The 2021 segment on UFOs may go down as one of the most chilling segments ever to air on “60 Minutes,” thanks to its credible reporting on aerial phenomena. For nearly 14 minutes, Bill Whitaker interviews and reports on a range of unidentified aircraft sightings from eyewitness navy pilots. This includes credible radar images of the aircraft in question. Roughly a month after the news section aired, the National Intelligence Department released an unprecedented assessment of unidentified aerial phenomena after decades of relative silence on the matter.
Shortly after the episode aired, viewers shared their excitement and confusion. On the subreddit r/Television, u/mewhead3 shared, “This is wild and it’s awesome that this was just broadcast on US mainstream media last night.” Viewer u/Krinder agreed and added, “For real. Especially when they put the former DOD expert in charge of some of our most classified weapons programs saying ‘whatever it was it wasn’t us.’ That’s terrifying,” before sharing how they were confused by the segment.
Not everyone was on board with the report, with u/drive_chip_putt stating how the program usually reports on “major events,” and sharing their confusion by the segment, when other topics — such as the ongoing struggles in the Middle East — could have been covered. A deleted account said, “Any confirmed cases of these UFOs in space? I assume that would help us to explain if these are terrestrial or not.”
