Nice drop to a Friday semi-crazy news dump, and who would have guessed UFOs would receive sincere appraisal from government agencies, especially NASA, but we live in all-around strange times.
From Wikipedia: ‘In ufology, a close encounter is an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object.‘

Hence, here we are:

US intelligence has no evidence confirming Navy pilot UFO encounters were alien spacecraft but has no assessment as to what they may be, sources say https://t.co/AdY99H9kAA

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 4, 2021

Details per The New York Times, updated this afternoon:

American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military, according to senior administration officials briefed on the findings of a highly anticipated government report.

The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology, the officials said.
That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret.

But that is about the only conclusive finding in the classified intelligence report, the officials said. And while a forthcoming unclassified version, expected to be released to Congress by June 25, will present few other firm conclusions, senior officials briefed on the intelligence conceded that the very ambiguity of the findings meant the government could not definitively rule out theories that the phenomena observed by military pilots might be alien spacecraft.

Americans’ long-running fascination with U.F.O.s has intensified in recent weeks in anticipation of the release of the government report. Former President Barack Obama further stoked the interest when he was asked last month about the incidents on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” on CBS.
“What is true, and I’m actually being serious here,” Mr. Obama said, “is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.’’

The report concedes that much about the observed phenomena remains difficult to explain, including their acceleration, as well as ability to change direction and submerge.
One possible explanation — that the phenomena could be weather balloons or other research balloons — does not hold up in all cases, the officials said, because of changes in wind speed at the times of some of the interactions.
…
Navy pilots were often unsettled by the sightings. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast.
Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who was with the Navy for 10 years, told The New York Times in an interview, “These things would be out there all day.”
With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed.
Some of the incidents were recorded on video, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

And what are ‘we‘ watching (video released mid-April this year)::

And add to the serious shit of this seriously — NASA is seeking answers:

"The bottom line is we want to know." NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tells CNN's @RachCrane that he has begun an investigation into recent UFO sightings. https://t.co/3Hpo314Pyf pic.twitter.com/Gpa0sGxI69

— CNN (@CNN) June 4, 2021

Some research needed and NASA’s new chief is seeking it — via CNN late this afternoon:

Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator and spaceflight veteran, told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane during a wide-ranging interview on Thursday that it’s not clear to anyone — even in the upper echelons of the US space agency — what the high-speed objects observed by Navy pilots are.
Nelson added that he does not believe the UFOs are evidence of extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
“I think I would know” if that were the case, Nelson said. But, he acknowledged, it’d be premature to rule that out as a possibility.
…
“We don’t know if it’s extraterrestrial. We don’t know if it’s an enemy. We don’t know if it’s an optical phenomenon,” Nelson said.
“We don’t think [it’s an optical phenomenon] because of the characteristics that those Navy jet pilots described … And so the bottom line is, we want to know.”

NASA press secretary Jackie McGuinness said Nelson did not establish a formal task force to begin investigating UFOs. However, he did direct researchers to move forward with exploring any lines of questioning around the topic as they see fit.

“There’s not really a lot of data and…scientists should be free to follow these leads, and it shouldn’t be stigmatized,” McGuinness said, acknowledging that UFO research can be negatively associated with unfounded conspiracy theories.
“This is a really interesting phenomenon and Americans are clearly interested in it [so if] the scientists want to investigate, they should.”

This shit is so 2021 it hurts…

(Illustration out front: Still-image from Pentagon-released video, and found here).