Three U.S. army veterans have said they encountered a UFO on the Israel-Egypt border 2014, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday.
The three army vets shared their sighting shortly after a public Congressional hearing on the subject of UFOs was held for the first time in half a century.
According to the report, they saw eight bright objects hovering in the sky at a tremendous speed back in December 2014, at a U.S. military base in the Sinai Desert. The men, who were trained as cavalry scouts to identify aircraft, believe the objects weren't something a human could have developed.
One of them even claims he was told to "keep your mouth shut" by a senior officer after the observation became the talk of the day in the regiment.
Travis Bingham, 36, Vishal Singh, 29, and Dovell Engram, 28 also said that even if they had the option to report the incident, they would not have done so out of fear of being sent for a psychological evaluation which could lead to the end of a military career.
Engram was the first to spot something strange while on watch in the guard tower during the night. "I was really scared," he said, as he recalls he saw an aircraft spinning, and small lights were coming out of it. Engram said he radioed other nearby bases within at least a 300 km (200 miles) radius, and they replied they also saw the strange lights. Two minutes after spotting the object, Engram called his sergeant, Bingham.
Bingham, who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, "It looked like a large object with several small objects around it, and it seems like they were communicating".
"We knew it wasn't our military and it was baffling. The objects were glowing – you could clearly see them with the naked eye, and it was clear how fast they were moving. To this day, I’ve never seen anything like that craft, covering such distance with extreme speeds," he told the Daily Mail.
After spotting the object, Singh said he focused on it using his night-vision goggles. He stated it was difficult to identify its shape, as the edges seemed blurry, but he could roughly see an oval-shaped object in a horizontal position that was the size of a wide-body aircraft.
"The craft and smaller objects began moving like fireflies, left, right, up and down. "They were turning everywhere instantaneously. They must have been 30,000 ft high in the sky."
This isn't the first time U.S. forces encountered UFOs in the Sinai peninsula.
Back in 1985, at an international military base in El Gorah, soldiers from the U.S., Norway, Fiji, and Colombia spotted an object hovering outside the fence surrounding their base.
"The whole camp went on alert and the Fijians were in their underwear and running to their positions with machine guns ready to go and everyone was screaming 'don’t shoot at it!'" said paratrooper Matthew Heines, who witnessed the event.