The following is a conversation with Commander David Fraver, who was a Navy
pilot for 18 years, and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as
the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.
He's also, famously, one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO,
an identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac,
and the incident more formally referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident.
His story, corroborated by several other pilots, from my perspective as a curious scientist and
an open-minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm
aware of. He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to. I put out a call for questions
on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many of the questions that people posted as I
could. And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure if the world wants us to and if
there's more questions to be had, we'll talk on this podcast again. Quick summary of the sponsors,
Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to
get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and
UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general, is foreign to me because of the high
ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost,
but an open-minded one, often looking and thinking outside the box. I'm often disheartened by the
closed-mindedness of the scientific community. And in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of
rigor and basic scientific inquiry and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists. I believe
there's a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds should walk. I think
we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars and the nature of reality
and the nature of our very own minds. The path to understanding can only be walked humbly.
The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology,
whether human-made or alien-made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to every scientist
and engineer on this earth. There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that,
once understood and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings. Paradigm
shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes and allow
ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints on innovation placed on
us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing,
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look up to have done. People who've done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different
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of spending time on an island alone with potentially no hope. The natural question is if I could,
what would I bring to this island? The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing. The first
thing that popped into my crazy mind, which is the introduction to algorithms book also called
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is an impossible chaotic mess. I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months,
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get a discount and to support this podcast. And now finally, here's my conversation with David
Fravor. You're a graduate of the Navy fighter weapons school. Yeah, I am. But are known as
Top Gun. Yeah. Let me ask the most ridiculous question. How realistic is the movie Top Gun?
So it's funny, we used to joke and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said this,
there's two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic. One,
there is a place called Top Gun. And number two is they do fly airplanes there. Other than that,
I went through in 97, class 497. And there's actually a log of every single person that's
went through, kind of like a SEAL training. There's a list. So people, because there's a
lot of posers out there, I was a Navy SEAL, no, you weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun,
you can actually go to Top Gun. And matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the real patch,
you have to have gone there. So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real.
There's the real ones are controlled, the people that make them honor that. And when you go in,
they look up your name, if you want to get one, they look up your name, you just tell them,
they go, okay, here, no, I'll sell them to you. If you are not on the list, you ain't get no patch.
Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go through. But it's, for me, probably one of the
best experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent. It's very, very
challenging. But it's what we all signed up to do. So it's just the entire group that is,
when you want to be that level, where you go, everyone really cares and everyone really wants
to be good. Is it competitive like in the movie? No, it's, when you go through, it's, you know,
if anything, it's more of the students, you know, and then there's the instructor side.
And the instructor sides are really, you know, they're guys that you know,
they just chose to stay up and fall in. And it's extremely difficult job, because they have,
they have a very small tolerance for not being good. So they're brief, the guys,
when they give a lecture, so let's just say there's a fighter employment lecture,
which is one of the hardest ones. It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture.
The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, they call them murder boards,
where he's scrutinized by his peers and he practices. By the time they actually stand
in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized,
and they don't even turn around, they just click and they know them in order. And they repeat the
same thing over. It's, and it's standardized. So they are extremely, extremely standardized when
you go through the school. And there's a reason for that, because what they're doing is they're
training. So when you come out of Top Gun, you're called a strike fighter, weapons and tactics
instructor, okay, so your SFTI. When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the
weapons schools on the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons. And then you visit
the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that. So there's a, there's a reason that they
are extremely particular when you go through the course. It's, it is literally one of the best
things. And it's not, it's not a rank based thing, because think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a,
you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander. The lieutenants, the hierarchy, well,
used to be, I don't know how it is exactly today, but I imagine it's the same. The hierarchy is
actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily ranked. So when the tactical decisions
are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in the Fallen ranges, they set the top
X number of folks that have been there seniority wise, and I mean, time wise, are the ones that
actually make the decision. And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and
everyone comes out from the staff, they all speak the same language. It's, and it has to be that way,
which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded. So it's just a, it's an
incredible group of individuals. So there's a bar of excellence that,
that the instructors demand? Oh, very much so. And they're held to it. So it's not a, hey,
I'm now an instructor so I can do what I want. There is a standard and they have to live up to
that standard. They have to, and I mean, every moment of every day. So if they go someplace,
if they go from Fallen and they come down and do, they're called site visits where they come down
and they'll come to Lemor, California, which is where the West Coast fighter wing is at for the
Navy. And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on some
of that knowledge. That's that same high level of standard. It's, they can't just drop your guard
because you wear the top gun patch and people know that. And they wear light blue shirts. So
it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there. And, you know, and then everyone else who's
been through the school, including them, have the patch on their sleeve. So there's a standard that's
expected when you come out of there. So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years? Yes. Can you briefly
tell the story of your career as a pilot? Yeah. So, you know, first I was enlisted, I was a Marine.
And then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy. So it's always
better to be lucky than good. But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I've had that
dream to fly. So when I got selected, they've always dreamed of flying. Yeah. Since 1969,
when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember
watching it. I was just prior to being five. And I said, Oh, yeah, it's so cool, mom. And she said,
well, you know, they were all pilots. And then at that point, it was like, I'm going to be a pilot.
And if you knew me growing up, because I was a little bit of a delinquent,
people are just like, yeah, right. I used to joke, I'm going to fly, I'm going to fly jets,
I'm going to drop bombs. And if people that knew me as a kid, they would be like, yeah,
and they'd be like, not a chance. And then when I did, I actually had a, this is a funny story,
and I'll get to it, and I'll finish my career. But I was at my cousin's wedding and we all
grew up in the same neighborhood. But we kind of, they had Italian side of the family. That's
how we grew up. So it was my house right down the street. It was my cousin Chad. And right around
the corners of my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff. The guy two doors down from my,
I was a paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all knew me. And I went to my cousin's wedding,
and he, and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor, I go, Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes,
you fly jets, top gun and all that. I go, yes, sir. I figure he'd be in jail by now.
And it was kind of a, to me, it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on. And I kind of
overcame that. But what do you attribute that to? So you, I've heard you before and just now
say that it's better to be, it's better to be lucky than good. And you talk modestly about,
about just being lucky. But if you were to describe your trajectory, maybe in a way of advice,
like retrospectively, how'd you pull it off to be like, to be truly a special person?
And the easiest way is one, never, never take no, don't let anyone put you down and say,
you can't do it. Or those, I mean, I knew, I knew what I was capable of inside, you know,
and if I really believe if you want something and you want to do something, then you, you can
achieve it. Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball, and I really wanted to be in the
NBA, there's a realism that says, I'm five foot eight, and I got like a really short vertical
leap. And I'm really not that good at basketball. It's probably not ever going to happen no matter
how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is. Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast,
you know, I'm not that big. It's just physically, I'm incapable of doing that.
But there's things that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and strength,
but it's, it's mental. And I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a
fighter pilot. Matter of fact, you don't. It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly.
80% solution is typically good enough, because if you overthink it, you're, you're behind.
And then in an air to air fight, that's what happens. People try and overthink it. And before
you know it, because it's happening so fast, you, you don't have, you can't get to the nth degree,
you know, six decimal places. 80% solution is good enough.
You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution. Just.
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the 80% solution.
I love that. If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what,
like if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really,
really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this. And then I know that if I do a maneuver,
if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do a, if he doesn't do a, he does some degree less
like BCD. And then I know how bad his, his error is. And then I capitalize. So mine might, I don't
have to be perfect. You know, I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees, nose high.
If I just kind of get above 40, then I'm good and I can watch over your acts and then I can adjust
for that. And you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away. Cause if you
start neutral, you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage
till eventually, you know, and if you're really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only
rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy, kind of World War II dog fighting type stuff,
then it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at,
you know, 400 knots, 300 knots depends. So to get, to be one of the rare individuals that
are able to do that, he just had the dream and didn't take no for an answer.
Well, you know, you know, part of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a fire
already aim guy, you know, he'd smack me and then ask me what I did wrong.
Yeah. Good parenting.
Back then, you know, I, I joke and, and people look, cause you know, at times it was kind of
tough, you know, cause he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, you know, I probably needed
to be rained in a little bit at times. But then everyone else, my family, you know, my mom was
really awesome when I was a kid. My, my grandfather, who is a big, big part of it, my mom's dad,
who, he taught me a lot. And you have a question there that we'll talk about, about him, but
huge, huge influence, very, very positive. And a lot of the stuff that I do today,
and decisions are based on things that he taught me. And, you know, I figured, you know,
it was the first funeral I ever went to, and it was about three miles long and church was
overfilling and people were out. He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious. And you go, someone
asked who died the Pope. So a lot of people loved him. So back to, back to my career.
Yeah. First question, cause I'm getting down at rabbit hole. No, I, when I was at the,
I was going to, I was going to stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man, I love the core. I
think it's of all services. It's that one, everything is in a ball. And they're very,
very professional. And it was a great, great organization to join. But I went out to the
Nimitz on my freshman cruise. After your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship
and you, you're an enlisted person. You get to experience that half when I already was enlisted.
So it's fine with me. Because it comes up a lot. You mind saying what the Nimitz is,
what a ship is. Yeah. So Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. So it's four and a half acres of sovereign
U S territory that floats around the U S oceans. Does it have weapons on it? The air wing is
really the weapons. It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part, it's a giant
moving airport is what it is. So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off.
And I'm like, Oh, and the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a VF 41 and
a 14 squadron VF 84 and a 14 squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons. And we actually
ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a six pilots and BNs. So it was really a
neat experience. And I said, I want to do that. And the way to do it was to not to go in the Navy,
because there are marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are
land based, you know, to support the Marines, because they're that, that unit, that whole unit,
you know, the Marine Corps is at one surface as at all. And so when I graduated and I got to,
you know, I worked hard through primary and that's where, you know, I knew Missy, we were in
the actually went through together, Missy Cummings, we went through primary together. And then I went
to Kingsville, we all selected the same time I went to Kingsville, there was another guy, Scott
Weedemire, the three of us. So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beaville and Missy went to
Meridian. So the three of us that we had all went through, we got, we selected out of primary
together, we all ended up going jets. And that's that's, besides from school, I knew her at school
too. The long story I got done, got winged, it took me two years to the day from the time I
graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings. And through some luck, I ended up getting ASICS
is on the West Coast, which is a side by side bomber. So it's a pilot on the left seat and
the bombardier navigators on the right seat, it was built in the 60s. It is all weather,
and it flies low at night, it's got a terrain mapping radar.
How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for the public?
Yeah, that's fine.
How many fighter jets are side by side like that?
That was in the Navy, that was the only one. The Air Force, the F-111 was a side by side,
but the Navy, it was the ASICS. And then there's the E-A6B, which is a derivative of
that. Now that those are all gone. The E-A6Bs just went away a few years ago, and now the
E-18G Grawler is the replacement for the E-A6B. There was never a replacement for the A-6
that I flew. It really became the F-18, which the A-6 could go quite a bit further,
distance wise, by fuel than the Hornet.
The Hornet is the F-18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually like
in front and behind?
In the modern two-seaters, yes. But most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single
seat. Single seat is just one person.
One person. With the exception of, I'll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the
exception of the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two-seater,
and the G is also a two-seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say, full up fighter,
bomber. So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18 year career, was it two-seater?
That was about half and half. So I started off in A-6, was a two-seater. Then I went to single
seat F-18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and, let me think, 2001, to the end of 2001.
And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets, and I've flown both of those,
the E's and the S. But I deployed when I had command of VFA-41, I had the two seat. They were F-squadron.
So you eventually ended up commanding the Strike Fighter Squadron-41. I love the name,
the Black Aces. What, is there some parts of that journey that are amazing,
parts of it that are tough that kind of stand out? To me, it was, one, it was a huge honor,
and I got to serve with, you know, I got pulled up because the guy, the people that are exos,
because we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number one guy. So the exo becomes the
CO. So the executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had worked with,
now soon to be Vice Admiral Weitzel, was the, he was commander Weitzel at the time, was the exo,
and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets
came into LeMore. LeMore had been a single seat fighter community since the, forever. And now
all of a sudden you've got the F-18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators in the back
that are not pilots, they're weapon systems operators, and there's a difference.
And Kenny is a weapon systems operator. And Kenny knew because of my A-6 background that
I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat, one seat, two seat, because when you fly two seat,
there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take the advantage of the weapon
systems operator. And it's not that one plus one equals two in that environment, because it really,
there's a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that
comes for the ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies.
But it does, it does equal more than one. And I would say that one plus one with two people as
well is a minimum of 1.5 because you've got an extra head, you've got extra eyes, you've got
someone that can monitor systems, the airplanes can do two things at once. I mean, there's an
incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.
Can we just pause on that? Just for me, from like a human factors perspective and also an AI
perspective, what's, how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people, there's also a third
person that's the AI part, the some level of automation, like autopilot, maybe even, that's
correct. Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions
really quick, 80%, how do you deal with another brain working with you? And then also the automation.
Is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn? And also as that changed throughout your
career, I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms of the automation or perhaps not?
Well, I can tell you, so that let's start, no, this is, this is good. This is good. And this
is, you know, I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than
a tic-tac. So let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the
sixties. All right. And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the
interaction between the pilot and the bombardier navigator. So we would fly low at night in the
mountains. So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington. So you've got the Cascades and
incredible amount of time. And we would get in the simulators because unlike, normally people
think terrain following, and there's the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it'll,
the radar can see and it'll fly, it basically flies a straight line. So it goes up and over
mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual.
So you do this low level routes where you're going to, you're going to fly in the mountains at night,
you're going to be at, you know, 500 to 1,000 feet above the ground, ripping through like fog
layers, because you don't need to see outside. You're, you're literally flying a little TV screen
and a radar. What are you looking at most of the time? So just as a screen? It's this really
primitive. If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really
fun. So is it similar to like the FLIR stuff? Is that? No, this thing is totally radar-based.
Now the airplane had a FLIR ball. It's a target recognition and multi-sensor. It was called a
tram. So you're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects? No, actually what it is,
is the, the bomb of your navigator had a radar and he was getting raw feet off of a pulse radar
in front. Okay. So it's just basically mapping the mountain. So if you look at a mountain on
a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be, it's going to give you a
really bright return. And then the backside, it's just going to be a giant shadow because you can't
see on the other side. So the bombardier navigators would do that and they would have charts and
they could shade their charts knowing that, hey, if we turn a little bit left here, we can get in
this valley, we can sneak up this valley and then go around the backside of the mountain,
which is what the airplane would do. And sorry to interrupt. I'm going to just keep asking dumb
questions. I apologize. But the pilot, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the
bombardier? So you're actually just controlled. I'm flying the jet. I have the throttles, the stick
and I have a, it's about a probably a four inch or six inch wide by maybe four inches, five inches
high. It looks like it's literally a CRT. That's how old it is a CRT screen. And what it would do,
what the radar would do is the, the, the bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking
out about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scoped down
because the radar can see a lot further. He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're
in the terrain mode where we're dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is there's,
they're called range bins and there's eight of them. So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half
mile, you know, and the closest range bin it's a thing. It'll be like between like a half a mile
and a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile. The next one might be three quarters of a mile to
two miles. And then it just keeps going out like that. So if there's a mountain in front, let's
say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles and we, we're just
driving right at it. So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar
is going to see it on his scope, my 12, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show like a
big bump like a mountain. And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show
it. And I could see that that bump was moving towards me. And then if I turned a little bit,
you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over to the right hand side.
And I could do that. But it wasn't like a video game. It was, it's literally like,
if you think of the original Atari's. Yeah. But you build up, I imagine that you start to get
a really deep sense of like the actual three, three D environment based on that little Atari's
it's here exactly right. And you have to, you have to train. So there's been studies.
As a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people will probably argue with me, but it's true.
There were studies done watching a six crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST, the weapon
systems trainer. And it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and you just, you could
fly these things and add train that they would inject into the system. But the crew coordination.
So you get, so my first fleet, Bombardier Navigator, who I'll name him, his name is Crusado,
he's works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad. I think computer engineering, he's scary smart.
So Chris could really work, and matter of fact, all the guys that flew us. So there's another
guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP, we did our first night traps together.
The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things that you just, you're never going to
forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together and we were actually the most junior crew
in the squadron, we'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the
system. One, because he was extremely brilliant and he was had that inquisitive mind of, oh,
we can do all these different things and there's all these degradation modes.
But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get because, and it's,
you almost talk in partial. So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say,
I've got rising terrain, that's just what they say, showing rising terrain at 12 miles.
And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, got it. This is going to go to your question on the
autonomy and how you work with two heads. So when you first get together, the interaction,
it's almost like you have to rehearse it, you have to know, and you talk in full senses.
The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, I'm showing, and he'd get like rising out.
And before he finished, I'd say, I've got it. So you end up starting to talk in partials because
I have to trust him like, I mean, there can be no, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do
his job because I'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous
picture of that mountain moving. Remember, the mountains here, and then it's going to pop up
here, and then it's going to pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system
was set up. Remember, it's an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can't see all
the way to the left and he's got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn't show that.
So he's telling me, start a left turn, or start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that.
So my truck is all happening quick, very quick. Well, you're doing, we would typically fly between
420 and 480 knots of ground speed, well, 427 miles a minute, or between 7 and 8 miles a minute
is what you're flying at night. I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember him and I flying,
we were on its IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low, they're all around
the country. There's IR344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, fly from the
land, you go out over the ocean, turn around, and then you could practice actually coming in on a
coastline. And we were flying and we ended up in the clouds. Keep in mind, we're between 500 and
1,000 feet in the mountains and we're in the clouds, like, you can't see anything. And I had to turn
off our red lights that flash, you know, they're called the anti-collision lights, because it was
reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you, it just gets annoying. So I turned it off
and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying, we break out of that coastal marine layer and
we break out and it's a decent night. And this is right by Mount St. Helens, this is kind of
where we're coming in. So we're coming in from the east and we're just north of Mount St. Helens is
where the route goes. And you look up, you know, because you can kind of see the silhouette of
this mountain that's right next to you, but you're flying along here just like, you know, you got to
trust. And you can see houses, you can see the lights, they're above you. We're literally below
people's houses flying down these valleys and stuff. So just incredible experience. So when you take
that and then you move into an F-18F. So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in
this century and you're flying. So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we're not doing those
night low levels, but that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what
you're doing is you're sharing the load. So most of the communications that go out of the airplane,
the WIZO does all the talking, he's got actually, he uses his feet, that's the weapon systems operator
in the back of an F-18F. So he's going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we
have a situational awareness display and it's linked to all the other airplanes.
Just a curiosity, what's the situational awareness display? Because that term comes up a lot.
Think of it as a God's eye view. So if you have a, the back of the Super Hornet has,
well, the Block 2s has about an 8x10 display for the WIZOs that they can look at. The pilot's
is smaller. It's down between, it's a 6x6 between his legs and they're getting ready to redesign
that Boeing is. But when you look, it'd be like if you put your airplane and you're looking down.
So all the stuff, like if your radar's seeing bad guys out in front of you, be like looking down,
going, oh, I'm right here and now there's bad guys out here and my wingman is over here and it shows
everything. It's just like, it gives you, you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where
everything's at. I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy, it shows you all this. It's
an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of
what's going on because it's happening so fast. And this is with that autonomy piece. This is the
third brain. So we're all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion. It's pulling stuff
together going, oh, this is all this guy. This is this guy. This is this guy. It's sending it out
through the link. So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network,
you know, that we don't even see. It just says, that airplane says, hey, I'm over here and it
tells us and we go, oh, he's right there. And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I'm looking at
this airplane, this bad guy, and it shows us, oh, he's over there and he's looking at this guy. I
mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot, but when
you look down at stuff itself, you know, you can sell the picture really quick.
The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and gives
you a big picture view. What about the control? Like, is there, and I apologize if this is a
dumb question, but you know, people use the high level term of autopilot. How much is there,
let's use a loose term of AI. How much automation is there? How much AI is there in helping you
control there? The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls.
So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly. And when I say easy,
it's relative because people go, I can do it because I did it on flight sim. Real life is a
lot different. In flight sim, you have no apparent fear of death. You'll do things in a simulator
that you would never do in real life. But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage,
I mean, because you think about it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data. You've got a
targeting pod that's feeding you data. All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got
a joint helmet mounting queuing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit
so it can tell where your head's at looking. So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will
actually look to the right. The targeting flare will look to the right. And oh, by the way,
the back cedar has a helmet on too. So he can look to the left and he can do things. So depending
on what sensor he's controlling, so if he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left,
the targeting pod looks left. But if I have something where I want to lock a guy up that I
don't see that maybe the radar didn't see, but I can get over and now point the radar,
you know, get the, because it's a phaser radar. Now it doesn't really scan.
There's all kinds of cool stuff that technology brings because if you just, if you went back 30
years and said, hey, you're 40 years ago and said, hey, we're going to have this helmet and you're
going to be able to slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean
literally you're just going to map magnetic resonance and go, oh, look, and then I can literally
slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer, you know, high quality coordinates
from a system into a joint, you know, a JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS
bombs that you see all the time and then let that thing fly. And I'm solving this problem in seconds,
vice minutes, or, hey, I got it, we're going to have to menstruate coordinates and you know,
you bring back the data and then they do all the targeting for it and then they send another group
out to get it instead of all that. Now it's that fast. So there's a, okay, I mean, we probably
don't have enough time to talk about the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are
flying a control in the plane. But at a high level, this is a really interesting question
for people who don't know what they're talking about like me, which is what is the difference
between a human being and an AI system? Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI
technology for control in the plane? Like how much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have
automated flight, for example? Like what is the hardest part about flying that a human does
expertly that an AI system cannot in warfare situations, in flying a fighter jet line?
So I would say AI systems are usually black and white. When you write the algorithm for an AI system,
it's really, basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really
what you're doing. So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are, there's a line,
it says, I can or I can't. And it's a very finite line, but you can go up to the line where a human,
we all have gray areas where we go, maybe, I'll try it.
So humans can operate within that grid? So if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just
take a hornet for a while, a super hornet, doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go,
here is the flight performance model of the airplane. So if you know an EM diagram is the
energy, so it basically says the airplane can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this,
it can pull this many Gs, force of gravity, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
And then based on the airfoil design and everything else and how it can pull,
here's how it's going to fly, you know, because it's really physics-based. Well, if you, depending
on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight,
right? You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope,
where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally departed
the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is that's where the
human goes, can I do this? I know it's outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that.
So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes
with digital flight controls, they're extremely forgiving. I've done things in Super Hornets
that literally even as a pilot inside the airplane, you're just like, wow, I cannot believe it just
did that. It'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I guess in a way you could probably
program it, but I still think that when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage,
there are things that a human will do that AI won't. And I don't think we've got to the point
because how do you map illogical solutions? Most AI is logical. It's based on some type
of premise. When you write the algorithm to control it, there's bounds. Yeah, there's this
giant mess. Like you said, the difference between the simulator and real life also gets at that
somehow, that there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play.
Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sally landing
that plane famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some...
Well, it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6. So
one is when you're flying with a crew, there's standardization. So you got to remember when
Sully flew when his first officer, that's the co-pilot, showed up first time they met. And this
happens all the time in the commercial world. There's six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines,
your chance of flying with the same guy all the time is slim and none. We're in the Navy,
we were crewed. So I had a primary and a secondary whizzo that flew with me.
For months? Oh, yeah, for like all of the deployment. So because you want to...
These brains to use trust and all of those things.
It increases the capability of the airplane. It's not to say we can't swap out,
but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex missions like a forward air controller,
we're in the air actually controlling ground assets and supporting ground troops.
If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you do that.
You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you're going to be ineffective.
So when you get to the commercial world, and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial,
there is a standardization. Like we know that at this point, I'm going to put this switch,
you're going to do that. And everyone, they know their roles. Captain's going to do this,
first officer's going to do this. And they know that when the emergency breaks out,
so in Sully's case, when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem, and if you've
listened to the cockpit recordings of him, the two of them talking, you got to remember,
they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes, but they're also talking to the air
traffic controllers in the New York area. And it's like, we got a bird strike and the first
officer already knows, hey, silence the alarm, they silenced the alarm. The first officer is
pulling out the book. He's going through the procedures while Sully's actually flying the
airplane, knowing that they've lost their motors. And you got to think of his decision process,
like they're trying to get him to go into an airport in New Jersey. And he realizes,
not happening, we're going to put this thing. And he made a decision soon enough
so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was going to put this thing in the Hudson
River. And he did it flawlessly. I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck. The
only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, you know, and it got fished out of the Hudson.
But what is it about those human decisions you had to make? Is that something you put
into words? Or is that just deep down some instinct that you develop as a pilot over time?
It's when we, when you train, you know, an aviation is a self-cleaning oven. So if you make bad
decisions, you're, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making
bad decisions. So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial
industry and the Navy and the Air Force for all that, we have what's called, we have emergency
procedures that we have to know, like the engines on fire, the first three steps, you just have to
know what they are, right? So they know the airline, same type, you know, they go, Hey,
I know this is they pulled a book out because the airplanes are designed, they're built to have some
time. But there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second guess it. So when
he decided, I'm putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go,
well, maybe I can get over to that airport. He looked, he made a quick assessment. This is
that 80% solution where you go, these are not, you know, it's like a multiple choice test when
you go, Oh my God, I don't really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong. Gone. So the Jersey
Airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone. So what's my next option? Well, the Hudson River's
there. That's probably looking pretty good. Or what is my other one? Can I get a restart on the
motors? And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else? He had to make really,
really fast decisions. And then once they as a, they go that 80% solution, you realize, all right,
I'm going into the Hudson, there's the 80% get the book out. Let's see if we can get an air start
because if you listen to the tapes or trying to get it air started, the closer he gets to the water,
the more he's going, I'm ditching the airplane. So the original decision to this is my best option
right now. This is where I'm going. And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change
the events, which they tried to do. And then he gets to that last minute says, we're going in the
water, they changed the plan, they secure the airplane, they do exactly what they're doing.
And he does that basically flawless landing on the, on the Hudson. But you got to remember,
every, it's every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research in the airplane
in the simulator, were they trained to the airplane being broken, you just lost a motor,
you just lost another motor. So they go through this extensive training, you know, and all these,
and it's, you know, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave, where you're going to get
in, because you know, that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator that the airplane
is going to break, you're going to lose hydro, and it's sometimes they're a problem like, oh,
I just lost this hydraulic system, but I'm having an issue on the other motor. Well, if I shut down
this motor, and I've got a hydraulic, you know, because there's two hydraulic systems, one on
each motor, well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system, and my right motor
is starting to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down because that's going
to kill my hydraulic system, that's good. And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic
system, and with a hydraulic, the airplane won't fly. So they, it's a really, they're challenging
problems that you have to think through in real time. And of course, the weather's never good,
it's always dark, it's always crappy, you're going to break out. I mean, it's just,
all this stuff gets compiled on top of you, and it's intended to increase the level of stress,
because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke, it's going to stem power,
you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down, and you are literally on
instinct like an animal. Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction
that you're going to have, when the main part of your, your, your cognitive ability start to shut
down, you're, you're running that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly
what to do. And that's literally how it happens. So there's no, how do I put it, fear of death,
like in Sully's case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his decision is
wrong, a lot of people are going to die? You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say
there was so much going on at the cockpit in that time. His, his mindset was probably,
I can do this, I'm trained, I'm going to do the procedures, I've practiced this before,
I've done these things, and I, you know, I'm assuming that in his mindset, because I never
thought about when things were really bad, you know, if you're having problems with the airplane,
that, you know, that I was going to mort, you know, and, and plant it into the ground, it was
always, you know, maybe it's an ego thing where you think I can do this. So you never, have you
experienced fear during flight? Like, I mean, one, one way, we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson,
I mean, he talked about like, as he's walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically
in fear. And, yeah, worried about how things are going to go. I mean, it's purely to put
in towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and
grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could
defeat me. So like that's, that's his experience of overcoming fear. But do you, did you experience
any kind of thing like that? Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to
the training, and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?
I wouldn't say I was never afraid. I think that would be, I couldn't tell you that anyone I know
that wasn't afraid at one time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just,
it's usually especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no
moon and the weather sucks and the decks moving, you know, the ship's going up and down because
it will scare the ever living shit out of you. Can I say that?
You can definitely say that. So it's about landing and take off that?
That is if you, even the, they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam,
you know, guys that go flying missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was
going on and people were getting shot down a lot. The highest anxiety and heart rates were coming
back to land on board an aircraft carrier. How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible,
like for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that.
The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night just like day. I mean,
there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, whoo, you know, this is not that bad.
But you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with you're driving in your car
and it's just a, it's, it's an overcast, dark night and you're on a country road with no
side lights. Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of, oh my God,
because you, what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark,
you know, and you can get outside a, you get outside of the city and get up in New Hampshire,
especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good.
It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million, because you have no depth
perception. What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving.
Up and down and left to the right.
Yeah. Oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move. And we have two systems,
you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually, it stabilizes with
it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship. And then there's the ILS. Now civilian pilots
will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope, you
know, you come down, you, it's like a plus. On the carrier, it's not, it's really just a beam
that goes out and it's considered a non-precision approach. It's, it's not stabilized at all that.
And I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the, and the, the tack and needle
will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving because the, the base that it's all sitting on
is doing this. And ships don't just go up and down. They, they, they do this. So the bow goes
up and down in the tail, like you normally see a ship. And then there's, so that's pitch.
And then it has roll. So it's doing this. And then it has heave. So the whole boat
is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling. And you're going to land on that.
So, and it's, I mean, I remember landing, I was with Chris Sado and Chris and I,
we were off the USS Ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into
razor blades. We're flying the old A6 and we come in and it was off of San Diego. And it was just
the ugly night because San Diego always has a marine layer that is about 1200 feet. It was
lower than that that night. And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's
thunderstorms all around. It was just the craziest night I've ever seen off of San Diego.
And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean,
you literally can't stop. And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked,
we call it the six pack. So it's right in front of the island. So if you've seen
aircraft carrier of the island and the number of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of
that and we're looking at the landing area. So it's like you get front row seats to the concert.
And, and this, this, this EA6B comes in, you know, ugly pass. He ends up catching a one wire,
which is the first one you never want to catch the first one. It means you're not really high
above the back of the ship when you landed. And it comes in and the exhaust on an EA6 or an A6
actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft.
That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see across. I mean, I could see the
front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white because of the water being blown
off the deck. And I'm shaking and I, I'll never forget, I looked over at Chris and I said, oh
my God, I go, Hey, dude, man, 10,000 foot runway looks really good right now. And I go, and I'm,
I'm shaking my hands like this. And I said, I'm not even, this is, I'm not faking this, dude.
I go, that's literally, I cannot stop shaking. I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me.
Yeah. But you, but it scares you afterwards. You don't, during it, you're not, I'm not,
you don't have time to think about that. You're doing it. You got to do,
as we know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what's that, the girl's baseball movie,
where he goes, there's no crying in baseball. Well, that's our joke. There's no crying in
naval aviation. I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night. But, you know,
there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it. So you cry all you want,
wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it's, it's time to, it's time to,
you know, man up and land, land a jet. Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the,
the kid that dreamed to fly. What's it like to fly an airplane? What, it looks incredible.
As a human, like a descendant of eight, I sit here on land and look up at you guys.
It seems incredible that a human being can do that. You know, people ask, you know, I'll be
sitting around with my friends and they're like, how was I? I said, the greatest job on the planet.
I said, you know, it's, it's an office with a view because you're sitting in a glass.
You, you can do, you know, it's like roller coasters. You go, oh, it does all these cool
stuff. So we take people flying every once in a while. And it's like, oh, yeah, I like roller
coasters. Like, oh, no, take any roller coaster, coolest roller coaster you've ever been on
and multiply it by a thousand. I said, it's an experience, you know, to put your body under,
you know, you know, the jets rated at seven and a half, but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses.
It depends on fuel weight. So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight Gs.
To be able to do that to your body, I mean, it takes a toll. Like I can't really turn my head
real good anymore and stuff like that. But would I trade it? I mean, it was a childhood dream.
And how many people get to do that? You know, professional, I want to be an NFL, you know,
and you end up to the NFL, which is a very small percentage. Well, I want to fly jets and, and
to fly, you know, at the time when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had on our squad and
were brand new, like literally right out of the factory, I had come off our first Super Hornet
cruise. We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were building my new jets that
I was going to get and actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it
together. So I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet together that's going to get delivered
to me in a couple of months that I'm going to fly. So just, I mean, the whole of it is incredible.
I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away.
Yeah, do you miss it?
I told myself I wouldn't. I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command,
your flying really starts to tag to come down. You know, even if you go and you're an airplane
commander, which is we call them CAG, carrier group commander, you're not flying as much as like the
normal pilots, nor should you be. I mean, there's young people that are coming up and it's training
your relief because that's the next generation. So like currently, I have friends of mine that we
serve together, their kids are flying Super Hornets, right? So to me, that's really neat because I
watched them when they were little. And now, you know, one of them who was good friends,
I won't get his last name, but Joey, who lived down the street from us,
was a top gun instructor. And I'm like, hey, Joey's a top gun.
You know, and I'm like, that's cool. Because, you know, I went there and I knew him,
he would come down to my house. And now to see these kids that are, because typically military
breeds military, you know, because the kids grew up in it. I mean, and I, the only reason that my
son is not doing it is he's colorblind. So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a seal,
because he'd talked about doing that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff
and water polo player. But he's, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and
my son's in his third year or so. But there's a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective,
a bittersweet handover of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation.
So you don't, you told yourself you're not going to miss it. You miss it?
There are days I do. When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over,
but I have all the memory. So I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever. You know,
Tom Brady can't play football, but there's going to come a time where he has to stop.
I know, he seems to have done it for a long time.
But, you know, typically when you look at ego, I had the opportunity,
and I think as automation moves on, especially with AI, that, you know, when will, when will
the last manfighter be built? You know, and that's that big question. You know, we just did F-35.
It's over budget. It's seven years late. There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it.
And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the Air Force is working on with
smaller, cheaper, a treatable platforms that you can go, oh, we can, because if you don't
put a man in the box or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this too.
So, I'll just say that as person.
Yeah. So, we say man and he, we mean both men and women, because offline,
you've told me about a lot of incredible women that've flown.
So, I had, I had three, three female, but actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore.
She actually lives right around here. She, she's, she ended up going into aircraft
maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore. One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly,
she's one of the most gifted people I've ever met in my life. She is the Vice President of
Amazon Air. You can see her on TV. Her name's Sarah. Incredible. And then I had a page who
ended up taking command. She got out of fighters and went into other platforms.
And she was a commanding officer. And then the other one is a,
teaches leadership. And she is, all three of them, actually all four of the women that were
direct. I'm hoping not forgetting. I don't think I'm forgetting someone. Incredibly, incredibly
talented and a great addition to the ready room. So, anyone who gets into the, oh, you know,
women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. Hey, you know, we can talk about the original
integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy.
So, women can fly as good as the guys?
Yeah. You can't tell if you pass another airplane. You can't tell if there's a man or woman in it.
It really comes down to stick and throttle, the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going
to be, where the airplane would be if you're fighting another one. You have to be able to
think fast. Anyone has those characteristics can do it. And then I think most important besides
that there has to be a desire. And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, because we used to
track, so when I ran, we call it the RAG, it's the replacement air group. It's where, so the
Super Hornet training squadron, there's two of them. There's one on the East Coast, 106, and
there's one on the West Coast, which is VFA 122. 122 is the first one. So, I ended up going there
and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer, okay? So, we tracked the last
100 students, right? So, everyone goes, ah, it's funny to hear students talk because, oh, he's awesome.
If you took the 100, there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally gifted aviators.
They're well, well, well above average. It's like the person in a math class that sits down in
complex math and they just get it. At the bottom, there's the three at the bottom that are going
to struggle and there's a good chance they won't get out. And if they do get out, they're going to
have to work really hard to just maintain kind of average. Sometimes it's just the way your
mind works. Not everyone is good at everything. If you took the 94 of them in the middle, they're
within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there. They're all, you know, it's a, the bell
curve doesn't look real good. It's just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone's right
there within one mean deviation. And then you have the outliers, usually not on the high side
because they're going to get through, but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through.
So, for the most part, the Navy does a really good job as does the Air Force of screening. So,
now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and you started. Now what you do is you actually
go fly a Piper Warriors low wing to see, are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation
that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go and then they put
you into primary. It's kind of like a, it's like a pre-check, you know, like the pre-SAT,
the pre-SAT to go, hey, how am I going to do on the SAT? It's very similar to that, but it's more
of a hand skill. Can you adapt? Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not,
you know, we, this is, you know, this is all has depth with all that where it's really relative
to aviation. We are two-dimensional, very two-dimensional. Can you explain that? So,
so our perception is actually more limited than the, than that of an aviator? Very much. And here's
why. Yeah. So, we look at, let's look at a tall building. Let's look at one World Trade Center
in New York because that's, everyone knows what it looks like, big tall building. That's what,
maybe 1800 feet tall, even the Burj El Dubai, which is like, what, 20, some 100 feet tall,
it's not that big. So, a super hornet to do what a split S is, which is I'm flying, I'm just going
to roll the airplane upside down and then I'm going to do basically a C, the letter C. I'm going
to go in the top and out the bottom. So, and I'm just getting basically a vertical displacement
of the airplane. So, I'm going from high to low. It's very, very tight and it doesn't in about,
roughly about 2,500 feet. Give or take a little. So, you go, that is, that is a really tight vertical
turn. Yeah. For example, the A6 in order to do that was about 9,000 feet. And we look at a building
that's 2,000 feet high and think that is tall. Right. All right. So, in aviation sense, when
you're starting to do vertical displacement maneuvers going from 35,000 feet down to 20,000
feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane because the human brain thinks
we really are, we like to be flat. I see what you mean. We think 2D. So, if I'm fighting,
how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane is to work in the
vertical because most people will do like one move in the vertical and then they want to start to
flatten out because that's where we're comfortable. Yeah. So, do you still think in like stacks of
2D layers or no? Or do you, do you truly start to think in that third dimension, like the rich
3D world of like a fighting? Like, do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3D
nature? You do because you have to project where you're going to be. So, you have to know the
performance of the airplane knowing that, hey, if I do this maneuver that I'm going to go, it's
kind of like when I talk about when we were chasing the Tic Tac. So, the Tic Tac's coming up and I'm
at about, you know, and I've been doing this for at the time 16 years. So, I'm looking and I'm going,
hey, I'm here, he's there on the other side of the circle. I'm going to do a vertical displacement.
I'm going to go like this. I'm going to cut across the circle and I'm not going to him. I'm
going out in front of him. I'm going over here because I know that by the time I get through
this maneuver, that's where he's going to be and I'm trying to, you know, basically join up on him.
But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this because what I didn't,
if we're here and I do this, I'm going to end up over here and he's going to be above me and then,
you know, I have to get that energy back to get up to him. And when you're doing a max performance,
it's a trade. So, you have, this is, this is really important when you're, when you're fighting
airplanes and you're really max performing. So, when you go to an air show and you see the air
demo, he's literally playing with it. He's got a finite amount of energy, right? He can add some
with the motors and stuff. But what you're really doing is it's a trade-off and you can trade off
kinetic energy, speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other piece is, is I can
trade some of that kinetic energy for performance because I know if I do a nice easy turn, the
airplane will make it at what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot
split S, that it's going to cost me energy. So, if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right,
I'm going to come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots. Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential
energy, I converted that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in
order for me to get that high performance turn. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're
at and it's your overall energy package. So, you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like
he's going to kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's
just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds, right? It's overall energy
package and that's that you got to be constantly evaluating where you're at. And this is that
80% solution. Can I afford to do this or not? Yes, no. And you have literally a split second to make
the decision. The most incredible dance of human decision making is just incredible.
I know a million people want me to talk about tic-tac and I definitely will, but let me ask the
one last ridiculous subjective question. What's the greatest plane ever made in history?
You don't get to like... From pure speed, I would say SR-71, I think it's an engineering marvel that
was actually developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, you know, Skunkworks. For what that was able to
do and then when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built the CIA actually made
like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and build an airplane
out of titanium that we would fly over Russia. To me, that's an incredible... Engineering marvel.
I think that like the X-15, you know... By the way, the SR-71 still holds the
speed record of any plane as far as I can understand. Yeah, what's funny when you get
into it is it's... Remember, fast is relative. When I say that, I mean... So if you're going
3,000 miles an hour, 100 feet above the ground, you're going 3,000 miles an hour through...
You know, that's how fast you're going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated
airspeed and there's a, you know, your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really
how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the air is so thin up there,
that you may only be showing like 300 knots. But at 300 knots, you're really doing 2,500
miles an hour over the ground. So, you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet
when we had to do full maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200, you know,
and some odd knots, it's actually slow for the airplane. It's... You know, you're getting...
You know, it's kind of like... It's not... You know, there's maneuvering speeds. You know that
if I hit a certain speed and a super hornet, that I have the full capability of the airfoil.
If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G, okay?
So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast?
When you look at an SR-71 that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet,
the air is so thin, you know, just like the X-15, you can get to much higher speed,
but the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low.
So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low.
But because you're going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that
you're going 300 knots, you're screaming. I mean, the fastest I ever got was I was with the...
Well, soon to be vice admiral White. So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78.
I got a super hornet up to Mach 1.78. And it was... And we were just right by Pebble Beach too.
And then it... What's that feel like? When you get that fast, it started... To me,
it got a little bit weird because you realize in your brain, and I did, that there's no out.
If something happens, I can't eject. The ejection would kill me.
Isn't that kind of liberating in a way? Or maybe not.
You always want to push the limit. You know, it's like how fast... I could have got it going
faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had... It was fuel limited
and space limited because, you know, I'm off the coast of California,
Big Sur and I'm going and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, you know,
the whole Monterey Peninsula. And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute.
I mean, you're screaming. I mean, that's... And then you have to turn... Well,
the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was a slipped off super hornet. So it was basically
just the airplane. No pylons, no pods, no nothing. And then we had to get it turned around
because we got to go to the exit point for the area. And I'm trying to get it down below to
subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled like the speed brakes that normally we
pop out when you're going that fast. They don't... Because the super hornet really doesn't have
speed brakes. It deforms the flight controls. They don't function. So you're really...
You're trying to maneuver and when you're going that fast, you can't turn because a 7G turn at
1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn. So it's just... It's crazy.
It's incredible that a human can do this. And a human can engineer that,
the system, which allows another human to control that system.
To me, it's... I think it's just... It's one... It's a great experience.
Was it sad to see the SR-71 go? I think it was during your career. I mean,
do you guys romanticize the different planes?
We would see it flying when I was flying hornets because we... West Coast flies and it's called
R-2508, which covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards. It's a huge area. It's actually...
I think we had a guy from Switzerland come out because they had hornets and he's like,
this is bigger in our whole country because it's a pretty big area in California that you fly.
But you would see the SR-71s. They had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale
and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington State and Montana and they do a loop.
And so you'd see them coming back down. They descend out of above 60,000. You'd see them...
You'd get contrails, the white lines behind airplanes. They'd come down and hit the tanker
and then they'd go back up. So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.
But I think with money, age, the advent of satellites because they're everywhere now.
I mean, you've got commercial companies putting satellites up. How much of that need was really
there? Because you got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying
around. It was the U2 and the SR-71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was
needed. If you think about it really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time.
Yeah. I mean, literally, we have yet to pass that. And you also asked, well, is there a need
to pass that? I go, I don't know. We got stuff in space. So do we need to make an airplane that
goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put
a person in. It does all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, the work with automation, all that kind
of stuff. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least
in my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO,
literally an identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it,
like, chase it, essentially? Chase it. Chase it. So let me just lay out, I think it's easier than
you telling the story, maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories.
I understand it. And then maybe you can correct me. So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton,
which is one of the carriers. That's a cruiser. It's a cruiser. So you can't land on a.
No, helicopter, has a helicopter pad on the back. Got you. And it has weapons on it. Okay,
got you. It shoots the missiles up. But it has a nice radar. Just incredible spy one system,
phased array, four panels. So it looks in quadrants. Perfect. So they started noticing
on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet with speed of,
what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour. Don't know what that's in knots,
but on the coast of California. And they kept detecting these objects for just about a week.
Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th. From the, I guess,
it's from the USS Nimitz. You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white tic-tac shaped object with
no wings, flying in ways you've never thought possible. And in some interview somewhere,
you said, I think it was not from this world. So that there's a mysterious aspect to this
object, to this entire situation. There's videos involved, the video of a flare forward looking
infrared receiver, as also the visible lights, you can switch. Yeah, as TV mode, as a TV mode.
So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode. And Chad Underwood recorded that video.
And those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later, one of the three videos.
The two other videos Go Fast and Gimbal were recorded in 2000, something 14 or 15,
on the east coast of the United States. They had different kinds of objects,
but they're weird in the same kind of way, in terms of at least the videos and the experiences
that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness. But the differences
is actually on the east coast of the 2014 case, very few people have spoken about it.
And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it. So there's a mystery to it.
But it's in some sense, this is a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery.
And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions, there's division of opinions,
because it's a mysterious, I mean, it truly is a UFO in the sense that UAP,
what is it, an unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you maybe correct me on any of the things
that got wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general?
So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train,
and they canceled the mission, and they sent us on. There's all kinds of rumors out here.
There's all kinds of, after this has come out. So originally, it was the four of us.
There's two jets, two people in each jet, they're F-18Fs. There is no video from our event. It was
all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it, when Chad
and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it?
That's exactly, that's it. So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are
seeing a thing? Yeah. So as we're flying out, we get vectored, they come up and tell us,
hey, we're going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is a Siege's cruiser.
So we're talking to one controller who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance we have
on board. And I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and training typically because
bad stuff happens. Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off
and hits a good airplane and it's not good. So we had what's called a CATM-9, which is really
just a Bluetooth with the AIM-9 Seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile.
So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off of the sledgehammer,
you can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back
in that holding on. When it really fires the impulse from the engine, it actually throws the
lugs forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail. That's how it works.
So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking. So as we're going out,
my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left-hand side of me.
So she's kind of stepped up like this and I'll use your mic box to start. So as we're going out,
they're calling ranges, they're called bra calls, bearing range and altitude, and they're telling
us, hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles. So they're saying, hey, 270, 30,
20,000, that's all they say. So we got our radars and we had to, we had to mechanically scan radars
at the time, APG-73. Good piece of gear, APG-79, new ones way better, but anyway.
And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it's useful, but they're telling you a location
of a thing that you should look at. Yep, they're telling us, they have a contact on their radar,
they don't know what it is, they just have a blip, they have a little blip. Well, they've been
watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're
driving. He says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks. That's, we had been
at sea for two weeks because this is the first time we've had planes airborne and we want you to go
see what these are. Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out.
That's exactly it. So we start driving out there and as we get down to, he's going, you know,
20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles, and then you get to a point where they call merge plot,
which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar because radars don't see everything,
they're, so they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right? So, and it's basically
think of a little cube so they can, and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes
and they're looking. So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same
little cube, then the radar can only see one thing. Does that make sense? So they call merge plot.
Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around, something's around you,
get your head out. So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizards,
the wizards can look, but everyone, it's heads out. When they say merge plot,
you're done looking at your displays inside, you're doing this and you're trying to find it.
So as we look out to the right and you look high and low, because he could be anywhere
from the surface all the way up. Now, keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away,
so it can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey,
it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel. Can he really see, you know,
there are radars that can see around the curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time.
So you go, is it, you know, where is it at? So as we're looking around, we see,
you know, this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no white caps. It's just a
calm. It's actually a perfect day. If you owned a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind
and you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have white
water come out. It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.
How many miles out do you see? Like seven, like you see just, it's a clear day.
That's 50. It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon.
It's just clear. It's nothing. And we're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go
San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that and we're probably about,
by the time this all hits, we're priced, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out,
it's pretty far off the coast. Perfect visibility.
But from 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed. You can do the calculation. You can see stuff,
you know, you'll see land 50 miles away. You know, you can see, you know, and when you're
looking at a continent, it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island. I mean,
you're looking at Mexico. And you can see on the white caps in the water if there is any.
Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or
so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when
we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight,
because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day,
you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call it the verbal, but when the air flows
across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up.
So when you're coming aboard the land, it's going to make you go up a little bit and then
you're going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stand glidesome. So we're pretty,
we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So we look,
there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no white caps. And we look down and we see white water.
So if you put a, if you put a piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like, you know,
even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough as the waves come in, you know, waves have height
and length. When they come in, that's what happens on the shore. When a wave comes in,
it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go
anymore and then it breaks over the top. And that's where you get the white.
So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount, you'll see stuff come in,
the wave will crash and you'll get white water. You can go out when it's high tide
and any one of the coast, you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see
those rocks and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered, but there'll be white water
around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make
sense? So that's what it was. We see, we don't see an object because there's all kinds of, oh,
they saw this, they saw another craft below the way. We didn't see anything below the water.
We just saw white water. But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross.
I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet
below the water. So the wave is breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the
plane is at. You'd see this, this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross. So as we're looking down
off the right side, the back seat or any other airplane, Jim says, this is that talking in
partials again. He says, hey, Skipper, do you, and that's about what he gets out of his mouth.
And I go, what the hell is that? Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? So we see the
white water and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we
see this white water. I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that. And then
we see this little white tic-tac because we're about 20,000 feet above it. And it's doing,
it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, and it's abrupt. It's very abrupt.
So it's not like a helicopter. If a helicopter is going sideways and it goes once, it's going
sideways, left and right, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed, it slows down because
there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way. This thing's not. It's like
left, right, left, right with no... So moving in ways that doesn't feel intuitive to you at all
of the things you've seen in the past. So as a pilot, the first thing you think is,
it's a helicopter, right? So you go, oh, what is it? Because when we see it, it's moving. We're
like, oh, helicopter. So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing
that because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash.
You see it in the movies when the helicopter is by the water, it kicks, the water comes up the
sides because the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that, it pushes the
air down and then it has to come up the sides. So you see it and you go, well, there's no,
there's no rotor wash. What is that thing? So by this time, we're driving around. So as we're,
if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and
we're just watching this thing. And it's just, it's still pointed north-south and it's going
left-right and it's kind of moving around the object. And if it had, if I had to say it
biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east-west and then
the north-south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out.
It's just kind of moving around up down left and it's crossing over it and it's going up.
It's just kind of, so now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check
it out. And the other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here. And I said, yeah, stay up high.
Cause now we get, we get a different perspective. So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending.
She can watch, cause right now all I'm watching is the tic-tac. She can watch me and the tic-tac.
So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important.
You can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is,
it's perfect as the story goes on. Cause it gives us two perspectives, you know,
of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't,
you know, cause if it's just like, oh, I lost it. And they go, no, it's over to the right.
We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12
o'clock and I'm descending and it's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a
really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering. Cause I have, I have everything
available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 o'clock as the tic-tac's
doing this, it literally, it's like, it's aware of us and it just goes, and it kind of points
out towards the West and starts coming up. So now it's obviously knows that we're there, whatever
this thing is, it knows that we're there. So as we drive around it, it's coming up and I'm just
coming down and we're just, I'm just watching it. Now you gotta remember this whole thing is like,
this is like five minutes. This is not like a, we saw it and it was gone or, oh, I saw lights
in the sky and they were gone. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained
observers to watch this thing fly around. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the 8 o'clock
position and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet above it. And it's about, so I'm probably
at about 15 K. I think it is. I think that's my story is about 15. That's just estimating.
So you can see it's really easy to set because- So what's 15 K? 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000.
The other plane ends up about, so they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around
and I'm descending, they're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as they drive around.
Okay. So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the 2 o'clock position. We're about the
8 o'clock position and I'm like, oh, I've got, I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to,
I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to,
I'm going to do this. He's like, go for it, skip, because I was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom.
So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming out. I'm going to meet it
and I'm driving and I get to pry. It's, I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think,
well, a half mile is pretty far. A half mile in aviation isn't, it's nothing. That's, I mean,
you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile.
You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm
basically pointing back towards east. So I'm cutting across because I'm going to the 3 o'clock
position. It's at 2 o'clock and I'm going to meet it at 3 o'clock. So as I do this, it goes,
it just accelerates and disappears. So it's, this happens at around,
estimating about 12,000 feet. So they're at 20. So they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude above
us when this happens. And it just, is it crosses our nose? It just, it accelerates and literally in
less than, you know, probably less than a half second. It just goes, and it's gone.
And so we're like, and I had the first thing is, dude, do you guys see it? The other airplane's
like, it's gone. We don't, we have no idea where it's at. So we kind of spin around, Roque. I go,
well, let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the white water and we
can't, the white water's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I
remember telling the guy in my back seat, I go, dude, I'm, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty
weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had, at the time, like 30 some hundred hours of
flying, I'd been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like anything you've seen. No, no. So
as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on my
real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to, you know, overseas.
So we got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CO, because I got to get,
I get it training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that. So
hey, let's go back. And the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CO, the Marine Squadron.
And so Cheeks is at the other, he's listening to all this happen, you know, because he's just like,
because he, they, when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little Hornets,
the legacy Hornets, the F-18Cs, don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets. So he had launched
first and they were going to do him. And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just
told him, yeah, go to your cap point down south and we're going to send, we'll pass this off to
the Super Hornets. What's the cap point? That's where we hold. So it's called a combat air patrol
point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end.
It's kind of like, hey, you guys are going to, it's a football field. We're going to sit on one
goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say, go, we're going to run
at each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our set
reset points. Okay. So you're talking to him. He's listening to all of us. He's just listening.
We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because they know that we all
know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like, because they canceled
training. So what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles.
So he's waiting for him and his wingman. So they're listening to all this go on.
And then at this point, you move on. Yeah, we come back up to train. We go back. As we're flying
back, the controller, because we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OSs,
they're operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars. And we're talking to him
and he's like, hey, sir, you're not going to believe this, but that thing is at your cap.
It showed back up and just popped up. This is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like,
oh, okay. So we got the radars out. We're looking for it. We get out there. We never see it.
We never see it again. We do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like,
oh, this is going to be, you know, I told him, I told him, I go, dude, you know, we're going to catch
we're going to catch shit for this. When we get back to the ship, word's going to get out and we're
just going to catch maximum shit. And we did. And it's kind of that joking. You know, so the ship
plays movies. We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat because there's
a day check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night plays. So you never get
to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy because I'll watch
stuff on TV that way too. I'll be like, oh, here I've seen this and I'll jump into a movie in the
middle and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put it all together
because that's how we have to do it because we're so busy. Well, the movies became,
it was Men in Black, Aliens, Independence Day.
Definitely going to catch some shit. But let me just ask some dumb questions. So just taking
because it's whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened, it's, you know,
you know, one of the most fascinating things, events in recent history. So whatever it was,
it's interesting to talk about it, different kinds of angles. There's no good answers,
but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here. So first of all, you mentioned, see,
you saw it at some point, X, Y, and then somebody in the Princeton said, you're not going to believe
this, sir, it's at your cap point that that's a different place. How the heck did it know what
your cap point is? That's a good question. And that's the one if you don't, you know, you don't,
we don't tell it, we don't broadcast it, we have a waypoint in the system. But I don't know,
maybe it knew where we were going because we use the same one day after day after day.
But it, it obviously knew. But you never saw it there. Never saw it there. Chad,
when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, hey, look, we just,
we just chased this thing. They're like, well, I go, chase it. And they're like, well, I go,
dude, I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, so, and that's how he is.
He's like, I'm going to go. And he was, he was determined that he was going to find this thing.
So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn't out that they don't see because
not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward-looking
infrared receiver. I'll probably overlay the video. So when he, when he goes out, it's,
you know, what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically two radar displays up.
He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one.
So this is called the ASL display. And this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the,
you're at the bottom of it, you're at the bottom of the square. It's really taken this,
it's taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out.
So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this, they square it off.
So, so he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because when he's
not trying to lock it, so the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it, you know,
it's a Doppler radar. So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing. It's going,
hell, I can see you, I can see you. And it's looking for return. So he gets a return,
so he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square unless it builds
a track file on it. But a little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving because it's,
it's sitting in one spot in space. He locks it up when he goes to lock it up. Now he's putting
a bunch of energy on it, but he's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight and whatever
is there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is,
how fast it is, and the direction that it's going. Okay. The radar smart enough that when the signal
comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.
So that's all it is. As you send the signal out, something, it manipulates the signal,
either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back. And the radar was smart enough to go,
that is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me, I'm being jammed.
And it shows you, and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar, and it does some stuff.
So you can, well, it does, it goes full into, it's being jammed at about every mode you can
possibly see, because everything comes up and the, this aspect gets along, it's all kinds of,
I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. So, and it's-
As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right?
Active jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it's technically an act of war.
It feels like you should be freaking out at this point. I mean, so, well, he does it,
and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle, they have what their side
stick controllers, so they can control all the sensors, and they can just toggle around and do
stuff. So, he can, he has the ability to just move one switch real quick, and it will go from
that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod. Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to
look at that target, the targeting pod goes, oh, what's over there? And it'll stare because it
goes down the line of sight, because all the systems are hooked together. You can decouple
them, but they're going to automatically couple up. So, when he castles over, it's a switch,
it looks like a castle switch was a castle. So, when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps
the displays out, and he says, instead of looking at the radar, I want to look at the targeting
pod, he sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pod is already looking there.
And now he's on a passive track, because he's not literally sending any energy out. He's just
receiving IR energy from the tic-tac, and then the system itself will track the pixels and the
contrast differences. It depends on what mode you're in. So, it says, oh, and that's what those little bars
you see in the video where the bars come up left and right. There's doing some vision-based tracking.
That's exactly what it is. So, and then he goes through. Changes zooms, changes the mode. He goes
through all the modes. So, there's the narrow, medium, and wide. So, wide is far away, medium,
and then narrow, and then there's the TV mode, and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode. The cool
thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode. So, you can actually get closer
with narrow TV mode. It's got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode. So, he goes
through all those things, and that's when you see it going from a black background to a white
background. Trying to figure out what the heck is this? Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much
data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going, what is that
thing? So, the video has been out. It actually was on YouTube for years before the government
released it. It was leaked in 2007. The guy that was in my backseat sent me an email, and I had
retired. So, this is about, nope, because I was working down in San Diego. So, this is about 2008,
early 2009. He sends me a link to Strangeland.com, which is not suitable for work. Oh, yeah,
it's top notch. Yeah. And he says, hey, I can remember the email. Hey, Skip, does this look
familiar? And I look at it, I'm like, how the hell did that get on Strangeland.com? So, next thing
you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube link to someone.
You don't send Strangeland.com to someone because you don't know what you're going to get. It's
like Googling kittens. Yeah. So, it ends up there somehow. So, it gets on YouTube, which was cool
because I would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they'd go, dude, what's the coolest
thing you ever saw flying? It's kind of like you were asking what it's like. And I go, oh, dude,
I chased a UFO and they're like, get out. And I'm like, no, serious. So, this is literally how it
happened. So, I was sitting with my friend Matt. So, Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right
seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trap, right? And we were friends to this day,
right? Because when you do stuff like people like that, you know, you had to have faith in him,
he had to have faith in me, you know, they become like your brother. And these are guys that literally,
you know, I don't talk to them on a regular basis like Chris who works at Apple. If Chris called
me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help, I need this, I'd be like, all right, let's figure this
out and let's do it because it's, they're like family. You do it. And most Navy guys, we don't,
we're not, we don't send letters to each other weekly. You know, I have friends that could,
I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door, you know, pop a bottle of wine,
grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes to catch up. And then it's, it's like
old times and it's, it's amazing how fast this happened. So, incredible. So, I'm out to dinner
with Matt and I'm telling him this story and he's like, get out of here. So, he goes back and he
tells our friend Paco. Paco has fightersweep.com. It's a blog site. So, Paco's obsessed like he
is way into UFOs. So, Paco calls me up. He says, dude, I was talking to Maddie. That's what we call
him. He goes, I was talking to Maddie. He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story. So, I'm like,
all right, so I spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and I'm like, I get a voicemail.
Hey, give me a call. So, I call him up and he answers the phone but I can hear people in the
background and I go, hey dude, what's going on? He goes, hang on, hang on. I got to put you on
speakerphone. I go, what do you put me on speakerphone? He goes, you got to tell the story. I'm
having a dinner party. You got to tell the story. So, he's literally having a dinner party with his
cell phone in the middle of the table as I tell a tic-tac story. So, he calls me up again. He says,
hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff like he wrote about, we call him
the shit hot break. That's a guy that when you're landing on a carrier comes and turns and gets ready
to land really fast, like breaks it off right at the back of the ship. And one of the guys,
when we were junior officers on the USS Ranger, one of the department heads of the other squadron
is the guy, Nasty. And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit
hot break, right? So, he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there's
another guy or MAV was our, one of our landing signals officers for the air wing. It's just,
it's just, it's a good article on how this was and how, you know, it kind of forms you in naval
aviation. It's kind of being part of the club. So, he's like, I got to write about this thing.
I'm like, what do you guys, I got to write about it. I go, all right. I go, because at first,
I would say, no, I'm like, dude, I don't want this out. They're just-
So, you haven't really before then talked about it much?
My wife didn't even really know the whole story.
What? Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some-
No, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days, we had the incident for about two days.
They played the goofy movies. There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule
that they would put. It was like, first one was a far side and the second one was
me and the guy in my back seat and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know,
protecting the Nimitz battle group type stuff. It's just funny shit like that.
So, to me, it wasn't that big of a deal. It was like, okay, that's where we're never going to know
what it was. I want to get out, because this is important, because there's all kinds of rumors,
there's a group of folks. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.
Nobody looking like me came out on a helicopter. No one came out on a helicopter. No one came
out on an airplane. You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified. What's funny is
all the COs and several of them are still in the Navy. There's one that is a- I think he just
finished up. He was the captain of an aircraft carrier, you know, so he'll end up making admiral
and all that stuff. Those guys are all my friends. I talk to them daily.
Just to clarify, so just for people who don't know, there's a story that both on the Nimitz
and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed, they showed up, they took the data,
quote, unquote, so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident, and they took it
and presumably deleted it. There's a kind of story to that. And then from what I've seen,
you said that you believe just like we were talking about offline, that jokes spread faster than-
or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships, that it might have been a joke
that started and- Well, they did. So here's the joke. So they had come down, right, we had the tapes
and they were Chad's tapes. So we use those tapes over and over again.
They're consumable, but remember, I have a budget as a squadron, so I have a budget. So I have to
buy those tapes. All that stuff that we use, I'm accountable for. And the tapes are actually
classified secret because of the data that's on them. So we had the tapes. So the intelligence
guys, the Intel officers came down from what's called Civic, CVIC, which is Carrier Intel Center,
came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These guys are going to come and get them.
So we're like, oh, whatever. So we hand them the tapes. And then someone, because I have,
you know, people, shortly after they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said,
you know, they're messing with you. They're playing a joke. So I said, oh, let's see how well that
goes because, you know, I'm a CO and they're not. And so I went down to Civic and it was a,
I think he was a Lieutenant or a Lieutenant JJ. So he's way junior to me. And I said, hey,
I want my tapes back and that he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are pulling my leg. I know
you, there's no one came out. And I go, and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before
I start tearing this place apart. That's literally what I told him. And I said, and if your boss has
an issue, he can come and see me because it's not going to go well. I said, because it's bullshit
and I need those tapes. Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet and opened it up.
They weren't to save. He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled him out and handed him to me.
I said, and I basically said a few things to him like, don't ever fuck with me again.
And I left. I had the tapes. So this, no one came out. There's no flying going on when all
this is happening. And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes. So I took two brand new
eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor too that, oh, the original
FLIR video is 10 minutes long. And there's some, one of these petty officers is saying, I saw it.
That's total crap. The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the
release video is the entire video. So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things,
please correct me, but you, you have mentioned that like on Rogan, I think that you watched it
on, you know, on a bigger screen. It felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the question,
is there a higher definition version? Do you think of the FLIR video that would give us
more pixels and more information presumably because of the high number of pixels?
I would doubt it because I don't know where, the stuff that the government released,
I don't know where they got. Okay. So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube,
you know, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like a rack. You know,
there's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive
and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube. No, it's just like, you know,
anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets
it degrades. So this, you don't know how many times this has been copied. So we were looking,
the videos I've seen are right off the original. They're high eight tapes. It's basically pulled
off the back of the display. So it's not filmed with cameras. It's literally a digital feed.
It's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape. That's how the recorders work.
Now it's actually digital to digital. It's not even on tapes anymore. It's a digital recording
system, but we were still in that process of slowing up because originally we had little
cameras here that shine. So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays. So this is,
it's a pretty good feed. When you put it on, so we're, instead of looking at it on your tiny
little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on a like a 19 inch because it was still
normal TVs back there. We had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought
so we could watch movies. A nice huge 19 inch screen. It's maybe 20. It was nice. Wow. That's
huge. It was gigantic. I can get for like 50 bucks and get like 60 inches. This is 2005.
So you look at this big thing and, but you could see, so when you get to the TV mode,
when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those.
It was very clear. But in terms of the actual visual on the tic-tac, was it,
did you get much more information from the higher, from the clear?
The little things out of the bottom. So the bottom of information. So when you see it,
because he's coming almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little,
you know, like if you look at a session, there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom,
kind of like that. There's two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on the top.
There was no plume, no IR, no, no visible propulsions, even heat signature, you know,
it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the
radar display, which that really raises a classification love, especially to see what
the radar does when it's being jammed. You know, as a matter of fact, when they did the
unofficial official investigation in about 2000, and let me think, about 2009,
I'd gotten a call on my cell phone from a guy who, government employee, and said, hey,
told me who he was. He's still in the government. I'm friends with him. And he said, hey,
we're going to investigate your tic-tac thing. This is literally five years later. Yeah, five
years later. And I said, okay, whatever. And he did a pretty good job. I caught the unofficial
official report because it was really never official. It wasn't. But I'll give you the
history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests. So he does the report,
he sent me the report. And all he said is, hey, I'm going to send you this report,
please don't distribute this report. I said, okay, the report is now out because Harry Reid got
it to George Knapp. And they were good enough to redact it, but there's a few versions of it
unredacted. And I'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this. So Jim has
talked, but he's off the grid. He doesn't talk to anyone now. The pilot of his airplane,
she has come out unidentified, but they don't release her name, although people are starting
to do it. And she's had weird shit happen around her house. She's got kids. So I'm very protective
of her. And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that the names ever came from
you, I will never talk to you again about this. And Jeremy's been really good about it. And so
is George. And then, but George, George knew the names were because he had, he got the report from
Senator Reid. And then the other crew. So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that
Chad was in, if you talk to that individual, they really don't have the recollection. They were
just out flying that day and it wasn't a big deal. So it's, it's you, you need to protect because
not everyone wants people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door. And you know, and
there's rumors all you talk to everyone. I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to
total. And that includes, you know, the, the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective
because there's so much, I mean, if I turned down like, I turned down Russian TV, I can give you
her name when we're done here. She called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called
my daughter, she called my son and she called my son in law because they're persistent. So I'm,
I'm pretty protected. I'm very particular. I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is because I knew
we would have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic-tac and the incident, but we could
actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people
involved to go, because I think there's, you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or
Chris Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that, that whole thing was, that's to the
stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLong group that got started. So you go, well, you know, because
I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him, he's,
he's, he's very smart. And I asked him, how'd you get into this? And he goes, oh, when I was
traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of books when you're laying in a van as
you're driving to your next gig before you make it big. And he goes, and he read, he was reading
books and he read one of them on UFOs. I'm trying to think the title, that's one of the big ones
that's out there, real popular. And so he started just, he started asking more and through his
fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more connected. You know, if you talk to Chris
Mellon, who is an undersecretary defense for intelligence, and he's part of the Mellon,
you know, dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart. He knows, he, he, he,
he definitely knows how the government works because he worked there. And so when I went down
to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson
about a month ago, a month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me. I texted him, Tom, Lou, to go,
hey, because they were like, you got to do it. Because I turned to, I had turned Tucker down
a couple of times before and his, his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it.
Because those guys are like, you got to, you got to do this for us.
So from my perspective, just to give you some context. So to me, there seems to be some stigma.
So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today.
And I think the people who listen to this include, you know, fellow faculty at MIT and major
universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from, from the scientific community.
A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting.
But you don't even know, one, you're afraid to talk about it. And two, you don't know what the
next steps are. Like how can we seriously try to think about what you saw, how to think about
how we further look for things like it, how we develop systems and plans for how in the future,
we can immediately collect a lot more data and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate,
try to interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective. And I just would
love to remove stigma from this subject. Well, I think that's the first step. We have done in
this country an absolutely terrible job with these things. So you go, and I joke, you know,
go back to Roswell. So the first reports that came out of Roswell was, we have this crash
flying saucer. That's literally what came out. And then magically the next day, it's a weather
balloon and they're showing your pieces of mylar. And you go, well, that doesn't look like what they
showed us yesterday. Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series
about Project Blue Book. But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things.
It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove. To the point
where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look. So there's always been this,
this, I don't know if you'd call it an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs that if you're
talking about them, they're nuts. With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy. I'm not a junkie.
If you asked me, do I believe that there's life outside of Earth, I would say you probably have
a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than we're the only planet that has life on it
in the universe. It just, the odds are against it. If you're, if you do just do the math,
you have to accept, because if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it,
and then I win and you lose. And the more and more science has shown that there's habitable planets
out there, that yeah, everything we've learned so far, we know very little, but everything we've
learned so far about the planets out there, actual planets, Earth-like planets, it seems that it's
very likely that there's life out there. Intelligent life is another topic, but life.
Well, we, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says,
we are it. And you go, not so much. Maybe we're not so intelligent.
Because we are, it's just how we learn. So, you know, our main mode of transportation and what
people figured out, you know, years ago was the internal combustion engine, which led us to jet
engines and solid rocket fuel. What if you're in another planet where you didn't, you figured out
the ability to create a gravity field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are
becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, catapults on ships were steam powered and the
new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic. Roller coaster used to use a chain to get you to the top of the
hill. Now, they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going. So there's a whole new realm
of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support
theory. You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently theories that Einstein had where
people actually joked about them. And now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity
can bend light. You know, we have proven that. So you look at that when you go, well, does that
mean that, you know, 70 years ago, Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago, Einstein was wrong? Or do
you go, we just didn't have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find something
that we could to actually measure and, you know, and I've seen this. And that's just 100 years.
And the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries. Look at what we've done in the last
20 years. Yes, crazy. All right. Let me direct, because it's such an interesting topic from a
career perspective, from a science perspective. You're, I mean, you've spoke, you've been brave
in, you know, telling your story, not some dramatic thing, but just telling the things you've seen.
Did it encounter, did it impact your career? Is that why more people haven't come out? Like,
you mentioned, Roswell, like, how, what advice do you give to people, to the community, to me
as a scientist, for ways to go forward about this topic and still have a, you know, not being
put in a bin in society that he's a loon or she's a loon or that person.
Mine is to get away from the little green men, just to divorce the two little green men. And,
you know, I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this, you know, and the group that they're working with,
which is incredible. I mean, they've got Steve Justice, who used to run Skunkworks, where they
built, you know, projects. Now, Lou Elizondo, which you mentioned, was a program director.
He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon. And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating
any kind of, you know, your followers, your APS. So what's funny is the unofficial official report
that I joke about. Yeah. The guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an
original member of ATIP. And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt. And people go,
how do you know that? I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are,
it literally, I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's why
the, that's why I call it the unofficial official report. It was never, it was never releasable,
because people go, well, I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go, well, just because
you put in a FOIA request and get it, I go, because how much, how much time do you think that
guy's going to spend to get you the information that you requested if he can't find it? I actually
got called by the Navy. I had a commander in a Navy call me about right before the article came out
in the New York Times. It was, this was starting to come back and she had called me because there's
been, there was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident. And I said, do you know of
anything she called me? She goes, do you know of anything else besides the, the situation reports
that come off the ship? You know, and you got to remember when the situation report comes off the
ship, that's like third hand. So we tell someone, they tell someone that person has to write it up.
So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it. But then there's the unofficial official report that's
actually pretty well written. There's some errors in it, but it was, you know, I didn't help write
it. I just did it. And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the
zoo and the players. So she called me and said, is there anything out there? And I said, officially
out there, she said, yes, I said, I don't know anything. I knew of the unofficial official report,
which is that one. But I'm not, you know, if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you
because that's not my job. And nor did I care. I mean, in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou,
I mean, did you think about your impact to your career? Just to get back to the question,
did you think others, other pilots, other thing, other people like in the Roosevelt are thinking
about this kind of thing? Why aren't they talking about this? Why are people afraid to talk about
this? Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust. I'll just tell you that right
now, we typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, you know, especially
when I do even the TV shows, you know, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it,
you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours. And then what you see on the screen
is five minutes. Well, and the, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective
from autonomous vehicles is the clipping happens. Yes. But also the incompetence. Let me just call
out journalists. They're not thinking. I mean, so here's the thing. I've, I have a PhD and I've
taken painfully too many classes from like physics and math. And I've also have a deep curiosity
about the world. I read a lot. That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to
a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting way, not the story,
but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed
in history. Like you, it might have been nothing. Who knows what you witnessed might have been from
a sort of debunking perspective, might have been some kind of trick of mind. You and others have
hallucinated something that could be some simple explanation, but possibly it was something not
of this world. And to not do justice to this story from a scientific perspective, it seems
at best negligence. And so yeah, that's true for journalists. That's true for other scientists.
It's just a human nature. If we, if we can't, if we see something that we can't explain,
then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's just me and you let it go away and you don't think about
it, you know, maybe it'll just, you know, it's, it's, you ignore it. The other side is the inquisitive
mind that says, well, what was that? And I want to, I want to dig more into it. You know, and if
you, you, you look at it or you're going against the norm, you can get ostracized, you know, and if
you look at, you know, Einstein's the perfect example. I mean, when he started coming out with
some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you're, you're a
nut job. And he's, he's literally proving them, but he didn't have, you know, he proved them in
theory, but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory.
There's a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim Gates
that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally
validate the predictions that Einstein made with, uh, with his theories. It's fascinating.
But yes, at the time it's kind of crazy. What are you saying? Yeah. If you look at it back at the
time, don't we, we look at it now and go, well, the guy was a walking genius and he was, but if you
go back in time when he was doing it, it was like, what are you talking about? You know, and, but
one of the challenges is your eye witness. One of the challenges is you're essentially an eye
witness account. Like we don't have good data. We have very limited data of, uh, of the incident
that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of, uh, maybe
to see if there's just to paint more and more of the picture. One, you kind of mentioned to
take tack shape. Let's break apart two situations. One is the video. Let's look at the actual
eye account, the, the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes. What's the, what can you
say about the shape of the thing? Is there interesting aspects outside of the tic-tac?
Like, is there any appendages? Is there, um, some texture to it that? No. Smooth white tic-tac.
You know, we don't, you don't see, there's no, no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows,
no probes that we could see. We don't notice, like I said, we don't see the little things
on the bottom of it until we see the video in the TV mode when it zoomed in right before.
It's shortly, you kind of see him zoom in. You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's
out there. Um, but remember we're looking at the original tape. So there's not, there's basically
no degradation. But when you saw with your eyes, there's no kind of appendages. No, none.
What about like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions. So, uh,
I appreciate you spending your time here. Let me ask some of them. Uh, did you, I mean, you
chased it. So when you flew close to it, relatively speaking, was there, did you feel
any wake, like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?
No, nothing, nothing. So, uh, another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've
developed a feel for, for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival
or did it, let me ask a few questions around it. So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised?
Did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability? Did, uh, and did
what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, um, uh, an air fight against, uh, sort of
like a, I don't know, a foreign jet? So one, I think it, I think it knew we were there when
we showed up. It's just, it's me. Uh, it's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in
a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the
field, it'll actually go, no threat and it'll start eating, you know, they don't put their tail
up. As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there and I'm going to react or I'm going
to move. So as we were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing, um, you know,
which I don't know, someone asked, what do you think? I don't know, maybe it was communicating
with something. I joked on good morning America. Maybe it's like talking to the whales,
kind of like Star Trek, you know, and actually use that clip. It was kind of funny, but
yeah, we're a little human centric. We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us,
but maybe he's talking to the dolphins. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was to whatever, you know,
because it was hanging around that white water and I don't know if it was, or something there
was a seam out. We just didn't find it again. I don't know. But once we started to descend and
it actually reoriented its, its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up and it was
obviously where we were there and it was really coming up just, you know, you figure I'm at 20
and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12 where I cut across the circle. I think it was
very aware that we were there because it interacted. We call it a two-circle fight when you're fighting
another airplane. But, you know, was it, was, were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me,
it was more curious. You know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have. And I
always felt, to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time as
I'd spent inside the airplane, flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a safe zone.
I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can't, if you're in the
airplane and you feel scared, it's not the job for you. You have to feel that because the airplane
is part of you now. You know, I am inside. I have the stick. I have the throttles. I've got my
wizard in the back seat. He's running all the displays. We are a team. We're in the state of
the art airplane, you know, brand new. You feel pretty good. And then you get something that,
you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did, like it was like no big
deal. You know, for an airplane, if you just put me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight,
just get me at 100 knots above the water. And for me to, you can't just start to climb. I'd
have to lower the nose. I'd have to accelerate and then I'd have to start coming up and
this thing just like, just did it like it was like no big deal.
Yeah. You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was it,
like it's something that you would love to fly almost. So this object, just the curiosity you
experience is like, like, what it almost like, what the heck is that piece of technology and I
want to fly it? Like what made you feel like it's something that you could fly? Do you think it's
something that a human could fly? Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology,
because another perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing.
And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like,
I don't think it was a projection. I think it was a real object.
It was an physical hard object that could be fly.
Oh yeah. Yeah, I think all four of us will say the same thing. It wasn't, this was not,
because you go, okay, let's just go on a, it's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting
next to each other, we were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that and I go,
oh, okay, there's a, in theory, you could have that. But with an 8,000 foot altitude difference
flying, you know, and there, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of
hanging out watching this whole thing happen. You know, you're getting two different perspectives
from two different altitudes over a clear blue. You know, if you've ever been at sea, and I don't
mean like coast, I mean, like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest. It's incredible.
You know, you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean. You got pretty high contrast.
And for this thing just to disappear, it wasn't, I'm telling you, I would, I mean, I know we,
we all have the same recollection of what happened. You know, there's some details
because it's so long ago, but for the most part, we know what we saw and we all came back and looked
at each other like, what the hell was that? What if, I mean, do you think about the thing under
the water that's not often talked about, if there's something under the water, couldn't have been
something gigantic? It could be. What, like, do you ever think about- It's the abyss.
Big ship comes up. I mean, that's why as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean,
my mom was an Olympic swimmer. So like, I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim
because the abyss, it could, anything could be under there. Like, there's not enough focus
on that perhaps because there's no visibility, but is there anything interesting to say about
the possibility that was anything underneath there? Could be. I mean, think about it, if you're
going to hide on this planet, where's, what's the least explored spot on the planet, two-thirds
of it's the ocean. There's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the 777, it was
the 777 that crashed, you know, they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just
disappeared and they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it. But you would think
there's large objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke
up, there's big pieces that would be, you'd find something, they haven't found anything except what
floated. So to hide something underwater, I think would be easy. So, okay, let's go a little bit
in speculation land, but it's the best, it's the best we can do, which is the basic question of
what do you think was it? So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human-created
technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomena? You know, like ball
landing, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things we probably just don't really understand.
Is it, like I said, some perception cognition that led you some kind of hallucination that made
you to misinterpret the things you were seeing? Let me put those things on the table. Or is it
misinterpretation of some known physical phenomenon like an ice cloud or something like that? What
do you think it was? Oh, it's definitely, I don't think it's an ice cloud because ice clouds don't
fly around and react to you. Do I think it was a light? I'd say no, because of the aspects and
what we looked and watched it do. I'd say no. What do you mean by light? Like a light ball,
some type of perception. There's their experience, like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go,
I can see it, but it's really not, it's plasma. I don't think so. You would see distortions,
I think, as it moved. Maybe not. I mean, I'm not a theoretical physicist and I'm not an MIT.
I would say, no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it when this
happened. No, I think it was a hard object. It was aware that we were there. It reacted exactly
like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly what I would do.
It mirrored me. It wasn't aggressive. There's taco. It flopped behind us. It was never offensive
on us. It never did that. It just mirrored us. So as we're coming out, it's just like you're
kind of, you said you do martial arts or wrestling. You see people out on the,
when they get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling because my roommate in
college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto became a wrestler because he beat me up every
night and we joke. I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week. But you see
wrestlers when they get out that you're kind of feeling each other as you walk. Boxers do the same
thing. It was doing that same thing. It's like, what's going on as it comes around, as it comes
around. And then it was like, hey, we're going to get here. And when I got too close to it,
it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we've never seen.
The other question is, what if I didn't cut across the circle? What if I just kept going around a
circle? Or just keep going like that? I could have just watched it. I mean, my one regret out of
the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and the joint helmet, there's a little camera,
but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch because you've ever put a GoPro on someone's
head where they're looking around like this all the time, it'll, it'll nauseate you. So we never
turn that on. And all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down and hit the switch.
And then we didn't go back and because our tapes didn't have anything because we didn't get it on
radar because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't,
it wouldn't lock. The radar wouldn't lock. And so... So then the question is, and this is unanswerable,
but let's try to get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human-created
technology that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of? Or is it not something not of this
world? So you, if you'd asked me in 2004, I just said, I don't know. If you ask me now, so we're
coming up on 16 years ago, for a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't
have a conventional propulsion system in it because I don't think it did. I would like to think that
if we had a technology that would advance mankind, leaps and bounds from what we normally do,
then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know,
and I understand, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government, and I never
will speak for the United States government, but I understand how some of that stuff works
for classification levels and why we classify stuff. You know, is it detrimental to national
defense? But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this
that could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space,
our ability to do things, you know, you talk about, you know, are we gonna go to Mars? Well,
if you have something that has the ability to go, because remember, these things were coming down
when the cruise retracted from above 80,000 feet, which is space, and they would come down and they
would come straight down, they'd hang out at like 20,000 feet, and then three or four hours later,
they'd go back up. We don't have anything that can come down, hang out, and once, you know,
and I'm talking, hold out in a spot, well, we all know there's winds, they're not drifting like a
balloon, they're just sitting there, and then they would go back up, and they tracked up to the,
when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10 of these things. There's other
guys, and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked a groups of these things
coming down, hanging out, and going up. So it's not just propulsion, and the way it moves, it's
also fuel. It's everything. So the whole, the whole of it indicates a kind of technology that's
highly advanced, but you don't think in your sense that you actually don't know, but you know
more than a lot of people, in your sense, the top secret military technology, if we think
about Skunk Works, if we think about like that, cannot be more than 15 years ahead.
I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117,
because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out, like it was developed at this time.
It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.
What's the 117? That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2,
but the stealth fighter. So you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide
things for a while, but I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this
and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology. This is a giant leap in technology. And the other
one is, do we have the basis to do that? Because usually when you have a technology like that,
universities, especially the one you're working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming
out of the top tier universities, you know, so you've got MIT, you've got Caltech, you've got
Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools,
Naval Postgraduate School is another one. There's usually indicators, there's papers of,
hey, this is where we're going. I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a
gravity-based propulsion system that literally, I've got an object, because how do you, how much
power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to
counter the giant orb that we live on? So by the way, you mentioned gravity-based,
that's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion,
like what kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of
movement. To me, all the gravity discussions just seems insane from a physics perspective,
but of course, it would seem insane until it's not. But because remember, we only know what we
know. Yeah. And which is very little. And as someone has to think out of the box to go,
is this possible at all? Yeah. Well, okay, so this, so you're saying that if you had to bet money,
all your money, it would be something that's alien technology. So it's not human-created
technology. Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't,
I don't think we've developed it. I don't have to be little green men, right?
I don't think we've developed it. I just, you know, because the other one,
someone had asked me, they said, what if there wasn't, maybe it was just a drone,
maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from someplace else. I mean, we've got stuff out
there flying around. So I don't know. I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the
giant brains that think this stuff up. I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them.
Which topic? Which you mean the drones for? Just space travel, technology,
because if you look at where we're going, you know, because everyone talks about Mars.
You okay? And you know, we're, hey, we're going to be able to colonize, you know,
and I know Elon is big into that. What do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA?
We put humans back up there. My theory, so it's funny because I know one of the guys that was,
he was one of the original employees at SpaceX. He's a friend of mine and I won't say his name,
but he knows Elon. He knows Elon and he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project. He's one
of the lead guys on that. So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, there's a movie,
there's a book coming out that comes out in about a year on this, the original,
the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX, you know, and he's named in the book,
you know, and they're supposed to make a movie on it. So I'm like, hey, who's gonna play it?
This is cool.
But what he's done, to me, it changed the game. And here's why. Because I said, you know,
in, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex, you know,
which it has become everything he warned us of, you know, it has become and it's really driven by,
there's the big three in defense, which is really, you know, Northrop, Lockheed and Boeing.
Those are the big, those are your bigs. And Raytheon's kind of right, like a subset of that,
but Raytheon's pretty big too. But in US defense, those are the big guys, right?
That's actually where a lot of military guys go and they retire, they go do stuff like that. So
when you look at that and you go, and the way government contracting is working and how we
charge and, you know, why things cost so much. And then you go, you got Elon, who's got an ego,
you know, and he doesn't like to do things certain way. And I've talked to the guy that
worked there on, you know, because the government likes to have oversight of contracts where he
was like, no, just tell me what you want. I'll build it. I'll give you a bill when it's done.
And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money because he's money driven guy,
which I like capitalism at its best. So now you look at the two things. So you got the SpaceX,
which is the dragon capsule, right? And then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing is
contracted to do in less time for half the money. And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the
boosters because they come back and land and you don't have to like Morton Thycall, we've
reused them on the space shuttle, but they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff
because they landed in saltwater and then you had to put them all back together where Elon gets
them down because I was joking with this guy, go, what do they do? Do they like rehaul, you know,
overhaul me because no, actually they clean them up and they can use them again. They're reusable
systems. Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company.
So being able to put people on and the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it's literally like
sci-fi when you watch when they went up. So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been
able to do because, you know, the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian
government, you know, and oh, by the way, if you didn't know, because I have some friends that are
astronauts, they all have to learn Russian, right? And they have to do, it's what level five where
the test is a phone call, where they call you up and they, you know, because they would go,
so I went to the pinning and two friends of mine. The one actually had a mission date,
the one got one later. So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a space walk, you
know, because I would pull up, because if I knew it was going on, I'd pull up the NASA thing. I was
in a meeting one day and I've got NASA on and makers out there floating around, you know,
doing his stuff. And I saw one, he's in the space station while they're doing a space walk. So it's
kind of cool when you go, oh, yeah, I know that dude, he's up there in space, floating around.
So when you look at what those, they're capable of doing and then you go, what Elon is bringing to
the fact that now it's back in America, it's actually, to me, it's cost effective for us to
be able to do more stuff. I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon? Is there a
reason to go back to the moon? Personally, I think if we're going to, if they're really going to go,
you know, in years from now, go to Mars, I think that the moon is the stepping stone to go back
to start proving some of the technology to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon,
and now we can get back off the moon. Because we did this on a less than a compact computer
in the 60s, which is the whole reason that I flew, because I'm obsessed. Matter of fact,
I have the giant Lego Apollo at home and the Lander and I have one that my dad built me in
1969 right after that. And Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy, and so am I. Matter of fact,
I have a picture of him in a car in Wapa Caneta, Ohio at the parade after he walked on the moon,
because his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle in Wapa Caneta, and they were out at
the parade. So I've been obsessed with this since I was a child. Do you hope to, do you think,
do you hope that you'll go out to the space one day? Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a
second. I am not. Because I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight is that
people like, I mean, it would be a tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in terms of,
you're not kind of a civilian, right? I mean, in a sense that you're just a normal person,
you're not a fighter jet pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up,
there would be somebody like you in the next like 20 years. I'd be, if Elon wants to throw
me on one of those things, I'd be all over it. I don't know what my wife would say, but you know,
sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you're alive. I'd love to hear that discussion with
your wife. Listen, there's the pros and cons. She's, I mean, I've known her since high school,
so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know, most people that know me are like, yeah,
you're pretty much the same person you were in high school. I was a class clown and I still
am that way. So let me ask you this question about, so I'm talking to Elon again soon.
I'm curious to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to him about tic-tac, about
these weird out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously just like you said, if there's
something to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it'll be extremely useful for us to understand
in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to out the space.
What, what should Elon think about this stuff? What should he do? What should people like him
do? I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and go,
you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do,
but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really,
and it's in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does.
If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant
amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they're done, they're done.
There's enough to get them back down. That's it. There's not a huge, you know, not coming back and
go, oh, I still got three quarters of a tank. Let's bolt them on and do it again. His system's not
doing that. But, you know, the way, the way contracting, especially in the government,
the government has tons of money, but you got to remember that the government has to justify
how they spend our tax dollars for the most part. There's times where they can hide money in the
budget to get stuff done. But then when you look at, and I'm just going to throw a few out there,
but if you look at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you've got Elon,
there's some big money out there. I mean, you're talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy
companies like big companies. Apple's another one. These companies had huge, huge amounts of money.
And then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they've got gazillions and gazillions of
dollars. We've got universities. There's so much money out there. If we really wanted to do it,
aside from what the government wants to do, because we do live in a free society,
I think there's enough to go, how do we do this? And because when you work outside of
what the government would want to do. So listen, we're not working on this necessarily for the
United States, although I am a huge giant. I would never, yeah, I am an American.
You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union. I can't believe you agreed to this.
But, but when I haven't killed me yet.
Yeah, well, you're here. And you've been here for a while.
No, I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American.
But see, when you do that, so you look at, let's just look at American universities.
Yeah. So there's some brilliant minds and we'll just use MIT because you worked down there.
There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that are not
American citizens. So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American
citizen, it gets really, really, really hard. But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money,
and they, let's just say they want to work together, they can split it up 50-50, the two of
them when the technology gets developed. But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work.
I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because
technology is technology. And if it gets developed and gets over to where, you know,
a country gets ahold of it and then just basically uses it for their own because you save them all
the research time. You don't want to do that. But if we can get to the point where we can,
we do it on the International Space Station, we realize that space was too expensive for one
country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate.
It's the one thing that the Russians in the US actually work together on. Think about it.
That's it. We work together on space because we realize it's way too expensive for us to do alone
and effective. So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around for God. Now,
what is it? Like 20 years that things been up there floating around. So it's getting old.
We're going to have to replace parts and do stuff. But if we can pool the money together and come up
with something that would literally change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a
more effective thing of exploring. Because if you develop that technology, you don't even have to
send a man person. If you can develop a technology that's so with our automation and we're progressing
and our computing power to send something out that's not just floating around when, you know,
can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface and come back
up. So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends data
back, it analyzes. But if I've got a technology that can go up there really quick, I'm not worried
about man, I don't have life support systems and all that, but it can go down, it can go,
it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples and it can actually take Martian soil
and then bring it back. So we can analyze it here. That's a game changer. It's a complete game
changer because it opens up all the planets. Exactly. So in a sense, the Tic Tac is a symbol.
So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there's a non-zero probability
that it's alien technology. And in that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to,
like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the
box. It's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion. We can overcome physics in an order
of magnitude better way. And it's worthwhile to try. I think, and I don't think the money,
if you look at a big picture with the amount of money, some of it's out there floating around
these private companies, I think if you said, hey, I've got, let's just say $100 million,
which really $100 million relative to, Bezos has got what, $100 and some billion dollars
in that word. So if he said, hey, $100 million, you drop $100 million and I go, and I'm going to
put a, you know, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that says, hey,
we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program. But what if I just said, hey, who's to
stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own to say, hey, I want to go pool universities
because they have fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars. They don't have the checks
and bounds. They can do whatever they want. So they're money. Oh, I'm sorry about that.
But to go, hey, I'm going to put this out and I'm going to get the best physicists that are
working at CERN that are at MIT, that are at Caltech at the schools I mentioned. And oh,
by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts and I'm going to basically, I'm going
to fund you guys for 10 years. So you get $10 million a year and I'm going to give you your
salaries and we're going to do that or whatever the amount works. So let's cut it down to five
so we can pay you well, right? To do the research. But oh, by the way, the research is,
it's not classified, but it's controlled. So we're not going to publicly just put this out
in journals. But if we make a leap that we think would advance because although those,
let's say there's 10 of them, those 10 scientists come up with something and they put out a paper,
there might be another number 11 at another university that reads that paper and says,
hey, I kind of had this idea. And now you can get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out
of the mindset because we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it's like
I was joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls. And I said, but you know, how
much when a person gets a PhD in like engineering, how much new math is really being done? I said,
there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I'm talking,
I'm talking Stephen Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something that's
totally different. That's a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody's
converged towards this local minima or local maximum, whatever you think about it. And it's
again, same as with the Tic Tac, thinking outside the box is not accepted and it probably should be.
But it's hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original,
you know, he was the, he was out of the box. Yeah, he did not think that he did not
thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories. Where would we be?
Okay, we're jumping around a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space,
but let's, let me jump back to a few questions that folks had. I have to kind of bring up some
debunking stuff because I think not the actual, not the actual facts of the debunking, but the
nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are
just talking past each other. But let me kind of bring it up. Mick West, I've just recently
started Pay Attention just in preparing to talk to you about this world and Mick West is one of
the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to debunk sort of. He's a,
his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic. I think it's, it's very useful and
powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective to take the approach he does.
It's valuable. And I think no matter what, I think there's, I hope that people quote unquote true
believers are a little bit more open-minded to the work of Mick West. I think it's quite useful
and brilliant work. So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests
possible other explanations of the things that were out there. He has some explanations of the
things that you've seen in, in with the tic tac, like with your own eyes, like he says that it's
possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and so on when you were
flying on. I don't find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that. No, let me do it right now.
Sure. So, because that comes up, like how, how did you know it was about 40 feet long? I go,
okay, so 16 years flying against other airplanes, know what stuff looks like, you know, I've looked
down on things. So if I know, I know, here's the known things. I know when we saw the tic tac,
I was at 20,000 feet-ish right around there. So when I look down, I know what a hornet looks
like looking down on them, because I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea.
So that's, that's why I said 40 feet, because it's about hornet size. So, and as I go around,
you get to the point where you have to be able to judge distance when we fly out of experience.
And you can tell if something small or big, you know, so I would argue the fact of, you know,
you know, peer experience, there's, you know, professional observers, which is what we're
actually trained to do. And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with
the same thing. They're like, yeah, it's about size of a hornet. From a human factors perspective,
how often in your experience of those 16 years, do you find that what you see is the incorrect
state of things? So like, how often do you make mistakes with vision?
You actually, you make vision issues a lot, because you're, and the sad part is, is your
brain believes what your eyes see. We are actually trained to do the opposite of that,
especially when you instrument fly, because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing,
but you got to trust your instruments. Let's go back to landing at night. So
your eyes assume that the runway and your brain assumes that the runway is fixed,
but you know that the runway is moving. So if I try and do stuff visually, I would,
you die every time, not every time, but you die close to every time trying to land on a boat.
So we actually use instruments with your counter to your brain. So, and there's actually all kinds
of things that we go through in training. They have this thing, I think they still use it. It's
called the MSD, multi-spatial disorientation device, or the spin and puke. It looks like a
giant carousel and you're in these little modules. And when you get out, you think the thing goes
really fast and they can, you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but you're
actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate as fast as a human can talk. But as they
spin you around in a little sub thing and slow it down and speed it up, your body does this and you,
you know, and then by visuals of showing you like they can spin it sideways to the outside wall,
but they can show like lines that are, they can make the line stand still because they're
moving the same velocity. They can move in the other way and you'll think you're screaming.
You see it in amusement parks all the time. You do all that because it gives you a sense of
the A, but you're really not doing, you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So
if you, if you want to look at it and go, well, you're, you're disoriented or this, I'd be like,
I'd argue going, no, I'm not because, you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking
at the tic-tac, I've got a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing. So I've got,
I know what I'm doing. I can look outside. I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking
inside to cross check of what I'm seeing is in reality what I'm doing. So you actually,
your brain gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information. You have to.
You have like supervision. So you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting what the sensors,
what you call in the instruments are giving you and that, that in turn is a loop that adjusts
the perception system that like, that, that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're
seeing. You'd be amazed at how good. So here's, here's another example. So if we go out over the
water, so there's no land in sight and we're going to fight. So when we fight, you know,
two airplanes, we're going to dog fight. As an instructor, and I was for most of my time,
you have to come back and you have to recreate it. So we call it drawing arrows.
So you have to recreate that stuff. So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would
take off and say, right, we're starting heading due East. And I know where the sun is at, because
in the short couple of minutes that we're going to fight, the sun's really not going to move much.
It's going to be in a relative zone. I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say
195 degrees, right? So I'm starting going East and it's actually be down off my right hand side.
So now I know as I'm fighting, because in the water, you don't have any reference like, oh,
I passed land, I passed land. No, you don't. And you can't use clouds because clouds do move.
But you got to come back because you go, here's where I started. And then you, as soon as you
end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355. And then you recreate the turns and the amount
of turns and use the sun relative. So you can create this entire battle that went on with
arrows so that you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened.
And you get really, really good at that. So when you come up and go, well, Dave,
how do you know you were at six o'clock? And he went around and he came up here. I go,
because I'm trained to do all that. And I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do it.
But usually it's you memorize it all and you get done. And then you read, as soon as you're done,
you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get sent and you start writing all your notes
down. And you're writing it really fast on your cart. And you go out of the stack of cards and
you stick the new one on your knee board cards. So you're ready to go. And here's the next setup.
It's kind of, it's in some way similar to what like at the highest level chess players do. I mean,
you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games, but the, the richness of the representation that
they use in remembering like how the games evolved. It's not like it's much richer than the actual
moves. It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all the
richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved. It's more like instinctual from years
and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really can't. It's, it's just,
I understand that. It's because for us, if we don't come back with anything, then there's no
learning to be had. Because the whole thing is the debrief, when we get back and we're
talking about, that's really where they're learning is. And it's the same thing if you want to go
back to chess, when you start off, you try and learn because you're remembering what you're
doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place, play with someone better than you.
That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything. You're just
learning that they're not good and you're better. When you, when you challenge yourself against
someone that is going to, is better than you, you learn. So I learned how to fight an airplane
with, he's actually one of my best friends. We'll call him Tom. I won't give his call sign
because I don't, he wasn't. So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just
left Top Gun. He was the, the training officer at Top Gun, which so that's the guy, the training
officer is the main guy at Top Gun. So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun. So Tom, when I
learned, because I had come out of A6 and we really don't fight because it was a bomber. So I get
in F-18s and I want to learn how to fight because it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the
F and F fighter attack. The F-18 is fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight. So now I got one
of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach me how to do it. And he did. And I
would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never been and then I
would go, well, I'm going to do this. And then he would destroy me and he would come back and go,
here's why you don't do that. And then I would take that knowledge and I would put it in my little
basket of tricks. And over time, because you don't, no one walks out into that world. I don't care
how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman. I am it. No, it's a learning process.
And so over all those years, you've gotten good. So I mean, so what are the chances that your eyes
that your eyes betray you when you saw the tic-tac? Low. Zero. Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So, okay,
90, I am 99.9%. So 0.1%. My eyes deceive me. But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive
the other four people. So the percentage is even lower. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't find that particular
debunking case that useful, but I'm glad you put it, you, you said those words out loud. So for me,
from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical.
So your eye account, I think is the most fascinating story. And that, I think that's inspiring to me
and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there. On so many levels, just like we said,
on the engineering level, that maybe there's propulsion systems we can actually build that can
do some crazy amazing stuff. So it's at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring. I
just want to say that. But on the video side, it's like, it's the videos for the FLIR video,
the GoFast and the Gimbal video. They are only interesting to me, to me in the context of your
story. Like without that, they're kind of low resolution. It's like it, it's easier to build
a debunking story to be skeptical. So that's just where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me
otherwise. But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the FLIR video and he says that
one of the most amazing parts of the FLIR video, where people haven't seen it, is at the end of it,
the Tic Tac, or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen. And what Mick West says
is that it, you know, Mick West, probably others, that the way to explain that is the tracking system.
Like we said, this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object, the tracking loses it.
And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking it.
So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video. Looking at your face, you do not.
So can you maybe comment to that debunking aspect? Sure, I will. So it's funny how people can
extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system. No, for sure. And that's like me going,
because I'm a big Formula One fan, you know, that's like me going, oh my god, Lewis, what were you
doing? You could have done this with the car and you'd have won the race. You know, and Lewis
Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two times, he's four times,
four or five times world champion, but that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis
Hamilton how to drive a car. As a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't
tell you how many times I've watched. You gotta remember when we looked at this thing, when Chad
came back with the video, we sat there and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I
watched it off the original tapes going, all right, all right, let's look at this. You know,
because you can look and see where the, you can see where the airplane's going. You can see if
it's looking left or right. And if you actually watch all that stuff, it doesn't do that. It
actually, when the vehicle starts to move, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up and the
people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod. The tracking gate
will start to open up. And but the thing, when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can't
move fast enough, it has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around. Because there's another
theory that, oh, the pod's looking forward. And when the pod passes underneath the airplane,
so if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me as it does this, the ball will actually flip
around to kind of finish off. And it'll, it'll, it swaps ends because it has, you know, it's a
gimbal. It can't just, it's not free floating. But there's a theory on one of them, oh, it's here
and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front. It stays like this.
So yet another, another debunker who doesn't know this. So, you know, and Mick has had several
theories on other, of some of the other videos, like one of them, the GoFats as a bird and Jeremy
Corbell actually did a nice job of saying, no, it's not because he's on, he's on black hot. So
the, the white object is actually colder than the ocean that's flying. Well, birds aren't colder
than the ocean. They'd be dead. So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video
is the rotation, the apparent rotation of the object that is something that is not
possible to do with systems that we know of. And Mick West suggests that a flare, like reflections
or whatever can explain. No, because what Mick West doesn't see is so when they take,
because I've talked to the, one of them actually I work with. So I know him, I know I talk to him
all the time. So, and it's his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends.
For the gimbal video, the gimbal video, both of them, the GoFats and the gimbal were shot by the
same person. Okay. So, and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each
other. Okay. So what you don't see is so the airplanes, they're flying still super hornets,
but they have the APG 79, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon,
things incredible. Okay. It doesn't, usually if it's, if it's out there and it sees it,
it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff,
and then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting pod,
there's heat signature, and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something's there. It's real. It's not,
you're not picking up some extraneous things. So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing,
and it rotates, and you go, holy shit, look at that thing, it's just sitting there, and it's in
the wind, and it's going against the wind, why it's doing this, you know, someone goes, oh,
it's an airplane. No, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect,
because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect, it just rotates. It's just rotating.
Right. The other thing that you see when you talk to them is, so they're on their radar,
there's an object that they identify as their number one priority or their launch and steering.
So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pods going to look. That's what you
get in the gimbal video. There's five other, I think it's five, they're kind of in a V, you know,
like a geese would fly, that are out in front of it, and they're actually coming,
they're out in front of it, and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while
they're filming the gimbal video, which I know Ryan has come out and talked about it,
but when you see it, you go, you know, if you take it in context, because you go, oh, it's just
the video. Well, if you take the video with the radar going, no, there's actually other things
out there, because there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the
vacapes. It actually became, I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time,
the fighter wing. I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, well, we got a note
tam out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning
area. So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area. It's all the warning area tells
you that there's high military traffic and training out here. It's probably best not to be here,
but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there. So these things have the right,
wherever they're from or whatever they are, you know, because people are like, oh, they're balloons.
Well, balloons float. Balloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location. They
had an airplane because there was two, there's the gimbal thing. That's a pretty big object.
There's also, they talk about, it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere.
A translucent sphere. What the hell is that? And they almost hit one.
It's almost hit them. So that's another, that's one of the biggest, another biggest
account is like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere.
What do you make of that? Again, you know, what, what, I mean, that, that's, that's the most
dangerous thing. You're right. The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go,
okay, so this thing passed between two airplanes and it was, I think it was like 100 feet or
something like that of the airplane and almost hit it. So what they do is they come back and go,
hey, I had a near midair. What'd you have a near midair with? This floating beach ball with
this cube inside of it. And you go, huh? You know, so they send out a no-tam again and they,
they do a, what's called a hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there,
we almost hit one. And that gets sent off to the Naval Safety Center.
What was done? I mean, what are you going to do? Can you, you know, catch one, go out with a giant
net and try and bag one? You don't know, because they've seen them. They've picked them up like
hovering on radar and then all of a sudden they're traveling at really high rates of speed. So,
you know, what are you going to do? Well, and that, let me ask this, because this is what
people kind of think about. After you witnessed Tic Tac and after these incidents, as far as we
know, with the gimbal and the GoFast, it seems like people in the military did not, did not react
like what, like did not freak out. It almost like was like a mundane event. How do you explain that?
Why didn't the people on the ship not, the higher ups, why wasn't there a big freak out?
Or as some people suggest, the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not letting
everyone know that there's some kind of secret military, you know, like, like tests almost.
So let's talk about, so let's say you've got this cool new toy, you call it a cool new toy.
You typically don't take your cool new toy out into an area where the cool new toy could get
damaged or what if the airplane would have actually hit your cool new toy and you got
two people that are ejecting or dead and you got a, you know, $80 million airplane that's
now in the bottom of the Atlantic. You know, tests are normally done in controlled environments,
just it's like any test, a lab test or whatever. When you take things out into the real world,
you know, you're still going to test it in an area where something goes wrong. So
when they started and we'll go back to Elon, so my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go
off, they were out in quadrillion. And when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket
and it ran out of fuel before it got all the way up and it came falling back down.
Well, when you're out on an atoll in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is
going to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land? And it actually
crashed next to the atoll and, you know, Elon wasn't happy and through this guy under the bus.
So that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So
because someone said, well, when we chased the tic-tac, well, it could have been some
secret government thing. Well, secret government things typically just don't come out and test
to where there's unknowing pilots. We can't control a lot of things.
You're exactly right. So you go, you know, it's, you know, it's not the Dr. Evil scientist that's
going to throw shit out there to get there's control and there's reasons that we do it
because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to, there's, there's, you build something in theory,
you model it, you go, hey, this is, it looks like it's going to work. You get funding, you build it,
you test it some more, you bench test it, you know, you, like an airplane with digital flight
controls, before it even leaves the ground, they've got things over the pedostatic system
that are changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it. And it's probably
up on jack. So the gear up, so it doesn't, it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know it's sitting
on jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system so they can
actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, hey, it looks like
it's going to work. And then there's wind, there's a bunch of stuff that they do. That's a control
environment where you can do the testing. Yeah. Throwing shit out in the middle of where people
are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that I've heard. Is it possible? Yes. Is it more
really? Is it, is it, is it, is it more likely? It's more likely they're not doing that. Yeah.
Then the other, the other side of that question is why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the
US government in general, not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen? Freak out in
the positive way, freak out in the negative way, like what are the Russians up to again? Or, or
more like, what is this? Like more turmoil. So if you were to put a Chinese flag on the side of it
or a Russian flag on the side of it, and I said, yeah, it had a big Russian flag on the side of it,
dude, then it would have got a lot of attention. It would have went high order, right? If it was a,
you don't have to say Russia or China. Just say, if there was another country's emblem on the side
of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then it's a big deal. So here's what's
going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups. And it was a joint workup. Normally,
they, we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month
at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving.
So we could run home up to the Central Valley, have Thanksgiving with our family, and then run
back down and do this. Okay. So, you know, and I had just taken over, I had had the squadron for a
month, right? So I'm a brand new CEO. I'm the most junior guy on the, as far as a commanding
officer goes for time in the Navy. And actually, at the time, I think it was the most junior
CEO for O5 command in the Navy, right? So you go, okay, so I'm out here, I got my squadron,
I'm running it, I see this thing, you know, we catch shit for it. I have a squadron to run.
I have the, the, the, the tic-tac was over here. And although an extraordinary event,
I have 17 aircrew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for, right? Their well-being,
making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're birthing, you know, and I'm working with
my master chief and I'm working with my exo snap. And we're going through all this stuff.
I don't have a lot of time to worry about the tic-tac. If people need to talk to me, so you
gotta remember, you got the captain of the ship, you got the air wing commander, and you got the
admiral, those are the top three. And you got the CEO of the, the Princeton, who is a major command
guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the
squadrons, which are O5 command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is O5 command.
So in the hierarchy as far as rank and responsibility of what's going on, I'm pretty much in the top
20 with all my peers. And then I've got, obviously, the captain and the admiral, right? And then he's
got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with. And I talked to him.
So you're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh yeah. This schedule, his missions,
you have to do a lot, get the job done, and there's no time for silly things.
That's exactly right. So, and we're the, we're the integration, you know, when a, when a,
when a battle group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing,
the air power is the key. It's, we take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want,
and we can do what we need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that,
oh, all these men in suits showed up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me,
the admiral never saying to me, the people on his staff that I was friends with never
saying to me, the other CEOs that I talked to you on a daily basis, never said anything to me,
and no one ever came and talked to me and I'm the guy that chased it. So in all the theories and all
the debunkers and all the stories, because I don't know if people think they're going to get rich
on this, because I made a big donut on this. I can tell you what I got paid for. I got paid to
go out and spend 21 hours of my day going to LA and do a five minute talk for someone. And I'm
like, and it wasn't for the talk, because I'll talk for free, because you're not paying me.
I said, I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because they, my wife and I got
to go, because it was just look like fun, because the whole town gets involved. And it's the only
time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this, because it was just,
you know, it was fun. And I got asked and Jeremy and George Nappin went the year before. So I went
with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife. And,
you know, we all hung out kind of, you know, talking not about UFO stuff, but just getting
to know each other as people, because, you know, Bob's like me. The stuff that he talks about is
not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life. You know, he's just a really,
really smart guy. That's just like the rest of us trying to get through life.
Nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lula Lozando's resignation note
from his, he was a program director at the ATIP program. One of the sad things is that he mentioned
that, you know, people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, like UFOs as a
threat. Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it, it's a sad thing to think about that
that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that we
don't want to deal with. And it kind of just fades into history. Like literally, it's kind of sad to
think that if aliens showed up, like, and it just didn't, because they're not like, when aliens show
up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule. And if they don't start killing people,
they just kind of show up in some very nonchalant, peaceful way briefly. People would be like,
I don't have time for this. That's so sad. That's so sad.
It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back, let's go back way back, way back in the
time machine, you know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe. You know, in Europe's
a perfect example. Why does France speak French? And then right next to them, Spanish, you know,
Spain speaks Spanish, and then you kind of jump over in Germans or German and the Polish people,
everyone speaks a different language, because if you look at the way the train kind of subdivide
the original people that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently,
right? You'd be like the US, but see, the US is different. We all speak English, because what
happened? We came over and we started on the east coast, and we migrated west. We won't get into
the, you know, what happened. And, you know, because the Native Americans all spoke different
languages. You know, it's that same type of thing. So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up,
you're actually, you think about, you're an alien. If I go to a different area, if I just,
you know, go back 500 years where, you know, or 1,000 years where travel, we weren't traveling
across oceans at the time. Well, we don't think we were. The Vikings probably were.
Because we had limited, you know, we had to have supplies and the boats weren't as big. We had to
build them by hand. We didn't have power tools and all that stuff. So, you know, if you show up
someplace, like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South America and you've got,
you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know, and then you look at what typically
happens when aliens show up in a human alien world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean,
you are not from that area. The other, we take what we want. And that's what happened. I mean,
we literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are. You know, humans are,
we're an interesting group. So, you go, now what, what if something is from someplace else? Just,
let's just, let's just go off the grid and go, let's say there are little green men.
What are their intentions? A guy, Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo,
and he said, what do you think they were here for? I said, I don't know. He goes, what, I go,
I don't know, they were observing. They'd come down, they'd hang out, and he goes,
what if they were prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do?
And you go, that's interesting. The other theory is maybe there's a more advanced
civilization out here and they just check in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization
is when a civilization that's inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become
equal or above. Because now these, they become the threatened type. So, you watch us grow until
we start getting too much. You know, it's kind of like you go, well, because they always have a
tendency to hang out around nuclear, right? And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced
civilization, I'm going to go science fiction kind of comical, they come down and watch us and go,
look at the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't
destroy themselves. Yeah, if I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention
with the atom bomb. That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of, what is it, UFO
sightings since- Since the nuclear era. Since the nuclear era. Yeah. That's-
So you go- Hmm. Let me ask a little bit out there a question, maybe it's a speculation, but
maybe touching on Roswell, do you think it's possible that there is out of this world aircraft
or beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth,
like the US government? Is it possible? So the one perspective of that, if it's possible,
is it possible to keep a secret like that? I would say this, I think it's very highly possible.
Because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings and let's go, just look at Project
Bluebook, it was what, you have to forget how many thousands of sightings, there's a percentage,
it's like 10 or 15 percent, they still can't explain. Like our tic-tac is one of them.
You know, they basically, the government has come out and said, we don't know what that was.
Okay, so if you go, okay, of that 15 percent that we don't know and of these thousands,
they're still, that 15 percent makes up a pretty big number. What are the chances that not one of
them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered? And I don't care if it's an intact
system or you've got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain or some biological matter,
to say the least. It could be intact or it couldn't, but the odds of that now are starting to go
down that, you know, that could never happen. And I'm not talking just the United States,
I'm talking the world. Globally.
So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone
in the, in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something
that is not from this world and I'm not talking a meteor, but something that was manufactured
in some way that allowed transport or observation. Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone,
you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff and we got stuff that just went
past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper Belt. You know, there's stuff out there floating around
and what about ours? It's going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever because we've
had stuff crash into planets. So if that's the case, you would think something is out there
that we have something that we can't explain. And according to Lou, there is stuff that we
can't explain. You know, and I would assume that Lou who ran ATIP has seen stuff that he can't
openly talk about because, you know, because I had a clearance. When you have a clearance,
you were, you sign your name, you're bound to that. And to me, that's an important oath
that you hold to, you know, and this is kind of where, you know, people have issues with Bob.
So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not. I'll
tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy.
Bob was our, yeah.
Yes. There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked,
you know, to those who will clearance who, you know, are true to the government, you would say,
he should have never spoke. He was under an oath to not say anything, but he did.
If you ask Bob, why did you say something? His answer was, I understand there's an oath,
but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind and it shouldn't be locked away.
And I'll leave it, if you believe Bob, that's kind of what Bob says.
And that's such an interesting viewpoint. If there is aircraft, a technology that's
in the possession of the, say, the US government, should they make that publicly known?
This is the Snowden question. This is the question of like, do we release stuff that
can potentially change the nature of human civilization? Like the way we,
the way we think about our place in the world. Also, the, if that technology is potentially
useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that
information or not? If you were the government? So here, well, here's exactly how. So for,
for classified information, the government is the people that classify it. So I can't go,
I can't look at something and go, oh my God, this Avion bottle is now top secret. I can't,
I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that. That's up to the government.
And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life. So I understand
that. But now you go, there's reason stuff is classified. Okay. And it has to do with,
sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained. It's just like the mob. If I have a spy,
I'm a mobster and you're the counter mobster, but I have a guy on the inside that's feeding me
information. I can't do it. And a perfect example is if you've ever seen the, it's the Tom Cruise
movie, what is it? Air America or whatever. But he, he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling
drugs for Pablo Escobar. And he ended up getting a cargo plane and the government, the CIA was
kind of funding him to do stuff. That's how he got hooked up with Pablo, but they put cameras on
his airplane. And when Reagan had come out and said, here's pictures, we have proof that they're
running these drugs, it didn't take Pablo long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside
of the plane of this guy he had been working with. And that guy ends up dead. Does that make sense?
Yeah. So you classify to protect the source. You classify to protect the technology because
if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there's levels,
depending on if it's a secret or top secret. There are levels of damage that can be done
to the U S government and our wellbeing as a country. And we owe it to this because we're
all Americans. You know, to me, no matter what some people will say, even into this country,
this is the greatest country on the planet. This is the only country that you have the ability to
do what you want to do. It's just don't be lazy. And I have stories of people that came over here
and started with nothing and they're, they're living the American dream and they'll tell you
and they didn't get it because of, you know, like you, you came over here from Russia,
you get no minority status or anything else. You get, you're a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant,
whatever your religion, but you come over here. I kind of knew that from the last
time, but, but you come over here, you basically have made yourself. You're educated, you're working
at literally the top research university in the world, to be honest. I can do whatever the hell
I can create with a bit of, with a lot of hard work I can do quite a lot. And no one gave it to
you. Yeah. So, I mean, and I, well, I'm a believer that like, I mean, we are a community. So like,
there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing. And this is,
this, I, you know, I joke about being Russian, but I, I'm an American and this is, I do believe
the greatest country on earth. So there's a reason the nationalist pride, the pride in your nation
is a powerful thing. And around that, this secrecy holds value. But to me, alien technology
is bigger than that. I mean, it's, it's not so much a threat as a, you're holding back something
that could inspire the world, like a human knowledge. So let's talk in theory. So I'm going
to go back to Bob, because I've talked to Bob. So Bob is a propulsion guy. Right. Right. Bob has
a bicycle with a rocket motor. He built the rocket car. You know, so he did that. So if you are trying
to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say this is, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory.
I am, I own, I have, I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don't understand. And I
know it's a propulsion system. So now I got to figure it out. Right. So who are you going to go to?
Right. You go find someone. So you go, wait, here's a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos,
which they have proven, who is big into propulsion. He designs all this. He builds a
shit in his garage. Hey, he's super smart. Why don't we bring him in? So you hire him on a contract
and you go, Hey, we're going to brief you into a program and he goes and works on wherever he says
he worked. You know, that's not important, but you get access to the technology to try and figure
it out. And then you go, well, you know, Bob comes out and says, you know, like, we're figuring
out these things, but there's a part where our technology isn't advanced enough for us to figure
the whole thing out. So then, you know, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out and tell anyone,
he works on it until he gets to the point where he's stagnated. He's at a, he's at a wall. You go,
I can't do it. So sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So you go find someone else
who's in a propulsion to bring him in, they work, they can't figure it out, or they get to the point
where kind of back to the Einstein theory where, Hey, I've got all these theories on how it works,
but we don't have the technology. We haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do.
We still have to advance technology more. So then what do you do? You shelf it. You go, hey, good,
projects over and the contract, you shelf it. And you wait another 10 years. And you wait another
10 years until technology and our abilities and our research advances more. And then you go find
new people to bring in that are experts in that field and go, Hey, we want you to work on this
thing. And here's what we know about it so far. Or you don't tell them anything. Because, because
remember, if you were, if you reveal someone else's research, you can taint their beliefs,
they'll start to sway in that direction. So you go, I'm not going to tell you anything.
I'm going to give you this thing. And now you tell me what you think. And as they progress,
if they get stuck on a problem that maybe Bob and someone else solved earlier, you can go,
Hey, what about this? You don't have to tell me where it came from. What about this? And now
they can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck
by our evolution of technology, you shelf it again. Do you think that's the right way to do it?
Because it's heartbreaking. I listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion
about Elon and so on. The alternative approach is to release this to the world and say there's
a mystery here. And then the elons of the world that Jeff Bezos, we talked about money, but it's
also not just money. It's like this engine that's within, we talked about the American dream to
say, I'm going to be the one that cracks this mystery open. And like that's within a lot of us.
And like money aside, people in their garage just will.
But you're thinking like a scientist. Now let me shift to, let me think like a country.
So we have country A, B and C. And you can look at the nuclear arms race. So we know that Germany
was really close. We know that Russia was getting pretty close. We just won the race and we were
the first ones with it. And still to this day. And Germany could have won. They could have won.
They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they knew they
had the answer is literally what it comes down to. Someone was smart enough to realize that that
got into the hands of the Nazis, that that would be the end. And that's a tough call to do that
knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the
wrong hand. And that's kind of the fear when you look at this, you go, okay, so if we do this,
if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it kind of international
space station like we're all going to work on it together, you know, like Antarctica is really
supposed to be treaty free for many weapons or anything more. We've got the international
thing down there. We're all going to work together. If you did it in the confines of that and you
could control the flow in and out, because what you don't want is the someone stealing information
and getting it back to where and countries are notorious to do this. Hey, we're doing
internationally, but we're secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with the solution
first. That's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like
that is power. It would literally change the game of the way the world operates and from
not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it's got huge, huge.
Yeah, yeah, so beautifully, beautifully presented. And there's, I feel like there's
a tension between those two places, the scientists view of the world and the national security view
of the world. Let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists
kind of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system that's
exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets. And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to
almost any conspiracy theory to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do. I agree with you.
But there does seem to be, and I tend to think of government as unfortunately
incompetent, at least the bureaucracy. It seems that the communication, like the three
videos that were released and just the way of DOD in general talks about the things we've been
talking about. It's just confused. There's contradictory. It's not inspiring. It's suspicious.
It's just not even the way they release the videos. The Tic Tac, if presented correctly,
could just inspire a generation of scientists. It's like us going to the moon. It's inspiring.
I mean, it's incredible. And the way it was released, it was suspicious. It was like low
resolution video on a crappy website with some crappy documents. I don't know how to ask this
question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of
communicating the things they do know to the public?
Because I don't think they know how. Especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years.
Because I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff. I just think that when it comes in,
like I said, the government has the right to classify stuff. They classify everything because
they don't know. You have something you don't know what it is. You don't know. So we just go,
well, it must be top secret and let's put it in a vault. It's kind of like the Indiana Jones
where they take the arc and they put it in. It's in the giant army warehouse. We don't even know
what we have. But I also believe that, and I'll say this openly, I don't think that the American
people need to know everything. I think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection
of this country. And I totally believe in that. I was joking with Joe when he was talking about
the Storm Area 51 stuff. That's probably the worst idea you could possibly have is to just
storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons that we have things that we
don't just let out to the public. Because if we do, as soon as you do let someone know that you
have something, they immediately try to counter it. A perfect example. The US in the 60s developed
a bomber. It was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB70. There was three of them built,
three of them ever built. It was a like 60,000 foot high Mach 3. It was an incredible airplane
when you see it. There's actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum.
It would go, the wingtips would fold on. It looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster.
When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG-25,
literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber. And they built an entire fleet
of MiG-25s. We built three XB70s and we scrapped the program. Because now you go, well,
the technology is cool. We proved it, but now it becomes obsolete. So it's not even worth building
a whole fleet of these things. It's a chess game. We do something, they do something. We do
something, they do something. We do something and then they counter it. You've got to figure out how
to defeat it. So you go, oh, we'll build something. So the more we keep quiet, especially from a
defense standpoint, the better. Actually, personally, I think we talk too much. And I think the
military and the DoD is starting to see that we're too open. You announce, hey, we're building this
because there's a budget line and we live in a free society. But you don't have to release all
the specs. And you don't have to put everything in open source. But that's a problem when we go to
universities. If we want to go do work with MIT and you want to partner with MIT in your defense
company, you want to partner, you know, you guys have a rule that if you create it, then it can
be open source because the university owns it. And we are an institution of learning where the
defense side might go, we don't really want that published in a paper in Scientific America.
Yes, it's so hard to break it. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Conquarks.
Some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever
is done in secrecy. And it sucks because it's so inspiring and they can't talk about it.
It is, but some of it's due to funding. The US government has deep pockets.
You know, some of this new technology that you develop for an open source and lesson,
this goes back to the original conversation. We now, there's enough money in the private sector
that individuals control. Bezos, I'm not talking Amazon, I'm talking Jeff Bezos.
A single individual. He's worth over a hundred billion dollars.
He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what, the Gates Foundation with between Bill Gates
and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos' ex-wife
actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation. So, I mean, what's the
Gates Foundation worth these days? You know, and these are guys, you know, brilliant, brilliant.
I mean, some of the greatest minds that we have to go, you know, what are they doing?
Because they have the ability, it's a non-profit. They can go, hey, I want to fund this. I want
to fund this research. They can look beyond the conflict between nations.
You can look beyond the conflict of having to have, you know, classification. You could do what
you want. You know, it's just like, you know, we classify how to do, you know, the whole nuclear,
how to create a critical mass, right? But there's really smart high school kids that have figured
out mathematically. They do their science project and then the government comes in and says,
hey, we got to classify your government because we just don't want this out in the public domain,
which I understand. But they never stopped them from free thought and developing that. It's just,
we really don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that. I totally understand that. But
if they, you know, if Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey, we want to do this and they're
going to work with Bezos and they're going to work with Elon and we're going to, you think about it,
there's a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D. And I'm not talking just science
like this. I'm talking medical research and all this. But then you go, well, who gets it? Because
now you're competing against the companies that actually do it. And you go, is that, well, are
they the greatest minds? I'd say, you know, we have a tendency to go, these are the best that
we have. And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have. But there's probably people
out there that don't want to work. There's brilliant minds that don't want to do anything with defense
because they just disagree with what it does. So they go to another path. They could do something
else. And in the sense that the elons of the world that Jeff Bezos actually, in a certain sense,
much better than DOD at finding the brilliant weird minds out there.
Because they're not tied to the government. So when you work a government contract,
the government writes, they tell you what they want and then they work with you on the requirements.
And they usually have an end in me. You know, they have an idea that this is what I want it to be
where if you go to like SpaceX, where, you know, they come up with, why don't we just land these
things on a pad and reuse them? Well, if the government scientist, if you're on a government
contract says, no, that's not the requirements, we're not paying for that, we want you to do this,
you're kind of controlled. Or when Elon does it, his company, they can do whatever the hell
they want to do because they have no bounds. The only bounds they have is the liability if it
doesn't work and it lands on something. So what do you do? You go out to Quadrillion and you test
it and if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we cleaned it up, no big deal, we lost the
money, but we'll move on. It's, you know, money makes the world go round contrary to what everyone
thinks. But, you know, there's a lot of money that's sitting around that you can do a lot of
really cool stuff with and I don't know. I mean, I'll guarantee that, what is it, Blue Origin?
Isn't that in Amazon? Yeah. You know, that they're doing some cool stuff because they have
funny and I joke with the guy, I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because they were
building the first test thing and they were limited and Elon found this like 400 acre thing,
I think it's about 400 acres down by Waco, Texas. And he's like, I go, how he goes, he goes, dude,
I worked, he goes, I worked with, he goes, because he's done government contract. He goes,
there's government contract and then there's working at SpaceX with Elon money. And that's
what he refers to it as is Elon money where it was like, don't, I'll throw them and he would throw
the money at it and make it happen. And it's, I'm talking this fast. I mean, he talks about,
he has a great story about this. I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the
private sector vice, the government where there's the bureaucracy is they had a company that was a
basically a tool and dye machine shop that did a lot of their high precision parts for the rockets.
They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies. And when the economy was down,
the guy was actually looking at going on a business. So the guy, I know, he's telling me the story.
He was talking to the guy, he had to go over there and get something and he's like, holy
shit. He goes, hang on. So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX. He says, Hey, is Elon there?
Can you get him in the boardroom? We'll be there in 20 minutes. So he grabs this guy who's literally
going to fold his company. They go over to SpaceX and I may be getting some of this wrong if people
are going to fact check me, but this is pretty close. They go in the boardroom and he said,
literally within like, you know, an hour or two, Elon has bought the guy's company. That guy is
now a senior VP running his company and they're going to pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing
so they can actually build the parts and they can still contract out to make the money outside.
And it happened like that fast. And it's not just money. It's because I've seen, I've witnessed it
too with Elon. I think it's whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk
to rise to the top. But like, because I've also worked for DARPA, like for research, for in terms
of a source of funding, there's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, like being
funded by DARPA. And with Elon, like I was literally in the presence of like, anything is possible,
cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork of the way things were done in the past, of the
bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, the, all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately.
How much money and time do you waste dealing with the bureaucracy when you could actually be doing
real work? That's the difference. This is why, honestly, when I went back to the industrial
defense complex that we were warned about, when you look at it and go, SpaceX can do something for
half the price ahead of schedule that what Boeing were paying Boeing. And you go, oh, well, this
just came out. And you go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with
this side? Because you've got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to
fly around in. It worked like a champ. It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down.
It worked perfectly. You know, we're going to dust it off. And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo
capsules that were used and put to museums, they're going to reuse that dragon capsule. It came down,
they're going to dust it off, put a new coat of paint on it, slap it on top of another rocket,
and away it goes. Holy cow. It's amazing. It's a shift. It's a complete shift in mentality. And
for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost. Yeah. It's exciting, especially given putting
the tic-tac in context, like then the sky or it's limitless, the possibilities we could do with
this kind of mechanism. I think it's exciting. I think we live in an exciting time right now,
besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is a hopeful,
like there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the
moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have a hope for the future to look up to the sky.
We're humans. We can solve so many. We can solve all of this.
I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing, and I said,
is this would be great? Because when the government had come out a month ago and said,
hey, this does exist. We're doing this. And oh, we're going to release more stuff. And I was
texting Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys before I went on because they had called me up to be on
Tucker's show. And I'm like, hey, I go, you know, this would be great. You know, just come out with
find the relic of a spaceship, like pull out the Roswell wreckage if you have it.
Pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it. God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with
the riots in the cities. And I mean, I know it's an election year and all that, but God,
it would be something, it would be refreshing to not have to turn on my TV and see everything
that is just depressing in the world. To begin with, holy cow, we actually do have this. And
we're working on this technology. Imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft and they pull it out,
imagine the innovation that happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than
that. Just the innovation that happens, the look on, you know, Musk's face, look on Jeff Bezos'
face and all the brilliant engineers. It would change the game. It would change the game completely.
Let me ask the big question. I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it. Outside, I mean,
one of the things, the fact that you've laid your eyes on a UFO, probably open your eyes to the
possibility that some of the other sightings, there could be other sightings that have legitimacy
to them. What to you is the outside of your own sighting is the most interesting sighting or
UFO-related event in history? I think there's several. What is it? Ramachan Forest in England,
the U.S. guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns. One guy was medically disabled,
but they weren't going to give it. And he had to help from John McCain. His office helped get the
guys' disability reestablished. I think that's a big one. I think there's people out there that
have seen stuff. And I'm talking credible because you got to remember there's a huge
chunk of these sightings that get disproven. They're actually explainable. You would send
me the question, the Phoenix lights. Phoenix lights. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these.
I'm not either. You want a funny story on that. So I was at a conference and said,
hopefully he doesn't watch this and get offended. But we had this, I call it speed dating. So there's
a table. There's about eight people at a table. And we would go sit at the table and they could
ask us questions. And then after 10 minutes, we moved to the next table. So I was speed dating
all these people that are really into this. It was kind of funny, but I'd sat down. And it's
always funny because some people will try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the
dominators away so that if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too.
So we got into this and the guy starts naming all these, well, what about this? What about
the Phoenix lights? I'm like, I don't know about the Phoenix lights. What about this event? I don't
know about that. He looks at me and he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not,
but I chased one. So I'm an expert at you. And you could see him getting deflated because I'm
kind of a smart ass like that. Yeah. I mean, the firsthand experience from a credible,
in some sense, these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human.
Well, I think part of that is to us, that that's a credibility piece because the four of us that
actually saw it plus, you know, the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video,
none of us are UFO obsessed people. So when we come out and say, because to me, it's just,
and it's five minutes of my life. I did a lot of really cool, I've had a really kind of neat
things I've been able to do. But when you look at it and go, we don't, to me, it wasn't, it's not
the pinnacle of my life, you know, to other people that they live in the UFO world. And it's like
they, you know, if you talk to people, they'll go that are really into it, who've never seen one.
It kills them that they didn't see one. When here we are because, and it's unique with ours,
which kind of adds that level is it wasn't, we just didn't see it. It wasn't like, oh, look,
something in the sky and it was weird. We actually engaged with it. You know, it was,
yeah, that was an engaged five minute thing. And there's other stories from other countries,
like there's a story in the back when the Soviet Union existed, that they actually would chase
these things. And one of them shot at some, you know, it shot it because they said shoot at it,
and it shot it, and then it got shot down. And then they said, don't ever shoot at them again,
and don't chase them, just so you can observe them, but don't go after them. Because obviously,
they have firepower that we can't control. Because if you can make something float around and jam
radars at will and do whatever you want, you know, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very
useful. You know, you can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around, oh, we got a,
we got it. Now you got a cyber warfare, you got to take the bug down, you got to take the warfare.
So now we can actually inhibit some type of damage. So there's a, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix
Lights. This is somebody on, I think Reddit said, ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the
Phoenix Lights. So the interesting thing, like you said with the tic-tac is that multiple people
laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix Lights or many people have seen it?
So here's a deal with massive sightings. So the Phoenix Lights is unexplainable,
although I know the Air Force had said something about it was an A-10 drop in flares. I don't
think so. Oh, flares don't burn that long, they just come out and they, you know, they detract and
they go away. Although on the other hand, there's, you know, because clouds can do things. So I lived
in central California for 18 years and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky? And it
was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off. You know, they were doing ICBM tests at one time where
they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across and they go land in the atoll at Quadaline,
you know, and then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff, you know,
it's stuff that we do because we're super power. But when you see them go up, you know, especially
if you've ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night, it'll have the stream to glow and
you can tell it's a rocket. But if you don't look up until later, when it starts to get to the outer
edge of the atmosphere where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, but you can
watch this on TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow, and then it
hits a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because there's,
you know, the forces aren't holding that all into one unique thing and it looks really odd.
And then it'll go off because it burns out and then you get stage separation. Then you see the
next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand it because they didn't watch it
from launch because we used to sit in our driveway and, you know, Vandenberg, it was a three-hour
drive, but you could sit and watch it go, you knew they're launching at night, you'd watch.
You watch and it's really cool. If you don't see anything, what you see is the weird clouds from
the exhaust plume, you know, what's left, the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere and
the wind starts blowing us. You get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky.
You know, that's part, but when you go to Phoenix lights and you go, hey, you know, when a thousand
people see something, you're going to discredit all a thousand people or you're going to try and
explain it away with something else, you know, the, you know, the big, it's a weather balloon,
you know, it's a weather balloon. Again, just like the tic-tac, I think is just inspiring
for the limitless nature of the science. I think you're, I think more is going to come out. I think
some of the stuff that the Two to Stars folks have done.
So there's a Two to Stars Academy. What are your thoughts about them?
Are they-
I talk to them quite a bit. I am not a part of Two to Stars Academy. I, you know, but, you know,
like I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.
Yeah. So he, what's their mission? What's their hope? What's their, what's their-
There, when they started, their mission was to try and don't look at this as little green men,
but let's look at this as a technology and let's try and almost reverse engineer and figure out
how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge, you know, physics-based
knowledge to go, how would something like this operate? That's really their bottom line, was
to try and use, and then couple that with, because they've got the series unidentified,
couple that with television to get the word out. So you're actually putting something instead of,
because everyone has a theory, you know, ancient aliens covers all kinds of theories,
you know, it's kind of off of, oh my God. And I've seen the stuff and I've seen stuff that
I've said taken out of context on shows that I did not talk to. So there's all that because
you can take a clip and go, oh, it's this, it's that, you know, and if I know about stuff like it,
you can't technically use my likeness unless I tell you you can. So if I haven't signed something
you can't do, there was a guy who put something out and I was in it and I told him, you can take
it down and you can talk to lawyers because I'm not, I'm not supporting you. So they use it to
tell some kind of narrative that doesn't, it's not connected to reality. Because let's face it,
if you're making TV shows, there's two reasons to do it. One, you want to get word out, or two,
you want to make money, or three, both. And so usually it's, I would say the make money is probably
the biggest thing to put a TV show out. And the mission of the, to the stars academies to not
do that is to try to get some. When I, when they started and I talked to them, because I've talked
to Tom and I've talked to Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify
the fact and, and get rid of the, the stigma that's tied to UFOs. And let's look at it from a
science base and then use TV to get the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool
things. I mean, you know, they've, the, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that
had been, you know, property of their government. They got a bunch from,
it might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of stuff. Like here's all our records. What can
you do with it to try and now pull from country base to a more global based research, which is
what you were talking about. And then using independent scientists that are not tied to
a government, I mean any government, but just using independent research agencies to start
looking at some of the metallurgy because you go, oh, I found this, we had this piece of metal.
What is it? And some of the stuff has been explained. They've got some objects, artifacts
that have not been explained. And that's slowly coming out, you know, and I think
and your hope is the US government will release some of the government is the government, the
US government came out a month ago and said, you, we have, we have, we have material that
we cannot explain the origin. They have said that they just haven't released the records
from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about. I'm like, huh, it's 70 some years old.
I mean, let it out. I think you put it beautifully that in this time, that would be a heck of an
inspiring, hopeful thing to see. Like people don't just to distract. Yeah, the division is,
I mean, nothing will unite us humans descendants of chimps.
Like the idea that there's life out there. Oh, it would literally change. I said this a while
ago, I forget, I think I was at the London, sometimes it called me and I said, you know,
personally, I think this is a global issue. It's not, if there is stuff coming down,
which we're pretty sure there is, there's enough stuff that we can't explain.
If there is stuff coming down, then this is not a country based thing. And it's not about
technology and it's not about who's going to win the next war, because you don't know what they're
doing. So you got really a couple of theories. One, you've got ET or close encounters. And the
other extreme is you've got Independence Day. Are you going to prepare and bet on ET and close
encounters? Or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is Independence Day, you actually have
a game plan. And when you get into Independence Day, that scenario, you know, and I don't like
going too much into sci-fi, but let's just say in theory that that becomes a reality.
It's not a US, Russia, China, England, France, Spain, name any country in any continent,
it becomes a global issue. And the only way you can deny it, just like Americans, we all,
you know, we're divided. We spend that way forever. So if you think we won't get through this,
we'll get through it because we've had times just like this before.
Until Nazi Germany pops up.
But if Nazi Germany pops up or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center,
and then all of a sudden we're all like United, we all also have very, very short memories.
Yes. We do. Exactly.
It's when you look and go, well, we can do this. And you go, no, no, if you think
that everyone on the planet is good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking.
You know, we said this. There were people during the rise of Hitler, no, no, it's okay.
No, no, it's okay. We're not going to do, we're not going to stop. No, no, it's okay.
No, no, it's okay. And you got to think. The only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego
by going into Russia. If he just stuck with the path with Stalin and not went to the east and
had to fight, and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him, and he would have put all his
high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally different outcome. The man in the
iron, the man in the high tower or whatever, it's a Netflix show where Nazi actually wins it.
And you look, you know, we didn't know everything that was going on, especially the atrocities
with the concentration camps and what he was doing to the Jews. I mean, you look at that going,
if you really want to see evil, and then there's the whole side of what Stalin did,
because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did, but that never gets the press.
And the thing is, we forget this, we forget this history in our conflicts today. We forget
that there is the nature of evil. We forget that there's real evil in the world. And the
thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both. It's like this interesting line, like you
talked about Joe Rogan, of being both like kind to each other, compassionate and pathetic, but
also being like strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to, to make sure that there's a balance
between kindness and force. What is, you use force when force is necessary, but you don't have to
walk around like Billy Badass all the time. I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with
that literally could kick the shit out of whoever came near them, they never got in fights, because
one, even people that didn't know them, because they were actually nice guys, you know, they were,
they're just good dudes. But, you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine,
he was, he's a nationally ranked wrestler. It went to, went to the Naval Academy with me. He's a
very, very good friend of mine. And he is, when you meet him, and he wrestled at 190 pounds,
and he did not lose a match his senior year until he went to nationals. He just had a bad day. He
actually lost to a guy he had pummeled the shit out of. And he would cross. It was funny. We,
we joke about it, even with him, because when you meet him, he's like the nicest like local,
hey, hey dude, you know, hey, how you doing? He's super nice. And he would cross that ring on a,
on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally different person.
And he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on.
And he would get done and he's like super humble and they'd raise his hand. And he would, he'd,
he'd have this blank expression, they'd raise his hand and he'd walk off. And as soon as he
crossed the line, he'd, he'd look up and swung, hey, hi guys, how you doing? Like he literally just
went and could rip someone's arms off. But as soon as he crossed the line, he was a totally
different person. He's like, and he's that way today. And man, he wouldn't even tell you he's
a wrestler. Yeah, that's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is.
Oh, he's a wrestler. He's a cross the line. You're, you're, you can be hard, but when,
when you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. Yeah. I know you're super humble,
saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. That's the entire trajectory
of having a dream of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career. What advice would
you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and is
inspired, that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice
you could give them about life, about career, about anything? Yeah. Yeah. First, let me start with,
and you had a question on inspirational people. So my grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier,
huge funeral beer delivery guy was delivering beer in the 60s riots where the guys in the
black neighborhoods where, you know, white people didn't go. And my grandfather was just silly,
and he was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States. So my great-grandmother,
and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat.
Huge, huge guy and just the nicest, friendliest would give you the shirt off his back,
obviously proven by his funeral. And I'm talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers
was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. I mean,
it was literally a mix of who's who. And he had told me once, you know, because when you're little,
you start looking. And I grew up basically, I was probably middle-class, lower middle-class,
my dad was a fireman, you're not rich, he's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck
living is how I grew up. And I was talking to my grandfather one day, and he said something to me,
and this is literally how I run my life. He said, it was about money, because you'd see,
you know, back in the day, if you saw someone in a Mercedes, that was rare. You know, they weren't
everywhere. You couldn't lease a car, he actually bought a car, and usually he bought a car with
cash. So it was a totally different than we are now. And he said, he goes, you know, David,
he goes, they're no better than you, and you're no better than anyone else. He goes,
you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone with the
respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes,
it doesn't make him a bad person. It just, that's who they chose to be. And you make choices in
your life, but never ever look down on someone because, you know, there will always be someone
that will look down on you, and you should never ever do that. And I kept that close to me. He was
huge influences, my mom's dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way I carried myself.
And he was one that would say, you know, you can be anything you want to be, you know, he grew up
dirt poor, you know, and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother
and did stuff like that, you know, to him, that was a success. And to me, it was always, you know,
trying to better and move on. And he was the one, you know, my parents were a big part of this too,
was instilling that that anything is possible. So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969,
you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says,
well, they were all military pilots. And, you know, we had an Air National Guard that at the time
was flying F-100. So I'm dating myself. And I was just fascinated with flight. And I just looked
at that going, that's really what I want to do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always,
I could do this or do that. And when I was going to go to college, before I enlisted in the Marine
Corps, I was accepted into natural resources at Ohio State. And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly,
I'll go be a forest ranger. Because I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and
look for fires. Because that's just, I like that stuff. You know, it was that or being oceanographer,
because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau. And actually, that's my degree. My undergrad
degree is Jacques Cousteau. So influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau. I have an
oceanography degree. I got an MBA from the University of Houston. Go Cougs. Got to mention them. And
then, so you're looking, people go, what are you going to do with that? And I said, you know,
I got an oceanography degree because I got, well, I'm going to sail on the ocean. So at least if
the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at. And that was a kind of a running joke. And then
so these passions and underneath it is the, is the belief that you can be anything you want to
do. You can. You know, I told my kids this, you know, when they were young, you know, it was
tough, especially for my son. So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind.
You know, my, my wife's brothers are both colorblind. It's really color-deprived. Color-deplined,
you see black and white. He can't tell. He has issues with greens, reds, browns. It's funny
if you're ever around someone like that. Because he'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at? He
goes, right over there by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go, this, like he had
a hat on one day. I go, which one are you going to get? He had a hat in his hand. It was green.
He goes, I'm going to get the green one. I go, oh, this one right here. He goes, no, the one
on my head. I go, Nate, that one's brown. He's like, leave me alone, dad. He got the brown hat
because to him it looked green. Yeah. Yeah. So he couldn't fly. He came and he said, I go, what do
you want to do, Nate? You know, you're talking to your kids and what do you want to use? I want
to be a pilot. Now, now I got to tell him, because he's looking at me because I'm a pilot,
do you can't be a pilot? He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you got eye issues.
You know, so you got to redirect. And the other one was because I had to, I stopped flying. I
was 42 years old and I was like, and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I
know exactly what it feels like when, you know, Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when
you still can do it. Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever.
So you do when you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you
have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.
So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids and I said, you know,
find something that you want to do, that you love to do, and that you can do your whole life.
And you should be able to do good things for other people. You want to be able to help other
people. That's what I said. So both of my kids and there's no one in my family, both of my children,
one of them is, my daughter is a doctor doing residency in internal medicine right now,
and my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors. And I look at it as, you
know, people go, oh, you got two doctors. I don't care. I told my kids, if you want to be a garbage
man or you want to dig ditches, I don't care. Just be the best ditch digger that you can be.
I said, and be happy doing it because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of
money, money, money, money, money, money, money. That's what makes the world go round. But what
you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather who didn't have a lot of money, and he was probably
one of the most happy people on life. And unfortunately, he died at 65. He had a massive
heart attack because he didn't tell that he kind of knew it was happening and he just made the
choice to do it. And it was devastating to the entire family. But he didn't have a lot of money.
But I'll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there's nobody at them.
And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, had literally, it was like three miles long.
The Pope.
It was crazy. Yeah, who died the Pope? That was because it was like, he's a Catholic,
he's Italian. He goes, you know, who died the Pope? And I go, no, that's my grandfather. And then
the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister. And it was like, you know, 30 people.
And I looked at my mother and I said, where's everybody at? She goes, oh,
no, this is normal. This is what a normal funeral looks like. So it's, you know, for young kids,
bottom line one, be nice. Kindness will get you, I'm a big believer in karma. Kindness will get
you a long way in the world. You know, it's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said,
you know, and get rid of the hate. And number two is follow your dreams. Because everyone is
capable of everything. And there's a self-realism. Like, you know, if you really have trouble with
math, getting a PhD in applied math, it's probably not something you're going to be able to do,
but understand yourself what your own capabilities are. And you know inside your heart. Don't let
anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do. You have to determine that yourself and go for it.
And you can do anything. It's just, it's a great, the world's incredible. It really is.
Let me ask the last big ridiculous question. So you've lived
much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death. So let me ask kind of
several different ways, the same kind of question. One, do you, have you pondered your
mortality, the finiteness of it? And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of
your tic-tac encounter, is what do you think is the meaning of this
thing we've got going on here, the meaning of life, human life in this sense?
So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often. And I don't get
into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do believe in God. I've just seen
too many things in the world that I can't explain. And some people will explain it by
subconscious. So I'll give you a story, and this kind of puts in the thing of, do I fear death?
So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with. We were stationed in Japan together,
and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins. So there's a real high cancer rate
for those that served on the base in Asugi, Japan. Him and his wife had one son,
and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday of cancer. And I was hanging out with,
I'll call him John, and I was hanging out with John. We were in oil and gas. He had come to the
same company, and we were doing an event together. And he was opening up to me, because we were
actually the demo pilots. We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff. And him and I were
sitting there talking, and he was giving me the whole story and how he had really changed his
look on life, that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die. Well,
unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location
that would fit there close to the water where they could do stuff, and I won't say where.
And he was doing what he loved to do, and he got diagnosed with throat cancer.
And I was talking to him. It was probably about maybe two months before he died.
And I said, dude, you're sad. I mean, this is your friend. And I'm kind of really bummed out.
And this is the guy that's dying of cancer. And here's what he tells me. He says, Dave,
dude, we're all going to die. He goes, but I have to look at it. I have to make the best of the time
that I have. And I said, I understand that. And he goes, with the exception of not being with my
wife, who he loved dearly, he goes, I'm okay with dying. I've had a really good life. And
about, because actually the original announcement when he finally passed away,
buddy of mine called me because I don't do Facebook and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had
passed. And about the day before he died, for some reason, I was thinking about him.
And I had a dream where I think it was a dream or an altered reality. You can get into whatever.
But he was there. It was just him and I. And I was really sad in the dream. I was actually crying.
And he was there. And he was actually in his uniform. He was in his whites because he was a navy.
And we were just talking. And he looked at me and he said, and this is in my dream. He's like,
Dave, it's all going to be okay. And this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have.
There's people are going to think I'm weird about this. But I know what my dream was.
And maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream. But in reality, to me, this was real,
that it was put there for a reason. And he basically explained everything. He's, it's okay.
I'm going to be fine. My wife is fine. He goes, this is what's meant to be.
You know, but, you know, and the bottom line was make use of every day that you have because you
don't know. And literally two days later, I find out that he passed. So.
But ultimately, he accepted the finiteness of it.
He did. Well, you have to. And it's like I talk about, you know, money and job position and this
and that. And I said, you can get in any, you know, you can go to a company. Just remember,
when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company. You have to.
You have to. I said, if you look, I joke with people at work. And I said, I said, you know,
when you ever think that you're important or this guy has that, I said, when you're sitting on 93 or
95, 128 and you're sitting in traffic and we're stopped, which doesn't happen right now because
of COVID, but normally it's stopped. It's bumper to bumper and you're sitting here,
like I was coming down here by the gas tank. When you're sitting there, look left and look right.
You know, and there can be a Lamborghini or an S550 Mercedes. And on the other side,
there could be some piece of crap car. We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time,
trying to do the same thing, which is just get home so we can be with our family because the
most important thing that we have, it ain't money. It ain't our job. It's not our position. I go,
because when it's all said and done, you could be, you know, you can be with the exception of the
presidents of the United States. I mean, name the vice presidents. Most people can't. And eventually,
they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the 1700s in the
Boston area and you're going to go, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life?
He probably did, but eventually people forget. You realize what's important now. And the one
thing that you have is your family and your close friends and that's it. You can take all the money
or everything else. If you're down on your luck, you know, who is going to be, we always joke,
who are your true friends? It's the person, well, there's ones that I won't say, but you know,
hey, you're broke down on a road in the middle of nowhere and it's three o'clock in the morning.
Who are you going to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you.
And that's life. That is life. The people you love.
It's the people you truly care about. And contrary to, I have, you know, oh my God,
I got 6,000 Facebook friends. You got about that many real friends that you can count on. And that's
it. Everything else doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you don't be nice. I mean,
I have, there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for and then come to my house and stuff,
but then there's the people that, you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers
that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when, when my uncle passed away at a young age,
you know, who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin Chad, and I got two
boys, there's 14 of us, but there's only two boys. There's three of us together. And we all
grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools, play football together, all that. I said,
if one of those, if Ray or Chad ever needs me, if something happens, like when my uncle died,
it wasn't, it wasn't an issue if I'm coming home. It's I'm booking the ticket and I don't give a
shit what it costs because I will be there to be there with you. And then those two guys and my
college roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with, you know, you know, if there's,
there's, I have a handful of people that, you know, I will drop literally everything, even if
my wife would be pissed at me at times. She's like, seriously, I gotta do it. And now she knows,
and it's the same thing with her. I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life
that if they really need her and she has to go, she would go and I would let her go.
So. Given all that, I'm honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time.
Dave, it was one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much.
It's a pretty long one. It's probably sets the record for the longest one. So I,
I mean, I'm, I'm a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for
talking to Dave. You're welcome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David
Fraver. And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN and BetterHelp.
Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on our podcast,
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman.
And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.