Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot with 11 years of service, details over 500 military UAP reports and critiques media dismissal of radar anomalies like the 2014 Jacksonville wedge formation. He argues that simultaneous sensor failures are inconceivable for physical objects, debunking DARPA holographic tests while highlighting legislative efforts to declassify programs since 1945. Graves emphasizes that entities often lack malintent, citing Zimbabwe school incidents, and promotes his Merge Point Podcast as a neutral platform for integrating this knowledge into aviation safety and societal understanding without stigma. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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First Pilot Speaks Out00:07:22
Is it true?
You were one of the first, or were you the first active duty fighter pilot to come out and talk publicly about UAPs?
Yeah, specifically active duty.
I was actually active duty when I did first speak about this.
David Fravor, Commander David Fravor, he was kind of the first one to, I think, come out and speak about this.
But at the time, he was no longer in the military.
Why is it that you were the first one to come out and talk about this?
Because people have been witnessing this and observing these things for long before you came out, right?
Yeah, that's my understanding of it.
So, I mean, why was I, you know, the first?
That's a great question, I think.
Perhaps I wasn't, just maybe I'm the one we're hearing about.
But, you know, from my position where I was, it was a little different because we weren't just seeing a one off object on the radar on a camera and then never see it again and question whether, you know, we really saw it or not.
We were seeing this on such a regular basis that it was something that we were briefing to every time.
We were not only briefing to it, but we were also informing others that did not have the Proper technology to see them.
And we were notifying the general public essentially with our notice to airmen, essentially broadcasting out that there were objects that we didn't understand what they were, but they were essentially a safety of flight hazard.
So for me to speak about it, it was just trying to solve that particular problem.
And that's why I spoke out about it.
And there was just the day we're recording today, which is what is today, the 13th of January.
And I think it was two or three days ago, the report came out that there was now over 500 reported incidents.
Of UAP sightings or UFO sightings by service members or military members?
Yeah, my understanding is that reporting comes strictly from the reporting mechanisms that have been created within the Navy and the Air Force.
And so, yes, they are seeing more.
And we would expect to see that, assuming what I've been saying is true.
An increase in reporting will lead to an increase in reports.
And so that's what we're seeing.
Now, it doesn't necessarily mean the quality of the reports will increase and it'll likely have more false negatives when we do have that.
But generally speaking, You know, they're out there, and now we have the agency to actually report them.
And so we're seeing the data come in.
I believe the New York Times article, there was a bunch of articles about it, but the New York Times article, I'm sure you saw, was speculating that a bunch of it was basically junk in the sky or weather balloons.
And they even mentioned, I think they quoted about the gimbal and the GoFast video, saying that the GoFast video, the object was only going 30 miles per hour.
Did you see that?
I don't remember if they specifically called out the GoFast video in those articles, but generally speaking, you know, There are aviators out there that are talking about this constantly.
They've talked to me about it and they tell me how this is something that they're talking about in their cockpits all the time now.
What they did express disappointment in was the fact that there were no reliable mainstream media organizations that they could talk to about this.
Not that they're necessarily looking to go out and make news, but they are looking for an opportunity to tell their story.
And what we're seeing from the mainstream media is just kind of the same old, you know, little giggling, little, okay, well, maybe it's real, maybe it's not.
And these people are putting their careers at risk to come forward to talk about.
This.
So to have it blown off like that didn't really go over well to the aviators I spoke with.
They're saying that the big mainstream media corporations weren't taking them seriously?
Essentially, they didn't feel like they could go and have a respectable conversation about this.
And we see that with some of the reporting we've had where they've essentially dismissed these sightings.
And what that does is the exact opposite of what I've been pushing for, which is to increase reporting.
If you're going to mock the aviators when they actually do report something, well, guess what's going to happen?
Naturally, some people are going to second guess whether they should report if you have a news organization like New York Times.
Putting things out that are detrimental to the safe operation of aircraft, right?
We have to report safety incidents.
And if we are minimizing those that report it, then guess what?
We're not going to have as many reports.
Yeah.
A Navy aviator seems like it would be the last person you would want to mock.
Well, it's that topic, right?
And we kind of did it to ourselves.
It's a conversation where, and it may not be pure mocking, but it's almost a defensive mechanism, at least what I've seen.
People immediately want to laugh when they hear this topic.
And I don't think they're laughing because they truly think it's funny.
I just think they don't know how to react, right?
And so they just burst out laughing and then they listen for a real response.
And sometimes they're shocked when they hear one.
But I think that we're going to see people continue to kind of hold that flag of ridicule until they convince themselves of it.
I don't think that one thing will be able to show them that data and they'll say, okay, that's clearly something interesting.
I'm going to now stop mocking this and really pay attention.
I see some of these people kind of holding on for quite a while until they have real evidence to stand behind.
Yeah, I don't see that.
I don't see many people that have that stance really.
Maybe it's just the people I surround myself with, the people I talk with.
To, but it's interesting hearing you say that because you know, you have, I'm sure you know, you deal with a lot of people that are still active military or still in the Navy.
So, a lot of people that you talk to that are still active service, are they the ones that you're referring to that still kind of are holding on to that stigma?
Well, certainly I'll say in the military, but I think it's more complicated than that because now that there is a classified reporting mechanism for this, I wouldn't expect them nor would I ask them to communicate about it.
However, I do still think the stigma is there.
The stigma that I was referring to primarily is on the commercial side.
Since they do actually have the agency to have a conversation about this, they really wanted to.
Some of the aviators I've talked to have got some pushback from their employees about speaking on this, including cease and desist orders.
I don't think they are necessarily asking them to cease talking about UAP or UFO, but just generally talking about operations of the aircraft.
I could see why they might have an issue with pilots communicating a safety issue publicly throughout.
Without their filter, where are the seasoned assists coming from?
Just corporate airlines or commercial airlines.
When there are pilots that are interested in speaking out, occasionally they have received seasoned assist orders.
Oh, wow.
Um, yeah, so I'm interested.
What was your take on that new report coming out with over 500 new sightings, or was it 500 total or 500 new?
I think it was 500 total.
Yeah, well, you know, it's a good thing because we're going to continue to see those numbers growing, I think, as more people report.
And again, that's only military.
What also kind of came out at the same time as a report was also an interesting PowerPoint presentation that was given to the National Transportation Board by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, which kind of fell out actually, I think, the same day, which has some interesting information regarding how serious they're taking this aviation safety threat.
Additionally, we also have seen the release of even more of what they're calling the Range Fowler reports.
Those are the actual reports from aviators who are, those are the data sets that they're generating these reports from.
Right.
And so those data sets, I would suggest, are much more interesting than the reports themselves.
You actually hear from the pilots themselves about the objects that they're seeing, why they're so confusing.
Interesting.
Reality Behind Air Combat00:14:23
Okay.
So, for people out there who may not be familiar, can you summarize your career as a Navy pilot?
I'll try.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really not that complicated.
I, you know, I went to four year degree.
You got your degree in mechanical and space engineering from Western Polytechnical Institute.
My junior year decided that the degree I was going for wasn't really that exciting enough, essentially.
I had an internship that really sucked.
So I essentially changed my major to the aerospace and decided I wanted to go fly jets.
Applied to officer candidate school, got in as a pilot.
And essentially, you know, the rest is kind of history.
I just kind of kept passing tests and moving forward.
And, you know, luckily the needs of the Navy were such that I was able to get the The aircraft that I wanted, which isn't always the case.
But yeah, I joined, or excuse me, I got in the F 18 Super Hornet for the first time, I believe in 2011 in VFA 106 on the East Coast.
I was there for a year and then immediately assigned to VFA 11, the Red Rippers, where I flew the F 18 for three and a half years and two combat deployments.
Once I was finished up with that, I went to Meridian, Mississippi, where I was an advanced strike fighter instructor and the T 45 Goshawk, teaching people how to land aircraft carriers.
Dogfight, drop bombs and fly formation, all that good stuff.
And that was when I first actually spoke out about this, kind of near the end of my time in that instructor tour.
And that was the last tour before I got out as well.
So I was in for about 11 years.
Wow.
What's it like being a fighter pilot?
I don't know.
I'm still figuring it out.
It's one of the most fascinating things.
They make movies about it, and there's The mechanics of it.
And just, it's just hard to wrap your mind around flying a machine like that and then landing it on this boat in the middle of the ocean.
And I mean, it's just, it's hard to grasp, you know?
I mean, a lot of people in the military do kind of like mundane things that aren't necessarily as thrilling as flying in a jet, you know?
Even people that are, you know, boots on the ground in the Middle East and stuff like that, it's kind of, it's just not as, I mean, it's definitely terrifying.
But doing what you were doing is just like on a whole nother level, it feels like.
Well, I mean, I was very fortunate to be able to be in a position like that.
Truly, for most of it, it's a matter of your own skill and how you can perform.
So, in a way, it's unique in that there's just so much concentrated effort and focus on applying the skill sets to the maximum capability of the aircraft and the weapons.
We don't go out there and fight at 60%.
We're always pushing the envelope.
Max performing the jet.
And guys and gals on the ground as well are doing that.
But when we're up there, we're very protected in a sense, even going into combat, at least in the environments we've been in, we're not doing air to air combat.
And so my job may have been more thrilling, but I have the utmost respect for the folks that are on the ground doing the hard work there.
It was my great honor to be able to fly around in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide support for the people on the ground.
That's essentially what I was there to do.
What can you talk about as far as what you were doing in the Middle East flying and like what sort of missions or objectives did you have and how similar was it to the Top Gun movie?
Well, I was trained to do flights like you see in the Top Gun movie.
That's typically called like a high threat.
We would call it close air support.
That was a pre planned strike, which is relatively rare, but we do train to do low ingresses like that.
The reality is a little more complicated.
However, because typically what we're doing is kind of playing chess while we're down there.
We're not necessarily just trying to go as fast as we can toward the target.
We're usually identifying things and executing tactics while we're performing down there.
And to get to your question earlier, that's really what's so difficult about being a fighter pilot.
It's not the flying itself, it's learning how to employ that weapon, because that's what it is to us.
We don't learn to fly the F 18 for very long, maybe a couple months.
I think it's our third flight, is when we fly by ourselves in it.
Really?
We're trained aviators at that point.
What we're doing is learning how to employ a weapon system.
And it's very complicated to learn the tactics and the timings and the distances and all the things that are required to survive up there if we are to go into combat.
So, what sort of thing?
So, what sort of targets are you going after?
And what sort of objectives do you have?
Like, what is day to day life like on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East?
Like, are you spending your days and nights on an aircraft carrier?
I'm assuming.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, once we leave, we're pretty much out there for nine, 10, 11 months or so, depending on how long it is.
But on a daily basis, essentially, you're looking at anywhere between eight and nine hour missions.
You're going to launch sometime between five in the morning and, well, I don't use times, but.
Pretty much all day, we're launching and going out in those missions.
And once we fly out there, it's very complex to kind of get into the battle space.
We fuel several times with tankers to get out there.
So it's quite the trip.
And then once we're out there, really what we do is we get tasked to various ticks, as they're often called, troops in contact scenarios where we have to buster over as fast as we can to provide support to those troops that are in combat.
And that either looks like us identifying targets on our own with our sensor systems.
And either requesting or having authorization due to the rule of engagement to employ on that, or talking with someone that's on the ground or in some base somewhere that is identifying targets for us, then we come in and prosecute them.
And so that's the majority of what we do on a regular basis in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq, or at least what we were doing.
However, a few years ago, we were also operating near Syria.
There were aircraft that were launched, and we actually had one of our first combat shoot downs since the early 90s, not too long ago.
First one since the early 90s.
Yep.
I believe it was a Syrian MiG that was essentially getting too close to one of the fueling operations, fueling tankers, loaded jet.
I don't know the specifics, but either way, so we were seeing a little bit of air to air combat over there as well, which is somewhat unique.
Air to air combat is unique, like dogfighting.
It is.
It's not something we do on a regular basis or train to, at least over the past decade or so.
You guys more have like strategic strikes from air to ground, right?
Well, let me be clear.
We do train all of it like 100%.
We don't even prioritize one over the other.
Okay.
But when we are in those operations in the Middle East, we already have air superiority.
So we're not focused on air to air combat.
We're simply deploying on the ground.
Right, right.
Not to say we don't carry, we do have the weapons as we've seen with that shoot down, but primarily it's air to surface.
When you're training to become a pilot, How important is vision, like human vision?
Like, what sort of do you do any tests on vision?
Oh, yeah.
And what is that like?
Can you walk me through that?
Well, you know, I don't think it's overly complicated.
It's just, is your vision correctable to 2020 and below some limit?
My vision was not.
I had to have PRK, laser eye surgery, before I joined.
Wow.
I did one eye at a time since I was still in college at the time.
So I could still see the blackboard.
So I did that to correct my vision so I could fly.
And it's pretty, pretty common.
I mean, you can fly with glasses.
Yeah, it just has to be correctable.
Interesting.
Yeah, because you're moving so fast and you have to make it.
I heard you describe it before.
Like when you're flying, you're kind of moving so fast, you kind of just don't even have time to think about anything.
You're just sort of reacting to your environment and just using your senses and your intuition to make decisions.
A lot of times, yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, the trait of a good fighter pilot would be to overcome that to some degree and push that.
There are best practices and there are tactics and there's standard operating procedure.
How do we push past that bubble to adapt to a real life scenario in order to?
Engage the targets.
Now, in the air to surface arena, everything's pretty static and fixed.
But when you start talking about large air to air battles, that's when it gets a little more art, a little less science.
What are the biggest dangers of your job when you were a fighter pilot?
Probably crashing into the back of the boat.
Oh, really?
Yeah, that's probably the most riskiest thing we do.
What is that like?
How can you describe the difficulties in landing and taking off from an aircraft carrier?
Yeah.
So, I guess the best way to describe it, and so I was actually a landing signal officer, which means I was specially trained.
As kind of an authority to land on the boat within my squadron, the air wing, I was eventually trained up to a head landing signal officer for my squadron, which generally means that I would go to the back of the boat with my team with an actual telephone looking thing and talk to the pilots as they're coming in to land.
And what we do is we train them to our voices so that if we give a verbal command, they immediately apply that command, whether they agree with it or not, because there are misconceptions, visual misconceptions, and cues that they can receive under certain scenarios.
And that's why it's so important.
That they listen to our voice once we start talking over what we call the ball or the lens landing system.
And so, you know, what is it like?
It's difficult and it's never something you don't just get it one day.
You know, I've seen commanders and admirals, you know, having the worst passes just like the new guys.
And so it's very much kind of like one on one in a sense, you know?
It's just you in the boat.
And a lot of times you'll, at least for me, it was very meditative and almost.
Um, serene, especially at night on these long straight ins when you can barely see anything.
Maybe I can send you a video of a night landing that I have.
Really, it's pretty cool.
Yeah, you just see a speck of light in the distance for a while, and then it's just an aircraft carrier all of a sudden as we're landing on it.
Um, but you know, how do you do it?
Like, you have to, it's so difficult because imagine if you were driving a car at about 170 miles an hour and you know, three dimensionally, uh, cars kind of easy because you can only go two ways, really, but um.
You need to drive this car within a one foot, one foot box or fly your head through a one foot by one foot box while you're in the cockpit going over the aircraft carrier at a particular plane.
Your head needs to go through that one foot by one foot box in order to catch a three wire on a perfect pass, essentially.
So, about 170 miles an hour, you're constantly making corrections to the right because the aircraft carrier is an angled deck, and so it's slightly moving to the right.
So, as you come down, you're making these little corrections, looking to fly your head kind of on that curve, you know, you're kind of curving down a little bit to fly your head through that box, and that's essentially a perfect pass.
Wow, man.
It'd be tough.
And there's a lot of risk there.
Flying a perfect pass is not what we teach.
We don't want people to fly a perfect pass.
We want them to fly a slightly high pass because that's safer.
Because if you're flying a perfect pass, any descent is going to put you below glide slope, and that's where it's dangerous.
Have you ever failed in doing that?
Or was every single landing kind of flawless?
Oh, no.
Definitely not flawless.
But fail, no.
I'm still here.
Right.
But I'm sure not every education.
Failed attempt would be fatal, would it?
No.
So when we come in, well, I won't call it a failure, not the trap.
So, sometimes you do everything right and you just don't trap.
So, what we do when we come down is we immediately put our speed brakes in, which kind of slows us down, and we bring throttles all the way up.
As soon as we touch down, we rotate.
So, it's almost as if if we didn't catch the wire, we're just bouncing off the deck, which is exactly what we do.
If we do catch the wire, then it stops us there.
And so, if we miss it, we just bounce up and go around and do it again.
And I don't know if I call that a failure per se, but that's kind of the negative example of a pass that doesn't involve a crash.
Right.
That would be the best case scenario other than catching the hook on the wire.
Pretty much, yeah.
Yeah.
The worst thing you'd want to do is clip the edge of the ship and take off your landing gear.
What's the worst thing you ever saw on the aircraft carrier like that, like with a landing gone wrong?
I've seen a tail hook hit the back of the boat.
It's called a ramp strike, but it wasn't too bad.
It didn't explode, which was nice.
I mean, because sometimes the hook hits the back of the carrier and the metal shrapnel goes everywhere, but that didn't happen.
My buddy ejected off the front of the cat.
It wasn't a landing, but he ingested foreign object debris or FOD during the cat shot, which took out one of his engines.
And there was a subsequent issue with the other engine as well.
And they ended up ejecting shortly off the front of the boat.
Really?
They were pretty low, too.
His widow, a weapons system officer in the backseat, got pretty messed up, broke his back in several spots, and, you know, X, Y, and Z. He's actually flying again.
I think he either was or is the commanding officer at XO of the Blue Angels now, actually.
Wow.
How rare is it for someone to eject, especially during training?
I don't know the numbers, but I'm sure there's a number calculated in hours of flight time.
But I've witnessed, I think five ejections.
You've witnessed five ejections.
I've flown over two of them.
The fireball is in the jet.
What?
Is this during combat missions?
No, these are all training.
These are all training.
Wow.
Training is much more dangerous than combat typically.
But you yourself, you've never had to eject.
No.
Nope.
I don't think I would have survived my back.
It would have got messed up.
What are these guys?
Did you ever talk to these guys after they ejected?
Rare Ejection Mishaps00:02:02
I was responsible for investigating some of these mishaps.
So I had to interview these guys.
Yeah.
What do they say?
What is that experience like?
It's a lot, you know, for some guys.
I think it kind of depends.
You know, I've.
They kind of like, I mean, in movies, they kind of gloss over it.
I mean, it seems like, you know, something that when they do it in movies, it seems like the guys are always good to go.
Yeah.
Like, especially the recent Top Gun.
What is he going like 10 mock and he just walks into a diner?
We should all be so lucky.
But no, you know, I've seen, I've seen, you know, I say, I'll say varying degrees of response, right?
You know, some younger guys are easy and happy to just brush it off and go back up.
And, you know, other guys that have families and stuff, you know, it can really shake them.
I mean, these guys are getting almost as close to death as you can get and still surviving some of these times.
I mean, one of the cases I'm thinking about, I mean, they basically ejected at the ejection window, basically 135 degrees down, about 400 feet up from the ground.
So essentially ejecting into the ground.
Oh my God.
And luckily they came out and they were able to swing at least once before they hit.
And they were fine.
But, you know, they had varying responses to how that kind of made them feel and their comfort level.
And I was, you know, the Navy trained me to be an aviation safety officer.
They sent me down to their Naval Aviation Safety School for about five weeks.
And that was my job.
That was one of my collateral jobs as a pilot.
If or when someone goes down, I go out there and I figure it out.
You know, I no shit clean the pieces up.
And figure out what happened and publish a report and then go into the manuals and try to make it so it doesn't happen again.
We had to do that a number of times.
Every time there's a mishap, that's what happens.
And that's why we say our pocket checklists are typically written in blood because we usually fix the problems afterwards.
And I've seen that lesson over and over again.
And I can't say for certain, but perhaps that was part of my motivation to kind of speak up about the UAP topic because it was just a matter of time before someone just slammed into one of these objects and we lost air crew.
Blood Written Checklists00:14:23
Yeah.
So when was the first time you experienced one of these objects, the first time that you noticed one of these things?
Can you explain like what was happening before you saw them and then what was happening after you saw them?
From what I understand, you had some new equipment.
Yeah.
So we got back from our deployment on the USS Enterprise in 2012, and we ended what's called a workup or, excuse me, a maintenance phase where essentially we kind of give our good jets to the four deployed squadrons and we cannibalize some jets and we fix some stuff.
And our jets were just so happened to be ready to be upgraded to a better radar.
It had the cooling systems already installed and X, Y, and Z.
And so eventually we upgraded.
And as soon as we upgraded, we started noticing objects on our radar that we hadn't seen.
Without that upgrade.
And so we went from flying around with our APG 73 radar, and we see our little sweep, right?
And just like a radar you see in a movie.
APG 73, you call it?
Yeah, APG 73.
Okay.
And it's kind of like a.
Is this the thing like the clock that goes around in a circle?
It kind of, but we see it kind of just like as a box with a line.
Okay.
Box with a line.
And so, you know, what do we see?
We basically just see like a little icon, right?
A little blip, and it tells us the speed and various kinematics about it.
And that's what we would expect to see.
We weren't seeing anything on the APG 73.
Uh, we upgraded our radars to the ABG 79, big jump, uh, kind of like digital to mechanical to digital in a sense, uh, much better, stronger, more powerful, see farther, all that stuff.
Um, and we go out there and we'd see objects, we'd see things on the radar, and it's like, okay, well, you know, I just, you know, does my wingman see this?
No, he has a different radar.
I have, you know, so we, we kind of just thought it was some kind of error at first.
We were seeing objects on our radar that weren't there with the other one.
It was just a natural assumption.
They were vulnerable, not vulnerable, but, um, There were all those errors that are involved in things like this.
And so we thought maybe some of those had carried over.
But, you know, long story short, we eventually got close enough to see these not only with the radar, but also with the camera system that's on the jet, the FLIR.
And so that kind of tucks in on our cheek pad here.
Whenever we look at stuff on the radar, all our sensors go to that spot.
And so as people were kind of noticing these and taking locks on them, and our sensors would go over, eventually people were close enough to see that there was higher energy coming from those spots as well.
What kind of energy?
Infrared energy.
Okay.
So, our camera system, the FLIR, shows us either just like a camera view or IR energy, heat energy.
And so, that's what you see on, say, the gimbal video, that black and white.
He's able to switch it from black to white, right?
You can switch it from black hot to white hot, which means the white is the hot that you see on the screen, or black, just changing the contrast.
Or you can go to like a full color mode, which is TV.
You know, it doesn't show you heat, but it shows you, you know, what you look through in the camera.
We typically fly with IR because you can see better, you can see further.
It's more prominent.
And yeah, we were seeing IR energy come from these spots where radar was dropping us off, essentially.
And so at this point, we had to conclude that there was physically something there and we had to at least respect it as aviators and not, you know, get too close to these objects or just ignore them and fly around them because we thought they were clutter.
Yeah, at this point, you know, we were confident they were physical, though we didn't know the origins or even that it was overly remarkable.
What do you mean confident they were physical?
What does that mean?
That if we were to fly through the spot that we, our radar is showing us there's something that we could damage our aircraft.
Okay.
Generally speaking, right?
So, what are the possibilities of if it wasn't something physical, what would show up on the radar that wasn't physical?
Well, there could be energy in that spot.
There are, I believe, plasmas that can be captured on a radar and other things.
You can have extremely thick clouds that can return radar signals, ABG 73.
And so, even like temperature inversions where the air is extra thick with the older systems could potentially show you radar track files.
So, that was our initial assumption that there were some strange things like that.
But now, to have energy coming from that spot in the sky as well in a very precise manner, as if someone was shining an IR flashlight at us, they had to make the assumption that they were physical at that point just for safety of flight.
When you saw these things, you mentioned you were flying with a wingman.
What does that mean when you're flying with a wingman?
That's not the WISO.
That's not the person in the cockpit with you, right?
Nope.
We'll have one person in the backseat called a weapon system officer.
And then if we have a wingman with us, if we're a section, that's two aircraft, lead kind of trail like this.
We'll fly in formation like that and we'll go do our mission.
Once we get out there, maybe we'll break up.
Maybe we'll be fighting against each other.
Maybe we'll fly around as pairs and drop bombs.
It's a million things we could do, but we'll fly out there in close formation.
Once we get into the areas, we'll do our stuff and then we'll join back up and fly back as a pair.
Okay.
Is that typically how all missions are carried out with multiple jets flying in formations and planned attacks like that?
Is there ever a solo jet flying?
There is.
There is all the time, but I would say it's just as common to go out into.
We pretty much.
It's just one of those things you might just go by yourself, but there's plenty of two sections or singles or even four aircraft in what we call a division.
So, just all of the above, frankly.
And what is it like to?
Sorry, we're kind of going off on a bunch of different things, but flying in formation.
Like, what is that?
How hard is that to learn?
That's like flying at the boat.
So, that's what I would tell the students, right?
Because I did teach them that as well.
And it's the same power motions, right?
When you do that as when you land at the boat.
Because when you're on the boat, You have to ride a glide slope.
If I add power, I'm going to start going above that glide slope.
If I just keep the power there, I'm going to keep going, right?
I have to make what's called three point power corrections.
I have to add power, get myself going the right direction, pull it back to kind of de accelerate, then re add power a little bit less to stabilize on that new higher glide slope.
Every time I have to make an adjustment, it requires three power corrections every time.
And so when you're flying the ball boat, you're doing this the whole way down, just very, very small.
Actually, we'll leave our pinky up like this on the rail.
Too, so we can have like a reference point where we are.
And so when you get close, you'll be just doing fingers, you know, and moving the two throttles just with your fingers and using that as a reference point, essentially.
But when you're flying formation, same thing, pinky up there.
And now instead of your reference being the glide slope, your reference is the other aircraft.
And so if I am falling behind, right, I have to add power to stop that deacceleration so I can catch back up.
And then, you know, then I have to take power off to deaccelerate and then add a little bit back to stabilize where I am in that relative position.
So three point power corrections all day long.
And if you're in perfectly clear skies, you might go out to a mile and do that, you know, in a transit position where it's much easier and the small mistakes and it's not as dangerous to kind of look away for a second.
But if you're in bad weather, man, you're going to be a few feet away, potentially for hours.
Hours.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
It's painful.
It could be very painful.
Holy shit, man.
My first flight into Iraq, I was on day one missions when our squadron got there.
I was one of the senior lieutenants in the airwag at the time.
And, um, Only one in our squadron, lieutenant, anyways, that had been on a prior combat deployment.
And so I got to go in on day one, and we had to go through a damn thunderstorm.
And not only that, but we had to tank in it.
We were all running out of gas.
We're in a thunderstorm.
The tanker's there.
And you're refueling in the air?
Oh, yeah.
In a thunderstorm.
Yeah.
The very first guy, he could not get in the basket.
He couldn't get in.
And he was getting frustrated.
He ended up going below his bingo number, which means he should have already diverted, right?
Which is not good day one.
You know, we don't necessarily have like bases set up, things of that nature.
But anyway, long story short, you end up getting in and just how it is.
Every day, it's just something to deal with all the time when you're flying.
You never know what you're going to get.
Okay, back to where we were.
First time you saw one of these objects, you guys were flying in formation doing a training day.
What was the weather like that day?
Well, let me correct you a little bit.
I don't want to, it's hard for me to say what the first time was because we were seeing his radar.
It never was like, okay, we're seeing them.
I didn't quite realize they were real.
And then, all right, they're on the FLIR.
But then we did see them with our eyeballs.
So, this wasn't just like the first time it happened.
It wasn't just like this unbelievable experience, like, oh, okay.
No, it was just kind of like, ugh, you know, something's messed up, right?
The radar's messed up.
And then when we're seeing energy, it's like, okay, our curiosity is peaking a little bit.
But, you know, your drive to survive and do what you're doing out there takes precedence over a lot of things.
So, this is 2014.
Yep.
But we were getting more curious as we were seeing them more.
And then eventually, one of my squadron mates, well, four of them, but two, one saw it.
They're flying out in a section.
So, two aircraft, four people, again, in this kind of formation, flying out to the working areas.
And there's a single spot in the sky where all the traffic going into those working areas goes through.
Cap point?
Not a cap point, just an entry point.
An entry point.
Okay.
What is the difference?
Yeah, definitely.
What is the difference?
But what is the reason for that?
So, cap point is kind of a tactical term that we use as a combat air patrol holding position when we're looking for a line of defense against enemies.
We might be holding at that cap point such that we give a command to push, and now we're attacking enemies.
An entry point is just the administrative point in the sky that we all agree upon that is the safest way to enter an area.
For entering only?
Yes.
And there's a separate spot for exiting?
Same spot, 1,000 feet below it.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
All right.
And so it's one of the busiest places, you know, on the East Coast, probably for air traffic.
And so they.
How far offshore?
With 10 miles.
10 miles.
Yep.
And it's at like maybe 12.
I forget.
Maybe it's like 18 or 19,000 feet.
I can't remember.
Maybe 12, actually.
It's been a while.
But either way, you know, it's not like at 2,000 feet.
You're not going to be seeing Cessna's up there very often.
But either way, they were flying in that formation.
And right at the entry point, one of these objects went right between their aircraft, closer towards the lead side.
The lead aircrew saw it.
The aircrew and the other aircraft did not, which is not surprising because you're so focused in on flying formation.
You're not, you don't have much of a.
Scan going on.
You're not taking in the scenery.
No.
But Lee does, and Lee did see the object and boom, right down the lead aircraft, lead pilot.
Okay.
And he just described it as a dark gray cube or black cube inside a clear sphere.
That's the description.
And it went in between their aircraft, but I'd be careful when I say that because we don't know whether it was moving or not necessarily.
I don't believe he had it on the radar.
If he did, I don't think he would have flown through it because we knew they were physical at this point.
Right.
I also just can't remember whether he had a radar or not, but my assumption is he did not.
They ended up turning around and coming home after that.
They didn't trust their radar anymore, right?
And they're going to do a combat mission, or not combat mission, but, you know, like a dogfighting training set, something that requires a radar.
So, if you're not even seeing objects and almost hitting them, it's time to come home.
Right.
But he came back and, you know, he had all his gear on the ready room and he was describing what he saw, just as I just described it.
And, you know, he's just like, I almost hit one of those fucking things, you know, because we were all very familiar.
We didn't have a name for them or anything, but we all were aware of them that they were a potential safety issue.
And, you know, but no one had seen one with a naked eye.
Not yet.
Not until this point.
So now, of course, now we're all like, whoa, this is getting weird, right?
Maybe there's some kind of weird drone thing or.
X, Y, or Z.
I mean, he didn't describe any propulsion.
There's no obvious lifting surfaces, but hey, that's what he saw.
So we kind of thinking it was a drone at this point or something.
So we submitted a safety report, a hazard report, which is something you submit when there's a chance of a mishap in the future.
Like maybe you got lucky this time, but next time you might not be so lucky.
And this is a good example of that.
And so we submitted out and we were thinking, hey, maybe this is someone's classified drone program.
Maybe this is who knows what, but.
Maybe by submitting this report, they'll get the message that they're stepping out of their lane here and creating a safety hazard.
We assumed it was some classified program at this point.
Of course, nothing actually happened.
I forget the total number of reports that are related to UAP off the East Coast in that period, somewhere around eight or 10, I think.
So it wasn't just our squadron, it was other squadrons that had this type of radar.
And over the course of time, We weren't necessarily going out and interviewing people or taking any type of data sets.
But generally speaking, whenever I talked to anyone on the East Coast that was a pilot that had sufficiently powerful enough radar and they had seen the objects, they described it the same way cube and the sphere.
Really?
Which is very unique compared to what Commander Fravor talked about.
He talked about like a tic tac object.
It was not even close to what.
You guys saw on the East Coast.
Yeah.
I don't think there's going to be just one answer for this whole thing.
But so there's no.
So if I can recall, Commander Fravor talks about sort of trying to chase this thing, right?
He was trying to chase it and the thing was mimicking him or mirroring his movements.
And then he talks about the thing showing up at his cap point before he even knew where his cap point was.
He knew where his cap point was, I believe.
He probably had it written down, but he hadn't been there.
Right.
From what I can deduce from what he said, he wasn't sure where.
Like he didn't even know where he was going to be prior to where, like, there was no way maybe the object knew where he was going to be.
It's kind of one of those things where you have like a bunch of waypoints and you're like, I know I need to be at waypoint nine, but I have no idea where it is.
Right.
You know what I mean?
So it's probably like that type.
Right.
He tipped over, like, hey, he's at your cap point.
Mirroring Movements Observed00:04:18
You know, it's like, oh shit.
The guy who saw it with his naked eye and you guys were in the ready room and he was describing that.
Who else was there and what was like, could you read the room?
Like, what did you take in from the other people that were there and what was their reaction to it?
Kind of had a similar reaction to the look.
That everyone had on their faces when we watched the Gibble video.
It wasn't the same people, but kind of had that like looking around with a dumb look on everyone's face, like, what the fuck?
You know, I mean, you know, the commanding officer of a squadron was there, four or five lieutenants like myself, the duty officer who is always there, it's always someone at the desk, and he's the one on the radio with the planes, welcoming back and, you know, troubleshooting and stuff, dealing with issues of the day, which this was.
And yeah, and so everyone's kind of like, you know, I was hit with those things, and it's like, well, What are we going to do now?
And the answer was to talk to the safety officer and submit a hazard report.
Eventually, the hazard reports, of course, didn't change anything.
It's more of a data collection mechanism than a proactive prevention mechanism.
Aviation safety.
Like I said, a lot of our procedures are written in blood.
Right.
But yeah, sorry, I forgot where I was going with that.
Did you ever see one of these things with your own eyes?
No, I didn't.
I looked.
What would happen is crazy.
And I talked again, when I didn't talk to people that had seen it, almost all the others had seen it.
But not physically seen it, but seen on the radar, or had tried to see it but couldn't, much like myself.
And so, what that looks like is okay, we have something on our radar.
Maybe it's, you know, 20 miles away or some distance, not within visual range.
As you get closer, you start to pick it up on your FLIR.
You dial, you know, dial in your course, and you're trying to have a 500 foot pass with it.
All your sensors are slewed.
Your radar is looking at it.
Your camera is looking at it.
Your weapon system cameras and sensors that are on your weapon, individual weapons are now all looking at it, right?
All that information is getting pumped into my helmet.
And so when I look out, I can see a box around where I should be looking.
And I look back at my radar, and yes, I still have the object locked and it's right in front of me.
And I look over at the FLIR and yes, I can still see the energy coming out of that piece of the sky, very precisely.
And then my sensors are telling me where to look, and we fly right by it within a few feet or a few hundred feet, and just can't see anything.
And you don't see anything.
Yeah.
But then it's still in the FLIR.
What is going through your mind when you see it on every single one of your instruments, but you can't see it with your bare eyes, your naked eye?
You know, I don't know.
We didn't make anything of it in a sense.
I mean, you think it was like something's fishy with the radar, something's wonky with the mechanical instruments?
No, at this point, it's inconceivable to us that our radar and FLIR and visuals would potentially be now not for everyone, right?
Not everyone, but for the cases that we did see objects to be able to fool all three of those is interesting.
Now, what you can do is you can say, okay, well, perhaps some were physical and some were not.
Right.
That's one way you could go down this.
And bottom line is, we just don't have the data for that, right?
To say whether every object represented a physical object or there were only some physical objects and the others were not physical.
We just don't have enough data to kind of make that assumption.
But when you're flying around out there, you have to make the assumption that they're all physical.
Right.
And how long did it take before people on the boat, when you guys got back and did debriefs or went over, how many of these reports were there before things started to change?
Well, or did things ever change?
I don't know how many reports there were.
There were about, I think, eight or so hazard reports that were submitted to the Aviation Safety Center that were specifically referencing objects that were, I don't want to say unexplainable, but not identified as drones or anything else.
Right.
There's a lot of others that indicate it's a drone, but, you know, what else are you going to call it?
Right.
Right.
But I don't know how many because we weren't really tracking it.
And so then, what did change essentially to answer your question?
Identifying The Big Aircraft00:11:10
Eventually, the Navy implemented a reporting process through the UAP Task Force where they were mandating, I believe, naval aviators submit reports upon landing of any objects that they witnessed.
And it didn't go through the Naval Aviation Safety Reporting Method.
It went to the UAP Task Force.
And so that is what changed.
I don't know how many incidents there were before that, but The UAP task force report and now the ODNI report that came out shows that it's happening quite often.
You spoke about, I forget which podcast it was, but you spoke about a moment when you were in the room and there was a senior officer, like a top guy who was reviewing it.
And then he looked at it, he's like, mm hmm.
And then he turned around and walked away.
What was that?
So everything we've talked up to this point has been off the east coast of Virginia Beach with no aircraft carrier involved.
In 2015, we started to prepare for our workups.
Or actually, it was 2014, but it was right at the chain of the year.
But we left essentially on an aircraft carrier.
To essentially get ready for war, it's called a workup cycle.
We spend months on the boat and we basically do all that training from the boat, just to practice like we play.
And while we were off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, that's when we filmed the gimbal video that people are familiar with.
And so, yeah, it's pretty intense.
And there's actually bases on the coast where they have called Red Air, Contract Red Air, essentially, where they come out and test us, right?
Day and night, they'll come out and fly out and try to like penetration test the carrier, right?
While we're doing missions, we might be on like a training mission and then we might need to break off of that because we're going to intercept some other red air fighters that have been launched off the coast to test whether we can intercept them before they get within weapons range of the boat or things of that nature, right?
So it's kind of, I mean, in one sense, it's awesome, fun, right?
I mean, you're out there zipping around, intercepting aircraft as they try to, you know, break their way into the carrier.
So it's kind of like, where are these guys coming from?
Various bases off the East Coast near Jacksonville and I forget where they're where they are, but you know, they just buzz right out there and they're essentially targets for us.
And we do that for our air to air training as well.
But, anyways, we were doing an air to air mission out there.
This is actually, well, interesting little tidbit.
I'll get to that after.
No, please.
I'll right after I tell the gimbal story, I'll tell you this little piece that doesn't get talked about much.
But yeah, we're going out doing an air to air mission.
The air crew that filmed the gimbal.
Essentially, started coming back to the boat after they had run out of gas or were waiting to land.
You don't like just come back and land, you have to wait for the deck to open up.
And so, what that means is you essentially have to just slow down and do what's called like a max endurance profile flyer at a certain airspeed that maximizes your time airborne versus being an afterburner and a dogfighter that burns the least amount of fuel.
Yeah.
So, if you're in like some dogfight training mission near the boat, you're eventually going to hit a fuel number and you bring your throttle back and you essentially just hang out.
You're done being tactical at that point.
And so that's the position they were in.
They're coming back and they ended up seeing these radar contacts on their radar.
And they initially thought it was a penetration test, as I talked about.
So they went over to intercept the aircraft and they were looking on the radar and all that.
But the kind of mechanics of it didn't really jive with what they would expect to see.
It was too slow and performing turns that they wouldn't expect to see.
Long story short, they essentially went to Stern Convert.
The object, which what that means is you essentially want to, if the object's just flying around, you're in any position, you want to kind of arrive in a position like this.
Okay.
You start and convert.
And so, what that really looks like in real life, usually you're like 10 miles apart.
You make this big arcing turn, kind of come in like that.
Okay.
And so, generally, that's what they were doing as they were trying to get closer to the objects.
What they saw, well, what they saw on the radar was one object.
And then nearby were about five other objects that were flying in like a wedge formation.
And so the wedge essentially proceeded along more or less a straight line and then kind of got jumbled up and did a very tight turn essentially and started proceeding in the opposite direction.
These objects that are in formation, it's my assumption that they were the object we were seeing off the East Coast on a regular basis.
And I say that because they appeared on the radar similarly as what we were seeing on the East Coast.
There are ways that we could identify it, such as.
The way the objects kind of like skipped around a bit with what we were seeing on the radar wasn't like a perfectly clear radar representation.
It would kind of skip around as if it couldn't really tell exactly which direction it was going, even though it was showing it moving in a consistent manner, which is confusing.
But that's how we were able to identify them on the radar.
And these look similar, right?
So it's an assumption that they were the same.
However, the gimbal object we had not seen before that was kind of located.
Below the objects, I'll say, or maybe to the south if we assume up is north.
But they're kind of like below the wedge and are following in the same direction, just slightly behind.
And when the wedge made that turn and rolled out in the opposite direction back in formation, the gimbal object just kind of went, it just kind of was going one direction and appeared from a God's eye view that it just started going in the other direction with no radius of turn.
That gimbal video was from a God's eye view?
No.
Okay.
But what I saw on the situational awareness page, you hear the pilots referencing, That's a God's eye view.
And so that screen, typically between our legs, we have one screen here.
Okay.
Screen here, screen here.
Typically, we keep the SA page down here.
And then we'll have our radar here or our FLIR and a different type of radar over here.
And so the SA page takes all of our sensors and has a fused image.
It's a God's eye view, 360 degrees around our aircraft.
Oh, wow.
With color maps and all this stuff, right?
So, like, That's like kind of like the conglomerator of all the data.
Right.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And that's a God's eye view.
So, this object, you know, you have the things here and then the other thing, you pull down here, these turn, and then this just kind of with no radius of turn, just start going in the other direction from a God's eye view.
What that turned out to be, it seems, upon further analysis, was that the object did with a vertical turn, essentially like a vertical J hook.
Whereas if you're looking from a God's eye view.
So, like that?
Yeah.
Very tight, though, in like a few hundred feet to reverse direction.
Which is not something you see a fighter jet do.
No, certainly not.
It takes almost a mile for a fighter jet to turn.
Wow.
But I don't think this was fighter jet size per se.
It was smaller.
And I say that because our velocity vector, which is in the HUD, but also gets transcribed onto the FLIR, that's set to a Size.
And we can set that in our jet so that if we're in a dogfight and the wings of the aircraft in front of us in our HUD are equal to the size of that velocity vector, it gives us a rough estimate of the distance of the aircraft.
And so if I look at that velocity vector and we're 10 miles away and that object is half the size of that velocity vector, it gives me a rough estimate of the size.
Okay.
I don't know what they necessarily had it set to.
So I can't necessarily make a judgment on the size.
However, if it was set to standard, I don't have a number, but looking at it, it would be smaller than an F18 based on its relative size to the velocity vector.
Smaller than an F18.
How long is an F18?
Oh, shit.
Put me on that.
That's something you should know, right?
Yeah, 30 feet, 35 feet, 35 feet long, and the wingspan roughly 28.
We're going to have to cut this part because I'm probably wrong.
Yeah, it's been so long.
Maybe you can find that.
We've pride ourselves in not knowing stuff that doesn't affect us in combo.
56 feet?
Wow.
That's the Hornet.
So the Super Hornet is twice the size.
Not necessarily length, but it's a big aircraft.
60 feet.
Yeah.
That was way around.
Whoa.
So that's what you were flying?
Yep.
The Super Hornet.
I have some better images of this thing.
It looks the same, but it's 33% larger overall.
Carry different engines, electronics, and all that.
Carry lots of.
Weapons.
Wow.
That's incredible, man.
So, you know, so yeah, anyways, we look at that one.
Look at all the bombs on the bottom of that one.
The one in the middle.
Yeah, right there.
Jeez, that thing is loaded.
Argum ER.
What?
It's Argum ER.
Oh, okay.
Advanced anti radiation guided missile, extra range.
Hard in the air.
So that is something that you would shoot.
And that's actually not an F 18 right there.
Oh, it's not.
Okay.
No, that is actually a growler.
A growler.
Yeah.
And actually, well, I tell you what, that's actually probably a test one.
What is the sickest jet that exists?
Oh, man.
I hate this question.
I'm partial to the F 35 because it's just the right aircraft for the digital environment that they need to operate in.
You know, we talked about flying and operating a weapon.
That's a 36.
Yeah.
I don't think a 36 exists.
Okay, this is a 35.
Yeah, I mean, the F 22 is a great jet as well.
I mean, the F 22.
Wow, that thing looks pretty, pretty cool.
It's like very stealth looking.
Well, it is.
It is a stealth aircraft.
It's a Gen 5 stealth aircraft that's designed for penetration.
Okay.
Like every, basically every fifth generation fighter is nowadays.
That has pluses and minuses.
For example, the F 22, fantastic aircraft, lots of thrust.
Ability to operate high and fast, all the good stuff, and it's stealthy, and all its weapons are carried internally.
But that also means the sensors on those weapons can't look out either.
And so, what does that mean?
The sensors on the weapons can't look out.
So, you build weapons, say, there's one called the AIM 9X, which is an IR seeking missile, which we use to employ it in close range.
It could also be used for, let's consider, high off foresight shots.
And that sensor needs to be able to kind of almost look behind you in a sense to like find that guy.
And if your weapons are loaded internally to your bay, it doesn't have the ability to do that.
Stealth Sensors Limitations00:07:40
Right.
And so there's some interesting problems.
I know they worked through them at this point to some degree so that those aren't as much of an issue.
But no fighter is perfect, is the point.
And they're built for different things.
The F 22 is no different, and the F 35 is no different.
Both very different aircraft, but both applicable in the modern warfare.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
Isn't it true that when the first, I forget the name of it, but the first, that big triangular black stealth bomber came out, there was, I think the government was going along with stories that it was a UFO.
They were trying to like push the fact that it was a conspiracy because they hadn't officially announced it yet.
But yeah, so this is the gimbal video, right?
So this is the object we were seeing next to the five other objects.
Okay, yeah, yeah, go ahead and roll it.
Dude, they're not fucking drone, bro.
There's a whole fleet of them, look on the ASA.
Oh my gosh.
They're all going against the wind, the wind's 120 knots to the west.
So these are friends of yours.
It was so weird when I was.
I'll tell you what's up.
That's not around us, though, is it?
It's not.
I do have an L on us, dude.
Well, if there's another thing, it's rotating.
Yeah, one of them was in my wedding party.
Really?
I won't say which one, but one of them I spent most of my career with.
We went through training together in the.
Fleet replacement squadron, we first met.
So we were like in a five person class together.
We trained together, and he ended up going to the boat with me.
He was like my Wizzo, not my Wizzo, but he was the Wizzo in the backseat when we went to do our night landings for the very first time.
Oh, really?
And it was his first time landing on a boat because the Wizzos don't do that until later.
But the pilots get day traps when they're in the advanced strike fighter training.
So, the wait with the Wizzo?
They don't do the landing, though, right?
They don't.
Right.
But still, like, this is like now they're like with another student, right?
And this, my, the student's first time landing on a boat, and now he's in the back seat.
You know what I mean?
So it's kind of like this big trust thing in a way.
Wow.
It's really his first, like, it's like, all right, saddle up.
You know, here's a guy who's never been to a boat before.
He's doing it by himself, and you're sitting in the back.
Oh, God.
Right.
So I imagine it's a little nerve wracking.
They don't have a stick.
I mean, they're not pilots.
Right.
They're just holding their breath.
Yeah.
So we did this.
We did this together, and it was an interesting story.
Yeah.
I know that guy.
Yeah.
We're those two guys.
Yeah.
But, So, we were going to do our first night trap together.
And the way we do that is we hold way back behind the boat up high.
And we actually, when our time, plus or minus three seconds of our push time, we have to be at a particular point in the sky.
As soon as we hit that, a certain airspeed, we go down eight degrees nose down, 250 knots, which is pretty aggressive.
That's like, I'm pretty sure that's aerobatic flight in a Cessna, theoretically.
But in F15, it's no big deal.
We're coming down.
And then at about 5,000 feet, we arrest our descent from eight degrees nose down to four degrees nose down.
Because there's something called the minute to live rule.
If we're descending at that eight degrees nose down, our rate of descent is greater than how much altitude we have left in one minute if we were to continue doing that.
Wow.
So, like, you're going to die in one minute if you don't change something here.
So, that's why we bring it up a little bit.
So, what happened was as we were kind of approaching that altitude where we start to roll out, we're down eight degrees, everything's steady, that's all good.
But as soon as we start pulling, essentially, Our mission computers inside the jet failed and they started resetting.
So, what that led to was all of our displays going blank and resetting.
So, not only now, this is a night landing, so there are no external lights, I have no navigation.
The jet's still flyable, I just can't see where I am.
And this is just as I start to pull up, which means I've lost my equilibrium, right?
And so, I'm pulling at 1G, which means it feels like I'm sitting in a chair, but I could be upside down, I could be sideways.
You know, I could be inverted about to hit the water.
It just feels like I'm sitting in my chair, right?
It's no different.
And that's what's so terrifying.
And the mission computers reset.
We're pulling up, they come back and we find ourselves somewhere like this, you know, and then they go out again.
So now I'm like, fuck me.
And I'm like, I'm like, I'm not like waiting for the reset.
Now I'm like looking for my flashlight, you know, so like I can at least turn it on and shine it at my backup instruments because there's no like real lights on those either.
Right.
I'm trying to do that while I'm fiddling with that, essentially trying to like somehow keep the plane upright because there's like a layer, overcast layer at 8,000 feet, which means there is zero light.
If there's just no moon and just sunlight, that's cool.
Like you can see the waves, you can see the ground.
But when there's an overcast, like 8,000, you might as well have your eyes closed.
You just can't tell.
What is this?
What is it?
Night landing.
Oh, this is a night landing.
Yeah.
I have a video just like this.
What are we even looking at right now?
This is a tiny.
Oh, it's the aircraft carrier.
There it is.
Wow.
So that's, I mean, see how it's like black up there?
That's what it looks like if you have that overcast layer.
You literally can't see anything.
So you're basically surrounded in blackness and you lost all your.
It's like I just went blind.
Everything went gone.
And you pull out your flashlight in the cockpit and you're shining it on the ground.
I'm trying to at this point.
Yeah.
I'm like trying to get it out because it's strapped right here.
And I'm like, I'll just tilt it down, turn it on.
Then it'll be like, I don't have to.
Meanwhile, you don't know if you're about to hit the water, hit the ground.
Are you above the water?
You're above the.
Yeah.
It's all ocean below us.
We can't see it.
Like I said, because of that overcast layer.
So, yeah, it was just like, man.
We ended up, you know, the mission computers were rebooting again.
They ended up rebooting and staying up that time.
We were somewhere like this, you know, kind of just floating there around like 3,500 feet or so as we were kind of coming down like this, just slicing down like this, more or less, you know.
Oh my God.
And so, again, we had a minute.
It takes about 10 or 15 seconds.
What is the protocol?
What if your instruments don't come back online?
What is the protocol?
What are you supposed to do?
Go to my standby instruments.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then fly that back, essentially.
Okay.
So, at this point, we declared an emergency.
We were probably about, Four miles, five miles from, like two miles from actually being on the pass.
You know what I mean?
Like being in that image where you see the runway and there's a lens over there.
So we declared an emergency and that was the easiest landing.
I thought it was going to be very difficult and stressful to land at the boat for the first time.
But as soon as I saw the landing lens and the runway, essentially, the boat, I was like, wow, you know, at least I won't hit the ground because I know where it is now.
And so everything else was just easy because I was just happy to be able to see, you know, see the ground essentially if they went out again.
Wow, that's terrifying, man.
So, anyways, we did that together.
And then we ended up going to the boat, and I was taught my class on the boat.
They sent me priority Alpha, which means I was deployable to, or I could be sent to a Ford deployed squadron just because my grades were high and then I did well enough.
And so, about two weeks after I finished that training, I was sent out to the USS Enterprise.
And I flew my first combat mission about a week after that.
And the gentleman I was just talking about, he actually got assigned to the same squadron.
Full Videos Released00:02:40
Oh, wow.
So then we hung out for the next three years.
We did specialized training together.
And then when I left, he left too, and he actually transitioned to be a pilot.
And so he actually ended up in Murdy, Mississippi when I was an instructor there as well.
No way.
Yeah.
So we pretty much spent our whole career together.
That's incredible.
Pretty cool.
So that gimbal video that we just watched was only 35 seconds long.
It was much longer than that, though, right?
I don't know if I want to say much longer, but it was definitely more there.
Yeah.
Why do we only get 30 seconds?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you have any speculation why?
I mean, you mentioned that there was like the wedge shaped formation.
Was that a part of this video?
I never saw those on the FLIR, but what I did see them on was the SA page.
Okay.
And that was primarily what I was looking on.
And when I did look at the FLIR, basically saw the same image that you saw, plus maybe a little bit more near the end as the flight mechanics seemed to get rockier.
So it kind of kept kind of doing that motion that you see.
Kind of seemed unstable in a sense, but I don't want to put words onto it until it comes out because it has been like six years for me now since I've seen that video.
And it hasn't, you know, which one is this?
Just that more of the gimbal, essentially, the full version of it, yeah.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Christopher Mellon was the one who sort of leaked these videos and is the reason they even came out in the first place.
Back in what was the year that first came out in the New York Times?
I think it was 2017.
2017, that's when it was, yeah.
And you know, he talked about in James Fox's documentary, The Phenomenon, how there's much more, there's these videos are much longer and they're yet to release the full videos for whatever reason.
Do you have any speculation of why they wouldn't release the full videos?
Well, I think it depends on your definition.
So, full video, the full video has radar data, right?
So, the FLIR and the radar and the situational awareness page are recorded at the same time.
Not necessarily those two pages, but the screens that they're displayed on.
And so, if you have one, you have the other.
And so, what that means is the situational awareness page with all the radar data, you know, it did exist.
I don't know if it still does exist, but, you know, that's where you'd want that's what you'd want to see because it has all the radar, the kinematics, and it's going to show it over the entire course of.
When they were detectable, whether they were directly looking at it or not.
So there is much more data to be had, even outside of just the video.
What is your buddy, the guy who actually filmed this, the guy who was in your wedding party?
Do you guys talk about this often?
DARPA Hologram Projects00:16:03
Not really.
I mean, he's still in, he's deployed a lot, he's very busy, so he's just heads down.
But no, not really.
I'm eager to engage with him when the time's right.
I know this isn't the time to be distracting him with stuff like this.
And I'm sure he already has enough of it from the people inside.
It's no secret who he is within the military.
Based off the uniqueness of his response to the video, is that you think the reason that he hasn't gone public about it is because he's still in there and he just doesn't want to, he doesn't want the attention or what it's not even attention when he legally he's not allowed to speak to you?
Legally, he's not allowed to.
Do you see any other military people just kind of do?
Yeah, yeah, I was almost arrested for that.
Really, yeah, that's what I've been told.
So when I did that, I was you know, I communicated to the best extent I could that I was just communicating as a private citizen.
About experiences I had.
The night before I left to go to DC, I got a call at like 10 p.m. saying that I now had orders to be there and I needed to be there in my uniform, my whites, essentially.
And I needed to go to the Pentagon before I went to Congress and the Senate, which was not a great revelation.
But so I was scrambling, right?
Like I was months away from getting out.
My uniforms packed up and like shipped across the country at this point.
It was like my dress of whites, you know?
Expecting to wear in case someone died or something, really.
Right.
So I'm like going around my buddies' houses at like midnight, borrowing their uniforms and their stuff so I could show up because my flight is at like six in the morning next day, you know?
Oh my gosh.
So it was a bit of a scramble.
I ended up going to the Pentagon, into the bowels with some naval intelligence folks, some who we might be more familiar with nowadays since the public hearings.
Who?
I'm so bad with names.
Oh, okay.
But we had a conversation about our experiences.
It was nothing nefarious necessarily.
It was more of, I think, wanting to hear from the horse's mouth before him.
I got quite the entourage from there over to the Senate.
There were representatives from the, you know, numerous admirals from the Navy and the Pentagon that accompanied me to that meeting, which included representatives from the executive branch, Pentagon.
Senate elsewhere.
Essentially, me at a table like this with, you know, Pentagon folks on one side and senators and whatnot and their staffers over here, and me at the head of the table.
How old are you at this point?
God, that's a good question.
How old am I now?
That's a great question.
I was probably 27, 28.
Wow.
Yeah, maybe a little bit older.
And what was that like?
What was the conversation like?
What did they seem interested in?
What did you sense the priority was there with them?
They seemed to just want to understand what they were seeing.
So, from the Pentagon side, it seemed like there's.
You know, they had some understanding that there was a problem in this regard, but it was classified.
We weren't really able to have too much of an open conversation about it in that environment.
I would say things, senators would ask me questions, and they asked the DOD folks, What do you have to, you know, do you have any comment on that?
And the answer was either yes or no, or we'll talk about it, you know, under a higher classification, essentially.
And so they didn't have a lot to add to that conversation on the Pentagon side, but it was clear that.
The folks on the Senate side were intrigued and were interested, and they would seem to be asking the right questions.
Of course, at the time, I didn't know where I was going to go.
I said my piece and then just headed back, essentially.
It was maybe an hour, maybe conversation, I think.
What were you afraid was going to happen?
Were you afraid that something was going to happen?
They were going to get fired or something?
Yeah, that or Leavenworth, I suppose.
You can't really get fired from the military per se.
I mean, you can a little bit, but I don't think that was the fear.
But, anyways, I. What do they say?
So I was kind of ignorant of all this kind of drama going on in the background.
Right.
After later that night, I got a call from someone who was in the meeting that we had on the Hill.
Okay.
Inquiring whether the Pentagon had intimidated me or whether they had.
Ask, you know, try to influence my story or anything of that nature.
So there seemed to be, you know, somewhat of a distrust between those two.
Wow, that's that's very interesting.
What I communicated was that that was not the case, I did not perceive that.
Well, well, maybe a little bit.
Well, I imagine that's got to be an intimidating situation for a 27 year old to be called up there the next day and sitting down in front of all these people.
Well, especially discussing things.
I mean, that it was classified stuff, right?
So it was not classified, it was not classified because it wasn't happening, right?
Like, this wasn't a thing.
And what gave you what made you think that you were almost going to be arrested?
What indication did you have of that?
Did they make that clear?
The person that ended up being responsible for giving me the orders came up to me and told me they did that so I would not be arrested.
Wow.
That's how I know that.
Wow, man.
Well, that explains why no one else is speaking out about it then.
Again, I wouldn't expect, yeah, I would not expect military members to publicly speak to the press about this.
That is, I would suggest, out of bounds, especially now that.
There is action going on, right?
There is a proper way to alleviate this through the system.
I didn't have that luxury at the time.
Not only did I not have that luxury, people didn't even think this was a real thing.
And so I made a decision I made so that we could prevent someone from getting into a mishap preemptively instead of it happening and then us writing our PCL and blood again.
When was the first time you ever spoke to Commander Fravor about this stuff?
I spoke to Commander Fravor the first time I interviewed.
With the History Channel for the show Unidentified.
Not the first time, the only time I did.
They introduced me to Dave prior and then he was there as well.
I think they're kind of using it as a kind of a comfort thing for me to show that there was someone else.
And I actually had recognized Dave because he had, I hadn't known him personally at all, but he was in a show called Carrier, which is kind of like a documentary of squadron.
And he was the commanding officer of the squadron at the time, Dave was.
So I had seen him actually before I was even a pilot on that show.
So it was funny to, you know, have him pop.
And we're friends now.
We talk a lot now.
But yeah, that was the first time I met him.
I know the objects were very different and the stories are very different, but were there, What was the biggest thing that stuck out to you talking to him?
I don't know if it's the biggest thing, but the thing that kind of seemed similar was just kind of how, how, what the reaction was, right?
How it was just completely laughed off and ignored and trivialized, which always pissed me off.
Not because, I mean, I, you know, we all joke and it's fun.
That's all good.
But, you know, this is directly something that we train for and have a lot of respect for, which is, Not only aviation safety hazards in the sky, but tactical threats as well.
We're very well aware that other nations are spying on us.
You know, at various times we're flying out there.
And this could very easily be an extension in some cases, or it could be leveraged to be a vulnerability for us if a foreign nation wanted to do so.
And so, from my perspective, I just wasn't, I don't approve the mocking from that angle because this is exactly what we're trained to do.
A friend of mine, James Fox, he produced the movie The Phenomenon.
I'm sure you're familiar with it.
I don't know if you are or not, but he was worked close with Jacques Valet, who was one of the.
I don't know how close you pay attention.
I don't know how close you pay attention to the history of UFO sightings and the different documentaries that have come out about it.
I know Commander Fravor doesn't.
I know he's not very interested in UFOs in general.
But James is a big name in the UFO community as far as investigating the different.
Events that have happened throughout history, the United States and around the world.
But when he was making that movie, The Phenomenon, he told me before he went to interview Commander Fravor for the first time, he was working close with Dr. Jacques Valet and he asked him if he had any sort of, you know, can you give me any sort of guidance to how I can approach this guy?
And Jacques Valet, his question was, I'm very interested in the possibility of them seeing it.
If they ever saw it with the naked eye or not, or if this was only on radar, because his main concern was holograms in the sky.
So, and when he brought this up to Commander Fravor, he was actually kind of like, he almost stopped the interview because of it.
He's like, How, how, you think I'm an idiot?
You think, you think I don't know what DARPA is?
You think I know what holograms are?
You don't think I knew what I saw?
He said, He was very like, not happy about that question.
But a lot of people speculate, especially on, depending on where you look online or wherever.
That a lot of these things could potentially be some sort of secret military technology that is used to confuse enemy radar, like with different holograms or whatever it may be.
I don't know which part of the military would be responsible for this.
I don't know if it'd be the Navy or the Air Force or whatever.
But are you familiar with this idea?
Yeah.
What are your thoughts on it?
In particular, I even had a guy on here that was a Harvard professor that was contracted by DARPA.
He was the one who brought this up to me in the first place.
And he claimed, he said to me that these sort of holograms that are designed to distract enemy radar are a real thing.
Yeah.
Something I've never heard of before.
Yeah.
Let me just kind of provide some background on like what DARPA actually does.
I've worked with DARPA.
You'd probably be mad at me, but Dave's worked with DARPA.
You know, he works generally, well, I don't want to say anything more, but DARPA is a very low technology readiness level organization.
What that means is they work on things that are very low TRL, call that TRL zero, where the other end of the spectrum would be TRL or technology readiness level nine.
And nine means that it's a capability that is deployable for testing essentially with operators.
Right, nine.
And so DARPA usually works around the zero to maybe like doing a little bit more of it, like three or four TRL.
So, what that means is the technology is not really proven.
If it's a zero, it might be math equations.
Okay.
And so, when people talk about DARPA doing things, DARPA's MO isn't to build an operational technology and then test it for years.
Right.
That's not what they do.
That would be an operate, that would be post TRL nine.
Right.
That would be another organization.
It would be the Navy.
Okay.
Right.
Because they would be the ones, or perhaps another organization.
And I don't think there's a realm like NSA or CIA, like they could potentially leverage that technology and take it in.
So if we're talking about Nemesis, which is what I understand to be kind of generally speaking, kind of the holographic EW confusion type technology, it would be the Navy testing it in our most active training ranges off the East Coast.
That's what that would mean.
It would mean that they were doing it for the better part of a decade and still doing it.
It would also mean that they're doing it over international waters, which means any country can go out there and study it.
And it would also mean that we're not testing these things at our billion dollar ranges that we have out in the Western US that are designed specifically for this type of activity, such as Navy China Lake or any of these other testing facilities that we have.
Navy China Lake?
Yeah, it's a weapons testing place that a lot of test pilots go to in the Navy or.
Other places, right?
It's where we develop weapons essentially and test them out.
We get a new bomb, send it to China Lake, strap on F 18 of the test pilot, and see what happens when you drop it, right?
Like it's an operational test area, okay?
Right?
So we have places to test this type of stuff.
So when people talk about you know these programs, um, like that, that's all well and good.
There is a lot of interesting technology that could be pieced together to provide examples of how something could be feasible, but if you step away from that and look about the application and the implementation of that technology, it's Starts to not make as much sense.
Why would we be testing this for seven, eight, nine years after it's been public in international waters off the coast, especially when there's safety reports?
Now, why would we be testing it for eight to 10 years in international waters?
Like you're saying that we wouldn't typically do it for that long?
No.
I mean, that's a whole cycle of development.
You know what I mean?
Like 10 years is a long time to be testing a particular piece of technology in a public yet hidden manner.
You know what I mean?
Right.
So maybe this doesn't directly refute what you're saying.
I understand that.
But I'm just kind of providing some context around these systems and why.
I think what you said about DARPA is very interesting, and a lot of people could gain some context from that.
So you said you guys worked with DARPA.
Why would a Navy pilot work with DARPA?
And what exactly is DARPA?
Navy pilot.
Yeah.
So, Navy pilot did it, but when I was working at BA Systems as a technology development manager, that was my job essentially to source or create or ideate on technology that would be relevant to the warfighter in 10 to 15 years that I could essentially pitch to DARPA and would build it.
And so, primarily, what I was doing when I was at BA Systems was automating my job as a fighter pilot.
I was working on multi agent intelligences, right?
So, autonomous wingman, forward edge tactical systems such as.
Tactics on weapons or aircraft related to autonomous systems, the reality of what hypersonic weapons and tactics look like.
So, this is all areas I was working in.
Wow.
And so, and what specifically does DARPA do?
What does it stand for?
DARPA is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Defense Advanced Research Projects.
Okay.
So, their charge is to work on technologies that are highly risky, that could fail.
They expect a lot of their projects to fail.
In fact, they call it DARPA hard projects.
Like, if you bring a project that's not hard enough, they'll just tell you no.
They would prefer to see something that has a lower probability of success, but a greater reward if it's successful.
Okay.
And so that's kind of the regime that they work in.
And they work close with these quote unquote think tanks, correct?
Is that?
I don't know if that's the case or not.
I mean, what is a think tank?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure I think.
Sounds cool.
Yeah.
I mean, a think tank could potentially just be a group of smart people that bid on a contract that DARPA was put out and they have the specialty to win that contract.
Mm hmm.
But DARPA typically works with big defense corporations, but also with the startup community in some sense.
The intelligence community essentially has its own version of DARPA that is specific for intelligence type operations.
DARPA is more military.
But yeah, that's what they do.
Anti-Gravity Propulsion Ideas00:16:20
So are you aware of anything?
Is there any sort of technology that's utilized with the military to confuse enemy radar like this, though?
Like, is there even this?
There's tons of it.
Not like this per se, but there's a ton of that, right?
That falls under a general category of electronic warfare.
Or even cyber warfare, you could consider it that.
But that's, I mean, another branch essentially that's being stood up at this point.
Cyber command, having an understanding.
The F 35 that I told you about is very much an electronic warfare aircraft.
It soaks everything up, it can jam, it can do all sorts of stuff.
When we start talking about, and it's not just us, you know, everyone wants to see how we can fool the next, the first wave, essentially, right?
If we have a World War III with anyone or whatever, there's going to be a lot of jamming.
Missiles are going to be falling out of the sky and things of that nature.
And one way to do that is with fooling radars to make them think that there's something there when there's not.
I don't know why you would then take that and apply that to IR.
I guess there are some reasons.
IR sensors are getting better for combat, I'll say.
There's something called the IRST, IRST, and that is essentially an IR targeting pod.
The Russians have been using them for a while, but we didn't quite use them that much because our radars were better.
They were essentially compensating for a lack of radar technology by having that.
But we're getting Earth now as well.
And so, really, what that is is a different way of being able to target into these things at range.
Because if you think of the way Fravor talked about the tic tac moving, it seemed like he was basically describing a laser pointer, right?
That's the way those things moved.
If you pointed at a wall, it was moving as if it didn't have mass, I think, was a good way of describing it.
Light does not really have mass.
A shadow or something that was non massive could move as if it doesn't have mass if it wasn't physically real.
So it was nuts and bolts, but it was also psychic, if you will, like knew where he was going to be, right?
Yeah.
I mean, the object showed up at the cat point.
Is that, quote, that wouldn't be psychic?
I know sort of the way these things are moving doesn't necessarily jive with general relativity, right?
Like these things could be using some sort of, some sort of, Propulsion that is gravity, like anti gravity, or it's not necessarily like a jet.
It's not shooting something out the back to move.
It's somehow manipulating gravity to move like that.
I'll agree that we don't see them spitting stuff out the back, but the mechanism that they are using, although gravity and space diametric engineering is a potential option for that, there I think are others as well.
Really?
Yeah.
So, you know, there's, well, let me just say this.
Transportation really at the end of the day comes down to energy.
If you can put enough energy into one piece, we have the math to build a warp drive or what have you, engineer space time metric, warp space time, which therefore would be warping gravity and allow you to potentially move super luminously.
That's one fun theory.
Mass reduction is a technology that has been proposed.
If you were able to reduce the mass of an object, then moving it through the air would be much more seamless.
Reducing air friction, is it warping?
Space time around it to avoid the friction, or is it somehow moving air particles around it, right?
We just don't know the answer to these questions.
So, one of the things I'm doing is trying to get the answers to those.
And the way I'm doing it is through the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where I chair the UAP Integration and Outreach Committee.
It's about a 50 person large engineering organization under the AIAA, or AIAA as I call it, which is a professional engineering organization with 30,000 plus members.
And we've built a team of fantastic industry engineers that are kind of coming out of the woodwork to study this kind of from an industry first viewpoint.
And one of the projects that we have underway is to help define what some of the detection mechanisms could be for these objects.
And just like you said, is it affecting gravity and how can we detect that?
Is it using some type of ionization and magnet hydrodynamics to move the air around the vehicle?
And if that's the case, how can we detect that?
A document to the engineering industry on a yearly basis that updates the best sensing phenomenologies and lessons learned and everything we know.
So, with the rest of the industry, we can start putting technology together to expand our data sets.
So, there's a lot of private aerospace companies that are working on this, correct?
That are basically sharing information and trying to work together to put more data together to try to understand this.
I don't have information on that.
I thought I read that that was part of AAIA.
Our group is made up of.
Engineers and scientists from all across the industry, from NASA to various DOD to industry to startups.
And so I wouldn't say necessarily any of those companies they represent.
Actually, I'll say this they don't represent the companies at all when they're there.
But there are members across the industry that are very interested in this.
Do you think it's possible that there are private aerospace companies, contractors that have technology that they're not sharing with the mainstream academia?
Technology?
Yeah, absolutely.
100%.
Science?
I don't know.
Like anti gravity.
Do you think it's possible that there's some sort of private aerospace weapons contractor, like whatever?
For example, Boeing or Lockheed that has figured out anti gravity and it's not being shared with the public.
I think it's possible.
Because it would effectively be immune to FOIA requests, right?
Because it's a private company.
That's a theory I've heard, or maybe it's not even a theory, maybe it's a fact.
But generally speaking, yeah, I think that is possible that our private defense industries and contractors have technology that isn't promulgated and it's classified.
But it would be for them to be testing it.
Off the coast of.
That's not a defense contractor.
That would be a government program.
It would have to be, right?
Yeah.
Lockheed wouldn't just be out in those areas.
That would have to be, again, approved military tests, which means.
But wouldn't.
I mean, forgive me if this is like an ignorant question.
I don't know anything about this stuff.
So Lockheed wouldn't be able to get permission or work with the military to do this kind of testing.
I'm not saying it's impossible.
I'm just saying that's not the way things work on a regular basis.
Right.
They go to ranges all the time.
I've been to ranges.
As in the defense industry, you know, to work on various technologies, but operational flight training areas and flight operation areas are a totally different beast, you know what I mean?
Um, that's um, you know, the difference between um, I don't even know what the difference, I don't even know the best way to phrase it, but um, like I said, like that entry area to our working area is one of the busiest places of sky on the eastern seaboard, right?
Right, so we're now putting we're testing objects by putting them directly at the entry point of that area at altitude after hazard reports have been submitted, right, for eight years.
Right.
I don't see the logic.
I don't see how we could be testing against ourselves, especially when we kind of zoom out and say, okay, where are we now in the world about this topic?
Do we really think that, you know, John Ratcliffe and President, former President Obama are going out on a limb because we're testing some, you know, EW on the East Coast?
The conversations got too large to support the thesis that we're testing EW.
Okay.
You know what I mean?
In my opinion, like we've gone beyond that just based off of how.
Much conversation has been around this because we're just drawing more attention to this.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And that's another kind of element you have to throw into this whole thing if it was something we, why would we be throwing all this attention?
Why would the US government intentionally kind of like acknowledge this like this?
Why would the Pentagon acknowledge it so much?
You always have to question their intentions just based on history.
Right.
Speaking of history, one thing I often think of, this isn't necessarily a leading question, but What lessons did we learn from the proliferation of nuclear weapons?
We created a nuclear weapon and others were trying to create it.
And now we live in a world that has nuclear weapons everywhere.
And it's a fear.
If we developed a technology that had the power of a nuclear weapon, perhaps even greater, what lessons would we have learned from that proliferation and taken that and applied to this new technology?
Yeah.
Where would we have blackened out the conversation?
The engineering side?
At the fundamental science side, I don't know to answer these questions, but I imagine we learned some lessons from that.
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I feel like we have a species that has amnesia when it comes to this kind of stuff.
You know what really kind of like tipped me off to or made me start leaning in the direction of it could be human technology is that when the Pentagon started really acknowledging it.
You know, putting out the New York Times dropping these articles and the Pentagon putting out more and more information about it and declassifying these reports, but not showing the whole thing.
Like, that's when I started to sort of go, you know, switch to maybe this isn't some sort of extraterrestrial thing.
Maybe this could very plausibly be something a foreign nation has or that we have that we're just not getting the whole truth about it.
I bet it's probably somewhere in the middle, you know?
I would think that somewhere in the middle, as in like we took the technology that we found from somewhere off Earth and then we sort of like back engineered it or something.
I think that'd be the safer bet to make that assumption that it's very probable if this has been going on for a while that.
Some of what we're seeing is our own, but originates from something else.
Not to say alien or whatever the flavor of other you like.
But I think that's a very feasible consideration to think that we've been trying to work in engineering this and some sightings could be contributed to that.
I think that's a reasonable statement.
What do you think about Bob Lazar's story?
How much credit do you give that?
Have you ever talked to him?
No, personally, no.
I mean, it's interesting.
And like I told Joe, I want to believe it.
It's interesting, but I just don't have any evidence other than the media that.
Being created to tell his story.
And that's just not sufficient for me to draw a conclusion on my own.
What do you think about the way he describes the anti gravity propulsion and being able to manipulate time?
That's something that you study, right?
That's something that you very much do.
I mean, that's grounded in good science.
Anytime that you would create some type of field that warps space time around you, you would be by necessity warping time as well.
Any increase in gravity or concentration of it in some sense is going to cause time to slow down the more dense and the stronger those.
The stronger the gravity is.
And so, yeah.
And so that, you know, I don't know if that supports a story necessarily.
That's something we've known for a long time, 20 years or so.
But it is consistent with, I think, special relativity or, excuse me, general relativity.
Being a pilot and experiencing everything you've experienced and just being like, Immersed in this technology, this war technology, which is incredible.
What do you see as the future of war and technology developing together?
And what does that look like?
Does it look like some of these objects?
Do you think eventually in the future, this is just like there's no more pilots in fighter jets?
What do you think it looks like?
Yeah, I think that's where we're going.
I think the direction we're going is you could call it like objective based autonomy in a sense.
So a wing or a mission commander who might be an F 35 or Eventually, maybe back on the boat or elsewhere, will likely assign mission objectives that need to be accomplished to a swarm of assets that the pilot doesn't necessarily know what they are, right?
He doesn't know where they are, he doesn't know what weapons they carry, he doesn't even know what they look like potentially.
I'm moving around.
You're good.
But he verifies the target and validates it and issues the commands and then.
The target is prosecuted with those assets.
That the autonomy is suggested.
We're going to use this and this and this to create those effects, versus taking one jet with a bunch of different weapons and saying, okay, try to make those effects work with what you happen.
There's more of almost like a cloud concept of warfare, and the mission commander is making those decisions.
And so I see autonomy playing a massive role in that.
And what that's going to lead to is more congested battle space, right?
Which is kind of what all this kind of talk about EW is all about, right?
Congesting the battle space and making it more difficult to target, and making it so the pilots don't know if the radar contact they just shot at is a real aircraft or not, or if they just wasted a missile, right?
Wasting missiles is great.
You only have so many of them.
So, if you can have the enemy shoot at drones or false tracks on the radar, then you're going to win that fight eventually.
What this could lead to is a reemergence of dogfighting as a valuable skill.
So, our fights actually take place over such long distances.
If it is a true war type scenario where missions need to be accomplished, eventually you're going to have to go in and increase your risk if all your long range weapons are gone or if they've been trashed.
Through EW.
So, what that means is getting closer and using your guns and IR missiles in a dogfight.
Oh, wow.
And so, there is a potential, should things get bad, to actually kind of reinvigorate the dogfighting regime.
If there'll likely be a transition period where there are still pilots, where if that has passed, then it'll just be all autonomous stuff fighting each other.
But before that, you could have a chance where the EW is so good that everyone's trying to employ their weapons, they get trashed, so you have to go and close.
So, if that's the case, Well, I'll go into that.
So, you know, what does it look like?
It looks like congestion, right?
It looks like a fog of war.
It's more confusing.
There's more uncertainty.
There's more wasted assets.
There's more ability to be clever and tricky, perhaps.
There's a weird thing that happens.
I've had a guy on here who was a drone pilot.
He was working at a base in Las Vegas and he was operating drones and pulling the trigger and killing people on the ground.
I forget in what country, but there's a.
There's a thing that happens.
There's a disconnect between people who are doing that across the world, operating some drone like a video game, and then someone who's actually flying a plane and like being there in person.
And, you know, I just wonder like the psychology of if, if that's what war comes to, people being across the world, just like hitting buttons on a controller versus being there in real life.
Like, what are the, what are the long term implications of that?
And how does that affect?
I think the long term implications is that it could probably get to a new deterrent system similar to nuclear weapons, in a sense, right?
Surviving Extreme G Forces00:07:02
If you have confidence in your ability to be successful without risking lives or making it politically tricky, then it might be more likely in order to engage in those type of skirmishes.
That would be the fear, in a sense.
It's like life becomes more disposable almost.
Yeah.
In a sense, though, the technology, and I've argued for this.
In fact, when I was at BAU Systems, we had some interns come in.
And one of them actually took the opportunity to ask how do you justify this type of work, creating weapons and things of that nature at this point?
And as someone has been out there employing these weapons, it was easy for me to answer because accuracy enables safer warfare.
If you have a moral government, in a sense, right?
If your government doesn't want to kill civilians, being more precise is better.
And that's why I said, as long as we assume we have moral leadership, then we would want our weapons to be as essentially powerful and as accurate as possible as a mitigating force.
And so I think that's where we go.
Things will continue to get more accurate and more precise, which may have negative consequences because people may feel more justified using them.
So I think you're the perfect person to ask this question.
Is hypersonic.
I hear about it all the time.
I hear about missiles being hypersonic, especially when it comes to this war in Ukraine and Russia and Russia having these hypersonic missiles.
What is that?
What does that mean?
Yeah.
Is it the same thing as?
Like Mach levels, like Mach 1 through 10?
Yep.
Okay.
Anything below Mach 5 is just supersonic, they call it.
Above Mach 5 is hypersonic.
Okay.
So, hypersonic, I forget what the barrier is, but there's also a thermal barrier that you need to get through to go certain speeds.
You can't just continuously go faster if you're a more powerful engine because you're going to just start to melt stuff.
Right.
And so, there's kind of a thermal barrier that's related to our material science and engineering levels.
But generally, it is what it sounds like.
Things are just going a lot faster.
Just faster.
And what does that mean?
You know, everything.
In war, really, it's not that complicated at the end of the day.
You just need to do the simple thing better than the other person in a way.
And when we have these ICBMs and cruise missiles and all these things like that, the most important consideration is how long can I intercept that missile for?
When is it visible to me?
It's visible when it's on my radar.
And so, if there's curvature of the earth, depending on where the missile is launched, we put radar sites in various places so we can see the missile sooner.
We put them in space so we can see them as soon as they launch, perhaps.
Hypersonic missiles reduce the time that you can see the missiles because they're traveling so fast that they can go at altitudes that prevent radars from seeing them due to the curvature of the Earth in some cases.
And then it also decreases the time to intercept that missile.
And so, for example, if Russia had a hypersonic missile that could just travel over to the US, that could Poise a significant issue because our systems might not be calibrated to be able to hit hypersonic missiles, maybe only supersonic missiles, right?
So it's just a stair step, just like everything in war seems.
Something's fast, you find out a way to take it out, let's speed it up so those other systems don't work anymore.
Are there any sort of missiles that can just change direction on a dime?
Well, no.
No.
No.
There's some interesting stuff you could do if you had like a throttled missile, but that's not what you're describing.
Instantaneous movement or anything like that, even if we had a missile.
So, the way these missiles work is that you lock up, you shoot, and they'll go near the object.
And once they get within a certain range, they'll save some energy so they can perform what they call like a max G maneuver at the very end in order to trade all their energy to get close enough to impact the aircraft with shrapnel.
And so, when they do that, they might pull like 70 or 80 Gs, which is a lot, but compared to an ejection where the first few milliseconds is like 300 Gs.
300 G's?
Yeah, for like a millisecond.
The only reason you can, and then it backs off to like 12 G's, but it just kicks off very fast.
The only reason that's survivable is just due to the inertia of your body and the blood.
Wow.
And yeah, so 300, boom, and then it slows down.
Yeah, sorry, I forgot where we were going with that though.
Yeah, we were just talking about like the way the missiles travel and how fast they travel.
And then you got into ejecting at 300 G's.
Yeah, but when you start talking about something like with Dave Fraber and moving position very fast, the G's in there could be in the thousands.
That's the first thing I just thought about is if there was.
If there were actual beings inside of those things, they would just be liquefied.
Potentially, if they had mass and if they were operating with our normal space time frame, right?
So if you're bending space time, then you're going to be in your own isolated bucket and you're not going to be feeling those inertia changes, right?
Because gravity is a field, right?
And so gravity is affecting the atoms of your body all at the same time.
It doesn't pull on your head and then pull on here, it's a field that's pulling all in the same direction.
So, if you're moving gravity, you're not going to be feeling that inertia changes.
That's one way you could do that.
Another way is to reduce somehow the mass of the object so that it doesn't have as much of an effect from inertia.
Right.
And I don't have all the answers here.
I'm just kind of just explaining a couple potential options where you could see that movement and still survive.
If we don't assume any of that and assume they're operating in a normal environment without reducing mass or affecting space time, then yeah, the g forces would be probably, well, not probably, they would be too much, even for hardware.
Has anybody ever seen one of these things manipulate the environment?
Like, for example, punch through clouds or, or, or, Affect the water at all or anything like that?
Well, Dave Fravor talked about kind of the water being spun up underneath the tic tac.
But I'm not aware of really, no, I'm not really aware of any cases like you described.
Well, yeah, what did he say about how the thing was like hovering right above the water and there was just sort of like white water below him?
Yeah, I think they kind of described it as like foaming or bubbly in a sense.
Because that's another huge element of this is.
Being underwater, how much attention do you guys pay to being a Navy pilot?
How much attention do you guys pay to things happening on the surface of the water or ever?
Do you ever do that?
Yeah, no, we do.
We have particular radar modes for ships.
Are submarines a threat?
Not to me.
Not to aircrafts?
Not that I'm aware of.
Okay.
But they're certainly, well, if we're on an aircraft carrier, they are.
If the submarine comes to the surface, though, could they be a threat?
Radar Modes For Ships00:08:45
I honestly don't know enough about submarine weapon systems to tell you.
I hope not.
But no, typically we're not worried about submarines.
But we don't really have the capability to track objects in a transmedia manner.
So if we see something get close to the ocean, we may have trouble tracking it depending on how close it gets, just due to the movement of the water and all that stuff.
And then if it goes below, it's just going to disappear off our radar.
There's no continuation.
So we can't necessarily make that assessment of it going in the water.
We just see it and then we see it.
Our radar is so.
It can see very far away.
So, almost 99.9% of the time, what we're seeing on the radar is well beyond our visual range.
What is sort of happening currently within the government, publicly or not, that you're aware of to sort of like move this whole conversation forward and push it more into get it away from the stigmatization that people are used to?
Yeah.
And we're seeing a lot of good work on that.
Within the AIAA, I mean, that's one of our primary missions is to mitigate.
The stigma around this topic so that we can do real science on the topic.
And we are seeing that form up now.
We're seeing the engineering skill sets and prowess come in that want to approach this scientifically and agnostically.
Within the government itself, we have the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or as I call it, ARO.
It's a mouthful.
Yeah.
Not that bad as, yeah, yeah, yeah, double A.
But there seems to be a very concerted effort to actually get to the bottom of this.
In my view, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick of Arrow, I've heard him express that he believes he has all the access that he needs in order to continue investigating this.
I know that he's made trips to National Archives and he's really putting the legwork into understanding this.
So I believe that he is truly working to uncover this to the best of his ability.
And from my perspective, he's getting the support he needs from the Senate and Congress in order to do that.
With the National Defense Authorization Act that was signed by President Biden recently.
What is that one?
What is that act?
National Defense Authorization Act.
Okay.
Had somewhere around 30 pages of UAP related legislation in there that essentially forces a reckoning of any classified programs or manipulation attempts on the public related to this topic going back all the way to 1945.
Additionally, it removes whistleblower limitations for potential whistleblowers from $300,000 for liability to unlimited.
And that both for defense contractors as well as military contractors.
Military folks as well.
And so, really, what we see is this is a mechanism for kind of opening it up and allowing Congress and Senate to really run this to ground.
Yeah.
Oh, and by the way, the NDA also has Aero reporting, I believe to the SecDef or Deputy SecDef now versus ODNI.
And so, the last report that came out was an ODNI based report.
I would think going forward, there might be a little more ease in communication now that there's been a transfer.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, what is his background and what is his?
He's a former chief scientist at the Missile Defense Agency, US.
So he's a well established and published scientist that has been working for the DoD in various capacities for quite some time.
Okay.
How much attention do you pay to some of the other stories that are coming out?
I mean, obviously, your background is very objective, it's very science based, very tactical.
But when it comes to like some of these other stories and some of these other things that are coming out, like for example, like James Fox's new latest documentaries, how much attention do you pay to that kind of stuff?
Or even like abduction stories?
Is that just too out there for you or do you pay attention to it?
I'm doing my homework to some degree.
It's just there's a lot out there.
I, you talk about the, the, how do you pronounce it?
Varginia.
Varginia.
Is that the one?
Yeah.
Did you hear about that?
Yeah.
I watched that.
It was fascinating.
I mean, it's interesting, but.
Generally speaking, it's not the way I kind of.
So there's two ways I kind of approach this topic.
There's one is, in a sense, it's almost due diligence where I am engaging in those types of stories to some small degree.
I mean, not small degree, but just through the literature.
I'm not actively investigating or like talking to.
The problem is it's so entertaining, right?
Yeah.
It's, well, there's been a trend, I think, in the past where due to lack of data.
Probably for one reason that there has been an entertainment industry of sorts that has kind of folded on around this.
I don't see myself as necessarily participating in that.
And so, yeah, go back a second.
You know, I try to do my homework to get a broad understanding of this, but I'm very focused on the future as well.
I think that there are real solutions that we can bring forward in order to better understand this outside of the military leash, right?
I don't think the way to expand this conversation is to just wait for the government to essentially provide us with the answers.
We know we can see these things, right?
We can see them on certain radars.
These radars aren't classified, but the technology necessarily isn't.
You can find phaser razor radars out there.
And the democratization, access to these technologies, I think, are going to allow us to expand this conversation with or without the government.
And I think that maybe is why this time is so unique.
The tools that you have access to can provide answers that the government can't necessarily keep a leash on.
Yeah, man.
But like the Virginia case is so interesting too because.
A lot of the people that were there that day, James says that they were just intimidated to the point where they would not talk about it.
Like the one guy, he literally chased him off, threatened to shoot him and kill him if he didn't leave his property because of government intimidation.
They say these people, these quote unquote men in black, would come and basically tell them, like, if you love your family, don't say a word about this to anyone.
And then additionally to that, this so and so, this so called being that was found, the Air Force, the United States Air Force, all these United States planes landed the next day and basically like hushed everyone up and took all the evidence and went back to the United States.
So, like, It's almost like the biggest barrier is at the same time the government, even though the government is claiming to put all these things out in the New York Times.
The Pentagon wants to openly talk about it.
It's like, this is what we're doing on the public side, but on the other side, we're also doing all this stuff with intimidation and all this stuff to keep people shut up.
Yeah, I don't disagree, but I think one of the misconceptions is that the government is extremely well run.
Yeah.
One, I think there are different factions.
I think there's different people within the government that are involved in this.
I don't necessarily think that they all work together.
The government is so big and there's so many people and personalities and interests.
It's not as monolithic as people make it out to seem.
And this story you just described, it's interesting because what official channel of communication exists between Brazil and the United States in order to facilitate something like that?
That must be an ongoing relationship of some degree.
What's the Brazilian form then?
Brazil, from what I understand, really relies on the United States and they rely on having a Good, really strong relationship with the United States.
I could be wrong, but on UAP, on anything, if they had something, and so if you're Brazil, why would you want to keep that from the US?
Was the US even studying, right?
Like officially, the government wasn't really studying this, so was there some communication between them?
If there was some high level commander or high like the head of the military in Brazil, do you think they have an open line of communication to somebody here?
No, that would have to go through political channels.
So, I don't have any answer here, but these are the things that interest me.
The case is very interesting, but what does that relationship tell us?
When did it start?
Did it start then or did it start elsewhere?
And if it started elsewhere, why did it start there?
What else don't we know?
Biological Consciousness Questions00:03:42
And so, the case is fascinating.
I want to know more.
I want it to be true.
But these are the clues I try to look for to help better understand really what's going on.
And it's so much different than what you're seeing, too, because There's, if that case was true, there was a biological being inside of a craft that accidentally crashed.
If these things are so advanced, how the hell would it accidentally crash?
And why would they travel so far and put a biological being that is of importance to whatever civilization it came from?
Why would they leave it?
Why would it be strange?
You know, it seems like they're so advanced that.
That sort of thing wouldn't happen.
I think there's some assumptions in there that I'll push back on.
Okay.
One, a Lamborghini is incredibly advanced, you know, or, you know, anything, a Tesla, they still break.
Now, even if you take that to the extreme scale, is there, you know, 100% success rate?
I don't know.
That's just one poor argument against the crashing, right?
If you were to take one back to 3000 BC and drop someone a car, they probably think it worked all the time too.
But let's just put that aside.
You're right.
That's fair.
Let's just put it aside.
Put it aside for the most part.
And then talk about the assumption around a biological entity having importance.
I would imagine that technology would move into an area where you'd be able to replicate biology artificially.
And that would be probably a much more efficient means of reproduction of the asset or modification of it and the maintenance of it versus, say, a heavy mechanical object.
That's just, I'm not saying that's truth or anything, but I'm just saying we would be able to print, like 3D print our bodies.
So just because something's biological doesn't mean that it's evolved over billions of years to be a self intelligent, self conscious.
You know, its own agent, right?
Intelligent agent.
It's biological, but does that mean it's not a robot in some sense?
Right.
I don't know.
That's an assumption, I think.
So just because it's biological, maybe that's just, you know, the best means for doing the thing.
Right.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
That does make sense.
And then, you know, that kind of like goes to the idea that once we do advance to a certain level, that we, you know, we, like our bottleneck right now is our biological bodies decay and we age and we die.
But if in a thousand years it seems plausible that we would be able to, I mean, we're already doing it.
We're already cloning ourselves, cloning cells, and basically like 3D printing skin, like burn victims can get brand new skin.
So, why wouldn't we be able to eventually just create new meat vehicles that we're in right now and just basically take our consciousness and put it into a new one?
So, essentially, if this was in a civilization that was that advanced, they would be able to do something similar to that.
Maybe there is no consciousness, too.
Another assumption.
You have a potentially have a biological being that isn't necessarily a conscious agent, perhaps.
You know, we can at least get rid of the consciousness transfer that you mentioned.
Right.
We can throw away that assumption.
But these, you know, these are the fun conversations.
We're never going to like get to a conclusion on any of this, but it's interesting because I try hard to not anthropomorphize this conversation too much.
And it's so easy, right?
We assume it's a biological entity on there.
And so that has value to the society in some sense.
Maybe that's not the case, right?
Exactly.
That's what makes this conversation so difficult.
Financial Entertainment Niche00:09:31
Right.
The thing, though, is it is a very different situation what happened there with a thing crashing with something in it than what you, it seems like, compared to what you guys were seeing.
I agree with that.
You know, and then if you were to attribute something like a technology that we have, like some sort of advanced military technology, Then, how do you explain all the things that were happening in the 40s, all the different sightings?
And there's documented cases of all these things hovering above nuclear bases in the early days.
I don't know what year, what decade that was 50s, 60s, 70s.
How plausible is it that we had that technology back then?
What the hell was going on back then?
Yeah, I don't have an answer to that question.
But that is kind of the weird thing about this subject it's so entertaining and it's so fun to talk about.
But at the same time, that's what makes it.
Kind of like what makes people be able to dismiss it so easily, you know, because you have the History Channel, but the History Channel just makes stuff entertainment.
It's really entertainment.
I don't know if you've ever watched a show on the History Channel, like some of these shows, like Skinwalker Ranch, like a person like me who's familiar with like production and how it works and watching this thing happen.
It's just they're making a fucking movie and they're trying to entertain people.
Like for somebody who understands some of the stuff that has actually happened in these situations and, and, The research that's been done behind it scientifically, and then you watch it dramatized on television, to me, kind of like doesn't do it any favors.
It makes it less credible to me.
But I understand, like, it's fucking entertaining and people want to see it and you can make money.
Companies like the History Channel and the Discovery Channel make tons of money because it is entertaining.
And now, with the conversations that are happening with the New York Times and the Pentagon, now it's actually getting more and more truth.
So this stuff is becoming more and more of a financial opportunity for entertainment niche, niche, niche.
What's that word?
Niche.
Niche.
Yeah.
I mean, generally speaking, I think more attention that goes on this, the more people, um, For good reasons and bad reasons, we'll try to financially gain from it.
I do have one pushback, which is one thing I've seen a lot is that there seems to be this almost gatekeeping around the topic, where if you're not doing it for the pure enjoyment of the topic, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
And I don't agree with that.
This has been relegated to a hobby for way too long.
And a hobby is not a sustainable way of creating a new industry around something that we're seeing out there that requires technology and investment.
And research and people to commit to that research and write papers, right?
And guess how that gets done?
Money.
Yes.
So, hey, eventually we got to grow up and start putting our money where our mouth is.
Yes.
That doesn't mean necessarily entertainment, but hey, the government, you know, they're not going to buy sensors for the general public to figure this out.
Will NASA?
I doubt it.
I've had conversations, you know, with members from NASA and people from Aero, and, you know, they both are pretty aligned around the fact that the normal funding channels for this type of work doesn't really exist.
Within DOD.
And they don't really exist within NASA.
And we're seeing a little bit of a change.
We're seeing NASA put a little bit of money, $100,000, as they essentially build a program.
They put $100,000.
Yeah.
But the point is that they're not doing work with that.
They're building a recommendation for a program.
And that's the output.
They're going to be looking at the data and various things and providing a recommendation on how NASA can actually gather data to bring answers forward on this.
And so that's when I think more money will come in and stuff.
And, you know, to go back to your point on entertainment and stuff, I think that's why a lot of pilots haven't been willing to talk about this because it has been more in that UFO attainment type of mindset.
UFO attainment, good word.
And they don't want to, pilots don't want to risk their careers by going on something like that and getting labeled as, you know, a believer or something like that, right?
It's, I think, a little derogatory to kind of label these pilots that have witnessed things believers in a sense, because a lot of these people have seen some very inexplicable things with their own eyeballs with multiple aircraft and multiple aircrew.
Like their first officer and multiple other professional aviators, and they're seeing things that have changed their lives.
They've gone out and talked to artists to do drawings of what they've seen, and they've kept in touch with the pilots they've seen this with.
And so, to take those emotional experiences in some cases and take it on to a UFO type attainment thing, it's just, no, they're not going to go anywhere near it.
They will potentially lose their job.
And the way it works in airlines, you can be at a company for 40 years and If you leave that company and you go to another airline, you go right to the bottom of the pile with 20 year olds that will be more senior to you.
It's all seniority based.
So if you've been in and you have a long career and you want to start talking about something like this, that's quite the risk to take.
Yeah.
And so that's why I've created the podcast Merge because I want to provide a scientifically focused, neutral place for aviators, scientists, and innovators to actually have a serious conversation about this outside of entertainment.
And it'll be more than just a podcast because we're going to be able to take that information.
And we're going to be able to apply that within the AI double A and have conversations about the technology and perhaps pursue that.
If someone has a good idea and we have a conversation about it, we can go get things done.
We don't just have to talk about it.
We have potentially the resources and the equipment, and eventually the equipment and the people and the minds to actually start to solve this.
And so we want to try to bring those together and have those conversations, both with pilots and the people that are going to be able to figure it out.
That's powerful.
Having somebody like you being able to sit down on a podcast and talk to some of your peers and some of the people that you respect or some of the people that respect you in this industry and not have it be wrapped around entertainment.
But I do understand what you're saying.
Like it is important to have an industry.
There should be a big market on this niche because, I mean, that's how you fund things.
That's true.
That's the market should be no matter how it happens from the ground up.
If it is some with some of this outlandish entertainment, I mean, that's the way that's the way naturally it has to evolve.
That's the way that we're going to attract money to the situation.
That's the way people like you, you know, it got me.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, I knew there was something there to talk about, but um, the document I talked about being able to release within the AIAA that's really what that's going to be centered around is being able to provide a broader understanding throughout industry of.
The science and the sensing phenomenologies and things, so that technology can be built.
So, to kind of answer your question, you know, how do we get from there to where we want to be?
We're getting there, right?
We have created scientific organizations, they have been created to actually study this, right?
And what's going to happen from that is we're going to be putting out information and data and conclusions and results, and that is going to go directly into developing new and better technology that's going to help us understand this problem better.
So, we're there, we're getting there, we're establishing that.
And when we look out in the wider scope of things, we see that.
Arrow and others are taking a whole of government approach on this.
This isn't, you know, one department, one agency, one organization, one, you know, senator or congressman with a hobby.
The whole of government is kind of wrapping itself into this so that we can take that whole approach and make sure that we're using all the resources we have as a nation to understand that.
And that's what's happening now, whether people see it or not.
We're building the stage, we're setting the stage.
And I think this year we're going to see a lot of activity on that stage.
How many episodes have you recorded of your podcast so far?
Four.
Four episodes.
What kind of people have you had on there?
We had Professor Gary Nolan.
We're going to be airing that episode tomorrow, actually.
Oh, wow.
And the rest, or the other three, were commercial and F 18 pilots.
Wow, that's amazing.
And where is it on YouTube or is it on Apple?
Yeah, you can Merge Point Podcast on YouTube.
You can also find us on mergepodcast.com and you'll be able to find all the episodes starting tomorrow on there.
And of course, it'll be on.
Starting tomorrow.
Starting tomorrow.
Wow, that's amazing.
Good timing.
This thing won't be released yet.
I'll release this next Tuesday, whatever date that is.
Cool.
Yeah, so we're going to, I think, then we're going to be airing about every two weeks now, and then hopefully every week with, you know, just constantly interviewing pilots because there's enough of them out there and they have the stories, you know, and they've been seeing this for a long time.
And so we'll have that conversation.
And at the same time, we'll be bringing in scientists and not just, you know, I have a lot of respect for Gary Nolan, but he's pretty wrapped into this conversation.
But I want to bring in some people that people aren't aware of that have been in the industry for 40 plus years that have now volunteered to help at the AIAA that are really tackling this known entities, you know, known, you know, I'll say senior engineers and scientists from across the aerospace industry are really getting around to put their might behind this in a public manner.
And so we're going to see a lot of progress, I think, this year and in the future.
Have you thought about what happens once, if and when this becomes just accepted public knowledge that there's, if there is another civilization that is trying to communicate or Traveling here and monitoring us, and that is here with us, and we're not alone.
Xenopolitical Reality Shifts00:07:01
Like, if that does become common knowledge and accepted knowledge within the world and all the main governments in the world, have you thought about like what the implications of that are?
What are the public implications and how does that affect wars and military?
And yeah, I don't have the answer for that entirely, but I will say that I know there are efforts underway to form certain organizations that will study this from a more broad perspective, like that.
Of course, within the AIAA, I'm focusing on science and engineering around this topic.
But I think we'll hear soon about some other efforts that consider the sociological implications of this, that include the economic implications of this, the xenopolitical nature of this.
But to kind of get to what does that mean, xenopolitical?
External politics, we have to now consider something other than ourselves in our relationship with how we interact in the world, perhaps.
How do we retain our agency if we do exist among highly technologically capable societies?
Right, I think that's really what it boils down to.
If we do come to terms with this, is that how do we maintain our dignity and our sovereignty in such an environment?
And I think, I think, um, truly, we have well, I think that's what it boils down to, really.
How do we interface on perhaps a stage like that as the weaker candidate, but with the self respect that we should have in order to operate at that level?
These are the conversations and the questions I think that we'll be able to explore in a more organized manner once we kind of get past this.
This uncertainty phase, you know, this very there's so many more questions than there are answers.
That's the that's gonna be the fun part.
I can't wait.
I mean, it's it's scary, it's scary to think about what could happen because obviously, you know, human the human mind goes to all the fear first.
Like, what could the worst case scenario be if the public knew that okay, that we're not everything, there's other beings here?
Would the economy collapse?
Would what would happen to religion?
Like, it's unfathomable, it's unfathomable.
I think we will do okay.
I really do.
I think that one of the reasons that perhaps this is an okay time for this is that our society is measured in some sense right now by how fast we change, how fast our technology advances.
And we see it all the time.
Our society and our social standards don't necessarily keep up with the technology.
Our technology is created and then we try to find a way to live with it in a sense.
I don't think this is going to be much different in a sense.
I think as long as we can retain our agency and our self respect in a manner like we were just talking about, that we're going to be able to integrate that information because really that's just.
You know, that's how the modern person lives right now.
Every year there's new technology and something different.
Not to mention the state of the world in some sense with COVID and everything else that's been going on.
I think people's comfort and reality has been shook a little bit by the events of the past five to eight years.
And if you did want to introduce some drastically different knowledge, I'd suggest that this would probably be a good time as a shock would be lessened.
Yeah, I am optimistic about it to an extent.
Just, you know, hearing some of the stories, it doesn't seem like these things.
If they are from a different civilization, they are a threat to us.
It doesn't seem like they are here for that.
They don't have any malintentions, especially when you hear, you know, some of the most fascinating things to me is how there's been a large number of sightings near schools and, you know, with young children seeing these things and reporting these things.
And I don't know if you're familiar with the Zimbabwe, the Rua school in Zimbabwe back in the early 90s.
There was something that landed in there was like three.
40 school children that all witnessed the same exact thing.
And there was that famous Harvard psychiatrist who interviewed them all.
Mack.
Yeah, yeah, John Mack.
And, you know, there were communications, they said that when they stared into the eyes of these things, that they felt this feeling of be careful with technology.
Technology can lead you down a dark path or it could be bad for your civilization.
You know.
Probably not the thoughts that these children were having.
Probably not a natural thought that these children would be having.
Yeah.
Especially during that time in the early 90s.
I mean, looking at where the world was then.
And then, you know, there were so many school sightings like this, which is very interesting to me how, you know, because when you think of children, how much more open minded they are than adults who are just hardwired into thinking the world is a certain way.
That alone just makes me, whether how real that is or not, that makes me optimistic about this whole thing.
Mm hmm.
And I'll say too that I don't think what we're experiencing is probably a new phenomenon.
I think that would be a statistical unlikeliness or be unlikely statistically to think that this just started in the very recent past.
I work from the assumption that this has probably been going on much longer than that.
Although, you know, what that means in my daily thinking, I don't know.
But I don't think this is new.
And if we assume that, then I don't think we have to have that much to fear as we better understand this because we're already living in that world.
We just don't know it.
Right.
So the fear is all just our own internal change that we need to come to terms with.
Yeah.
Stories like this, there's only two things you can really do with it in a sense.
You can accept it or you cannot.
And I think a lot of people choose the latter, like maybe perhaps a school teacher, because it's almost like a cognitive dissonance in a sense where you just cannot process that information and continue about in your normal life immediately.
And so your brain just kind of dismisses it as, Either confusion or temporary stupidity or what have you, and go about their lives.
And I've noticed that in this conversation that I've been having more broadly about this topic.
Sometimes there's just people that, and one of the best ways you can identify them is as soon as you mention something quote unquote alien or just different or UAP, just immediate laughter, right?
The first reaction is aha, you know, like, and then they realize you're not laughing and then they kind of like, oh, okay.
But they don't know how to move forward from that point because they're not ready to integrate that into their reality yet.
I truly think people really do live in their own realities, right?
You create your perception of the world in your brain, right?
And you do that based on your experiences, whether they're true or not, right?
And a lot of times I think people use that kind of mentality to protect themselves from this type of information almost as a protection mechanism where it's just too outside their scope of every day for them to really just stop and integrate it because it's just too much.
Integrating New Perceptions00:01:55
Right.
It's too much and we're busy.
Yeah.
We're busy.
We got shit to do.
Yeah.
Right.
Like it's almost the same thing that you dealt with in the Navy in a way.
Oh, yeah.
100%.
It's exactly the same way.
We got missions to do.
We got this.
We got that.
I want to promote.
I want to do this.
You know, I want to eventually get home and see my wife.
Right.
People are just so focused on their day to day lives and what they have to do in the next hour and staring at their phones on social media.
I mean, like, and we were, I mean, that was even true for us as fighter pilots when we were literally in the sky looking at these objects.
Right.
Which, bad on us, but, you know, we only have so much fuel and X, Y, and Z.
And there's a lot of reasons why that is.
The best, you know, that was the right answer.
Of course.
Yeah.
But it doesn't prevent me from looking back with a little bit of regret, wondering what we could have learned if we paid more attention at the time.
Well, cool, man.
I really appreciate you coming and doing this.
This was fascinating.
Yeah, it was my pleasure.
This is great.
Thanks for having me.
Tell people again where they can find your new podcast and whatever else that you have online people can follow to learn more about you.
Yeah, absolutely.
Oh, look, there it is.
There it is.
Merge Point Podcast.
Merge Point Podcast on YouTube or mergedpodcast.com.
We're going to start airing our first episode tomorrow.
It'll already be out by the time you hear this.
You can also follow me on Twitter at uncertainvector.
And yeah, I can't wait for you guys to see it.
That's incredible.
How'd you come up with the name merged?
Well, that's how we saw these things, right?
We have a merge with them.
A merge is a fighter pilot term when you get close enough to an object to visually ID it because you're uncertain of its origin or its makeup.
And so we go to merges and dogfights all the time.
And that's when we go nose on, we get as close as we can.
We merge plot, which means the radar operators can no longer distinguish our radar contacts on their scope anymore.