First Connection
After listening to Elizondo explain the reality of UFOs, the next thing that caught my attention was the US Navy’s encounters with these objects — the source of the three videos that circulated in late 2017.
Much has already been said of these encounters and their videos, so I encourage you to look into them. Rather than fully re-tell them, I’ll just provide a basic overview and my thoughts.
Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2.
Nimitz
In November 2004, the extraordinary happened.
The USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was performing training workups along the coast of Southern California when two of its radar operators — Kevin Day and Gary Voorhis — noticed a few anomalies.
Concerned their new Spy-1 radar was malfunctioning before an upcoming deployment, they recalibrated it to clear the presumed “ghost tracks”.
But the opposite happened. The returns became even sharper. Day, a top-gun trained senior radar chief, noted the “weirdness” of the readings. He had identified them at 28 000 feet tracking south. The objects would move at 185 km/h in groups of 5–10, maintaining close proximity to each other. Voorhis mentioned that they also appeared at 80 000 and 60 000 feet, and that their radar cross-sections didn’t match any known aircraft.
Upon receiving these returns, Voorhis would run to the bridge to personally observe the anomalies. While he couldn’t make out details, he noticed their erratic movement — hovering before instantly “darting” between points. He noted their “glow” was easier to see at night.
After two weeks of confusion, Day felt the objects warranted investigation. He advised aircraft be deployed to identify what they saw.
Radar operators informed top-gun Commander David Fravor about the situation. They told him they saw objects hurtle from at least 80 000 feet (the radar ceiling) to 20 000 feet. The objects had been reported at a height exceeding that of most civilian or military aircraft.
On this day, operators had observed an object move from 80 000 feet to 50 feet above the ocean — in under 1 second. Fravor, his co-pilot Alex Dietrich, and their two weapon systems officers, disregarded their training exercise. The two jets were assigned a real-world tasking: intercept the anomaly.
Arriving on scene, Fravor noticed a churning in the water. He then saw a large structure slightly beneath the surface — comparable to a Boeing 737. Above this, he saw a tic-tac shaped object approximately 40 feet long. The object — which he assumed was a craft partly due to what looked like landing gears — was behaving as Voorhis had described. Fravor compared it to a ping-pong ball in a cup, zipping instantaneously between vectors.
And he was not able to lock on it.
Fravor directed his co-pilot, Alex Dietrich, to maintain overwatch while he flew down to investigate. He said the object seemed to “notice” him and “mirror” his position. He claimed, “it was aware we were there”. After briefly circling each other, Fravor made an aggressive manoeuvre to intercept. The object then “disappeared — gone”.
It had shot over him and out of sight.
Dietrich called the episode “unsettling” and felt “vulnerable” in their perceived defenceless. They both maintain that the object radically outperformed their brand new F-18 super hornets.
Roughly five seconds later, the fighters were informed that the object was back. Only this time, it was at an encrypted rendezvous point — 60 miles away — in a location known only to the team.
Returning to the Nimitz, a replacement team deployed to investigate. While unable to establish visual contact, pilot Chad Underwood acquired the now-public “FLIR” UFO video using his onboard sensors.
More Details
There were several other things about this case that jumped out at me.
For one, it was also recorded by the E-2 Hawkeye, an aircraft outfitted with its own radar. Operators such as PJ Hughes were similarly perplexed. Hughes said that the object “formed up” extremely close to their craft, and that five people saw a “tic tac” with their own eyes.
For another, there were quite a few individuals attached to this incident, or the set of related incidents. The backgrounds of these individuals were quite varied — pilots, radar operators, police, suppliers, technicians.
For example, in one instance prior to the tic tac encounter, former Master-at-Arms Sean Cahill and his colleague claimed to have seen a series of anomalous objects, engaged in a swirling and disappearing act. In another, a former photo lab worker saw a dark, triangular vehicle larger than the Nimitz ascend from underwater, then fly off at very high speed.
For a time, there were even rumours that sonar operators had detected underwater objects moving twice the speed of the fastest submarines.
As well, the TV show “Unidentified” revealed that there was a culture of fishermen and nearby locals that had also seen these anomalies.
Specifics aside, I couldn’t help but feel there was something to this.
Clearly, these people were serious.
Clearly, they were trying to communicate their experience.
I could imagine one person misidentifying, even another flat-out lying, but I couldn’t imagine all of these people risking reputation for… what?
And though grainy, the “FLIR” video confirmed it actually occurred.
East Coast Encounters
As well, between summer 2014 and March 2015, naval aviators stationed on the USS Roosevelt reported almost daily encounters with UAPs.
They witnessed objects with peculiar characteristics, such as hypersonic speeds, high altitude capabilities, and no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes. Notably, pilots reported these objects staying airborne far longer than was typical. As Lt. Ryan Graves stated, “With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
This mystery deepened when one such object passed between two Super Hornets inside of 100 feet. Nearly colliding, the situation escalated to a serious safety hazard for aviators. An official mishap report was filed.
With further encounters prompting questions among the pilots and higher-ups, these reports triggered a shift in how the Navy addressed such encounters, resulting in the release of new classified guidance for reporting unexplained aerial phenomena in 2015.
The Navy even validated these encounters. As Joseph Gradisher, the official spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, stated “the Navy designates the objects contained in these videos as unidentified aerial phenomena”.
Elizondo
What I noticed about all of this: Elizondo’s relationship to the sightings.
Finding these reports credible, I was intrigued to see that when Elizondo would speak about his work with AATIP, he would often cite these cases. While I already found him fairly trustworthy, it was another layer of confirmation that he was as grounded as any outside skeptic.
His breakdown of these cases added to them. It was clear that he not only understood them well, but had formally investigated them with AATIP. Lue had an easy rapport with the witnesses, and over time, I felt demonstrated a real scientific knowledge of the topic. He explained that AATIP had determined “five observables” typically associated with UAPs, those being:
Positive Lift: the apparent defiance of Earth’s gravity without any visible means of propulsion or the effects of aerodynamics.
Instantaneous Acceleration: the capability to accelerate or change direction so quickly that it defies current physics.
Hypersonic Velocities: moving at speeds that would normally induce heat and sound waves (sonic booms), with no signatures.
Low Observability: the ability to manipulate how they are perceived, including cloaking from sight or radar.
Trans-medium Travel: the ability to operate in various environments (air, water, vacuum) with no change in performance capabilities.
Lue also provided a context I hadn’t considered before. For example, he would explain that such incidents were actually a very big deal — the US military prides itself on its ability to maintain battlespace awareness and readiness. Hundreds of billions, if not trillions, are invested each year to ensure that capability holds and expands.
Lue communicated the gravity of folks like Fravor and Graves reporting as they did. These are high-performers, among a select few that get to go through elite training. Not everyone gets to serve and become a pilot. Few of those get to be fighter pilots. Only a tiny fraction get to be top-gun pilots leading crews on an aircraft carrier. It’s no small thing to be in-charge of million-dollar weapon platforms — entrusted to win wars.
While it feels cliche to say it now, I gathered that these people actually are qualified observers. Serious money goes into their training. The chances that they all misidentified these objects seems more unlikely than the identical accounts they provided. Call me crazy, but every person that stepped forward seemed normal — hard-working professionals. I think we should listen when they organize, risking their jobs and the well-being of their families to communicate stuff they didn’t ask to see.
Simpler Than Expected
I recall thinking at the time, and still today, that this was actually fairly straightforward at the level of an individual argument. Only one question was needed to highlight the non-human nature of the Nimitz case:
Did they see an engineered object?
While there is a truth either way, if somebody would agree that Fravor probably observed a manufactured thing, presumably a craft, the chances of it being non-human in origin become extremely high.
It doesn’t mean “alien”.
BUT.
It does mean something in that camp.
Why? Because humans don’t have this technology. Debate it all you want, but the prospect that we developed multiple, operational anti-gravity tic-tac shaped aircraft, with no conventional characteristics, prior to 2004 (such as in the 90s), seems extremely unlikely.
Especially when nobody knew where they came from.
And it seems we still don’t.
No paper trail, no rumours. Nothing.
And based on the information that the jets were fresh-off the factory, we can assume the craft did not belong to a foreign government. Consider too that, almost 20 years later, the US military still has nothing like this.
Finally, early on, Elizondo stated that determining if it was domestic or foreign technology was among the first things AATIP did.
I’ll save you the trouble: it wasn’t.
Crazy as it sounds, the simplest explanation is an engineered object. Probably an intelligently-controlled craft. There is no other rational way to explain the “awareness” aspect Fravor described, the solid and static structure of the object, the landing gears, the advanced performance, and the knowledge of the encrypted and far-away “CAP” point.
More, I believed then and I believe now: we cannot reasonably call this a misidentification. We cannot call it a new species or ball lighting: there is a video of the object, after all. There are far too many quality witnesses. To label this anything other than what was described is to reach.
Can’t we just open our minds to this?
Thanks for reading!
Now for Part 4!
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