchat, and Vimeo all use Google Cloud in their backends, with the outages preventing users from logging in. (However, issues were far from universal, with some users reporting no impact at all.)
If you want to stay in the US, you’ll likely have to share your internet presence. As proposed in March 2018 (and to some extent in 2015), the country now requires virtually all visa applicants to provide their social media account names for the past five years. The mandate only covers a list of selected services, although potential visitors and residents can volunteer info if they belong to social sites that aren’t mentioned in the form.
Applicants also have to provide previous email addresses and phone numbers on top of non-communications info like their travel statuses and any family involvement in terrorism. Some diplomats and officials are exempt from the requirements.
The US had previously only required these details for people who visited terrorist-controlled areas. The goal is the same, however. The US is hoping to both verify identities and spot extremists who’ve discussed their ideologies online, potentially preventing incidents like the San Bernardino mass shooting.
The measure will affect millions of visa seekers each year, although whether or not it will be effective isn’t clear. A State Department official toldThe Hill that applicants could face “serious immigration consequences” if they’re caught lying, but it’s not certain that they’ll be found out in a timely fashion — the policy is counting on applicants both telling the truth and having relatively easy-to-find accounts if they’re dishonest. And like it or not, this affects the privacy of social media users who might not want to divulge their online identities (particularly private accounts) to government staff.
The company sought to completely change how we interact with computers, but now Leap Motion is selling itself off.
Apple reportedly tried to get their hands on the hand-tracking tech, which Leap Motion rebuffed, but now the hyped nine-year-old consumer startup is being absorbed into the younger, enterprise-focused UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal this morning; we’ve heard the same from a source familiar with the deal.
The report further detailed that the purchase price was a paltry $30 million, nearly one-tenth the company’s most recent valuation. CEO Michael Buckwald will also not be staying on with the company post-acquisition, we’ve learned.
Leap Motion raised nearly $94 million off of their mind-bending demos of their hand-tracking technology, but they were ultimately unable to ever zero in on a customer base that could sustain them. Even as the company pivoted into the niche VR industry, the startup remained a solution in search of a problem.
In 2011, when we first covered the startup, then called OcuSpec, it had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. At the time, Buckwald told us that he was building motion-sensing tech that was “radically more powerful and affordable than anything currently available,” though he kept many details under wraps.
