The New Film ‘What Are UFOs’ Examines Our Fascination with the Unknown

Nobody expected anything special when the squadron of Navy F/A-18 fighter jets headed out for routine aerial maneuvers off of the coast of Virginia Beach one day in 2013. The F/A-18s, a Naval workhorse, owned the local air space that day—but only until they didn’t. 

All at once, the jets’ radar picked up a cluster of half a dozen objects flying along with them, moving erratically—and entirely acrobatically. At some moments they ripped along side-to-side at speeds exceeding 350 knots—or 402 mph. Then, suddenly, they would stand utterly still in winds that themselves were moving at 150 knots (172 mph)—gusts that had the jets struggling to maintain position. Then the objects would accelerate again. They had no visible exhaust, no discernible means of propulsion, and indeed looked nothing like any aircraft in the nation’s civilian or military arsenal. 

Measuring five to 15 ft. across, they were a “dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere,” former Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who was aloft that day, tells TIME. “We almost hit one of the objects; they came within 50 ft. of the lead aircraft, and that's really when we knew we were dealing with something a bit abnormal here. There's no aircraft in our inventory I'm aware of that has the ability to operate at very low speeds, or no speeds, and then accelerate and operate like a fighter.”

That wasn’t the last time the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—the genteel, modern-day term for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)—harrassed the Navy. “We saw them in Virginia Beach between 2013 and 2015,” says Graves. “Later, when we executed training operations aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., they were either already down there or they had followed us down, because we had over a dozen incidents, two of which were recorded [by the Navy] and released by The New York Times in 2017.”

Those videos, known popularly as “the Gimbal,” after the objects’ pinwheeling motion, are just part of the eyewitness visuals featured in the new PBS NOVA documentary “What Are UFOs?” premiering on PBS stations on Jan. 22. And Graves is just one of the many people who have borne witness to them who offers his accounts. The documentary traces the arc of UFOs and UAPs in American skies, from June 24, 1947, when aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported the first widely publicized sightings of flying saucers, to the present, when accounts of UAPs have exploded, with 801 reported to the military since 2023 alone. Within the Pentagon’s $65 billion “black budget” of classified expenditures, an estimated $22 million has reportedly been spent on its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates UAPs.

Even before that contemporary program, the U.S. military was keenly interested in the provenance of UFOs and UAPs, as the NOVA film documents. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force ran a secret—though since declassified—program dubbed Project Blue Book, which investigated 12,618 sightings of flying objects. Of these, 701 remain unidentified. Some of the earliest reports, from 1947 to 1949, were sightings of military assets that were part of the Department of Defense’s Project Mogul, under which the Air Force lofted high altitude balloons carrying sensitive microphones designed to pick up sonic signatures of Soviet nuclear tests. The initial rumors of extraterrestrial doings at Roswell, N.M. stemmed from a local rancher collecting debris from a balloon that descended on his land.

In the 21st century there is a lot more airborne traffic giving rise to a lot more potential false UAP alarms. More than 1,800 weather balloons are launched worldwide everyday, according to the NOVA documentary, and the Federal Aviation Administration reports that over one million registered drones are in private hands in the U.S. Plenty of what is reputed to be aliens likely has a perfectly banal terrestrial explanation. But sightings like the gimbal are a lot harder to explain away—a point proven by another UAP incident known colloquially as the Tic Tac.

In 2004, the U.S.S. Nimitz Carrier strike group off the coast of southern California picked up repeated radar reflections of flying objects that would rapidly appear and disappear from tracking screens. During those intervals when they were visible, they would fly in a looping, diving, and skittering path, rapidly dropping from 80,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. and hovering there. Finally, Naval pilot David Fravor and others were sent aloft to investigate and found their quarry—a 45-ft. long flying machine that for all the world resembled in both color and shape a Tic Tac breath mint.

“All four of us looked down and saw a Tic Tac object with a longitudinal axis pointed north-south and moving very abruptly over the water, like a ping pong ball,” said Fravor in 2023 testimony before Congress. “There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings. The object suddenly shifted its longitudinal axis, aligned it with my aircraft and began to climb. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared.”

Video of the encounter was released by the Navy which has never offered a theory as to what it was. 

Like the Tic Tac and the Gimbal, the hundreds of other unexplained UAPs continue to flummox experts. Graves is now executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects sightings of UAPs with an eye toward helping to shape the public conversation around unidentified objects and deconflict airspace. He does not pretend to know what the bogeys are—but he’s pretty sure what they’re not.

“I don't think that we're seeing an adversary demonstrating capability beyond our state of the art during these relatively low reward, high risk operations,” he says. “To be able to take these technologies that we're not aware exist and to put them basically directly over our homeland, in a position to be captured and reverse engineered…I don't see that. I don't see that logic.”

Equally unlikely is that the craft are highly classified domestic technology that much of the military has not been tipped off about. “These were airborne assets that were exhibiting capabilities beyond our state of the art,” Graves says. “And what I mean by state of the art is technology that would take greater than 10 years for the U.S. to develop, if they started now.”

That leaves non-earthly origins and Graves, for one, does not speculate on that score. “I don't think we have the proper definitions to go down that road,” he says, “without having a better way of defining how we would determine whether something is truly from another star system…[whether] these objects are using magical physics that we don't understand.”

The NOVA film does offer other explanations. Conspiracy debunker Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole, theorizes that it’s not the object in the gimbal video that’s doing the moving but the camera that captured the image, creating merely the illusion of motion—though that doesn’t explain what the object, which would be stationary in this case, actually is. In another—infrared—video in which the object appears to disappear and reappear, West suggests that the camera might be capturing the image of a bird that reached thermal equilibrium with the background temperature and thus simply seemed to vanish.

The filmmakers leave viewers with pretty much as many questions as they greet them with—which fairly matches the state of the UAP art. With up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the universe, there are uncounted trillions of planets that could host a highly technological civilization. Whether one of those civilizations would send any of their flying machines to our lonely world—and why they’d bother—is impossible to say. But the sightings keep coming—even if the answers remain elusive.