Venerable news program 60 Minutes devoted a significant portion of Sunday night’s broadcast to exploring incidents of Navy pilots witnessing unidentified aerial phenomena and the United States government’s recent acknowledgment of the issue. Amazingly, the nearly 15-minute-long segment, which can be seen in its entirety above and is transcribed here, was actually the first time the program has ever covered UFOs in its more than five decades on the air . The piece largely served as an explainer to the 60 Minutes audience who may have been unaware of the remarkable series of UFO-related events that have been unfolding since the late 2017 New York Times article that revealed a Pentagon program to study unidentified aerial phenomena.
During the segment, reporter Bill Whitaker spoke to former military intelligence official Lue Elizondo and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, about their concerns regarding what they see as the government’s unwillingness to take a critical look at the UAP issue and how they have been working to rectify that situation. Also interviewed were former Navy pilots Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Alex Dietrich as well as retired US Navy pilot commander David Fravor. All three former pilots recounted their personal experiences witnessing unidentified aerial phenomena, with Graves making the eye-brow raising statement that he saw UAPs “every day for at least a couple years.”
While UFO enthusiasts may have found most of the material in the segment to be a retread of information that has already been circulating in bits and pieces over the last three years, the show undoubtedly brought a sizeable portion of the public up to speed on the matter, which is something of a victory for those wishing for the subject to be taken more seriously. On that note, one particularly telling aspect of the program was that, unlike in the vast majority of instances wherein the mainstream media looks at UFOs, the phenomenon was given a sincere examination rather than being the subject of ridicule. Additionally, it is noteworthy that not once during the segment were the words “alien” or “extraterrestrial” uttered by anyone.
Hellbound and Down 