You may want to dust off that tinfoil hat in your closet

It used to be in the United States that if somebody publicly said anything hinting at a belief in UFOs, they'd be forever consigned to the tinfoil hat club.

You know, those nuts who think space aliens spray cosmic rays down on us in an effort to scramble our brains so they can take over the world, and that our only known means of protection is wearing a tinfoil hat.

Now, all of a sudden, everything has changed.

On Friday, the US Defense Department is scheduled to publicly release a report that outlines what the national government knows about unidentified flying objects.

What's going on?

The US Congress ordered the about-face in its 2021 Defense Budget, that's what. And since then, credible information has come out－with more expected－that could go a long way toward vindicating the tinfoil hat crowd.

One of the first official acts of this thaw in the freezing of US government information came in April. The Defense Department released "aerial phenomena observed in (US military) videos …(that) remain characterized as unidentified". It's a stunning assortment of clips, and if you haven't seen them, look them up online. Try searching for three declassified videos by US Navy pilots.

The third of these video clips is related to an eyewitness account that caught my attention. In November 2004, two US Navy fighter pilots from the USS Nimitz carrier group were flying a training mission off the coast of San Diego, California, not far from where I lived at the time.

They received a report of strange aerial activity some 100 kilometers south, off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, and were dispatched to check it out. When they arrived, pilots Dave Fravor and Alex Dietrich told 60 Minutes TV news announcer Bill Whitaker, in a program that aired on May 16, that they saw a patch of unexplained whitewater "the size of a (Boeing) 747" in the ocean beneath them.

As Dietrich circled at high altitude, Fravor descended to get a closer look. It was then that he noticed a white, Tic Tac breath-mint-shaped aircraft, he said, about the size of his F18 fighter jet. It was hovering just meters above the whitewater.

Whitaker: "So you're sort of spiraling down?"

Fravor: "Yep. The Tic Tac's still pointing north-south. It goes click and just turns abruptly, and starts mirroring me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up."

Whitaker: "So it's mimicking your moves?"

Fravor: "Yeah, it was aware we were there.… I want to see how close I can get, so I go like this (gesturing that he tightens his turn to head directly toward the craft). And it's still climbing. And when it gets right in front of me, it just disappears."

Whitaker: "Disappears?"

Seconds later, the Tic Tac was picked up by the carrier group's radar, oddly, at the exact location where Fravor was to begin his mock dogfight exercises before he was diverted for the surveillance.

Two more fighter jets were dispatched to observe the craft and returned with the infrared video clip of the Tic Tac that was recently published by the Defense Department.

"It was not from this world," Fravor said.

Luis Elizondo, who was director of the US Defense Department's former Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program, appeared on the same 60 Minutes program.

He told Whitaker: "Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour (21,000 kph), that can evade radar, and that can fly through air and water and possibly space, and, oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces, and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing."

Tin foil hat, anyone?