Is the truth really out there? Why we need to talk about UFOs and the secrecy that surrounds them

The recent congressional hearings into the existence of extraterrestrial life raised more questions than answers, writes Borzou Daragahi

Claims of mysterious flying saucers in the night sky have been with us for decades (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

On an afternoon off the California coast almost 19 years ago, US Navy pilot David Fravor saw something that would challenge everything he ever believed.

While leading a routine training mission with a squadron of F/A-18 Hornets, he spotted something unusual in the sky. It was a number of Tic Tac-shaped objects about the size of his own plane but with the ability to move in a way that countered the laws of physics as we understand them. Some had reportedly moved from 80,000 to 20,000 feet at a blink of an eye, and as Fravor got closer, one of the objects sped away, “faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life,” he said in an interview years later.

Fravor was not the only pilot to spot the objects. Another crew even managed to get video of one of the Tic Tacs, which became a focal point of a largely secret five-year US government research programme, and a topic of discussion during a historic 26 July hearing in the Congress on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).