Pyramids, a Sphere and a Shrug: The Week the Pentagon Said 'Yes, That's Our Video'

The clip runs about 42 seconds. It's green, grainy, shot through a night-vision device on the deck of a Navy destroyer. Above the ship, blinking shapes hang in the sky, and they look like pyramids.

In April 2021, filmmaker Jeremy Corbell put that video online. Las Vegas reporter George Knapp had already published cockpit photos of objects nicknamed the "Acorn," the "Blimp" and the "Sphere."

Normally, this is where the story dies. Leaked UFO footage shows up, the government says nothing, and the internet argues forever.

This time, the Pentagon picked up the phone.

The leak

The material came out in pieces, through two connected outlets: Knapp's Mystery Wire and Corbell's Extraordinary Beliefs, according to CBS News.

Knapp went first. On April 6, 2021, he published three photos, the Acorn, the Blimp and the Sphere, reported The Debrief. Global News reported the images were taken by a weapons systems officer in an F/A-18 over Virginia on March 4, 2019. The Debrief's metadata analysis pointed to the same date.

Then Corbell released the night-vision video. He said it was shot from the destroyer USS Russell in July 2019, off San Diego, and wrote that the ship "observed and recorded multiple 'pyramid' shaped craft," according to Global News.

Corbell said the material had been shown in an Office of Naval Intelligence briefing in May 2020 and later leaked to him. He said he and Knapp verified it before publishing. Those details came from Corbell, not from the Pentagon.

"Taken by Navy personnel"

The Debrief asked the Defense Department directly. Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough answered.

"I can confirm that the referenced photos and videos were taken by Navy personnel."

"The UAPTF has included these incidents in their ongoing examinations," she added, referring to the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force the Pentagon had stood up the year before.

That was the whole confirmation. Gough declined to say whether any of the objects had been identified. She declined to comment on whether the images were classified or whether anyone was investigating the leak, The Debrief reported. She said the department doesn't discuss details "to maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries."

By April 17, CBS News had the same confirmation on the record. The department, Gough told CBS, "does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examinations."

Black Vault founder John Greenewald, who received the same statement, summed up the strange position the Pentagon was in. "They confirmed they are all genuine, but won't give their designation," he told Global News.

Then the sphere went into the water

On May 14, 2021, Corbell released a second clip. This one, he said, was recorded inside the Combat Information Center of the littoral combat ship USS Omaha, around 11 p.m. on July 15, 2019, within 100 miles of the California coast.

On the screen, a dark round object moves over the ocean and then appears to drop into it. Corbell's sources said a Navy submarine later searched for it and came up empty, The Debrief reported.

The Debrief went back to the Pentagon. Gough's answer followed the same template.

"I can confirm that the video was taken by Navy personnel, and that the UAPTF included it in their ongoing examinations," she said. She would not say whether the object was classified as a UAP.

The timing gave all of this extra weight. A month earlier, on April 5, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday had said the Navy had not identified the objects from the 2019 incidents, according to The Debrief. And the task force's report to Congress was due in late June.

What the Pentagon was really saying

It's worth being precise here, because the headlines weren't always.

The Pentagon confirmed provenance. It said Navy people took these pictures and that its UAP task force was studying them. It did not confirm Corbell's descriptions, his dates, his briefing account or the submarine search. It did not say the objects were craft of any kind.

Still, that was fast. The Navy cockpit videos that surfaced in 2017 weren't formally released by the Pentagon until April 2020. These leaks were confirmed within days.

When the intelligence community's preliminary assessment arrived on June 25, 2021, it reviewed 144 reports from government sources. It explained exactly one "with high confidence," a large deflating balloon. Everything else stayed open.

The pyramids get an answer

The pyramid video got its official explanation the following year.

At a House Intelligence subcommittee hearing in May 2022, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray said "the triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles," with the image then recorded on an SLR camera, as reported by The War Zone. The objects, he said, were drones.

The War Zone then got the receipts. Through the Freedom of Information Act, it obtained five Navy videos and related records from the July 2019 incidents off Southern California. Two of the videos came from the USS Russell, and The War Zone tied them to the footage leaked in 2021.

The ship's own logs read like a drone report, not a UFO report. On July 17, 2019, a Russell lookout team reported four probable unidentified drones. On July 30, another report logged "one possible UAS" at 4,000 yards, according to The War Zone.

Civilian analysts had gotten there first. On April 8, 2021, skeptic Mick West opened a Metabunk forum thread arguing the triangles were bokeh, out-of-focus points of light shaped by the night-vision optics. He suspected the shapes were "stars and a plane," pointing to the fact that "other static lights seem to have the same shape."

So the "pyramids" were never pyramids. That part is settled.

What we know, and what we don't

What we know

• The Pentagon confirmed in April and May 2021 that the leaked photos and videos, including the pyramid and Omaha clips, were taken by Navy personnel and were under task force review.
• Naval intelligence later said the triangular look came from night-vision optics and that the objects were drones.
• Navy records obtained by The War Zone show ships reporting probable drones off Southern California in July 2019.

What we don't

• Who was flying drones around U.S. warships off California, and why. The War Zone reported that remains unknown.
• What the object in the Omaha video was. We found no public official resolution of that clip.
• What the Acorn, Blimp and Sphere photos showed. The Pentagon has not identified them publicly.

The answer that raised a bigger question

Here is the twist. The leak that launched a thousand "alien pyramid" headlines ended with a far more uncomfortable explanation: unidentified drones, swarming Navy destroyers in a training range, and nobody on the record able to say whose they were.

That's not little green men. It's arguably worse. Someone flew drones around Navy warships in a training range across July 2019, and the public found out because someone leaked a video.

The Pentagon's spring 2021 statements set a pattern you'll recognize from every UAP story since. Yes, it's real footage. Yes, we're looking at it. No, we won't tell you what it is.

So what do you think: was confirming the leaked footage a step toward transparency, or just a way to control a story that was already out? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

• Pentagon Confirms Leaked UFO Images Are Authentic — The Debrief, 2021
• Pentagon confirms authenticity of videos showing unidentified flying objects — CBS News, 2021
• Leaked footage of 'pyramid-shaped' UFOs is real, Pentagon says — Global News, 2021
• Pentagon Confirms Leaked Video Showing "Transmedium" UFO Is Authentic — The Debrief, 2021
• Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2021
• Navy Releases Videos From Mysterious Drone Swarms Around Warships Off California — The War Zone, 2022
• Statement by the Department of Defense on the Release of Historical Navy Videos — U.S. Department of Defense, 2020
• Green "Pyramid" UFOs in Night Vision Footage are Bokeh — Metabunk, 2021