A US Navy’s top officer confirmed a bizarre incident in which Navy vessels were swarmed by dozens of unidentified drones.
Admiral Michael Gilday, the United States Navy Chief of Naval Operations, was asked about the incident by journalists in a roundtable on April 5, 2021. Gilday said that the involved aircraft remained unidentified and the information was still being analyzed.
According to recently surfaced reports, in July 2019 over a number of nights US Navy destroyers off the coast of California were buzzed by a highly coordinated swarm of flying vehicles. The Navy described them as drones and launched an ongoing investigation.
Insider information on the incident, published by The War Zone, points to drones in question being of the advanced military kind, as commercially available UAVs could not operate in such conditions and with such coordination. A number of documents point to Navy officials being confused by the incident and scrambling to investigate it.
According to Gilday, there was a well-established process of collecting and analyzing data in such cases, although no concrete information was revealed thus far. Prior findings reveal that the Navy collected a large amount of videographic and other kinds of evidence, although none of it was disclosed.
The Navy specifically identified observed objects as drones, yet their exact appearance was not disclosed. The incident is the latest such case in a streak of high-profile disclosures by US armed forces, revealing encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).