Spent some more time looking into this because it was so unusual to see the NYT report something like this, and the more I learn about it the worse it looks.
First, it looks like the NYT may have run this story to try to draw attention away from the sexual-harrassment-media-staff purge (see https://goo.gl/Dk8k9q, an MSNBC interview with one of the two NYT authors, where he says "it'll take some attention away from the day-to-day, let's put it that way"). The same day that this article came out, it was reported that MSNBC's Chris Matthews had also been accused of sexual harrassment.
The NYT articles say the videos were released by the "Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program", which according to their own reporting was apparently just the one guy (Luis Elizondo) who they interviewed for the articles, who has just left the Pentagon and is now trying to raise money for some kind of fringy UFO company with the former lead singer of Blink-182(!!).
Also, there is an apparently-respected UFOlogist online who has evidence that one of the two videos first showed up in 2007 on a website run by German special effects students (you can visit the archive.org version of the German site from 2007 at https://goo.gl/W56sX5 and download the video yourself). In any case, the video doesn't match the description of the event given by the pilot in the NYT article: it shows the object at the same altitude as the pilot's aircraft, while the pilot seems to describe the object rapidly ascending from below his aircraft to a position above it.
The other video *also* doesn't match up with the description given by the pilot in the article: the pilots in the video describe a "fleet" of objects, whereas the pilot in the article describes a single flying object, and as with the previous video, the pilot's aircraft is roughly at the same altitude as the object.
The origin of the video is uncertain, although two UFO researchers say it first appeared in 2007 on what they describe as a website run by German film students.
Researcher Isaac Kol lives in London and sometimes posts on the Web forum Above Top Secret.
He recently posted:
Back in 2007, I tracked the first online copy of the video back to the website of a group of German film students that specialized in creating science fiction movies with lots of special effects (Vision Unlimited).
His post also included, “in 2007, I was inclined to reach the tentative conclusion that it was a hoax... I find it very interesting that the current rounds of discussion seem to ignore the provenance of the footage…”
Kol told FOX5 in an email, “I don’t claim to have debunked that footage – merely shown that the place that it was originally posted raises red flags pending further evidence.”
Robert Powell lives in Austin, Texas, and publishes on the Facebook page Scientific Coalition for Ufology.
He said: “The video was first found on a German film site back in 2007 I believe. That makes one suspicious, but there is no proof that the video was doctored by the German film students. I'm not aware that anyone has looked at the video and made a determination that it was edited in some fashion.”
The two fighter planes headed toward the objects. The Princeton alerted them as they closed in, but when they arrived at “merge plot” with the object — naval aviation parlance for being so close that the Princeton could not tell which were the objects and which were the fighter jets — neither Commander Fravor nor Commander Slaight could see anything at first. There was nothing on their radars, either.
Then, Commander Fravor looked down to the sea. It was calm that day, but the waves were breaking over something that was just below the surface. Whatever it was, it was big enough to cause the sea to churn.
Hovering 50 feet above the churn was an aircraft of some kind — whitish — that was around 40 feet long and oval in shape. The craft was jumping around erratically, staying over the wave disturbance but not moving in any specific direction, Commander Fravor said. The disturbance looked like frothy waves and foam, as if the water were boiling.
Commander Fravor began a circular descent to get a closer look, but as he got nearer the object began ascending toward him. It was almost as if it were coming to meet him halfway, he said.
Commander Fravor abandoned his slow circular descent and headed straight for the object.
But then the object peeled away. “It accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said in the interview. He was, he said, “pretty weirded out.”
The two fighter jets then conferred with the operations officer on the Princeton and were told to head to a rendezvous point 60 miles away, called the cap point, in aviation parlance.
They were en route and closing in when the Princeton radioed again. Radar had again picked up the strange aircraft.
“Sir, you won’t believe it,” the radio operator said, “but that thing is at your cap point.”
“We were at least 40 miles away, and in less than a minute this thing was already at our cap point,” Commander Fravor, who has since retired from the Navy, said in the interview.
By the time the two fighter jets arrived at the rendezvous point, the object had disappeared.
There are people that claim that the U.F.Os seen since WW2 are advanced Nazi-Germany flying machines and that the Third Reich somehow has survived in South America. This is as good an explanation as "...they are from an alien planet..." I agree with professor Stephen Hawking when he writes that any encounter between us and aliens would be like Cortes landing in America. We would be wiped out.
Lara Logan: Do you believe in aliens?
Robert Bigelow: I'm absolutely convinced. That's all there is to it.
Lara Logan: Do you also believe that UFOs have come to Earth?
Robert Bigelow: There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence. And I spent millions and millions and millions -- I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.
Lara Logan: He told us he's had his own close encounters, but declined to go into detail.
Using their telescope in effect as a pair of Polaroid sunglasses, the team, headed by Dr. John Carlstrom of Chicago, discovered that a faint radio haze thought to be the fading remnant of the Big Bang itself is slightly polarized. That is to say, its flickering electromagnetic fields that constitute light waves were not completely jumbled, vibrating in all different planes as they sped to Earth, like feathers sticking out at all angles at the end of an arrow. Rather, they showed a slight preference for one plane of vibration, as if all the feathers lined up.
That, theorists say, is the predicted signature of the last bounce of light from hot, electrified cosmic gases just as the universe was cooling to the point where atoms could form, 400,000 years after the universe was born.