A video from the US Navy appears to show a UFO flying over the California coast

By Gadi Schwartz and Tim Stelloh - NBC News

A video captured by the United States Navy and recently leaked appears to show the moment when an unidentified flying object disappeared off the coast of California, according to a clip obtained by a documentary maker and shared with NBC News, the sister network of Telemundo News.

The video was captured in July 2019 by a Navy aircraft and recorded at the USS Omaha Combat Information Center, according to filmmaker Jeremy Corbell.

The clip appears to show a spherical object flying for a few minutes over the water, near San Diego, before disappearing.

"He fell into the water," military personnel are heard saying in the video.

The Defense Department confirmed that the clip was recorded by Navy personnel and said it will be reviewed by the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a panel created in 2020 to "obtain information" on the "nature and origins "of such objects.

[Pentagon declassifies secret UFO videos]

The video was posted a few days before the television show '60 Minutes' aired an interview with two former Navy pilots who recalled being sent to investigate

"multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" that descended 80,000 feet in less than a second

.

The incident also occurred off San Diego in 2004.

Navy confirms veracity of UFO videos

Sept.

19, 201900: 34

One of the pilots, Commander Dave Fravor, told '60 Minutes' that personnel found a "small white object resembling a (candy) Tic-Tac" moving over the water before disappearing.

Seconds later, his ship, the USS Princeton, said the object reappeared on its radar 60 miles away.

Christopher Mellon, a senior defense official in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said in an interview that there was "quite a lot of continuity" between recent reports of unidentified objects and reports dating back decades.

"What we are seeing is a series of perceptible and distinct things," he said.

"Sometimes we are looking at a 50-foot object that can travel at hypersonic speeds and apparently enter orbit or descend from altitudes potentially greater than 100,000 feet."

Mellon said the stigma associated with reporting such phenomena has kept people who have witnessed them silent for a long time, a sentiment echoed by Lt. Commander Alex Dietrich, one of the pilots of the Marina interviewed on the '60 Minutes' program.

"While we were drinking beers, we said,

'Hey, if I had seen him alone, I don't know if he would have said something,'"

Dietrich said.

"Because it sounds crazy when you say it."

Last month, the literary magazine The New Yorker published a lengthy story titled "How the Pentagon Began to Take UFOs Seriously," examining the work of journalist Leslie Kean. Kean co-wrote an article in The New York Times four years ago reporting that the Pentagon was spending millions of dollars on a threat identification program to examine unidentified aircraft moving at high speeds with no apparent signs of propulsion.