Lex Fridman Podcast - #122 – David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

David Fravor is a navy pilot of 18 years and a primary witness in one of the most credible UFO sightings in history, video of which has been released by the Pentagon and reported on by the NY Times. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast: - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex - ExpressVPN: https://www.expressvpn.com/lexpod - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/podcast or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. Here's the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 07:13 - Top Gun 12:06 - Navy pilot career 24:14 - AI is the third brain of a jet fighter 40:37 - Sully 47:34 - Landing a jet fighter on a carrier 53:18 - What's it like to fly a jet fighter? 1:05:22 - Greatest plane ever made 1:11:04 - The Tic Tac UFO story 1:49:16 - Intelligent extraterrestrial life 1:53:30 - Why aren't UFOs investigated more seriously 1:59:52 - Tic Tac UFO details 2:07:55 - What do you think the Tic Tac was? 2:16:23 - SpaceX 2:30:01 - Response to Mick West Debunking 2:48:24 - Was the Tic Tac a secret military test? 3:00:07 - Is the government in possession of alien spacecraft? 3:25:28 - Interesting UFO sightings in history 3:39:55 - Advice for Young People 3:47:47 - Meaning of life

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 Tick Tick and the incident more formally referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO Incident. History 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 close-mindedness of the scientific community. And, in equal. I'm often disheartened by the close 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 past no understanding can only be walked humbly. The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology with a 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, we'll 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 and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the 5 stars and Apple podcasts, follow

on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter, review the 5 stars and Apple podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on Twitter, Alex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. More and more, I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less ad Z more personal, but I give you time stamp so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all-in-one daily drink to support health and performance. I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need.

Now, let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting. I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an eight hour eating period of two meals, sometimes 24 hours. That's one dinner to the next. I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to have done. People who've done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits, it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life. Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal that every day is precious. I certainly experienced this with the 24-hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the 48-72 and even weak long fasts.

Anyway, I always break my fast with athletic greens, it's delicious or refreshing, just makes me feel good. So go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex to claim a special offer of free vitamin D for a year. Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast. This is the show called The Office that I fell in love with first with the British version with Ricky Chavez and then the American version with Steve Correll. ExpressVPN lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100 different countries and then watch one of the 9 totally different other versions of the office and other countries.

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help. Like you would try to spell if you want a deserted island and trying to get an airplane to notice you. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash flex. They figure out what you need and match with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Now, hard left turn, let me talk about Desert Islands. Whatever you think of it, I love the movie cast the way with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending time in 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 CLRS for the first letters of the last name of its four authors. I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world and site computers when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess. I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization. Anyway, check out BetterHelp at BetterHelp.com slash Lux to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now, finally, here's my conversation with David Fraver. You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapon School.

Yeah, I am. Better known as Top Gun. Let me ask the most ridiculous question. How realistic is the movie Top Gun? So it's funny. We used to joke in a front of mine who was a Top Gun? So it's funny, we used to joke, and in a front of mine, who is a Top Gun instructor, said, 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 your planes 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 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 posters 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 you're going to know something. 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 or something? No, when you go through, if anything, it's more of the students and then there's the instructor

side. The instructor sides are really, the guys that you know, they just chose to stay up and fall in. And it's extremely difficult job because they have a very small tolerance for not being good. So they're briefed, 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 power point 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, 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 Easter 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're extremely particular When you go to the course it's it is literally one of the best things and it's not it's not a ranked base thing because think oh Navy You can come in as a you you know, like an O4 lieutenant commander. The lieutenants, the hierarchy, it will be 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 their 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 has found it. So it's just a it's an incredible group individuals. So there's a bar of excellence that that the instructors demand. Well, very much 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 Fallon and they come down and do their called site visits where they come down and they'll come to LaMorca, 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 same high level of standard, you 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 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're an avi 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 in listed, I was in 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. So it's always better to be lucky than good, but I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished, and I had that dream to fly, so when I got selected... Steve, you've always dreamed of flying. Yeah, since 1969 when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on a moon, I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five. And I said, wow, 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 gonna 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 gonna fly, I'm gonna fly jets, and I'm gonna drop bombs. And if people that knew me, I'm gonna be like, yeah I'm gonna drop bombs. Then, and if people that knew me, I'm gonna say that.

They would be like, yeah, and they'd be like, nah, not a chance. And then, when I did, I actually had a, this is a funny story, and I'll get to, I'll finish my career, but I was at my cousin's wedding, and we all grew up in the same neighborhood. We kinda, 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 then right around the corner was is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff. The guy two doors now for my and I was a paper boy in the neighborhood. So they'll know me. And I went to my cousins wedding and he and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fraver, I go, Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes, you fly jets. Top gun and all that I go. Yes sir. I think it's a matter of figure he'd be in jail by now. Top gun and all that I go. Yes sir. I guess I had a 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 be it's better to be lucky than good and you you talk modestly about 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? 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 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 mental. And I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a fighter pilot, matter 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 behind. And 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 don't have, you can't get to the nth degree, six decimal places. 80% solution's good enough. People that are 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 air is and then I capitalize. So my mind, 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 racks and then I can adjust for that and you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral, you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage advantage advantage. To eventually, you know, and if you're really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only rear-corder, where you got to get behind the guy, kind of

World War II dogfighting type stuff, then 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 You know, you know, you know part of it is family, you know My dad was ice-coma fire ready am guy You know he needs smack me and then ask me what I did wrong. Yeah

guy, you know, he'd need smack me and then ask me what I did wrong. Yeah. Good parenting. Um, back then, you know, I joke and people look because you know, times it was kind of tough, you know, because he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, you know, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times. But then everyone else in my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid, my, my grandfather who is a big part of it, my mom's dad, who he taught me a lot.

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 I figured, 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 my career, first question, because I'm getting down at rabbit hole. No, 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 a, a, a, a, 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 was enlisted. So it's fine with me. Because it comes up a lot.

You might be saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is. So like? Yeah, so Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. So it's a four and a half acres of sovereign US territory that floats around the US oceans. Is there a giant thing? 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 VF41 and F14 squadron, VF84 and F14 squadron and then a couple of A6 squadrons.

And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of A6 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 unit, that whole unit, the Marine Corps is at one surface as it 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 actually went through together. Missy Cummings. We went through primary together and then I went to Kingsville. 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 Beville 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 how, besides from school, I knew I was 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 A6s 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 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 it was that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for for the public. Yeah, that's how many fighter jets are side by side like that. That was in the Navy. That was the only one. The Air Force, the F111 was aside by side,

but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the E-A6B, which is a derivative of that. And now that those are all gone. The E-A6B is just one way a few years ago. And now the E-18G, Growler, is the replacement for the E-A6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew. It really became the F-18, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance-wise by fuel. Then the Hornet and the F-18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually

like in front and behind? In the modern two-seater's, yes. But most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single-seat. Single 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 F15E strike eagle and the F18F 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 A6, was a two-seater, then I went to single-seater

F18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and, I think, 2001, to the end of 2001. And then I shifted over and started flying the super hornets and I flown both of those, the E's and the S. But I deployed when I had command of VFA 41, I had the 2C. 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, their 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 CEO, 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 Lamor, Lamor had been a single seat fighter community since the forever. And now all of a sudden you've got the F18F 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 A6 background that I have a switch that I can go one C2C, one C2C, because when you fly two C, 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 seed 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 is 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. Could we just pause on that? Yeah. For me, from a human-factor's 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 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 just start. No this is good. This is good and

this is good. I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tick-tax. So let um, so let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the 60s. 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 Woodby 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 that one 111, the B1 has a system like this. Put 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 gonna you're gonna fly in the mountains at night You're gonna be at you know 500 to a thousand feet above the ground

Rippin through like fog layers because you don't need to see outside You're you're literally flying a little TV screen. I guess what are you looking at most of the time? So you just as a screen it's this really primitive If you look at it now what we we did, you think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun. So it's similar to like the flare stuff is that is is this thing is totally radar based. Now the airplane had a flare balls target recognition and multi sensor was called a tram. So you're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects. He's actually what it is is the the bombardier navigator had a radar and he was getting

raw feed 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 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 go around the backside of the mountain, which is what the airplane would do. And it's an answer 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? Yes, so you're actually just controlling. 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'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, the, the, the bombardier navigator is looking at his radar. He's looking at about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scope down because the radar can seal out 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 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 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'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 12th, 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 arrangement 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, 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 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 3D

environment based on that little Atari's. It's all the space. You're exactly right and you have to, you have to train. So there's been studies, no matter if a lot of the basis and people probably argue with me, but it's true, there were studies done watching ASIC's crews in our simulators. We it the WIST, the weapon systems trainer. And it was not even a motion. I just kind of sat there and you just you could fly these things and they had trained that they would inject into the system. But the crew coordination. So you get so my first my first fleet, Bommet Air Navigator who I'll name him. His name is Chris Seito. He's a 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 I flew as 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're never forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together, 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, he 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 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'd say,

showing rising terrain at 12 miles. And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, got it. This is gonna 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 sentences. 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'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, I 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 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. How do I avoid the mic? We're still a hard turn, and we would do that. So my truck. And this is all happening quick. Very quick. Well, you're doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed.

It's about 20 miles an hour. Well, for 27 miles a minute. OK. So between 7 and 8 miles a minute is what you're flying. As fast. At night. I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember him and I is what you're flying. That's best. At night. I mean, I broke out of clouds.

I mean, I remember him and I flying. We were on it's the IR. It's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low. They're all around the country. There's the 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 it had to turn off our red lights that flash,

you know, they're called an anti-collision lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to body 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 as we're 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 a trust and you can see houses. You can see the lights there 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 F18F. So now we're into modern technology. It was actually built in this century and you're flying. So now, the whizzo 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 wizard does all the talk and he's got actually, he uses his feet,

that's the weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F. 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 airplane. Just like we asked you, what's the situational awareness display? Because that term comes up a lot in the back. Think of it as a God's eye view. So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the block twos has about an 8 by 10 display for the Wizows, that they can look at the pilots as small. It's down between, it's a 6 by six 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 you're radar 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 that.

So it's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of what's going on. Big picture sense 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 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, he's, his airplanes 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,

it's all, you can sell the pictures really quick. The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and gives you a big picture of you. What about the control? Like is there an 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 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. It's 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 and the airplane to allow you to manage, 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 mount, a cueing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head's at looking. If I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right. The targeting fluid will look to the right. By the way, the back cedar has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he can

do things. Depending on what sensor he's controlling. If he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left. 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 cuz it's a it's a phasoray radar now it doesn't really to scan. There's all kinds of cool stuff that that technology brings cuz if you just if you went back 30 years and said hey or 40 years ago and said hey we're gonna have this helmet and you're gonna be able to slew everything to your head. 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 set up, 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 J-dam, 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 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're probably doing enough time to talk about the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying a control into playing, 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? human being and AI system. Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for control in the planet? 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 fighter jet lane. So I would say AI systems are usually black and white. When you write the algorithm for an AI system, it's really, it's basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing, right? 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, you know, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have gray areas, where we go, eh, maybe, eh, I'll try it. So humans can operate within that gray. So if you took, if you take an airplane and say,

and I'll just take a hornet for a while, I'll just super hornet, it 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

You know, so one two three four five six seven and then based on the airfoil designed and everything else and how it can pull Here's how it's gonna 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 One 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. So you can literally, 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. Like it'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I guess, you know, 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 can, we'll 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 a simulator and real life also gets it 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 Sully 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, you know, the first time they'd met. And this happens all the time in the commercial world, you know, there's six, 7,000 pilots

at United Airlines, you know, 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 how for months. Oh, yeah, for like all the deployment. So because you want to use you have to trust it. All of those things. It increases the capability 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 or 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. We know that at this point, I'm going to put this switch, you're going to do that, and everyone, they know their rules.

Captain's going to do this, first off, he'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 know, 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 to the alarm, they silence 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 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, um, what is it about those human decisions you have 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 the self-cleaning of it. So if you make bad decisions when you train, you know, an aviation is the self-cleaning oven. So if you make bad decisions, you're, you're, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions. Oh, man. 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, 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 pull the 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 through it go Well, maybe I can get over to that airport. He he looked he made a quick assessment. This is that 80% solution where you go These are not I'm 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. Yeah gone

So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia gone. Yeah, so what's my next option? Well the Hudson River's there, and 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 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 tapes they're 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 do, and he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson. But you got to remember, every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research in the airplane in the simulator, where they train to the airplane being broken. You just lost a motor, you just lost another motor.

So they go through this extensive training and all these, and it's, you know, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave where you're gonna 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 gonna lose hydraulic, and sometimes there are 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 without hydroxier, I blame won't fly 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 gonna break out it. 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 cognitive ability start to shut down, 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 plan it into the ground. It was always, you know, maybe it's an ego thing where you think I can do this. You know, and you mean, so you never have you experienced fear during flight, like, I mean, one, one way, who just offline mentioned Mike Tyson, when he talked about like 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, purely to put it into words as 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 that's his experience of overcoming fear, but 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 once say I was never afraid. I think that would be I

Couldn't tell you that anyone I know that was an 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 Leather 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 they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam. You know, guys that go fly 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. For 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, ooh, you know, this is not that bad.

But you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with your driving in your car, and it's just a, 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'll do as you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark. You can get outside, you get outside of the city and get up in a new hamster, especially when the roads are curving and the lines probably aren't that good. Now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception.

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 right. Yeah, oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move. And we have two systems, you know, there was an automatic system that's actually, 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 asmeth and glide slope. You know, you come down to 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 not stabilized at all that.

And I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the attack and needle move. There's all kinds of stuff moving because the base that it's all sitting on is doing this. And ships don't just go up and down. They do this, so the ball 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 gonna land on that. So, and it's, I mean, I remember landing as I was with Chris, say, though, and Chris and I 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 was lower than that night and

it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around. It was just crazy. It's not ever seen on 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 called the six pecs. 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 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 Which means you were not really high above the back of the ship when you landed And it comes in and the the exhaust on any a6 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 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 evidence out of me. Yeah. But it scares you afterwards. You don't, during it, you're not, you don't have time to think about that, you're doing it. You got to do as we, you 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 gotta land it. So you can cry all you want. White pete I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you gotta land it. So you can cry all you want. White peteers away, you know, put on your big kid pants

and it's time to, it's time to, you know, man up and land the jet. Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what's it like to fly an airplane? What, it like to fly an airplane? What it looks incredible? Like as a human, like a descendant of ape,

I sit here on land and look up at you guys, it seems incredible that a human being can do that. You know how people ask, you know, be sitting around with my friends and they're like, how was I said? The greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's an office with a view because you're sitting in a glass pool.

Off the suite. Um, 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 everyone's, and it's like, oh, yeah, I like roller coasters. I go, 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, depends on fuel weight. So I mean, you routinely get up there towards 8G's. 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. I know 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. But, well, I want to fly jets 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, it like literally right out of the factory. I'd 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 I actually signed the inside of one of the wings why 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 it's 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 promise 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 in your airwing commander, which is we call him 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. 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 a 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'd 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, and I'm like, that's cool because, you know, I'd 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, he had talked about doing that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water pull a player. But he's, you know, both 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 bit of sweet

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? Uh, 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. There's going to come a time where he has to stop. He seems to have done a full-on time. But typically, when you look at it, you go, I had the opportunity. I think his automation moves on, especially with AI, that when will the last man fighter be built? That's that big question. 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 trittable platform 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 told me about a lot of incredible women that phone. So I had I had three three female 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 home not forgetting, I don't think I'm forgetting someone, incredibly, incredibly talented and a great addition to the Red Army. So anyone who gets into the, you know, women can't do it, that's all total horse crap. And 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, one of six 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,'s awesome. He's really, if you took the hundred, 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 and complex math and they just get it, you know, 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 want you to showed up and you started. Now what you do is you actually go fly 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 pre-check, like the preset, 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 our perception is actually more limited than that of an aviator very much. And here's why. 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 the, everyone knows what looks like big tall building.

It's what maybe 1800 feet tall, even the Burjale Dubai, which is like what, 20, 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 gonna roll the airplane upside down and then I'm gonna do basically a C, the letter C. I'm gonna go in the top and out the bottom. So, and I'm just gonna, it's 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 a really tight vertical turn. 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.

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 the profound, do you still think in like vertical and then they want to start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable. Yeah, so the profound. Do you still think in like stacks of 2D layers or no? Or do you truly start to think in that third dimension, like the rich 3D world of 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 am going to go, it's kind of like when I talk about when we were chasing the TickTack. So the TickTacks 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 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 is because what I did before 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 really important 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 in what doesn't bleed energy, but I know if I do a real tight net, 2,500 foot split S, that it's gonna cost me energy. So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I'm gonna 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 gonna pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. It's overall energy package and that's that you gotta 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 take that. 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 peer speed, I would say SR71, 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 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 model. I think that like X 15, you know, the front. By the way, this, that's our side to drop this, our 71 still holds the speed record for a any plane as far as I can understand. Yeah, what's funny when you get into it is it's, remember, fast is relative. And when I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3,000 miles an hour, a hundred 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, 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, you may only be showing like 300 knots, but at 300 knots, you're really doing 2500 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 the maintenance check flights on them.

So when you're doing 200, you know, and some mod 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 gonna stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G. Okay? So when you look at something like that,

you go, is it really going fast? And when you look at an SR71 that's flying upwards of 70 plus thousand feet, the air so thin, 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 air frame are not like they would be if you were down low, but because you're going fast to get enough air over your pito static system to show that you're going 300 knots, you're screaming. I mean, the fastest I ever got was I was with, 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 horned up to mock 1.78. And it was, and we were struck by Pebble Beach too. And then, it, what's that feel like? Of course, it's just 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. It's like how fast I could have got it going faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but it was fuel limited and space limited. Because I'm off the coast of California, big sir, 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. Yeah. I mean, that's, and then you have to turn, well, the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was a slick 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 breaks that normally we pop out when you're going that fast. They don't, because the super one really doesn't have speed breaks. It deforms the flight controls. They don't function. So you 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 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 this? I saw anyone 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 our 2508, which is 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 were dead hornets and he's like, this is bigger in our whole country.

Cause it's a pretty big area in California that you fly. But you would see the SR-71s, they had a loop cause the NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington state and Montana and they'd do a loop. And so you'd see them coming back down, they'd descend out of above 60,000, you'd see them either get contrails, you know, the white lines behind airplanes. And it come down and hit the tanker and then they go back up.

So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying. But, you know, I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, you know, 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 feed of aviation for that time. I mean, literally, we have yet to pass that. And you also ask, 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 hypersonic 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 and identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to how do you put it like chase it, I essentially chased it. So, let me just lay out, I think it's easier than you telling the story, maybe me, 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 cruiser. It's a cruiser. It's cruiser. So you can't land on a helicopter. 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. That's incredible. Spy one system. Phase to ray. Four panels.

So it looks in quadrants. Perfect. So they 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 low speed of 120 miles an hour. Don't know what that's in knots, but on the coast of California. So 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 take-to-act shaped object with no wings, flying in ways you've never thought possible, and in some interviews somewhere you said,

I think it was not from this world. So there's a mysterious aspect to this object, this entire situation. There's videos involved, the video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver, as also the visible light so you can switch TV mode. As a TV mode, so that gives you visible light and then as IR mode. And chat on the wood recorded that video. So, and those are the arm-owned and chat on the wood recorded that video. So in 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 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 is a lot of opinions, there's division of opinions,

because it's a mysterious, I mean, it truly is a UFO, in a sense that UAP, what is it, 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-18S. Okay. 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. And... So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing. 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 gonna 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 batch 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 catam 9, which is really just a blue 2 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 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, 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 taskings. So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers plane 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 Brockalls, Bering 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, a 270, 30, 20,000. That's all I say. So we got a radar as we had we had mechanically scanned radars at the time, a PG 73. Good piece of gear,

a PG 79 new ones way better, but anyway. And that ball just 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. So 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 there more and we want you to go see what these are. Got you. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say check it out. What's that? 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 asthma 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? Yeah, yeah. So, they call a 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 wizels, the wizels can look, but everyone it's heads out. When they say mirage 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, no, 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 own 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

or 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. It's 50. It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon. you see just it's a clear day. It'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 an inside of Mexico, we're kind of in

between that and we're probably about by the time this all hits were price, I 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 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'll see land 50 miles away.

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 where 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. Then it creates what's called, we call 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 board to 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 piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like even 20 feet below the

surface, it's big enough, as the waves come in, 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 off the top of the head. And that's where you get the white. So what happens is at sea, when you get a seam out, 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 a

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 will be white water around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense? Yeah. 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. And but the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was across. 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 gonna get white water where the plane is at. You'd see this kind of shape. So it looks like a cross.

So as we're looking down off the right side, the back cedar and the other plane, Jim, says, this is that talking in parcels again. He says, hey, skip or do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth and I go, what the hell is that in a night? Do you see that essentially? So we see the white water and that's what draws our eyes down.

Otherwise, we didn't ever see it. So we see this white water. I would have loved to see the look in 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 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's going sideways, and it goes once, it's going sideways, and 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

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, because when we see it's moving, we're like, oh, helicopter. So the first thing you look forward 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 size because the down draft, 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 road or 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. 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 gonna go check it out. And other pilot says, I'm gonna stay up here. And I said, yeah, stay up high, cause now 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 tick-tax.

She can watch me and the tick-tax. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important. You know, you can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is, it's perfect as the story goes on because it gives us two perspectives, you know, of perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't, you know, because if it 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 just sending it. It's

an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because 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 a tick-tock, literally, it's like it, 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 over there. So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down and we're just watching it.

Now you can remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it and it was gone. Or I saw lights in the sky and they were gone. We watch this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers watching this thing fly around. So we're like, okay, so I get over to the eight 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 15K I think it is.

I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating. So you can see it's really easy to send because. So what's 15K? 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000. No, the other plan ends 15,000 feet. I thought there was a thousand. No, the other plan ends up about. So you're talking to that.

Okay, gotcha. So there's still about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around the box. And I'm descending, they're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as a driver. Okay. So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position, we're about the eight o'clock

position and I'm like, oh, 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 like, oh, I've got enough altitudes. I'm gonna cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm gonna do this. He's like, go for it, skip, because that was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude. This thing's coming out. I'm gonna meet it.

And I'm driving and I get to probably, it's probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation is nothing. It'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 three o'clock position, it's at two o'clock, and I'm gonna meet it at three o'clock. So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and just appears. So this happens at around, estimate 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 in 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, did you guys see it? The other plane's like, it's gone. We don't, we have no idea where it's at.

So we kind of spin around, Rook. I go, let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the white water. And we can't even, 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, like a dude,

I'm, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, at the time, like 30 some hundred hours of flying, I've been doing it for 18 years. 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 mind's, especially as a CEO, because I got 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 gonna be the bad guys

is the CEO of 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 when he first went out, they were gonna 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, 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, hey, 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 it one end. He's going to hold it the other end. It's kind of like, Hey, you guys are going to

get it's thing about it. 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 field and then go back to our set reset points. Okay. So you're talking to him. He's he's he's listening to the all listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on. Because he's like, because I canceled training. So what else is he going to do?

He's just going to hang out there and do circles. He's waiting 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, the call OES, is their operation specialist. They're the ones that run the radars. And we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, the, uh, the, uh, they're called OS's, their 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. You know, 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.

Uh, we get out there. We never see it. We never see it again. Uh, we do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like, oh, this is gonna be, I told them I go, dude, you know, we're gonna catch, we're gonna catch shit for this.

When we get back to the ship, we're just gonna get out and we're just gonna catch maximum. Shit, and we did. And it's kind of that joking. 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 in a night check, so the same movies in the morning and night play.

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 it'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, and I've, it was men in in black aliens, independence day, definitely going to catch some shit. Oh, we did. But let, let, let, let me just ask some dumb questions to just take him because it's whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened. It's, 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 some point, XY, and then somebody in the Princeton said, you're not going to believe this, sir, it's at your cap point. That's a different place. How the heck did it know where your cap point is? That's a good question. That's the one.

If you don't know, you 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 used to say one day after day. Right, it's usually. But it obviously knew when we were going on. 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, what, I go, chased it. And they're like, why, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, and that's how he is. He's like, come, I like come to go and he we was he was determined and he was gonna find this thing so

When you look at his video, and this is the stuff that is now that they don't see because not all the you all you see is the flea tape That's the targeting pod the forward-looking infrared receiver I'll probably overlay the video 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 azmeth and range on the right one, and he has azmeth and elevation on the left one. So this is called the azl 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 the 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, how I can see you, I can see you, and it's looking for returns. 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's 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 is 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 is 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 me it will it does it goes full into it it's being jammed at about every mode You can possibly see because everything comes up and the this aspect gets longer It's all kinds I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. So, and as you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an active war, right? Active jamming is when you actively jam another platform. Yes, it's technically an active 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 controller so they can control all the sensors and they can just toggle around and do stuff. So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that asmeth 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 gonna automatically couple up.

So when he castles over, he, it's a switch, it looks like a castle switch was. He castles. 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 wanna look at the targeting pod. He sees it on the targeting pod

because the targeting pod's 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 tick-hack. And then the system itself will track the pixels and the contrast of it. So it depends on what mode you're in. So it says, oh, and that's what those little bars you see in the video or the bar's coming up left.

There's been some vision-based tracking. That's exactly what it is. So and that's the video. He goes through changes, he changes the the mode he goes through all the modes So there's a narrow medium and wide so wide as 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 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. That's when you see it going from a black background to a white background. Just 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, he just staring at it. What is that thing? Yeah. Grana, so the video has been out. it actually was on YouTube for years. Before the government released it, someone leaked a 2007. About, no, I got a, the guy that was in my back seat sent me an email and I had retired.

So this is about, no, because I was working, I was working down in San Aos. So this is about 2008 early 2009 This sends me a link to Strangeland.com Which is not suitable for work. Oh, yeah, it's top notch And he says Hey, I can remember the email. Hey skip. Does this look familiar? And I look at I'm like how the hell 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. 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 go, dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying? You know, 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, sir, so this is literally how it happened.

So I was sitting with my friend Matt. So Matt and I did art. My he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trip. Right. And we were friends to this day, right? And I did art, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trip. Right, and we were friends to this day, right? Because when you do stuff like people like that, you know, I had to have faith in him, he had to have faith in me.

You know, they become like your brother. Yeah. 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 their 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. We, 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 amazing how fast this happened. 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 a fighter sweep.com, it's a blog site. So Paco's obsessed, like he is way into UFOs.

Yeah. 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 go hey, dude. What's going to go? Hey, hang on I got to put you on speaker phone I go what do you put me on speaker because 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 a cell phone in the middle of the table as I tell a tick-tock 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 that we call him the shit hot break. That's a guy that when you're landing on a carrier comes in 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 apartment heads in the other squadrons, the guy Nasty. And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break. Right. So he'd read, he literally wrote 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 one of our landing signals officers for the air wing. It's just a good article on how this was and how, you know, it kind of forms you in naval aviation. It's kind of being kind of 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.'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 there. Just, you haven't really before then talked about it much. No, my wife didn't even really know the whole story. What, just as a comment, is it just because you caught some, uh, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days we, we had the incident for about two days. They played the goofy movies

They 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 The second one was me and the guy in my back seat and it was men and black but it had our names You know protecting the world protecting the Nimitz battle group type stuff. It's just funny shit like that um So that's it to me it wasn't that big of a deal was like okay, that's weird. We're never gonna know what it was I want to get out, because this is important. Yeah. Because there's all kinds of rumors.

There's a group of folks there. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us. Nobody looking like me. No. Came out on a... No, no one came out of the 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 you just finished up. He was a 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 talked to them daily. Just to clarify, so just for people don't know There's a story that both on the limits and the Princeton

folks in a helicopter landed They showed up they took the data Coronco 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, the joke spread faster than that, or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships that it might have been a joke that started.

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. I have to, 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. Okay. So we had the tapes. So the, the secured, 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, they're going to come and get them.

This is, this is, so we're like, I'm like, oh, whatever, you know. So we hand them the tapes. And then someone, because I have, you know, 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 CEO and they're not.

And so I went down to Civic. And it was, I think he was a lieutenant or lieutenant JG. And so I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant JG. 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. And he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up. They weren't a safe. He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled him out and hand 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 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 mill tapes. And I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor too that, oh, the original Fleur video is 10 minutes long. And there's some one of these petty officers, a 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 have mentioned that, like on Rogan, I think that you watched it

on a bigger screen, it felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the question, is there higher definition version do you think of the flare video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high numbers? 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 that's basically pulled off the back of the display. So it's not filmed with cameras. It's literally a digital feed that'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 slowly up because original we had little cameras here that shine, so if the light hit

it would wash out the displays. So this is a pretty good feed. When you put it on, so we're instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor, whatever, I'm looking at it on a 19 inch, because it was still normal TVs back there. We had just put flat screens in the radio room that I had bought, so we could watch movies.

So, because we had a nice, huge, 19-age screen. It's maybe 20. It's a nice. Wow, that's huge. You look gigantic. I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches. This is 2005. So, you look at this big thing and it's...

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 hired from the clear little things out of the bottom at the bottom? The bottom of the mission guys So when you see it because he's coming almost co-altitude with it you can see the bottom up and it looks like little You know like if you look at a system, there's a little

antenna hanging on 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 visible proportions, 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 level, especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed.

You know, when I, as a matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2000 and, let me think, about 2009, I had 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 tick-tock 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 NAP. And they were good enough to redact. But there's a few versions of an 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. How she's got kids, you know, so I'm very protective of her. And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that a name's 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 work because he had, he got the report from Senator Reed. 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, you need to protect,

because not everyone wants people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door. And there's rumors how you talk to everyone. I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total and that includes You know 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

Yeah, she called she not only called me. She called my wife. She called my daughter. She called my son and she called my son Because they're persistent So I'm pretty protect, 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 tick-tack in 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 Melon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that whole thing was, that's to the stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLong Group that got started.

So, and you go, well, you know, because I think Tom has called out a crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to me, he's, he's very smart. And I ask him, how did you get into this? And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink 182, 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 that Ty, let'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 ban, he got more and more connected. If he talked to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary defense for intelligence,

and he's part of the Mellon dynasty from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart. He definitely knows how the government works because he worked there. And so when I've 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 gotta do it. Cause I turned to, I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his, uh, his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. Because those guys like, you got to, you got to do this for us. So for my perspective, just to give you some context. So, um, 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 this subject 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, 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-flang 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. 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, 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, I'm not a, you, I'm not a UFO guy. I'm not a junkie. If you ask me, do I believe that there's life outside of earth? I would say you probably have a better chance of winning the megaball lottery than were the only planet that has life on it in the universe. The odds are against it. If you do, just do the math, you have to accept, because there only has to be one other planet that has life on it, and then I win, and you lose.

And then more and more science has shown that there's habitable planets out there. That yeah, everything we've learned so far and 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 as humans, 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 our main mode of transportation and what people figured out 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.

Rollercoaster used to use a chain to get you to the top of the hill, and 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, I've seen this a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen if you say look what we've done in last twenty years yes crazy

let me direct because it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective from a size 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 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 Luel Azano 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 skunk works, where they built projects. Now, Lu El Azano, who should mention, was a program director. He ran the A-Tip program at the Pentagon.

And A-Tip was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of, your fault, as UAPs. So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I took about, the guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP. And the original stuff that ATIP did was for you 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, literally I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's why I caught 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 of your request 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? And 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

and 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 it's not my job. And nor did I care. I mean, did in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou, I mean, did you think about your impact, your career, just to get back to the question, did you think others,

other pilots, other people like in 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, especially when I do,

even the TV shows, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, 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 other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from autonomous vehicles, is the clipping happens, yes? 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 journals.

They're not thinking, I mean, so here's the thing. I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes from like physics math and I 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 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 a journalist, that's true for the society. It's just a human nature. 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, and you know, maybe it'll just, you know, it's you ignore it.

The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that? And I want to dig more into it. And if you look at it, or you're going against the norm, you can get ostracized. And if you look at Einstein's the perfect example. I mean, he started coming out with some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you're a nut job. And he's literally proving them,

but 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 the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with the theories. It's fascinating. Well, 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 look at it now and go, well, the guy was a fucking 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, but one of the challenges is your eyewitness, one of the challenges is you're essentially an eyewitness account. Like, we don't have good data. We have very limited data of of the incident that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions

So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's Just a pain to more and more of the picture one you kind of mentioned so take-tack shape Let's break apart two situations one is the video. Let's look at the actual eye count 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 some texture to it that? No. Smooth white Tic Tac. You know, we don't see, there's no wings,

no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could see. We don't notice, like 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 them zoom in. You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there. But remember, we're looking at the original tapes, so there's basically no degradation. But when you saw your eyes, there's no kind of appendages.

No, none. What about like somebody asked a lot of people asked you questions, so I appreciate you spending your time here. Let me ask some of them. Did you, I mean, you chased it, so we 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 another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've developed a feel 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 feel like the thing was surprised? Did it feel like it wanted to be seen? Almost to show off its capability. And what did it feel like relative to if you were doing an air fight against a sort of, I don't know, a foreign jet? So one, I think it knew we were there when we showed up. It's just me. 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, you know, which I don't know if someone asked what do you think? I go, oh, 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 it's talking to the dolphins. Yeah, it was, 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 up, we just didn't find it again. I don't know. But once we started the descent and it actually reoriented, it's 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, we figure out 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 called it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane. But, you know, was it, were we afraid?

I don't think so. I mean, and to me, it was more curious. 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, just say, slow flight, just get me at a hundred knots. Above the water. And for me, you can't just start a 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 your 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 heart object that could be fly. Oh yeah. Yeah, I think all four of us will tell you the same thing. It wasn't, this was not,

because you go, okay, let's just go on if it's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting next to each other, we were just looking at it from the exact same angle and all that and I go, okay, there's the in theory, you can have that. But with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, and she's probably not directly above me,

she's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen. You're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue. 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's 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?

It's not often talked about if there's something under the water Couldn't have been something gigantic. Like, what, like do you ever say? The abyss. Big ship. That's why as a person. So I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles and Olympic swimmers. Like, I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss,

anything could be under there. I 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 gonna hide on this planet, or what's the least explored spot on the planet?

Two thirds of it's the ocean. There's literally, I mean, come on, the, the, the Malaysia airplane, the, the triple seven, it was a triple seven 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, and 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 that 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 creative technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomena? You know, like ball lightning, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things we probably, humans 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? 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. Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there's their experience like plasma. You can do plasma and you can go. I can see it, but it's really not, you know, it's plasma. I don't think so. So you would see distortions, I think, is it move? Maybe not. I mean, I'm not the theoretical physicist

and some, you know, 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 You know it mirrored me it wasn't aggressive You know there's talk oh it flop behind us and never it was never offensive on us. It never did that It just mirrored us so it was we're coming down. It's just like you know you're you're kind of

You know you said you do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, 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 know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you're kind of feeling each other as you walk and boxers do the same thing. It was doing that same thing.

It's like, what's going on? Is it comes around? Is it comes around? And then, it was like, hey, we're going to get here. And then when I got too close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we have never seen. The other question is, what if I didn't cut across the circle? What if I just kept going around a circle?

We'll just keep going. Okay. But I could have just watched it. I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is, we have a camera in our helmet in 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 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. Yeah. And then we didn't go back 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 it wouldn't lock. The radar would lock. So then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try, you 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 to ask me in 2004, I just said, I don't know. If you ask me now, so we're coming up on 16 years ago.

Yep. 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, it would advance mankind, leaps and balance 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 cruiser tractor 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 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 talk 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 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 you think about skunkwork, if you 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

if you look at that, yeah, I think you can hide things for a while, but I think a technology elite, I mean, this is not, 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, you know, and the other one is do we have the basis to do that, you know, because usually when you have a technology

like that, universities, especially when you're working at MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top tier universities. 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 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 hypothesized and that people do in terms of what kind of propulsion would have to have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussion 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 someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all? Yeah. Well, okay, 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 think we developed it. I don't think we developed it. You know, because the other one, someone 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, I don't know. I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the, the giant brains that

think this stuff up, I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them. But, which topic, which, you mean the fadrones for, uh, just, uh, just space travel technology, because if you look at where we're going, you know, cause everyone talks about Mars. You okay? And, you know, we're, hey, we're gonna be able to colonize you know, and I know Elon is big into that. You know, yeah, what do you think about, we think about Elon's basex NASA, we put

humans back up, uh, back up there. My theory, so it's funny because I, I know one of the guys that was, he 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, and he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project. He's gonna lead guys on that.

So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, he's, 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. And he's named in the book. And they're supposed to make a movie on it. So I'm like, hey, who's gonna play it? 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 and 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, north-rope, block-heat and Boeing.

Those are the big, those are your bigs and Raytheons kind of write like a subset of that, but their Raytheons pretty big too. In US defense, those are the big guys, right? Let's actually where a lot of military guys go and they retire, they go to stuff like that. When you look at that and you go in the way, government contracting is working, how we charge, and why things cost so much. And then you go, you got Elon, who's got an ego, and he doesn't like to do things certain way. And I've talked to the guy that worked there on, you know, because a government likes to have oversight of contracts where he was like, no, just tell me what you want. I'll build it, and 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 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 Thigh Call, we reused them on the space shuttle, but they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff, because they come back and land and you don't have to like more than die call we 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 they had to put them all back together where Elon gets them down because I was joking with this guy. Well, what do they do? They like re rehaul you know, overhauling because now 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 on 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 at our astronauts They all have to learn Russian Right, yeah, and they 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 to 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 on 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, 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've 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 Wapakinato, Ohio at the parade after he walked on the moon because his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle in Wapakinato 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 the space one day? Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. You know, I am not. Because I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight is that, you know, like people like, I mean, it would be to us tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in in terms of you're not kind of a civilian

Right, I mean in a sense that you're in just a normal person. You're not a five-year 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 you know 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 in 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 love that way. So let me ask you this question. 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 would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to out the space. What should Elon think about the stuff? What should he do? What should people like him? I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and go, we are tied to fuels in either solid rocket or liquid or whatever do, but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust. It's really in layman's terms, 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, 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, not coming back and going, well, I still got three quarters of a tank. Let's bold 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

the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars for the most part. There are times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done. But then when you look at it, I'm just going to throw a few out there. But if you look at what Amazon 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 is another one. These companies got 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 want it 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 let's let's, we're not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant. I will be, I would never, yeah, I am an American.

It's all gonna be born so easy. I can't believe you agreed to this. But, but when I, no, I haven't killed me yet. No. Yeah, well, you're here. What, yeah. And you've been here for a while. But when I know I haven't killed me yet You're here wouldn't yeah, and you've been here for a while. No, no, I'm joking. I mean American citizen I'm actually pretty much American But see when you do that so you look at let's just look in American universities Yeah, so there's some brilliant minds and we'll just use my teeth because you worked out 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, Bayesos 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. If it gets developed and gets over to where a country gets a hold 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 and 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 thing's 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, I'm not you don't even have to send a man person. If you can develop a technology that's so, and with our automation and we're progressing and our competing 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 it just sends data back. You get an analyze.

But if I 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, 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 the sense, the the the take 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. 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 that's out there floating around these private companies, you know, I think if you said, hey, I've got, let's just say $100 million,

which is really $100 million, relative to Bezos has got what? $100 million some billion? So that's worth it. So if he said, he, $100 million, you drop $100 million and I go, and I'm gonna put a, you know, like the government will send a

Broad area announcement out this is hey, we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program But what if I just said hey who 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. It's their money Oh, sorry about that To go hey, I'm gonna put this out and I'm gonna get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech, at the schools I mentioned.

And by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts and I'm gonna basically, I'm gonna fund you guys for 10 years. So you get $10 million a year and I'm gonna give you your salaries and we're gonna 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 gonna 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, a 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 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 Steven 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 just conversed

towards this local minima or local maxima, or 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. He was out of the box. He did not think the norwegian. That's true genius. Had he 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 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 I did 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 to 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. So, if 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 Miquess. I think it's quite useful and brilliant work. So let me ask, here's 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 the, it would 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 fight that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that. I've heard that.

Let me do it right now. Sure. So because that comes up, like, how did you know it was about 40 feet long? I go, okay, so 16 years, finding it's 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 TickTack, 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 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 of something small or big. So I would argue the fact of peer experience. There's 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 hornet. From a human factist perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years, do you find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things. So I call off and do you make mistakes with vision? You actually, you make vision issues a lot because your, and the sad part is your brain

believes with 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 instrument. So let's go back to landing at night. So your eyes, 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 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, which are 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 MSDD multi-spatcial Disorientation Device or the Spin and Puk. 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 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 the 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

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 what you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So you a sense of the A, but you're really not doing what you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So if you want to look at it and go, well, you're disoriented or you're this, I'd be like, I'd argue going, no, I'm not. Because when I'm flying the airplane,

even as I'm looking at the TickTack, 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. 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. 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 instruments are giving you. And that that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're seeing. Yeah, you'd be amazed at how good. So 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 all of 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, all right, we're starting heading deweyced. And I know where the sun is at, because in the short couple of minutes, we're going to fight the sun's really not going to move much It's going to be in a relatively so and I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say 1 9 5 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 pass land I pass land no, you know 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 as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 3,5,5. And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns

and use the sun relatives. So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows 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 you went around and you 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. And 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 set and you start right on your notes down. Yeah.

And you're right and it really fast on your cart and you go out of the stack of cards and you stick a new one on your knee board cards, you're ready to go. And here's the next set up. Um, it's kind of, it's in some way, similar to what, uh, like at the, at the highest level chess players do. I mean, you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games, but the richness of the representation that they use and remembering like, how the games evolved. It's not like, it's much richer than the actual moves.

It's like, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words like, like, all the richness of thinking they have about the way they get involved. 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 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 talk about it. That's really where their learning is. And it's the same thing if you wanna 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 to 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 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 car sign because I don't, he won't.

So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun. He was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that's the guy. The training officer is the main guy at Top Gun, he was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that's the guy. The training officer's the main guy at Top Gun. So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun. So Tom, when I learned, because I'd come out of A6 and we really don't fight, because it was a bomber. So I get in F18s and I wanna learn how to fight,

because it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the F and F fighter attack. The F18 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 gonna 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'm the man or the woman. I am it. No, it's a learning process. And so, or all those years you've gotten good. So, I mean, so what are the chances that your eyes betray you when you saw the tick-tax? 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. The percentage is even lower. Yeah, okay. Well, I don't find that particular debonky case that you so 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 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. It's on so many levels, just like we said, on the engineering level that maybe there's propulsion systems where we can actually build and 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 Flare video, the GoFast and the Gimbal video. In the gamebo 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's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical. So it's just where I'm calling for.

Maybe you can convince me otherwise. But so to bring up Midwest one more time he looks at the Flare video and he says that one of the most amazing video parts of the Flare video for people who haven't seen it is at the end of it the the the tic tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen. And what Miquess says is that it, you know, Miquess, 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 to that debunking aspect? Sure. 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. And Lewis Hampton right now is defending World Champion. Two time ways, four time, four or five time World Champion. But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hampton how to drive a car.

Or, matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't tell you how many times I've watched. You remember when we looked at this thing, when Chad came back with the video, we sat down and watched it. I mean, 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 down and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've watched it off the original tapes going, all right? All right, all right, let's look at this. Because you can look and 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. 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. But the thing, when it leaves so fast off the screen that 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. When the pod passes underneath the airplane, so if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me, 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 is a bird. And Jeremy Corbell actually did a nice job of saying, no, it's not because the he's on, he's on black hot. So the, the white object is actually colder than the ocean. That's fine. Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd be dead.

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 that make us suggest 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 talked to him all the time.

So and it's his best friend actually shot the video. One of his best friends for the Gimel video, the game of it, both of them. The go fast 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, airplanes, still super hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new phase

derailleur, it's made by Rathion, things incredible. Okay? It doesn't, usually if it's out there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks new phased array radars made by Rathion, things incredible. Okay. It doesn't usually, 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 extravagant 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 pod's 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 Geesewood 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 is running the wing at the time, the fighter wing. I said, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, well, we got a no-tam out, which is a notice to Erman, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area. So anyone can fly a system 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 like other balloons. Well, balloons float. Bloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location. They actually 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 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? Yeah, a transparent sphere. How 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? I mean, 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 I think it was, I think it was like a hundred feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it. So what they do is they come back and go, hey, I had a near-mid-air. What do you have a near-mid air with? Now, this floating beach ball with a cube inside of it

and you go, huh? So they send out a no-tam again and they do what's called a hazard report. This 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 gonna do?

Can you get a catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one? You know, no 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 yeah, what are you gonna do? Well, and that let me ask this because this is what people kind of think about After you witness tic-tac and after this these, as far as we know, with the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not react like, did not freak out. It almost was like a mundane event. How do you explain that?

Why didn't the people on the ship not the higher ups? Why didn'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 are some kind of secret military. You know, like tests. Yeah, most. So let's talk about. So let's say you've got this cool new toy Yeah, 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. It's like any test, a lab test or whatever. When you take things out into the real world, you're still going to test it in an area where something goes wrong. When they started and we'll go back to Elon, so my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go off their route in Quadolene, 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 A-tall 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 A-tall and, you know, Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus. So that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. and 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. Because someone said, well, when we chased the TickTack,

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 going to be. On unknowing pilots, we can't control a lot of things. You're exactly right. So you go, it's not the doctor evil scientist that's gonna 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, you build something in theory, you model it, you go, hey, this is, it looks like it's gonna 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 pito static system that are changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed, talking to it, and it's probably up on jacks, 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 pito static 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 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 re-e-is it? Is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is more likely-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is more likely-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-is it-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. And the other, the other side of that question is, why do you think people on the limits and in the US government in general, not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen? Freak out in a positive

way, freak out in a negative way. Like, what are the Russians up to again? Or more like, what is this? Like, so more turmoil at the ranks. If you would have 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. If it was, you know, 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, that's a period where we actually had to beg for them to let us one 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 CO for O5 command in the Navy. So you go, okay, so I'm out here. I got my squadron. I'm running it. I see this thing. We can't shit for it.

I have a squadron to run. I have the Tic Tac was over here. And although an extra ordinary event, I have 17 air crew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for. They're well-being, making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're birthing, and I'm working with my master chief, and I'm working with my exo-snap. We're going through all this stuff. I don't have a lot of time to worry about the TicTack. If people need to talk to me, so you got to remember,

you got the captain of the ship, you got the Airwing Commander, and you got the Admiral, those are the top three, and you got the CEO of 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 05 command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is 05 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. So you're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh, yeah. This schedule, there's 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 integration, you know, 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 all these men in suit showed up So the cat and the ship never said anything to me the admiral never saying to me the people on his staff that I have

Which friends with never saying to me the other CEOs that I talked to 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 gonna 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, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest

because 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 lot of people who are in the world and are in the world of the world. to go to the McMinnville Fest because 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 Nappen 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 Bob's like me. The stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life, if anything, it ruined his life. He's just a really, really smart guy that's just like the rest of us trying to get through

life. That's nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Louis Luzando's resignation note from his he was a program director at the A-Tip program. One of the sad things is that he mentioned that people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, like your foes as a threat a threat like you said if it doesn't have a Russian label on it It's a 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, that's that's I don't have time for this. 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 Polish people. Everyone speaks a different language because if you look at the way the train kind of subdivided the original people

that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently, right? It'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, what happened. Because the Native Americans all spoke different languages. It's that same type of thing. 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,

go back 500 years where, or a thousand years were traveled, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time. Well, we don't think we were, the Vikings probably were. Because we had limited, we had to have supplies and the boats 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 go, 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. 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.

We literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are. 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 ask, let's say there are little green men. What are their intentions? Guy, Lew asked me this when we were talking to Lew Ellison. And he said, what do you think they were here for?

I said, I don't know. He goes, what, I go, they were observing. They come down and hang out. And he goes, well, what if they were prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do? And you go, they were observing. They come down and hang out and he goes, well, 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 they become the threat and 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 is certainly an uptick of what is it? UFO sightings since, since the nuclear. The nuclear. Since the nuclear era. Yeah.

That's, you go. Let me ask a little bit out there a question maybe it's 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 tightly possible.

Because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings and let's go, just look at Project Blue Look, go, there was what, you have to forget how many thousands of sightings and there's a percentage, it's like 10 or 15% of them, they still can't explain. Like our Tic Tac is one of them. They basically government has come out and said, we don't know what that was. Okay, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that we don't know and all these thousands are still that 15% 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 a 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. 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 to media, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation. Could it be a drone? Could be a foreign drone. You know, like, void your 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's stuff that we can't explain. And I would assume that Lou, who ran A-Tip,

has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about 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. I was sorry, yes. Yes.

There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked? To those who will clearance who 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 if you believe Bob that's that's kind of what Bob says and that that's a such a interesting key point 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 note in 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, place in the world. Also, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that for me or not, if you were the government? So here's exactly how. So 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,

just AVI on 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. I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years in 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. Now, 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?

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 US government and our well-being as a country. And we owe it to this because we're all Americans, to me, no matter what some people will save and 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 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 is over here. But you come over here, I kinda knew that from the last one. 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 of work. And no one gave it to you. So, I mean, and I think people... 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, I joke about being Russian, but 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 not so much a threat as a,

you're holding back something that could inspire the world. Like 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. Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor. He filled 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. Yeah. 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 the seat, 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, I figure out these things, but there's a point 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, ah, 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, you bring him and 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 you, because remember, if you, 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 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. Do you do you shelve it again? Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because it's heartbreaking. I don't 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 Elon's of the world, the 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, now let's 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 the stage. 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. It 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 in a, you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from any weapons or anything more esposient. We 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 a 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, it's a beautifully presented, and 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 theory is to uh, I agree with you. But uh, 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 this contradictory, it's not inspiring, it's suspicious, it's just not, even the way they released the videos, you know, the

Tic Tac, if presented correctly presented correctly could just inspire generation of scientists It's like the you know us going to the moon It's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible But you know and and the way it was released was suspicious. It was like low resolution video on a crappy website like with some crappy documents and I mean why what 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 and I don't think because I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that, you know, 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 unless put it in a vault. You know, it's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the arc and they put it in the giant army warehouse.

You know, we don't even know what we have. So, 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.

So, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about a storm area 51 stuff. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably the worst idea you could possibly have is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons. 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 and encounter it. And perfect example. The US in the 60s developed a bomber. It was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB 70.

Okay, there was three of them built, three of them ever built. It was like 60,000 foot high, you know, 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. You know, it would go that wing tips would fold on. It looks like a concord, 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, right? We built three XB70s and we scrapped the program, right? 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. You know, it's a chess game.

We do something, they do something, we do something, they do something, and it's, we do something, and then they counter it. They got to, you 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. We actually, at person, I think we talk too much. And I think the, the military and the DOD is starting to see that, you know, we're too open.

You know, you know, you know, now it's, 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 the universities. If we want to go to work with MIT and you want to partner with MIT and your defense company and you want to partner, you know, you guys have a rule that if you create it, then it can be open source because the universe, the

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 or I believe. It's so far, break, I talked to CTO of Lockheed, K. Eko Jackson and just, just, just concoerks the 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 developed for an open source and less than this goes back to the original conversation.

We now, there's enough money in the private sector that individuals control. Baseless, I'm not talking Amazon, I'm talking Jeff Bezos and over over $100 billion, 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 work 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 to, 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 can do what you want. You know, it's just like, you know, we classify how to do,

you know, the whole nuclear, you know, how to create a critical mass, right? But there's really smart high school kids that have figured out math and math and 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 Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey, we want don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that. I totally understand that.

But 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 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.

You go, is that, well, are they the gross 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 who and other path. They go do something else. And in the sense that the e-lons of the world, the 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 mean. 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?

Yeah. Well, if the government scientists, 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 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 clean it up. No big deal. We lost some money, but we'll move on.

It's, you know, money makes the world go around contrary to whatever one 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 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 they were limited and Elon found this like 400 acre thing. I think it's about four and 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. Yeah. I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this, I mean, this is Elon, and 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 die 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. When the economy was down, the guy was actually looking at going out of business. The guy, he told 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. He calls up on the phone, SpaceX. He says, hey, is Elon there? Can you get him in the board room?

We'll be there in 20 minutes. So he grabs this guy who's literally gonna fold his company. They go over to SpaceX, and I may be getting some of this wrong if people are gonna fact check me, but this is pretty close. They go in the board room, and he said literally within like, you know, an hour or two, Elon has bought the guys 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 that's just money. It's because, I've witnessed it too with Elon. I think it's a whatever the, whatever the forces of capitalism that, 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 the source of funding, I, there's a way to bureaucracy when I was working

like being funded by DARPA. And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of anything as possible, cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, 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 I 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, a head 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? Yeah.

Because you've got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got the 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 gonna dust it off. And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and then 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, slapped 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 tick-tax 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. Yeah, 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 like 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 like Lou and Chris Melon 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 this. Find the the relic of a spaceship. Like pull out the Roswell wreckage. If you have it, pull out the Roswell wreckage if you have it pull out the Roswell wreckage into it. God it would be so nice to not have to deal with the the riots in the cities and I mean if 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 holy cow we actually do have this and we're working on this technology. Yeah, 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, the all musks face,

the look on Jeff Bezos' face and all the brilliant in your- 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 there could be other sightings that have legitimacy

to them. What do you, as 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? Ramishan Forest in England, the US 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 Jim, 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 there's, you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven. They're actually explainable. Yeah. You know, you would send me the question, the Phoenix lights. Phoenix lights, I think there's what's that? So I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these. I'm not either. It's, I mean, you want a funny story on that. So I was at a conference and say, well, hopefully he doesn't watch us and get offended.

But we had this, I call it speed dating. So there's a table. 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 that's not as funny. Cause some people will try and dominate it. But you It was kind of funny, but I'd sat down. And that's not as funny, because some people will try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the dominators away so that, you know, if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question to it. 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 goes, he looks mean he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not, but I chase one. So I'm an expert at you.

And he could seem get deflated because I'm kind of a smart ass like that. Yeah, I mean, the first hand 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'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 in it's five minutes of my life I might did a lot of really cool I've had a really kind of neat things have been able to do. But when you look at it and go. 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 that are really into it, who've never seen one, it kills them, that they didn't see one. When here we are, and in which unique with ours, which kind of adds that level is, it wasn't, we just didn't see one. When here we are, and in what'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. It was an engaged, five minute thing. And there's other stories from other countries, like there's a story in the back, and 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 it them again and don't chase them. Just 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 can go to Independence Day. They had that force field around. 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. Somebody on, I think Reddit said, ask them any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix light. So the interesting thing, like you said with the TIGTAC is that multiple people laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix light? So many people seem to be. So here's a deal with massive sightings.

So the Phoenix light is unexplainable, although I know what the Air Force had said something about it. It was an A10 drop and Flair's, I don't think so. ASE. Flair's 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 Van and Berg shooting a missile off, you know, they were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Van and Berg and they fly across and they go land in the A-tallet quadruing. Then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff. It's stuff that we do because we are super power.

When you see them go up, 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. 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 us on TV when even the SpaceX ones go up. It's nice and narrow and narrow and narrow and then it hits a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because 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 stayed separate and 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 just sitting our driveway in you know, Vanneberg is a three hour drive but you could sit and watch it go you knew in their launch and night you'd watch you watch and they 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, the two the stars folks have done. So there's a two the stars Academy.

Yeah, it's what are your thoughts about them? Are they, I talked to them quite a bit. I am not a part of two the stars Academy. What are your thoughts about them? Are they? I talked to them quite a bit. I am not a part of to the stars Academy. I, you know, but, you know, like I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this. Yeah. To heat their, what's their mission? What's their hope? What's there? What's their when they started their mission was to try and don't look at this as little green man. 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 a 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. I know I was in it and I told him you can take it down and you can talk to the lawyers because I'm not, I'm not supporting you. So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that it's not connected to. Because 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 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 get rid of 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 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 base 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 you hope as the US government released some of the things. Well, 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 wreckage from the Roswell thing which I keep joking around like, huh, it's 70 some years old. I mean, like, let it out. I think we put it beautifully that in this time, that will 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 I was at the London sun times, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 becomes a reality, it's not a U.S., Russia, China, England, France, Spain, name any country and any continent. It becomes a global issue. And the only way you can deny it, it's just like Americans.

We all, you know, we're divided. We spent 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 in 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 that there were people during the rise of Hitler. No, no, it's okay. And 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. We're not gonna stop. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay. And you gotta think, the only thing

that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia. If he just stuck with the pact 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, whatever, it's in that flick show where Nazi actually wins it.

And you look, 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 history in our complex 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 you, that there's a balance between kindness and force. That- You use force when force is necessary. But you don't have to walk around like Billy Badass all the time, right? I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with

that literally could kick the shit out of whoever came near him, they never got in fights because one, even people that didn't know them, because they were actually nice guys. They were just good dudes, but if you cross them, I had a friend of mine. He's a nationally ranked wrestler. It went to 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 national and he just had a bad day. He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled a shit out of. And he would cross.

It was funny. We joke about it, even with him, because when you meet him, he's like the nicest like low go, hey, hey dude, you know, how you doing? He's super nice. And he would cross that ring 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 herd on and he would get done and he's like super humble and they'd raise his hand and he would 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 look up and smile. Hey, hi guys. How and he'd walk off in his soon as he crossed the line, he'd look up and say, hey, hi guys, how you doing? Like, he literally just went and could've ripped 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.

I mean, 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 crossed the line. You're, you can be hard, but once you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. Yeah, I know you're a super humble Saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring That 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 them earlier, a huge funeral, a beer delivery guy, was delivering beer in the 60s riots where the guys in the black neighborhoods where white people didn't

go. And my grandfather's a civilian, 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, I.O. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, I.O. 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 know, people that they, you couldn't lease the car, you actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash. So it's a totally different than we, 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 them 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 influence.

It was 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. 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 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 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 international 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 followers in Colorado and look for fires, because that's just, I like that stuff. You know, it was that or be an 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 University of Houston, go Cougs, got a mention of 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 gonna sail on the ocean. So at least the ship sinks on the where I'm at.

That was a kind of a running joke. And then those, so these passions and underneath it is the belief that you can be anything you want to be. You can, I told my kids this, when they were young. It was tough, especially for my son. So when Nate they were young, you know, it's it was tough Especially for my son so when it was about five six year we knew Nate was colorblind, you know my my wife's brothers are both Colorblind. It's really color-to-prieve color-to-prieve you see black and white He can't tell he has issues with greens, reds, browns

It's it's funny if you're ever around someone like that Because so 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 with this like he had a hat on I'm like, what are you looking at? I go, this, I can't have a hat on one day. I go, which one are you gonna get? He had a hat in his hand. It was green. He goes, I'm gonna 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. Cause to him, it looked green. Yeah. So he couldn't fly. He came, he said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate?

You know, you're talking to your kids and you know, what do you want to do? He's like, I don't want to be a pilot. No, now I got to tell him, cause he's looking at me, cause 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 Farve 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 And you love and you think you can still do it So I told them I said look I was talking to both my kids. 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. So 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, that's what makes the world go around. 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, it literally, it was like three miles along. It was crazy. Yeah, who died the Pope. That was because there was a case of Catholic. He's, you know, Italian. He goes, you know, who died the Pope and I go to ask my grandfather. of Catholic. He says, you know, it's time. And 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. 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 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 yeah 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 meeting 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 at Tsukiji Japan. Him and his wife had up 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 fit their, you know know 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

There's probably about maybe two months before he died And I said, dude, you're sad. Do you mean this is your friend? And I'm kind of really bummed out. And this is the guy, this is a guy that's dying of cancer. And here's what he tells me. He says, Dave, dude, we're all gonna 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, cause 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, right, 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 an avi. 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 gonna be okay. And this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have. There's people are gonna think I'm weird about this. But, you know, I know what my dream was. And, you know, 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. It's okay. I'm gonna be fine. My wife is fine. He goes, this is what's meant to be. But in 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 money and job position and this and that. I said, you can get in any, you know, you can go to a company. You just remember when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company. 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 stop it's bumper to bumper in your 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 can be with the exception of the presidents of the United States, I mean name the vice presidents.

Most people can. 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, who is going to be a we-eye-ses-joke?

Who are your true friends? It's the person, well, there's the gooders of ones that I won't say. But 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? It's going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you. And that's life. Those... That is life. The people you love.

It's 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. Oh, it doesn't matter. You can't, it doesn't mean you don't have to 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 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 rare Chad ever needs me, if something happens like when my uncle

died, 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 here with you. And then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with, you know, if there's, 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 got to 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 was one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. This is a pretty long one. It's probably says the record for the longest one. So I, I mean, I'm a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for talking to you, Dave.

You're welcome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fraver. And thank you to our sponsors. I feel like it greens express VPN and better help. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe by YouTube, review it with 5 stars and not a 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.