Following the Pentagon's official release of three videos of unidentified flying objects last month, that were previously made available by the To the Stars Academy, it appears that the US military has recently made available a number of official “hazard reports” regarding “encounters between US Navy aircraft and "unidentified aerial phenomena", as CNN puts it.
The reports, which were first obtained by The Drive via a Freedom of Information Act and which are all marked "Unclassified" and "For Official Use Only", detail eight incidents that occurred over the US eastern seaboard: seven of the encounters took place between 2013 and 2014 off the coast of Virginia and North Carolina, with the US planes involved being F/A-18E/F Super Hornets; while the eighth encounter involved an EA-18G Growler flying off the coast of Maryland.
As the media outlet points out, the reports appear to suggest that at least some of the flying objects encountered by the US pilots might've been drones, using the description "Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)".
For example, one report mentions that a small aircraft that was visually acquired by one pilot "had an approximately 5 foot wingspan and was colored white with no other distinguishable features", thus being deemed a UAS "due to the small size", while another paper mentions an aircraft that was “white in color and approximately the size and shape of a drone or missile".
The papers note, however, that the military was unable to determine who was operating the drones in question.
Also, the media outlet notes that Luis Elizondo, former head of the Pentagon's now-defunct program that was studying the recordings of “aerial encounters with unknown objects”, previously said that he thinks "there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."
"These aircraft -- we'll call them aircraft -- are displaying characteristics that are not currently within the US inventory nor in any foreign inventory that we are aware of," Elizondo said.
