The venerated news-magazine show 60 Minutes has covered just about every significant news story in its 53-year history, but until Sunday night, had never before gone in-depth about the phenomena known as UFOs. In a nutshell, the story by Bill Whitaker confirms that the U.S. government admits that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) exist. The average person knows them as UFOs, unidentified flying objects. And the number of encounters over several decades has reached a point that the Pentagon admits that yes, there is something out there.

Whitaker talks to Lue Elizondo, a military intelligence veteran who never gave UFOs a second thought until 2008. That’s when he was to join a Pentagon program called Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). He asks Elizondo if UFOs actually exist. His answer?

“Bill, I think we’re beyond that already. The government has already stated for the record that they’re real. I’m not telling you that. The United States government is telling you that.”

Whatever your thoughts are on the possibility of UFOs actually existing, hearing two veteran Navy pilots describe the encounter they had in 2004 with an unknown aircraft, is quite remarkable. Watch the clip below:

Now the U.S. Senate wants to know what the military knows.

While he was still the head of the Senate intelligence committee, Florida Senator Marco Rubio ordered a briefing from the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense on all these mysterious sightings, to be delivered by next month. Rubio said in an interview that he knows some of his colleagues don’t take the topic of UFOs seriously, but he views it as a legit national security concern.

Watch the full segment above.