Angry Planet - Navy Pilots Keep Seeing UFOs Because They're Real

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Flying saucers. Little Green Men. UFOs. Over the past few years, reports from US Navy Pilots of strange flying objects has been hitting the pages of America’s newspapers. And no, not just the tabloids. The New York Times is talking about UFOs. So what is going on? Is this evidence of extraterrestrial life? Lights reflecting off of swamp gas, or dastardly new tech designed by America’s enemies? Here to help us answer these tough questions is the editor-in-chief of The War Zone, Tyler Rogoway.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Producer Kevin Nodell is traveling to Germany and then the Middle East, so I'm going to be flying solo for a little while. Flying saucers, little green men, UFOs. Over the past few years, reports from U.S. Navy pilots of strange flying objects has been hitting the pages of America's newspapers. And no, not just tabloids like the Weekly World News. The New York Times is talking about UFOs. So what's going on? Is this evidence of extraterrestrial life, lights reflecting off of swamp gas, or dastardly new technology designed by America's enemies? Here to help us answer those tough questions is the editor-in-chief of the war zone, Tyler Ragoway. Tyler, thank you so much for joining us. Hey, always great to be with you guys. All right, so let's get some definitional stuff

out of the way right at the top. We're not just talking about UFOs. We're also talking about USOs and what are like when the Navy talks about those what do they mean specifically? Yeah, when you hear, I mean, UFO, we all kind of got an idea what that is, but it's not necessarily a flying saucer. It's just an unidentified object in airspace is being monitored or being seen by a sensor or, you know, the human eye. U.S.Os are, they come from underwater, so, and sometimes they're cross-medium, at least, you know, in the past, how this, it's sort of this whole world's been defined of these, you know, very nebulous ideas is, you know, a U.S.O can, you know, act like a submarine, right? So it can be underneath the water. But now we're kind of in this realm, especially with these accounts that you mentioned, where these potential craft can maybe move, between the two. So that complicates things quite a bit, especially in our minds when we think of very different ideas of crap and we think of something that flies through the air or that travels through the medium of water. But apparently that might not be such a big barrier for whatever

technology we're seeing and what pilots are seeing. All right, so this stuff used to be very X-Files, Art Bell, conspiracy theory fodder. You know, the History Channel is airing a television show right now about Project Blue Book. Why has this all become suddenly so public? It seems like the Navy, or at least Navy pilots, are willing to talk about this stuff much more now. In 2004, the Nivitz incident off the coast of Baja Peninsula down there in the training ranges that are, you know, some of the best training areas the United States has to offer. vast areas that can be controlled and are not highly trafficked.

So they can put a carrier strike group down there and have them, you know, work together on some pretty complex training missions. During the Nimitz's run up to their deployment, they ran into a series of events. But the main one was a number of intercepts. And one in particular with a craft everybody calls the Tic Tac, that it looks like a flying Tic Tac, as how it's been described. This is like a 45-foot-long craft white.

It has a couple little antennas underneath it. But beyond that, it looks literally something out of this world. And, you know, that's one thing to see that on a targeting pod, a fleer pod, or even an electro-optical system or whatever. But the commander of VF-41, a Super Hornet Squadron, a very respected guy, he flew information with us. He chased this thing. Well within visual range.

closer than, you know, a lot of times aircraft will come even in a within-visual-range dog fight. And there was other aircraft as well in that formation that saw it, you know, and the weapon systems officers. So that story, and there's a lot more to it. This thing was picked up on radar, these things, I should say, over multiple days. It's an amazing, amazing store with mini-witnesses. That has been the catalyst. Now, you know, basically, you know, 14 years later or whatever. that has propelled this subject from laughable tinful hat territory into, hey, this might actually be something.

And it's worth actually looking at. And then within the last couple months, we have had the Navy not only acknowledge that this phenomenon is real, that they're concerned with it, and they're changing their rules as to making it easier and more acceptable for all different types of sailors and pilots and naval aviators to come forward and say, hey, this is what I saw. But we also have now a slew of new pilots that encountered craft all the way up into the within visual range regime through 2014 and 2015. And there's real parallels between that and what happened in 2004.

So this isn't some old story that we're kind of rehashing and trying to, you know, make new. We've seen massive movement on a level that I've never seen in my life on this particular topic, and it's something that the military is saying needs to be taken seriously in a public domain. One of the things that I found interesting in your own reporting on this, and I think I want to hammer home to the audience, is the recording and networking capability of the Nimitz. Right. And why that's important to this story.

I want you to, can you explain it to us, like why that's such a big deal? Yeah, it's definitely a key part of that 2004 incident. At the time, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was the first operational. operational carrier strike group that was being deployed with cooperative engagement capability. And that's a level of sensor fusion between radar systems and data links that allows for much higher fidelity of quality of tracking different targets within the airspace around the carrier strike group, which can range way out, hundreds of miles. We're talking about Spy 1 radars on ages of class destroyers and cruisers, as well as the Nimitz

itself and some of the aircraft that were. you know, inside, or part of the air wing there. So this was a revolutionary capability. It was in its very early stages. It's matured a lot since then. But this was the first time that a carrier strike group is even, from what we can tell, even trained at a very high level, integrated level, with that system in place. So that's kind of a tech side of the story that, like, the UFO community didn't figure out

until this thing became more mainstream, and we started talking about it. And there's also reports that the data bricks, the hard drives basically that record this data were confiscated, like immediately after those intercepts occurred in a very short period of time and left the carrier strike group under, you know, custody of Air Force officials. Multiple people have said this. These are sailors. These are average people. These are UFO people. These are people that now have come out and said, yeah, this was weird.

This is my experience. And yeah, the data from the CEC capability was taken. So anyway, for me, as a defense writer, not a UFO rider, that watches this, you know, if you were going to test something, something that's very clandestine and very exotic, if you were to test something or knew something was going to be in an area, you have in the Kier, in the Nimitz Karish strike group there, the most robust air defense capability anywhere in the world, bar none, that's it. And that's the first time it was all together in one place at one time.

So that does open up a question, and which is I think everybody should be asking, is that is this our technology? Is this something that we have that, you know, we wanted to test and, you know, do it without any notice to the Nimitz-Carray strike group overall? You know, what are the explanations for unidentified flying objects is often, well, the equipment that observing it was malfunctioning. What you're saying is that even though this stuff was new, it was state of the art, and it was witnessed by whatever the TicTac was, was witnessed by the eyes of multiple people.

Yes, and that's really the key thing, right? So you can have, you know, there's reports that during this week of these strange events, which these things are tracked basically from Catalina Island area, which is a very, you know, major military operating area, all the way down to sort of off the Baja Coast in Mexico, right? That's kind of where these things were flying. And then the one that was actually intercepted was in that Baja Coast area. You know, it's one thing if there is, you know, radar anomalies, you know, things happen.

Obviously technology is not perfect and especially sensors that have to range out over hundreds of miles to get a contact. And even electro-optical and infrared systems can have issues, and things can look very different than they actually are, that's understandable on why people would have those questions. But when you also bring the human eye into it and being there and seeing it and reacting to it and seeing it from multiple angles, and it's a physical object,

and that's something that is a different level of evidence than we have with just technology alone. But when you fuse all of those together, when these things are being detected on a RF, you know, radar frequency regime and a electro-opsyl infrared bands, and then going into the visual regime where somebody's seeing it with their own eyes, multiple people, okay? This was an anomaly in the computers or in the radar system, or this was electronic warfare. It just, it makes zero sense. You know, and you could go and just say, oh, yeah, it's hologram projections or something like,

Yeah, you could say anything. We have no idea what this really was. That's fine, you know, but it was there. It was physical. And the most highly trained observer you could probably have a look at it was aggressively trying to chase it, and it was reacting to that person in real time and doing maneuvers that aircraft,

fixed-wing aircraft using, you know, jet engines just are not capable of doing, and the humans inside would not be able to survive. Maybe even electronics inside to certain extent, too, because of the acceleration and the maneuvers of this thing was seen doing. So this is outstanding evidence. This is not two guys on the side of the ship seeing something at night. And now we have a whole other round of it that happened, not just over a week, but happened over many months.

And so obviously, you know, if this, regardless of what the narrative is, this is interesting. It should be interesting to anybody that's fascinated with military technology and aerospace engineering. All right, let's drill down on this object just a little bit if we can. All right, so looks like a Tic Tac, white, two little antenna kind of coming out of the bottom of it, presumably. You said that it was performing maneuvers that equipment inside and human beings probably would not have been able to survive. What do you mean?

Do we have any idea how fast it was going and how it was reacting as it was being chased? You know, there is, some people have looked at what Commander Fravor has said and sort of worked out a little bit of maybe how fast it would have been moving. But basically what you have is these things will be able to go from 80,000 feet down to, you know, sea level in a matter of one or two seconds. Okay. And that's on radar. So once again, we don't have to take that as fact because, yeah, maybe electronic warfare and whatever. Who knows? But when it came to the visual sighting, the craft was able to help well.

outperform a super hornet that was aggressively chasing it. And then on top of that, toward the end of that engagement, or actually that, I'd say the end of it, it shot off so fast that it was literally gone in a blink of an eye, and it showed up at those, that flight's cap point, combat air patrol point, where it was supposed to go. That's information also that was not being transmitted openly. That was something that, like I say, this thing seemed to have some away. awareness to it where it actually went back to the point that that flight was originally supposed to go in just a matter of a second or two. Very fast. The radar operators were seeing it back where those super hornets were supposed to be in an area for training. So we're talking extreme acceleration. We're not talking like a rocket. We're talking just massive going from zero to hypersonic in seconds, or in less than a second. Some people described as non-Newtonian, you know, meaning it's not being gravity is not working in a similar way that we're used to seeing with these objects. But these are what we hear from these accounts or from this account. And obviously the radar operators saw these things do amazing, amazing maneuvers. But we can discount all that. Just take what we saw in the visual range and take all that other evidence is just more, you know, more circumstantial evidence around it.

And just what we know about what was going on in the visual range with very high, trained observers. It's absolutely astonishing. Do you think it's ours? Something I put forward, and this is what I say on this, is I don't know what it is. I have no idea, no idea what it is. But I think, you know, obviously, leaping to aliens or whatever, you know, is a big leap when we know for a fact that, you know, we've had a black budget that's gone on for, what, 70-some years, you know, tens of billions a year dropped into it, we've seen very little come out of that as far as hard, like, you know,

operational machines, flying machines. And of course, the Defense Department and their contractors are going to be interested in the holy grail of aerospace propulsion. Of course they are. So maybe somewhere along the line, they got lucky. It's quite possible. Maybe it's very hard to replicate. Maybe it's a very, You know, you can't necessarily build a lot of them, but maybe they did. There's no way, we have no evidence to say they didn't, okay? And there's a lot of also, you know, over the years, people that have come out of the dark side of the aerospace sector have mentioned that. You know, we've done incredible things that are very locked up in compartmentalized programs, and, you know, we probably won't see them for a very long time if ever. I mean, how many aircraft are supposedly just buried out at Area 51?

You know, he's literally in the ground. once they're done with them, it's cheaper to do that than, you know, they get rid of them otherwise. So I don't know. I think it's something that since we're having people that we trust as a society with a 70 million dollar aircraft that can do a lot of destruction, I think that we can take their experiences as valid, and we can start breaking down what we could be saying. but I think looking at internally is very much needed before we jump to conclusions externally. And also foreign powers. You know, I mean, China's no joke.

You know, they're doing some pretty amazing things, and they've caught up a lot, you know, close to parity. And who knows, maybe once again, they got lucky, and this is something that they're using to observe us. I have no idea. But I guarantee you if the Department of Defense is being truthful. and there could be multiple layers to this, so it all depends. And they don't know what this is. They have no idea, and they're trying to figure it out, maybe have some assumptions, then it is something that we should all be aware of

and that we should all be trying to realize that this is something. It's not a joke, and it's not to be laughed at, and people to be ridiculed. It's something to be taken seriously. Well, the Department of Defense, like you said, seems to be taking it seriously. Can you explain what happened on the Nimitz when they began to report back? Yeah, right. That's a great point. Once the flight landed and another one went up,

and that's where you see the Outflear targeting pod video that shows kind of a little tick-tack-looking thing. I mean, it's not high definition. Apparently the video that they got was very good definition. It's just been degraded so many times being passed around. But when they landed, they went in. said, hey, listen, they're freaked out. You know, they're spooked at what they saw.

They weren't, nobody's happy to see this type of thing, you know. And they got made fun of, you know, in the intelligence area, the tinfoil hat thing, and it went on for apparently for weeks that people kind of laughed at it, even though they had video evidence of it apparently sitting right there. It's embedded in our culture. And, you know, listen, the CIA and, you know, the powers of B, we know for a fact openly and absolutely and actually. actively perpetuated UFO myths throughout the Cold War to guard their own clandestine aircraft projects.

Because, you know, somebody sees an S or 71 or 812 in the sky. It's easy to just laugh them off. It's all you saw a UFO, another UFO guy. And who knows what else? Like I say, we still don't know what's all come out of that. So there has been a playbook for this. Is it being actively, is this an information warfare campaign? I have no idea.

Definitely something to be aware of. and there could be layers of it. Maybe Big Navy doesn't know what it is. Maybe deep inside aspects of the government, they do. I have no idea. But what I do know is that this is happening. And these are normal people. These are not normal.

They're fighter pilots. Very accomplished people. And people we should be trusting that are seeing this and reporting it. And there's multiple layers of evidence that we're just uncovering now about it. Let's talk about some of those other layers of evidence. What are some of the other incidents? that have been reported recently. You know, the New York Times has got new stories out.

And is the capability of what they've seen similar to what the people of the Nimitz saw? Yeah. So the sea change in radar technology, this is something we were first to report on. The sea change in radar technology going from mechanically scan array radars, air crews know that these things are in their vicinity. Going from mechanically scan array to active electronically scanned array, radars, AASER radars, which the Super Hornet was equipped with after about 2007, they started spiraling them into the aircraft coming off the line. They've retrofitted some of them. And you know,

that gives you better fidelity, better range, a whole better resistance across electronic warfare. And that system is the APG 79 and those jets. It's gotten better as time has gone on. Same time, the Air Force has been having that technology on the F-22 since, you know, operationally since 2005. So nowadays, this technology has proliferated out farther than just, you know, the Super Hornet back in 2007. But apparently the change with the squadrons out of Oceana in Virginia, specifically VFA 11, which is the Red Rippers, who fly the Super Hornet F, the Foxx Trot model, the Tsu C model. These guys mentioned that once the new radars came in line, they started seeing these things on radar in their airspace. and they tried to chase them down, and some of them got close, and even got, like, their AM-9X sidewiners would lock on to the signature

when they were close to it, but sometimes they couldn't get a visual. Other crews did get a visual, and saw very strange things. The one that has been reported is basically like a cube, like a cube, right? A geometric cube inside a field around fields, almost like a cube in a beach ball type of thing that flew right past and they almost hit it. And they're seeing this thing on radar trying to find it. And they have that visual, that moment where they were actually able to get a good look at it as it whipped by. And there's been, from what I've been told, there's so much more.

There's so much more. This was not just one squadron. This was the whole strike group that was getting spun up. And in addition, and this is really important for me to make a case for us that when that strike group which I believe was the Theodore Roosevelt. I can't remember exactly what I'm in front of me, but when they were spinning up in 2014 and 2015 to deploy to the Middle East,

once again, that Carrier Strike Group got the latest, newest version of cooperative engagement capability, which allows for actual weapons delivery, you know, from remote launching, so basically a Super Hornet could generate our target way hundreds of miles away from a carrier strike group, and they could send a SM6 missile on remote to shoot it down far over the horizon

using that radar picture from the Super Hornet. So we're talking real cooperative, distributed engagement capability here. This was the first time that that had ever been deployed on that carrier strike group that was working up for deployment. So there is a similarity between these two incidents, or these rounds of incidents that happened. This is by their own words.

This situation went on for months until they deployed in early 2015 time frame. And even apparently when they were overseas, they had some encounters too with similar objects in the Middle East. This is happening not, you know, hey, we're talking about stories from the past, you know, 15 years ago. Who knows what people's accounts are? And, you know, we're talking about something that's very, very near. time-wise. And those same airspace out there that they're training in, those whiskey ranges, warning ranges off the kind of the south-east sea border of the United States. They run from Florida up to Virginia. Those are used by Air Force aircraft too all the time

and the most advanced Air Force aircraft, F-35, F-22, with better capabilities, sensor capabilities than even the Super Hornet. So who knows what information they're sitting on regarding this phenomenon? You touched on another question I had. I want to see if there's any more information. So the people aren't just seeing things in North America. They're seeing this in theater as well. That was a huge question I had after the New York Times. The most recent piece came out before we started hearing more from these pilots.

And what we've heard now is that once they deployed and they were in theater, the Persian Gulf, these things started showing up again. We're similar, you know, these things are such a hard thing to say here. Similar anomalous, you know, aircraft in their airspace that had high performance, crazy performance levels. At least for time being showed up over there. I don't know enough more about those incidents or, you know, if this was a very isolated scenario or this was over, you know, a large scenario,

or what sensors saw these or how many eyeballs did. it's hard to go out right now and say, oh, this happened. This was a big part of the story. But apparently there was something over there that was similar. And that kind of, it was almost like it had followed them to a certain extent. All right. Let's get, let's get weird. Can we get a little weird?

Hey, I'm down. Are these incidents at all similar to what we know of, you know, past UFO encounters, older UFO encounters? They sound a little similar. within our culture, maybe not in reality, but in our culture it goes way back, you know, to the foo fighters back in, you know, World War II. And then farther back, you know, with some people claim. But for me, I think it's really key that to be serious about this and to not get into all the, you know, laughing stock, tinfoil hat world, we really need to take the Nimitz case forward.

and look at that because that is, you know, that's very relevant to our time frame today. And we have those people around, they're alive, the technology is familiar. I think if we focus more on those as far as analysis and trying to figure out what's going on and what's coming out now, I think we're going to be much more successful in letting people live in this space with a little bit more ease that they're not going to be made fun of and they can write an article about it and it's not going to, you know, screw up their career. But yeah, it goes way back. I mean, there's legends and legends and legends,

and we have, you know, crazy incidents like Randallsham Forrest that people still say it was, you know, relevant. And guys like Bob Lazar that said that they were out at Area 51 and many people have tried to debunk it and parts of it have. And, you know, it's all Merck. But then again, it's not too surprising because we knew, we know for a fact that the government really liked this. This was a positive thing for them.

or at least for some areas, because it gave them cover for clandestine programs that they were running, you know, to develop new weaponry and principally aerospace technologies. What do you make of how the brass is reacting and how the Pentagon is conducting itself and how it's different from, you know, say the 60s? Well, this is really, we have hard witnesses of these pilots that weren't told to shut up. and now from the Navy's own public admission, which is odd that they go out and talk about this instead of just doing internal change and maybe leaks, maybe it gets out whatever. But it's a big commotion. Political articles started it about them saying, hey, we're going to change how people can report these things. And once again, this is not just about guys and airplanes and gals and airplanes. This is about sailors under the sea too and everything in between.

That seems like a good thing to do. Not just for UFOs and all that, but like I say, we've got competitors out there that are very interested in what we're up to. Maybe something that looks to Sailor looks like a UFO, right? Maybe it looks something totally out of this world. But maybe to the right intelligence people, it can be part of a pattern of sightings of things that might be a capability that the enemy is actually building. And I've always taken an interest in UFO reports because of the same thing. I mean, maybe there's a secret program in there that somebody saw, and they just don't know what they're looking at.

But with the right eyes, more context can be given, and maybe some really good intelligence value can be cleaned beyond the whole, you know, UFO's thing. So that makes sense to me. We haven't heard much from the Air Force. Actually, we haven't heard anything. We haven't heard from the other services on this. It'd be interesting to see if they step into this realm,

but it's changing, and it's changing on a systemic level. And what that means, I still, I think everybody's questioning it. Is this information warfare? Is this, what is this movement? And we do have hard witnesses that we can presumably trust, expert witnesses, average people that were in a place that had a certain job that just saw something or were a part of something that disturbed them. And they can now talk to us more freely.

And that's a really good thing. All right, you know what I have to ask now, right? Shoot. Is it aliens? I mean, that's obviously what pop culture loves to think it is. But like I say, I've tried to tell, you know, really push and say, you know, don't think because something looks amazing or has amazing capabilities, a technological piece of gear of any type, that is just, you know, landed here from another planet. We spend a lot of money in the dark. We shovel it.

into dark spaces to develop very, very, you know, in hopes of developing very exotic technologies. So I think that there's a, you know, I think jumping to that conclusion first, I think is worthwhile. So, but I don't know. I have no idea what this is. I, you know, and it sounds like nobody else does either, at least that is willing to disclose it and actually has evidence to back it up. And primarily that's the government. I mean, I did it. If this has been happening for so long, I mean, they haven't been just not interested in it. I mean, you know, that's insanity. Obviously, they have.

And if it's not theirs, then I'm sure they've been very concerned about these things, and they know probably a lot more than they're letting on. But at least we're seeing progress in that way. And maybe it will change. Maybe it will all dry up. I have no idea. But we are living in an odd time on this subject that is really actually unprecedented. Tyler, thank you so much for coming on to War College

and walking us through all of this. Hey, love to be, love being here, guys. And, you know, we'll hopefully get more in the future we can talk about. Yeah, absolutely. This is not the end of this story. That's for sure. That's all for this week. Thank you for listening.

War College is me, Matthew Galt, Kevin Nodell, and Derek Gannon. It was created by myself and Jason Field. If you like the show, please like and subscribe. Leave a review if you're so inclined. You can find us on iTunes and wherever else find podcasts are We're over on Twitter at War underscore College. We'll see you next week. Until then, stay safe.