A former US Navy pilot said he saw UFOs off the Atlantic Coast every day, moving in a way that was impossible for scientists to explain

• US military pilots on 60 Minutes described a series of encounters with UFOs.
• One Navy pilot said such sightings were a nearly daily occurrence.
• A Department of Defense report on the sightings is expected in June.

Former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves told CBS's 60 Minutes that pilots training off the US coast sighted UFOs nearly every day.

The show on Sunday explored a series of alleged recent encounters between US military pilots and UFOs, some of which were caught on film and have been released by the Pentagon.

One encounter took place in 2014, when Graves and his F/A-18F squadron sighted UFOs in restrictive airspace near Virginia Beach, in southeastern Virginia.

-60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 16, 2021

In 2019, US military pilots recorded UFOs in the same area in images obtained by the program. The Pentagon told CBS News that it had not been able to identify the objects.

Graves said that such sightings were a nearly daily occurrence.

"Every day. Every day for at least a couple years," he said of the sightings.

He discussed an encounter off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, in 2015, captured by one of his pilots on camera.

"This is a difficult one to explain. You have rotation, you have high altitudes. You have propulsion, right? I don't know. I don't know what it is, frankly," remarked Graves.

On the show, several more US military pilots who've witnessed UFOs described the experiences.

Lue Elizondo, the former head of a Pentagon project to investigate UFO sightings, said that some objects seemed to defy what was believed to be technologically possible.

"Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 G-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, 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," he said.

In April the US military certified the authenticity of several videos showing encounters between pilots and UFOs that had been published in the media. It followed the declassification last year of several videos showing encounters with UFOs.

Following the sightings, the defense department last August launched a special taskforce to investigate them. Its report is scheduled for release in June.

Elizondo told the program that after running through all the possibilities there were some sightings his team had been unable to explain.

"We're going through our due diligence. Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance?" he said. "Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what-ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic."