2010–2019 · 4 events in the archive
The decade modern disclosure begins. The Navy's 2014–2015 east-coast incursions produce the GIMBAL and GO FAST sensor recordings; the December 2017 New York Times investigation by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean reveals AATIP and names Luis Elizondo as its director.
Anchor incidents include the 11 November 2014 El Bosque/CEFAA Chile case (helicopter FLIR recording released by the Chilean Air Force's UAP unit), the East Coast Navy incursions of 2014–2015 (reported by Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 and others), the December 2017 NYT story, and the 2019 Navy reporting-pipeline reform that formalised UAP incident submission and ATFLIR data preservation.
The 2010s is also when the academic literature begins to engage. Wendt and Duvall's 'Sovereignty and the UFO' had appeared in Political Theory in 2008; through the 2010s the political-theory, IR, religious-studies, and history-of-science treatments multiply (Eghigian 2014, 2017; Pasulka 2019; Dodd 2018). The peer-reviewed physics treatment opens with Knuth et al. 2019 ('Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles', Entropy).
Why this matters. The 2010s is when the modern public UAP record stops being a curiosity and becomes a research domain. The institutional infrastructure of UAPTF and AARO that defines the 2020s is impossible without the 2017 NYT story, which is impossible without the 2004 Tic Tac.
Anchor moments
4 entries · sorted newest first
Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean publish a front-page New York Times investigation revealing the existence of the Department of Defense's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The story includes a release of the 'FLIR1' video and on-the-record statements from former AATIP director Luis Elizondo.
This document is a mission briefing summarizing an observation of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) by a U.S. military platform near Latakia, Syria. A U.S. military pilot flying a P-8A aircraft reported observing an object via the aircraft’s EO/IR sensor, which they characterized as appearing to be in “sea skim mode,” traveling at approximately 500 knots (575 mph) on a southeasterly heading. The P-8A lost visual contact with the object after two minutes. All descriptive and estimative langu
F/A-18F crews assigned to Strike Fighter Squadron 11, operating from Naval Air Station Oceana, report routine encounters with UAP off the U.S. East Coast. Two of the three Pentagon-released videos — 'GIMBAL' and 'GO FAST' — are recorded during this period.
The oldest sensor video in PURSUE Release 01 — a 1-minute-46-second AARO clip from 2013 — shows what military observers described as an 'eight-pointed star formation' of objects over a Middle Eastern theater of operations.
Other decades