An upcoming government report has found no evidence that UFOs spotted by Navy personnel are alien - but still can't explain them

• An upcoming government report leaves many questions open about more than 120 UFO sightings, per the NYT.
• There is no evidence the sightings are of alien origin, but it is not being ruled out, the paper reported.
• The Pentagon has increasingly acknowledged the existence of UFOs as a real concern to the government.

A soon-to-be-released Pentagon report says there is no evidence that UFOs spotted by US Navy personnel are of alien origin - but we know so little about them that it can't be ruled out, The New York Times reported.

According to the Times, the upcoming report reviews more than 120 incidents of unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs) - more commonly known as UFOs - over the last 20 years.

Almost none of the encounters appear to involve technology currently held by the US, the paper said, citing the report.

Beyond that, almost no firm conclusions can be drawn, several officials speaking on condition of anonymity told the Times and The Washington Post.

The report will also include a classified section, which also has no further confirmation on whether the incidents represent alien technology, officials told The Times.

One possible explanation the report will put forward is that the UFOs are advanced technology from other countries, The Times reported. Whatever their origin, the ability of the observed objects to accelerate, submerge and rapidly change direction remains hard to explain, the report is purported to say.

The commissioning of the report - due to be released to Congress on June 26 - was wrapped into former President Donald Trump's COVID-19 relief package from March last year, The Post reported.

In March, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox News of the report's creation, saying that it will describe "difficult to explain" sightings.

"When we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain," Ratcliffe said.

Former President Barack Obama also acknowledged on The Late Late Show with James Corden in May that the government has unexplained UFO footage.

"We don't know exactly what they are, we can't explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern," Obama said.

In recent years The Pentagon has increasingly confirmed that leaked footage, which has circulated online for years, is real. In April, it confirmed that footage of a triangular UFO shared online was real and had been taken by the US Navy. It also confirmed that the footage is being studied by the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

Other leaked US Navy footage from between 2004 and 2015, long the subject of UFO-watchers' fascination, was officially released by the Pentagon in April last year.

In 2017, David Fravor, one of the pilots recording the footage released in April 2020, described to the New York Times how one of the UFOs he saw "accelerated like nothing I've ever seen."

Last month, former US Navy pilot Ryan Graves told CBS' 60 Minutes that sightings like this were common while he was serving.

Graves told CBS he saw UFOs "every day for at least a couple years."