US Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the country, uploaded 10 videos that appear to show craft moving in strange ways in our skies.

The videos were released on August 9 without warning, a press release or much in the way of context, only to be discovered by UFO enthusiasts and online sleuths earlier this week.

The videos document a fighter jet pursued by an apparently baffling flying orb, as well as something that appears to be a propeller-powered hang-glider, and yet another apparent floating orb, hovering this time near a parked 16-wheeler truck.

But the enigmatic nature of the drop — which offered little detail regarding the times and locations of these sightings, plus more than a few sweeping redactions — has left more questions than answers.

The quiet video drop follows rising tensions within the corridors of power in Washington on the once taboo subject of UFOs.

Open congressional hearings, federal legislation and even brand new government offices have now been dedicated openly to the investigation of these aerial mysteries, with at least one former senior US intelligence official calling the strange sightings ‘a national security issue.’

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The videos were released on a dedicated site for agency records made public via requests under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

But perhaps most significantly, the release confirms, at least tacitly, the veracity of a heavily-scrutinized, 2013 thermal UFO video leaked to UFO researchers in 2015.

For the first time since that leak, the April 25, 2013 Aguadilla, Puerto Rico UFO video first investigated by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies has now been confirmed by the US government as genuinely unidentified.

Asked by NBC News, Chris Mellon, a former official with the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, described the release as ‘very significant.’

‘This will help the public understand what our military personnel are encountering all over the world,’ Mellon said.

‘We’re getting, on the Defense Department side, 50 to 100 [UFO] reports per month — and this is happening globally.’

‘It’s happening overseas. It’s happening off the east coast and the west coast,’ he elaborated. ‘This will help people better understand why Congress takes the issue seriously [and] why it’s a national security issue.’

While Mellon praised US Customs’ show of openness and transparency with the official release of these 10 videos,  America’s dedicated community of UFO skeptics were less impressed.

Mick West, a prolific and dedicated examiner of UFO claims and the owner of the skeptics forum Metabunk, described the videos as ‘mostly not new.’

‘And those that are new are not particularly interesting,’ West told the DailyMail.com, noting that several had already been the subject of unofficial leaks to reporters and researchers on the UFO beat.

West, a retired computer programmer and video game designer, described the first of US Customs’ UAP videos as something that ‘looks like a microlight aircraft.’

Several others, he noted, appeared to be ‘ambiguous white dots, […] a balloon or a plastic bag.’

The second video, West said, was the so-called ‘Rubber Duck’ UAP, which the noted skeptic devoted considerable time to investigating on his YouTube channel and in Metabunk’s forum back in 2021.

West identified CBP video 9 as the ‘infamous ‘Aguadilla’ video,’ which he has argued reveals a thermal signature ‘consistent with a pair of wedding lanterns drifting in the wind.’ 

West has taken the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) to task for errors located in an Appendix to their lengthy report on the Aguadilla case, but at least according to the SCU’s co-founder, engineer Robert Powell, those errors do not undermine the remainder of his team’s ᴀssessment.

‘The report does not depend on Appendix L,’ Powell told the DailyMail.com, stating that West did not have an answer for why floating wedding lanterns would veer from west to north, as the Aguadilla UFO is recorded doing in the video’s final moments.

‘The second reason it’s not Chinese lanterns,’ according to Powel, ‘is that Chinese lanterns can’t survive the wind speeds that were occurring that day. The wind speeds were around 13 miles an hour.’

‘It’s basically a little candle that sits on these little wires, and you’ve got a very light [plastic or paper] bag around it,’ Powell said. ‘Heavy winds will collapse the outside of your Chinese lantern.’

Whatever the mystery of Aguadilla proves to be, US Customs’ 10 videos were not the only agency records quietly released this August under FOIA. 

The agency’s official confirmation of these previously only leaked thermal videos and security recordings were also accompanied by a 389-page PDF document, ostensibly of UAP records held internally by US Customs. 

While the paperwork includes much chaff — news clippings, and already public government reports — the FOIA drop also included internal emails detailing internal deliberations on the law enforcement agency’s UFO cases.

Several agency emails from August 2021, document an exchange between a UFO enthusiast and his superior regarding efforts to comply with spirit of the then-recent congressional legislation on UFOs and the resulting UAP Task Force report.

‘As a pet project, or for fun, do all the research you want,’ the redacted official wrote to the CBP’s equivalent to X-Files FBI agent Fox Mulder. ‘I know this topic is of great interest to you and there’s a ton of information to sift through.’

‘There just isn’t an avenue for any formal research or reporting any type of findings or conclusions,’ the redacted official stressed.

The also-redacted CPB employee responded, ‘T4… I apologize, and took The Director of National Intelligence’s UAP report seriously.’  

But the release also includes over two dozen tantalizing pages that have been redacted in their entirety. 

Per statute, each page lists the legal exemption under which US CBP is permitted to withhold certain records relevant to an open records request.

The majority of these redactions, in this case, were justified under the b(5) and b(7)e exemptions clauses of federal FOIA law.

Investigative reporters and open government advocates have dubbed the b(5) exemption the ‘The Withhold It Because You Want To Exemption’ as its guidelines were even described by the US Justice Department as ‘opaque.’

The b(7)e exemption pertains effectively to law enforcement’s own ‘sources and methods,’ as it withholds details that would ‘disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions’ and other material that officials believe ‘could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.’

To this end, several of the released videos have notably redacted the majority of the heads-up-display information from US CBP’s infrared or thermal video recordings: which would likely include data on the alтιтude, bearing and range of these UAP.

All summer long, a sweltering UFO fever has gripped Washington DC, stoked in no small measure by a series of extraordinary claims and revelations from lawmakers, former US intelligence and Navy personnel.

This past June, charges of an illegal, hidden UFO crash retrieval program operating within the shadows exploded across television airwaves and online as made by Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch.

Soon thereafter, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio revealed he too had been briefed by several other US government officials with top-level security clearances, who professed that they personally had ‘first-hand’ knowledge of UFO programs.

By late July, Grusch was reᴀsserting many of his claims under oath before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, along with Ryan Graves, an esteemed former pilot, and veteran Navy fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, who witnessed the now famous 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ UFO.

In his further comments on the new CPB videos, former DOD intelligence official Chris Mellon hoped that the newly official US Customs videos would spur the Pentagon toward greater transparency itself.

Mellon noted that these mysterious UFO videos highlight ‘the challenges we are facing monitoring and controlling our airspace.’

He cited both last February’s infamous Chinese spy balloon affair (and still-as-yet-unidentified UAP), and ‘of course the explosion of drone use around the world,’ as examples of the new threats to US sovereignty posed by the weak official reporting and widespread stigma surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena.

‘I hope that the Defense Department and [US] Intelligence Community are paying attention,’ Mellon told NBC.

‘They have many videos that are of a similar, unclassified nature,’ he noted, ‘or were, until they — out of nowhere — created this new classification guide.’

Echoing comments by Grusch on the legality of the Pentagon’s actions, Mellon went on to express the opinion that the DoD’s new and more expansive classification standards for its own UAP or UFO videos might not be ‘lawful.’

‘I don’t think that’s consistent with the executive order governing classification,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘But they are withholding a lot of similar kinds of videos from the public on that basis.’