The New York Times has made waves with a new report on sightings by U.S. Navy aviators of unidentified flying objects between 2014 and 2015. But the UFO issue, which follows a similar 2017 story, is far more interesting than the reporters let on.

The U.S. government does not know what these UFOs actually are. The report focuses on witnesses of so-called “Tic Tacs,” but other shapes and sizes of UFOs have also been credibly recorded by the U.S., British, Chinese, Russian, and other governments for the past 65 years. But what are these strange things?