Corbell discussed the footage on his “Weaponized” podcast on Tuesday with co-host and fellow Ufologist George Knapp. He said it was given to him by a witness, who filmed it in April 2021 near Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, the USMC’s largest base, located in the desert east of Los Angeles, California.
“Two years ago, this thing happened and nothing has come out,” Knapp explained. “There’s been no media coverage in two years since.”
Corbell said he “got a tip from two bases at the time,” adding it was someone “high up.”
“But the tip was basically like ‘something happened and you should look into it. Click,'” he said, indicating the caller abruptly hung up the phone.
Relaying what a witness told him, Corbell said the object was a "large, silent and hovering triangular-shaped craft."
In the video, voices can be heard asking what the object is. As people run through the list of possibilities and dismiss each of them, one eventually concludes: “We’ve got aliens.”
The footage was published on Corbell’s Instagram* on Tuesday and included an interview with two US Marines two days after the event occurred.
“One of my buddies was outside and he was looking at the sky and it just kind of appeared out of nowhere … those lights appeared out of nowhere,” one Marine said, adding that slowly about 50 people came outside to look at it.
“They were just kind of baffled, nobody could recognize it, I mean we’re all military.”
Corbell noted that one of the witnesses captured what Knapp called the “coup de grâce,” a photo using a low-light camera that purportedly showed the triangular shape of the UFO, which he also published on his Instagram.
"Let's figure out what this is," Corbell said.
However, according to Sue Gough, a spokesperson for the Department of the Defense, what the Marines witnessed was actually just a drill.
"I can confirm that there were military aviation assets in the Twentynine Palms, California, airspace and a Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course was being conducted at the time," Gough told US media.
"There is no record of communication with the base range control concerning a UAP sighting, nor of the allocation of any base resources to investigate a UAP sighting. AARO does not have a record of this alleged event and cannot verify the authenticity of the report."
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) was established by the Pentagon last year to investigate reports of UFOS or, as they are called today, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). In addition, Congress has required the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to issue annual reports on UAPs.
Indeed, a slew of UAPs spotted in American and Canadian skies earlier this year quickly led to a hysteria about supposed Chinese “spy balloons,” after the US shot down what Beijing said was a weather balloon that blew off course and over US soil.
Following a Senate hearing on UAPs last month, US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told US media that Americans "are understandably concerned" about the dramatic increase in reported sightings.
"What’s worse, our government spent too many years ignoring or downplaying the threat," Rubio said. "Thankfully, that is beginning to change, but as we saw earlier this year, the defense and intelligence communities are still struggling."
However, the Earthling-made explanations aren’t enough to satisfy some US military pilots who encountered the UAPs, and they have called on other witnesses to come forth with their stories that defy official explanations.
*Meta, the parent company of Instagram, is banned in Russia for extremist activities.