A commercial plane had a “near miss” with an unexplained aerial phenomenon, more commonly known as unidentified flying objects or “UFOs”, over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York, according to a fresh report released by the Pentagon. After the close brush, the airline crew informed the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stating that it had a “near miss” with a “cylindrical object” while over the Atlantic Ocean” just off the coast of New York. It remains unclear when the supposed close brush took place, or which airline was involved.

The case in New York remains the only incident recorded where a “possible flight safety issue” was encountered “during the event”, the Pentagon report added. The agency that reviews all of the new incidents being reported by military personnel and now additional federal agencies is the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which added that it was continuing its research into the Empire State case.

Notably, between May 2023 and June 2024, AARO received 757 new incident reports, 485 that occurred in that time period and another 272 reports from 2021 and 2022 that had not been previously revealed to the premier agency. A total of 18 incidents were reported near US nuclear infrastructure, weapons, and launch sites as well.

“10 of the reported Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) flew over protected areas for a duration less than five minutes. Two instances involved longer flight times of 53 minutes and 1 hour and 57 minutes respectively. Flight duration is unknown for the remaining six cases,” the report noted.

Owing to the rising backlog of cases, a significant number of reports remain unresolved. Currently, AARO is investigating 444 cases.

Also read | Annual UFO Report Finds Over 700 New Cases, But No Proof Of Alien Activity

‘Cannot explain them’

The Pentagon stated in the report that it could not explain more than 20 reports of UAP sightings in the past year alone.

“There are interesting cases that with my physics and engineering background and time in the I.C. I do not understand, and I don’t know anybody else understands them,” said Dr Jon Kosloski, AARO director.

“Orbs, cylinders, triangles, in one of the cases, it has been happening over an extended period of time, and it is possible that there’s multiple things happening,” Kosloski added, explaining how the UAPs might have looked like.

Despite not being able to explain multiple reports. AARO said it had “discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology”.