Memes Engulf Twitter as Indians Freak Out Over UFO Sightings Caught on Camera by US Navy

In the late hours of Monday, the US Department of Defense (DoD) authorised the release of three unclassified Navy videos that show some unidentified flying objects hovering over various bodies of water.

US Navy personnel, who were quickly interviewed by American news organizations, described the UFOs as unidentified flying objects that looked like 40 feet long "tic tacs" maneuvering inside the Earth’s atmosphere.

​The news sent Indian netizens into  humour mode – which has been a great defense mechanism to tackle life at such an uncertain and intense time.

With over 20,000 mentions, #UFOs is trending on Twitter in India: tweets on alien invasions, and is-the-world-coming-to-an end questions are flooding the micro-blogging platform.

​Re-tweets of Some people making claims that they have been abducted by UFOs in the past are also surfacing on the social networking platform.

​In an official statement, the Pentagon confirmed that these three videos are indeed real.

The unclassified Navy videos, one taken in November 2004 and the other two in January 2015, have been circulating in the public domain after unauthorised releases in 2007 and 2017, the DoD said in its statement.

“After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorized release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena. DOD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real,” it added.

Last week, international UFO hunters claimed that they spotted a cigar-shaped object on multibillionaire tech moghul Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink live feed, featuring the launch of a new batch of 60 globe-spanning satellites into orbit from US space agency NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 19 March.

If this was not enough, along with the novel pandemic and UFO sightings, news of asteroids approaching the planet at super speeds have also been a topic of discussions lately.

Earlier in April, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico released an image of the enormous 1998 OR2 asteroid that will fly past the Earth on 29 April. 

​Recently, Nasa’s Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies also revealed on its website that an almost 500-metre asteroid is currently hurtling towards our planet, and will come particularly close on 7 May.