The Team House - The TRUTH About China's 6th Gen Fighters & UFOs/UAPs | Alex Hollings | Ep. 326

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Today we're joined by friend of the show Alex Hollings, former Marine and current editor of Sandboxx News and host of Airpower on YouTube. We talk Chinas 6th gen aircraft capabilities, stealth, & ufos.Find Alex here:https://www.youtube.com/@UCNPMEL4N_kfEC-w2A6CuPGg https://www.tiktok.com/@alexhollings52?lang=enhttps://www.sandboxx.us/author/alexhollings/New merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!The Perfect Jean⬇️https://theperfectjean.nycuse code "HOUSE15" at checkout for 15% off & free shipping____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#ufos #6thgenerationBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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check out their pillows, they're bedding. They have all kinds of great stuff there. So thanks to Ghostbed and check them out. Special. Operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey folks. Welcome to episode 326 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. Returning on the show for, I believe this is his third appearance is Alex Hollings. Alex is a former Marine and he now does a, mostly aerospace news for sandbox.

You've been doing that for quite a while now. I mean, ever since I've known you, you've been a big aerospace buff and obviously doing really good at it now. So welcome back to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. I am honestly always glad to talk tech, but in particular with you guys.

I appreciate it, man. Yeah, we appreciate your time. And I mean, we can just be. we can just jump in wherever you want. I mean, let's just start off, you know, what's on your mind these days in defense tech? What are you looking at? What are you interested in? Well, you know, I think one thing that is right now we're on the precipice of a crazy revolution in aerospace technologies.

But I don't think we've seen really since the late 60s going into the 70s when we were sort of transitioning from third generation fighters like the F4 Phantom to fourth generation fighters. like the F-15 and the F-16. Now, I am on record as saying that six-generation is marketing bullshit. It doesn't mean anything right now. But the way aerospace technology is changing is very similar to the way it was back then, in that we are once again, and when I say we, I mean the United States, but also a number of adversary states, particularly China, are investing heavily into not just sort of iterative improvements on the existing technology.

we've had for a long time, but on actually new emerging technologies. Big, big leaps. Yeah, you know, things like collaborative combat aircraft, AI-enabled drone wingmen that will be flying alongside crude aircraft. They're not going to replace fighter pilots, but they are going to fly with fighter pilots. And I think one of the biggest changes that we're looking at is we're doing away with the idea of fighters and bombers sort of in general. Or at least that's what I think it's we're trending toward. Back in the day, there was eight different classifications of fighters, right? You had interceptors, you had fighters that were better at,

you know, close in two circle or one circle fighting. But now we just kind of have multi-role fighters that we expect to not only do everything a fighter does, but also everything attack jets used to do, right? Now every fighter does air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. Well, now the B-21's emerging with the same avionic suite and then some of the F-35, it'll be capable of leveraging air-to-air weapons, and it'll certainly be capable of controlling those drone wingmen that carry air-to-air weapons. And I think likewise, with China's J-36, which was one of the new stealth aircraft that sort of emerged in testing in December, they're going in the same direction. We're leading towards multi-role bombers, where large aircraft that can

carry a great deal of payload will be able to engage airborne targets on their own. They'll be able to use their drone wingmen the same way the next generation of fighters will. And the lines are blurring, basically. And what air warfare is going to look like in 30 years, 40 years is going to be dramatically different. And that is something because 30 years, 40 years ago, air warfare looked pretty much the same as it does right now, you know. So I guess when I say, what am I looking at?

what is my focus on, it's on those inflection points. Drones are a big one, artificial intelligence, which is a term that means nothing, but can be used in this context, is going to change things quite a bit. But then the other thing that's going to change things quite a bit is just money, man. We're worried about China, so we're throwing a bunch of money at defense again, and that way we haven't really since the Cold War ended. So the key technologies you're talking about drones, AI, are there any others that you're kind of focused on that maybe we haven't heard of most of us? The other two things that are really, really important for this shift are next generation propulsion systems, new turbofan technology, not necessarily just about producing thrust or getting good fuel efficiency, which are important, you know, for competition, but for electrical production.

and that really comes down to heat management. The engines we have in fighter jets today could already produce more electricity than we let them because they would run so hot they'd burn through the fuselage if they did. So the F-35 is getting a coolant upgrade right now that theoretically will allow it to produce more electrical power.

But these new next generation adaptive cycle engines that GE and Pret and Whitney are building will be able to produce maybe twice as much electrical power. And that is when we're starting to get to the realm of directed energy weapons or lasers actually being viable, I think. That's still iffy. But microwave weapons and especially electronic warfare capabilities all rely on that power production, right?

And then the other side, which is also tied to that power production, is transitioning away from kill chains, which I know you're familiar with to kill webs, which to put it really sort of succinctly, a kill chain is sort of the six steps that you need to execute in order to engage a target and then assess that you did. But if you interrupt that kill chain by stopping one of the platforms that does one of the steps, you can stop the engagement with a kill web, which is sort of networked assets all throughout the battlefield. If you lose an asset, it's a self-healing mesh network.

It just moves to the next asset, and you can still complete that kill chain. It sounds a bit like the strike cell model that we've used in the past. Yes, it is. Nailed it. You know, so. And of course, that. That relies on powerful sensors and a whole bunch of electricity, you know? So it's the engines, it's new stealth aircraft that are sort of blurry between what's a bomber, what's a fighter, what's a cruise missile, what's a ballistic missile, what's an arrow ballistic missile.

The stuff's all kind of blurring together. They all do a lot of the same stuff. So what really is going to matter is the detection methodology, how stealthy can the airplane be, how much electrical power can it produce, and how well are they networked together? So I want to get into the stealth stuff, but I don't want to brush right past directed energy weapons, which is always something I'm fascinated with. So if I understand correctly, you're saying the engine can be used to essentially turn a shaft and generate electricity while using its own power. And that can create a sort of reservoir or a deep magazine to power these weapons. That's it.

You'd have to basically do it that way using like a capacity. to like store up a great deal of electrical. Because it can't carry a plane like that can't carry a battery big enough to do that. Exactly. Nailed it. Now, we used to use airborne directed energy weapons lasers that were really powerful, like one megawatt class lasers. And like a 747, these were chemical lasers that would produce that electrical power through chemical reactions that were really dangerous.

The material was hazardous. We effectively scrubbed the premise because it wasn't worth the trouble. But in recent years, we've been making direct, or excuse me, solid state directed energy weapons. You know, they're much lower power lasers, at least thus far, but they're much more practical, you know. And these are the lasers we've seen on the Navy ship. There was pictures and video of Helios being tested recently. They've had laws on Navy ships for, you know, 10 years now. And they're moving toward a system called Hellcap.

And the whole idea here is that power output. So according to the Navy's assessment, you need certain levels of power output to take on different types of threats, right? So right now, Helios is a maximum power output of 120 kilowatts, which is around on par with like the iron beam that Israel's putting in service. It's effectively enough power to take down a mortar or an unguided rocket, something like that. But really nothing better than that, right? Hellcap, they're aiming for a 300 kilowatt class range, which at that point, you could burn through the side of a drone or even the side of the fuselage of a cruise missile,

but you couldn't burn through the nose cone of a cruise missile and definitely not a ballistic missile. Those nose cones are designed to withstand a great deal of heat and friction and pressure, and you're not going to burn through that with 300 kilowatts. You've got to get up towards like one megawatt to be able to burn through the nose cone of a ballistic missile or use it for hypersonic defense. And we are, and experimental lasers about halfway there.

Lockheed Martin's got a 500 kilowatt class laser that they're developing. But to be honest, I don't think we're ever going to see lasers as a truly viable means of ballistic or hypersonic missile defense because of atmospheric physics. There's issues like thermal blooming and atmospheric dissipation. If you ever take like a flashlight and spray water in its beam and you can see the particulate, But that's basically what atmospheric dissipation does. Because of that, lasers tend not to be very effective outside of 10 miles. Because the laser is essentially light carrying the energy, so the light gets deflected by water

in the atmosphere. Right? So like these systems can be very effective against slow moving threats that aren't all that resilient. A lot of types of drones, they could be really good for quadcopter defense if we can make one that's powerful enough to be able to take it down quickly. but you're never going to hit something, you know, 20, 50, 100 miles away with one of these lasers and actually have like an appreciable effect, at least not, in my opinion.

It's interesting that the way you're describing it because it reminds me a little bit of the Tesla coil. Yeah. That it was this idea that, you know, you could basically fire a bolt of lightning and use it for, you know, initially one of his ideas was to use it for the defense of England. against the Nazis who were bombing. Oh, I didn't for power transfer, but I didn't know. It was a plan at one point. It never got further than that.

But what Tesla didn't know at the time, because he didn't know about the sonic boom, was that so he would need to use a medium to carry the electricity. So it was like firing a metal dust up into the air. And then you would fire the Tesla coil, would fire the electricity. and that creates this bolt of lightning that goes off and hits the target. But there is someone much smarter than I am was describing to me how, because Tesla didn't, no one knew at the time about the sonic boom, that would actually destroy the device itself when they launched it.

And so that was the hiccup there. And so again, it's a question of range and, you know, resources. No, 100%. And we will get to the point where we see directed energy weapons. I think more likely microwaves than lasers, becoming a really capable drone defense type of system. But in terms of airborne assets, like on fighters, you know, Lockheed Martin delivered a laser for testing on the F-16. Last year, we ended up sort of scrubbing the program. They didn't disclose why I have a sneaking suspicion it has to do with power output.

But you could use a system like that. And Russia claims they are with the SU-57 as a huge. directional infrared counter measure. So effectively, infrared guided air-to-air missiles or surface-to-air missiles coming towards you, you could hit them right in the nose with a laser and effectively confuse that infrared sensor.

I mean, you can't you do that with microwaves, too, because you can fire like a wider beam? Yes, and you can transfer more energy with microwaves than you can with directed energy weapons, at least right now. Which is why I think they're more likely, especially for like if we're talking drone swarm defense,

the challenge of using directed energy weapons to take down 100 or 1,000 quadcopters that you can only fire one at a time and you have to get good target coordinates for each individual one, you know? And at that point, you could use kinetic systems. We've got some systems that are radar guided 20 millimeter guns, you know what I mean?

And that, you know, long term, you know, you do have to replenish that magazine, you know, and stuff like that, but it's using logistics that exist. It's a more reasonable expense in my opinion. I've seen some of the video footage that DOD has publicly released where they'll hook up like one of these laser systems to an AC130 and you'd see it like burning through like a car engine block and I think like oh that'd be pretty cool to have back in the day for like vehicle interdictions and things. But you think that it probably isn't ever going to be much more than that that it's we're not going to be able to use it against

high end targets? Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, and the biggest challenge being that the lower the power, the longer the duration of the beam, right? So like if you have 120 kilowatt class weapon like Helios and you're trying to bring down a drone, we're talking like 10, 20 seconds of sustained fire on that drone to bring it down. You know, if you've got a 500 kilowatt class one, well, now you only need one second on that drone,

but you still need 10 seconds on a missile, you know? And if you want to burn through the engine block of a car, you know, we're talking one megawatt class. and again, pretty significant, sustained duration of fire, you know? And at some point, you're kind of given, you're either giving yourself away because one thing that is cool about lasers is they are invisible. So there are some really cool covert use cases for like a 500 kilowatt class or a one megawatt class weapon, but not as many conventional arms,

close air support type options, you know? Havana syndrome. For instance, you know, maybe microwaves for that. I don't know. I'm not sure. Yeah, it's microwaves. Yeah, I'd be willing to bet. Yeah.

So, yeah, I guess I'm a party pooper when it comes to lasers, but I do think that they will have a place on the future battlefield, but I think that it tends to be overblown and sort of popular perceptions of it. One thing to follow up on there that I'm curious about, what are the dynamics like for orbital-based systems? Because the atmospherics must be completely different. That's 100% true. And theoretically speaking, a satellite could use a laser to engage other orbital threats like other satellites and extreme ranges.

At that point, what you're basically dealing with is just how do you keep your beam as narrow as possible over great distances, right? But yeah, you're not worried about atmospheric dissipation. There's no thermal blooming. So thermal blooming is effectively superheating the air around the laser and it creates a lensing effect that will not get effectively. off target. You've got none of those concerns in orbit. But I can counter that by saying that in orbit it is exceedingly easy

to break stuff. So lasers are a really good option for depth of magazine. You know what I mean? But they're not necessarily a good option depending on power production on the satellite. Right. You know, it's power using solar. So what do they call it? Solar sales?

Yeah, yeah. Actually, I helped crowd fund solar sale man a long time ago i i wonder if it ever actually went up or if i just set somebody my money hey what's up everybody i want to think our newest sponsor the perfect gene they sent us a couple of these uh an order of these for everybody last week and i've been rocking them and as i figured out there's a reason why some sponsors don't want to send you stuff but these people did and uh i've been rocking these jeans i rocked them a few times this past week and they're probably the best jeans I've ever worn in my life.

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And thank you to Perfect Gene for helping us support. support the show as well. We couldn't do it without you guys. Thanks a lot. House 15, 15% off. That's, I mean, it's not, that's a technology that doesn't just have military applications. If they can figure out how to get that working, that solves basically the world's energy problems. And also interstellar travel to some extent. A solar steel, the only systems that we can conceive of right now that can reach some percentage of light speed eventually. Right. So let's change gears a little bit and talk about stealth, because you mentioned that.

Just recently it came up. I believe Elon Musk was saying the age of stealth is over, everything's going to be drones now. And to be fair, I have heard an argument similar to this for a long time that basically our stealth is pretty easy to defeat with modern radar systems and so that the error of stealth is sort of over. I mean, you know way more about this than I do. What are your thoughts? So I can start with Elon Musk's, what he was saying, the solution to stealth is effectively using visible light, which is just seeing the fucking airplane.

So that doesn't really solve the air defense problem when you're talking about beyond light of sight engagements, like outside of a couple of miles. Elon Musk is very, very good when it comes to rockets, and he's very, very good when it comes to cars, perhaps. He does not seem to know much about air power technology or the current state of defense tech. But he's right to some extent about drones.

He's just not right about the types of drones. He showed a tweet with like a bunch of quadcopters doing sort of a synchronized movement, saying that, you know, some people still think the F-35 is a good idea, as though quadcopters could do any of the things. That a N. A multi-role fighter does. Quadcopters by their very nature are small and limited in range.

The best quadcopters in the military use case today have a range of 30 miles-ish. And those are the ones, you know, in the front lines of Ukraine and in experimentation in the American Southwest. I think that's what's melting a lot of people's minds a little bit is the war in Ukraine. And people are seeing them use quadcopters a lot. What I would like in it, too, is like what I saw in the Syrian Civil War, some people made the claimed that the Kurds over-relied on snipers. But you have to understand is that these forces out there that are fighting for their freedom in this case are limited by their resources and they're using what they have at

their disposal. The Ukrainians have these quadcopter drones. Makes total sense for them to do what they're doing. But that's not necessarily the future of war between great powers, right? Nailed it. Quadcopters are definitely going to be in the battle space, right? And they're going to be leveraged using lessons that we are learning in Ukraine right now. But you're 100% right.

We're talking about Russia, which has mostly a Soviet-era military apparatus, in a war against Ukraine, which is a definitely Soviet-era military apparatus, with like a bunch of piecemeal Western components coming in to help, right? The way that they're going to go about waging this war is inherently different than the United States would because America's biggest superpower is a giant pile of money, right? So, you know, if Ukraine's going to use off-the-shelf quadcopters that can do pretty effective things, the United States is going to use a locking quadcopter that costs 20 times as much and does 10 times more. You know, it's not necessarily a bargain, but because we're not worried about the budget.

It's extremely effective, right? And the future of air warfare is going to be very reliant on drone systems, too. They're just going to be drones that look a great deal like fighter aircrafts, that we're familiar with now. There are a number of these systems in testing. General Atomics has got the XQ67A. Anderil has the Fury. Northrop Drummond's got the Vanguard.

You know, these are, the Vanguard even has a cockpit for testing. It'll be a drone. But these aircraft look very much like conventional stealth fighters, just without a cockpit. And that's because the form factor of a stealth fighter is dictated by the mission, not the pilot, right? So there are only so many shapes that are very good at deflecting radar, but also that can also carry a pretty significant payload and enough fuel on board to go carry out the types of mission that you need to carry out. And quadcopters like drone swarms are very effective anti-infantry and maybe even anti-armor systems.

But you have to replace all those quadcopters every mission, you know? So the question shouldn't be which one either or it should be, of course, both. But if we're going to do the cost-benefit analysis, an F-35 can fly for 8,000 hours, you know, before it needs a service life extension. And it can drop, you know, two small diameter bombs on targets every day for the next 20 years, you know, whereas those quadcopters have to be replaced every single op. So again, both of them have their places in warfare. The new drones that will be flying alongside fighters, there will be variances and value. but a lot of them will be reusable aircraft we expect to get 8,000 hours out of because that's just way more cost effective than single-use platforms, you know?

I have noted, I think I'm probably like one of the two nerds out there that actually read like these publications that come out of Fort Benning and places like this. But I notice that they are definitely concerned with counter UAS, that the war in Ukraine has presented this problem, like how do we protect the infantry? squad, infantry, platoon from this type of attack, they're definitely looking at it seriously. And for good reason, because, you know, one of the things that I think a lot of people mistake, when we're talking about, for instance, drones being spotted over U.S. military installation stateside that shouldn't be there, or, you know, drones mounting a successful

attack against U.S. forces overseas, people always say, don't we have systems that can counter this? And the answer is yes, but the problem really is don't we have enough of these systems fielded in all of the places? And that's sort of the challenge that we're facing now is that there's a number of technologies we have that are really effective at countering these types of threats, but we have to field them. And we have to field them effectively everywhere, you know, if we want to be able to mount this type of defense everywhere there are American personnel. And that's not the type of challenge we're used to dealing with. We're used to sending air defense assets to a theater based on the nature of the threat that they might face. Ballistic missiles or cruise missiles or fighter jets. The idea that we need effectively ubiquitous quadcopter defense is a massive expense.

But I also think that that's why the eventual impact of quadcopters on the battlefield will be lessened. Because we need defense against it everywhere, so it's a real area of focus. You know? You mentioned the drones over America, which I, I want to ask you about that one because that's an interesting topic. But before we move on, just to put a finer point on it, the relevance of stealth technology itself as we move forward into the 21st century. No, it's okay. We can go down some of the rabbit holes. It's interesting.

But is it a relevant technology? Is stealth going to be able to hide our aircraft in the wars of tomorrow? So that's a great question. And the answer is yes. know, depending very much on perspective, I always like to say that stealth is sort of a catch-all term. It's a really generalized term that we use to describe a collection of technologies that we use to delay or prevent detection, right? And then beyond that, targeting. So what was considered stealth, the stealthiest aircraft you were going to run across in 1983 was the F-117 Nighthawk,

which managed its electromagnetic signatures by just not having any. You were a very important. flying in the dark and all by yourself in the F-117. No radio comes with anyone, no radar to identify incoming threats. You are naked and alone in the F-117. Now the F-35 is also stealth. It's a stealth fighter. We use the same terminology. But the F-35 is significantly more difficult to detect from more different angles,

and importantly, relies a lot on electronic warfare, right? So the F-117 used to fly with an EA 18G growler, an electronic warfare aircraft in the neighborhood to help mask it. Now our stealth aircraft carry their own electronic warfare capabilities. The next generation of stealth aircraft are leaning more into what we call all-aspect stealth. And that's why the renders don't have those standing vertical tail surfaces like you can see above my head on the F-14. And instead, they look more like a stealth bomber. And the idea is twofold. The first is that your radar cross-section is variable,

depending on the angle of observation and the frequency, right? So if you have a radar array that's pointed directly at the nose of a stealth fighter, it'll usually have a much harder time detecting it than if it's perpendicular, if it's looking at the side of that stealth fighter, right? Now, without those standing vertical tail surfaces, it'll be much more difficult to detect them from the side, which right now is feasible to do. But also, different radar frequencies are better,

at detecting things differently. So low frequency, early warning radar systems are not effective at producing what we call a weapons grade block. They don't have the fidelity to guide a missile into an airplane up in the sky. But they can detect a resonance against stealth fighters that's produced by those standing vertical tail surfaces and the big gaping jet inlets.

Not always, but frequently enough that you could use it to cue a high frequency targeting radar array. And that's what more advanced radar arrays are doing now. Like Russia's S-500 uses the Nibo M radar array, which is actually multiple radar arrays in different frequencies. So if you can spot an incoming stealth fighter with that low-frequency array, it helps you point your high-frequency array at it. So the minute that stealth fighter is close enough, which probably would need to be around 20 miles with the Nibo M and an F-35, then you can get a target grade lock and launch an interceptor at it. Because that low frequency array oriented you to start with, you can do it five seconds faster, maybe 10 seconds faster.

And that could make an appreciable difference on the battlefield. But then you also have to contend with multistatic radar arrays, which are effectively just networked arrays in different locations. And then they're kind of creating a fused view of the battle space. Like a 3D view, yeah. Right? But this is why the planning of stealth flight operations is probably just. just as if not more important than the technology. And this is sort of the secret weapon that the U.S. military has,

even as China is fielding a larger stealth fleet, the U.S. has 40 years of experience operating stealth aircraft and combat environments and importantly doing that planning stage, where you use the best intelligence you have to determine where those different radar arrays are positioned. And then you plan your egress and your ingress based on presenting the best possible aspect of your aircraft to those arrays to minimize the chances of detection and then targeting after, right? So you use really effective mission planning to mitigate a lot of that threat.

And then in the best case scenario, it is a very boring flight, right? Being a bomber pilot and a well-planned mission is the lamest job in the world. You just, like, sit in your cockpit for 38 hours and, like, hit a button at some point. We interviewed a, I think it's called a Wizzo or like a weapons officer on a B-1B bomber, talked about some really long flights. Exactly, right? You know, but that's good mission planning, right? As I'm sure you're probably familiar. It's probably the same on the ground, I don't know, but good mission planning makes missions pretty boring, right?

The idea with, the idea is that eventually quantum computing and these multistatic radar are, arrays could make stealth compromised to an extent that our very fancy stealth designs and our very expensive radar absorbent material isn't benefiting us as much as it used to, right? And at that point, we're going to have to turn to new technologies, better electronic warfare capabilities or the other thing, maybe better radar absorbent materials that are ceramic based rather than polyurethane based. But when we do that, we're going to call those new technologies stealth also. Right? So the technologies that

we call stealth today and that we rely on for success today will change, but stealth will still be here and it's going to stay important forever, right? Because the idea that you can obfuscate detection and prevent targeting is always important. Just the

way we go about doing it is going to shift over time. You know? So the drones over New Jersey story. You mentioned, it briefly, so we got to go there, though. So I wish I could say it's all bullshit, but I have friends in New Jersey, of course. I live in New York, including some people who actually saw these things. So it's not purely War of the World's hysteria. It was happening. And then I believe when the

Trump administration came in just a few weeks ago, they put out some sort of a statement or there's a tweet or something. And I cannot remember, I apologize folks, I cannot remember exactly what was said. But the gist of it, as I recall, was, don't worry about it, guys. Yeah, it was all FAA approved. Everything's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Which tells us what?

You know, either, one of two things. Either it was all bullshit or the things that were being tested, those really exotic looking things were probably things that we didn't really want to tell everybody about quite yet, right? Yeah. So I had a bit of a kerfuffle with this whole drone story because when I was trying to research, you know, viable explanations for what was going on. I came across a press release put out by NASA about a year ago, a year and a half now, where NASA and the FAA and a number of other organizations were establishing a drone testing

corridor between military installations in Delaware and New Jersey. And so I, you know, found all that material. I reached out to them. I didn't get a response in a day or so. And I posted a video saying, well, this is probably what we're looking at here. The way they established the drone corridor was that you don't have to take off and complete your flights from those military installations. They can take place anywhere within the corridor. It's just effectively a general warning.

And the idea is that they were testing technologies they could use for drone infrastructure in the future, transporting people, transporting goods, things like that. So I posted a video saying, hey, this is probably what it is. And that video got a lot of traction. And then I got a very angry phone call from NASA the next day. saying that is not us. We've got nothing to do with this. We have not flown a single drone. They pointed me towards,

oh, man, now I'm blanking out of Air Force logistics command, but they're not called logistics. At any rate, so I reached out to them. They said, well, we're not flying anything, but we are managing the corridor. And I said, well, then can you confirm that? Well, what the hell are you managing if you're not flying anything? Exactly.

And I said, well, then can you tell me, if anybody is using the corridor, you know, and they said we don't have any that we can discuss. So whether that means we're not involved, sure. I think what's most likely is that there were probably a small number of pretty wacky, exotic-looking drones, maybe even large ones, like electric, vertical takeoff and landing passenger drones,

which we know are something that have been tested commercially in the past in the United States. And I think people spotted those things and started talking about it. And when they did, everybody else started flying their drones too, you know, including law enforcement who started flying their own large drones who tried to hunt out these other drones. And the problem a lot of people in New Jersey had is that when they aren't accustomed to looking up at the sky very often, especially at night, and then they do and they see an airplane. They go, oh, that's a drone. And then they tag me in it on TikTok, and I get 6,000 of those in two days.

But also, if you just see a regular drone, you don't know if that's Timmy testing his Christmas present, the local sheriff's department, looking for a missing kid, you know, a wedding photographer, filming a wedding nearby, you're going to go, well, that's one of those mysterious drones. So I do think that there was a handful of pretty exotic drones that were probably being commercially tested, maybe even in that drone testing corridor. What do you mean? I mean, you mentioned passenger drones. What do you mean commercially tested rather than militarily tested?

So the line gets awful blurry, right? So if you are a company who makes your money making electric vertical takeoff and landing and you have black budget contract money. That's the thing. Your only revenue options are to find a way to get flying cars into the private sector, which isn't going to happen with a human at the wheel because we're dumb, right? Or you've got to find someone in the government to buy it from you, right? So if you are a company producing something like this, you either have a DOD contract or you're pursuing one.

Those are really the only options. So you might be conducting your own testing in pursuit of ultimately securing that contract or maybe doing testing as a part of that contract. But the DOD may not be directly overseeing it. A good example that's not drone related is Hermius. They're a small Atlanta-based startup that's raised a lot of money over the past few years to build reuse. usable hypersonic aircraft. And when I went to their facility a couple of years ago, it was a bunch of like 25-year-olds with titanium 3D printers

and like a big empty factory space. Now they, you know, raised $100 million from Raytheon and others. The Air Force gave them another $100 million with promises of up to a billion. And they are building these aircraft. And right now they're about to start test flights of their first test article turbine-based combined cycle engine aircraft, which is called quarter horse. But the Air Force wasn't involved in testing at all up until fairly recently.

Until then, it was them having to demonstrate that they could do this to get the DOD to actually come in and sort of play a role in testing. And drone manufacturers sort of follow that same trajectory. If you're trying to, if there isn't a stated need for something that's got a line of accounting assigned to it, you've got to convince somebody at the DOD that you're worth some money. so you've got to do some testing first. So do you think some of these companies are trying to get Uncle Sam to fund

the flying car, or does DoD, they have a real interest in a drone that can insert troops essentially? Absolutely. 100%. They often characterize it as a Metaback platform slash resupply platform.

The idea being that it could get to remote areas to bring you equipment or gear, you know, supplies that you need or it could get injured troops out of remote areas really quickly. And they're autonomous electronic V-TOL aircraft. The idea of it being electric isn't just about, you know, sort of going green.

It's not really about that so much as they're significantly quieter. So it makes it potentially safer for you to like medevac somebody out of there. But yeah, there are already firms with DOD contracts testing that kind of technology. The name of them escapes me. But it's definitely something the DOD's expressed interest in for a good five years or so now. Interesting. Okay. And then another topic that I want to pick your brain about is the Chinese supposed sixth generation fighters that appear to be emerging in social media and places like that. There have been some pictures taken and some sightings. What's your take on where China is with these technologies right now? I think that the Internet hyperbole machine, you know, tends to make a lot out of these things. It's important to remember that what we see. saw, so preface, on December 26th, two new Chinese stealth aircraft were photographed and videotaped

flying over China, right? One of them, we've sort of dubbed the J36. That's the way bigger one. It looks like a Dorito. It's a three-engine platform, which is pretty unique. And then the other one is a smaller platform. It looks like it's an intermediate to heavy fighter, but it's significantly smaller than that J-36. And I couldn't tell you if there's a cockpit or not. I couldn't tell you if there's a cockpit or not on that second one. But both of them, as far as we can tell, made their first test flights, if not on December 26th, very recently to that, right? So we're talking about aircraft that in the best of circumstances are five to 10 years out of service at best. You know, it took 11 years to get the J20 from prototype to in service. We're creeping up on 16 years for China's

J35. You know, it's a pretty long development cycle from first flight to service. I'm not worried about these platforms entering service anytime soon. But what they definitely point toward is how significant China's progress has been in recent years. It wasn't long ago. It was, you know, 25 years ago where China was struggling to make fourth generation aircraft using purchased production lines from Russia. You know, and now they're fielding, you know, they've got likely between 250 and 300 J20s. You know, what their readiness rates are, I couldn't tell you.

You know, if any have crashed, nobody could tell you, but probably in that neighborhood. There's one or two J35s right now, but they're going to go into production soon. And now they're testing two new stealth aircraft that probably have different roles. The larger one, I think, is probably more of a regional bomber. But again, the difference between a bomber and a fighter doesn't matter all that much, and it likely could leverage air-to-air weapons. but the fact that it's got three engines is really weird and interesting. It probably points toward being a pretty high altitude aircraft

that wants to super cruise or fly at supersonic speeds without its afterburner to cover a lot of distance, probably to reach targets like Guam, for instance. Whereas the other one, which appears to be built by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, is more of a conventional stealth fighter type design. I mean, conventional. It's like a weird modified Lambda Wing for the airplane nerds out there. If you look up a Boeing YF 118G, bird of prey, it's like an airplane they built out at Area 51 and tested there and then never did anything with. It looks a little bit like that.

It's a really exotic looking aircraft. But being in testing doesn't mean anything, really, other than where China's emphasis is. You know, they're clearly motivated. And, you know, intelligence analysts suggest that China's probably spending north of $700 billion a year on defense. and, you know, when you think of purchasing power parity, they can go further with that than the United States can with 800 plus. So China certainly has the money to be sort of fast-tracking the R&D in systems like this. But I would also very much caution people to ignore anyone telling you that China's got

sixth-generation fighters. Nobody could tell you what a sixth-generation fighter is right now. And we don't even know if those are meant to be fighters. right now they're prototype aircraft in testing. It's interesting. It points toward trends that we need to pay attention to. And I like to think that maybe it'll kickstart NGAT funding for the Air Force because right now it is on hold.

But right now, what we know is that China can make something that looks like a Dorito chip fly. And that in and of itself isn't all that important, you know? There's another one I want to ask you about regarding Russia. This happened just recently, maybe a little over a month ago now, where it was suspected that for the first time in combat they used in ICBM. It came out later. I believe it was actually an intermediate hypervelocity missile rather than an intercontinental missile. But, I mean, we all saw the footage, and I mean, it was pretty crazy seeing these different reentry vehicles coming in.

Yeah. It was the first time a multiple independent reentry warhead. had ever been used in combat, you know. So, yeah, the first and foremost, the difference between an ICBM and an IRBM really just range, right? The amount of fuel on board, the size of the weapon, right? And Russia was very cognizant of that because the warhead, that multiple independent reentry vehicles, warhead, is the warhead that they use in their ICBMs. Weapons like the RS-28 Sarmat, which has got multiple independent reentry vehicles that

Russia claims collectively can deliver about 50 megatons worth of destructive power, which is exponentially bigger than an American ICBM. Like you wouldn't see the American ICBM's yield on that bar graph. In fact, I did an article, you know, years ago when I worked for you about that, and I tried to make the bar graph and it was worthless because you can't see, you know, the 30 kilotons or three kilts, you know. But what was really important about the... the use of that weapon was not necessarily what it did on the battlefield in Ukraine. It had limited

battlefield impact. That was definitely meant to scare the hell out of the West. The idea was to remind the West that Russia's got this nuclear arsenal and they rewrote their own nuclear doctrine six months or a year ago to make it easier for them to leverage within their own rules. The idea really is that, you know, you guys should think twice about supporting Ukraine because we might blow you all up in a nuclear war. And in my opinion, I think that that wreaks of a bit of desperation. Not that Russia is running out of people, they're not. They could keep feeding people to the wood chipper for a long time to come.

They won't run out of, you know, Cold War era equipment for some time either. But, you know, we are three years into them taking 20% of a country the size of Texas that's on their own border. And at this point, it's not even about Russia's further success. It's about Putin's survival. And, you know, the last thing that he can do is appear to back down and appear, he needs this to be a win for Putin or Putin will not be in power, you know? And that, I think the only real risk of nuclear war is if there is a chance that Putin would lose power.

I don't think that we would see any real risk of nuclear war otherwise. It does wreak of desperation, as you point out. I mean, yeah, they're clearly trying to do. demonstrate that, you know, we have this nuclear capability as a propaganda message. But, like, are they really going to go nuclear for Ukraine? Like, I don't, yeah. Like, it's, so admittedly, so Ukraine is pretty resource rich, as we're sort of seeing now with the Trump administration, you know, trying to get, you know, rare earth mineral rights

out of Ukraine, which in and of itself is a bit of a quagmire, because as far as I know, and I could be wrong, most of those rare earth mineral deposits, the significant ones, are in eastern Ukraine, which would mean Ukraine would have a retain. There's also no rare earth mining industry in Ukraine. Like that industry would have to be stood up from the ground up and matured. So it's, yeah, I don't know how pertinent an issue it really is right now. Yeah, it's a pretty big significant, you know, but conversely, as far as natural resources go, the natural gas deposits off the coast of Crimea.

are certainly significant, you know, and potentially could, you know, help Ukraine replace Russia as a big energy provider for Europe. But I just, Ukraine was supposed to be a step towards something larger. And I do fervently believe that the decision to take Ukraine was based on Alexander Dugan's book, the foundations of geopolitics.

He's a pretty prominent, you know, Russian political philosopher. He wrote this book back in the 90s about how to bring Russia back to a Soviet era. Third Rome neo-fascism. Exactly. And he outlined a number of the steps that Russians' foreign policy has taken in recent years, including using reflexive control methodology and things like that to influence foreign elections. He wrote about using those same methods to try to encourage English people from separating from the European Union. which one could argue they successfully managed to do.

And he also argued that you need to take Ukraine because it's a buffer state between NATO powers and Russia. And according to him, it's ethnically useless. So obviously worth taking. Isn't Dugan a little bit on the outs with the regime? Because he, I believe he may have spoken out or criticized the war in some capacity. He criticized Putin initially back in 2014 for stopping at Crimea. Putin should have taken the rest of it, and he's kind of gotten increasingly outspoken since then.

Ukraine, you know, killed his daughter. Yeah, Dugina. But the fact that Dugan is still alive today, I think, is the extent of his continued political leverage. I think at this point, the plan to follow Dugan's book has fallen through, and the value that Dugan offers Putin has similarly waned. But he's still got enough pull left. to not get pushed out of window, I think, is where he's at right now. But, yeah, I don't see Russia going nuclear over Ukraine because as far as, as far as I believe

and understood the plan, Ukraine was never the end game. Ukraine was supposed to be the first step. And they just really fumbled the ball. You mean the first step to like Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland? Potentially, yeah. At the very least, the first step toward sort of planting, you know, using that. reflexive control methodology again, which is information operations, to start creating, you know, turmoil within those border states, to sort of try to affect the same sort of eventual change that

they managed to do in Ukraine where they, you know, held phony elections and things like that. It's important to remember that we like to think information operations wouldn't work on us because we're so smart and savvy. Information operations are just marketing. It's just advertising. And the same way that, you know, I've been in meetings for news outlets with Twitter or X or whatever, and they say, yeah, we can get somebody to download your app for $4.56 per user. And the way we do it is we show it to them in this succession. It'll be on the banner this time. It'll be in the middle of that time.

It'll be over here next time. And we can get you this many users for this much money, guaranteed. We know we can do that with downloading an app. It is not any different kind of convincing someone to vote against their own best interests. you know. So I do think that Ukraine was meant to be a step toward a new empowered Russia, especially because once Ukraine was a part of Russia, it would help solve some of their demographic issues.

I've got a new population to pull from. But at this stage, I don't see Russia being a prominent regional player after this conflict is over for a long time, you know. We, we, or I should say the Ukrainians, but with Western assistance, knocked them back a few decades, it seemed. I would suspect. I mean, because their economy is fucked.

Yes. Right now, their economy is just reliant on war. And that would work for a certain amount of time, but eventually you're going to kind of run out of the spoils of war. And then you're just kind of borrowing against yourself to keep the war machine going. And, like, Putin, when planning for an exit strategy, cannot afford an exit like the American exit from Afghanistan.

It has to be a win. It's got to at least look like a win for him. Right, right. Or he's doomed. You know what I mean? Mission accomplished. Yeah, exactly. He needs a mission accomplished being, you know,

even if it's not that much of an accomplished mission, you know. So like, I don't see it going nuclear, but I also don't see an end anytime soon because you need an exit strategy for the Russian economy as much as anything. I had somebody, you know, who's pretty focused on Ukraine. tell me the one scenario that Russia may consider going nuclear, which is a little unlikely, but we've seen the incursion into Kursk. And if the Ukrainians actually made an even more aggressive effort to take Russian territory, that could potentially trigger a nuclear response.

You know, I think I could, you know, if Ukraine's at the risk of taking Moscow or St. Petersburg, yeah, you know, I think that we would see Russia get pretty wacky. Like, if not nuclear weapons, we would see, you know, it's a cornered animal, I suppose, is the best way to describe it. You know, you're going to see it. The way it was described to me was like, we would do the same thing. Like, if America was about to be completely overrun by an adversary, we would probably use nuclear weapons defensively. You know, especially if it was a limited engagement, you know what I mean? Like, yeah.

Yeah, I can honestly see it. I genuinely could. But conversely, I don't think that we're going to see Ukraine make those kind of endings of Russia either. Ukraine's logistics alone would really make that a challenge. I know you don't, but people in general tend, you know, I know everybody loves to say that, you know, amateurs talk tactics, experts talk logistics, but it's true. Like American logistics are insane and unparalleled. And it actually really is difficult to mount combat operations outside your own borders.

very difficult to do and Ukraine just doesn't have it. Yeah, I mean you mentioned it earlier about how Ukraine inherited the Soviet system and some people who were involved with Ukraine from 2014 up until this more recent conflict or the same conflict but the more recent

invasion. Someone was explaining to me the Ukrainians had a push logistics system that they inherited from the Soviets meaning that like each unit in the military is a lot of X number of bullets, X number of canteens and so on and so forth. And each year, every unit gets that allotment.

It just is what it is. Whereas the American system is by request, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a pull of logistics system. Yeah, based on needs, right? Right, right, right. Like we, we, we, we, we, we, there's, there's an actual term for it, like an, like an infantry squad, you, you say that, you know, I'm five magazines down. I lost my canteen cup.

We have one guy who took a grazing wound to the shoulder, and that's the report that gets pushed up, and so you get resupplied with what you need to replace that. And even that is remarkably difficult to manage in the combat zone. Yeah, yeah. And on top of that, you know, and I've heard this from people that I know who were in Ukraine, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the gospel truth. I've also heard that there's been some challenges with it's just been a bit of first come first serve.

And commanders that are in the room when shipment arrived can say, I want that. And other guys that might need it a lot more aren't necessarily getting served. It's like where did all our energy drinks and protein powder go? Oh, the guy's back at headquarters got it. Well, you know, as the guy back at headquarters running the A-Lock usually, I needed those rippets. Yeah, well, I know you used all the protein powder too, Alex, because I've seen you a person numerous times. I don't know, any final thoughts on Russia before we move on? Well, I think the one thing that people need to recognize

that I see in the comments underneath every discussion like this about Ukraine is that there's room for Russia to be doing really badly and to still have plenty of fight left in them. Yeah, yeah. Russia's fumbled the bag every way that they can over the past three years, but they started out with 10 times the military footprint that you, Ukraine had, you know, and that buys you a ton of slack. I mean, three years worth and counting. So I think it's important that when you're staying on top of the news regarding Ukraine and you

hear about Russia losing another ship in the Black Sea, or you hear about Russia losing another AWACs, which is an asset they genuinely won't be able to replace for years to come, that's bad. That all hurts Russia, sure. But Ukraine is in a worse position than that. Yeah, yeah. So the fact that Ukraine has managed to prolong this fight for this long is absolutely incredible and commendable. I don't see a lot of avenues for this conflict to end with Ukraine sort of regaining all of its lost territory, not without a big influx of support. But the truth is that support genuinely is based on idiots on the internet like me. So it's important not to lose sight and not to sort of go, oh, well, what are we doing in Ukraine?

anyway just because they're still fighting for their lives. They're still fighting for their lives. We want immediate gratification, but we should expect it to take a while. And it's going to be expensive. I promise you that it is cheaper than fighting Russia would have been, right? Let's let Ukraine utterly degrade Russia's ability to mount combat operations anywhere in the world. And while they're at it, let's let them fight for their own freedom. That's my own kind of take.

But that is what I'd like to leave people with regarding Ukraine. So production has told me that I'm obligated to ask you about UFOs. My least favorite topic, I mean, I'm happy to have a reality-based conversation about classified aerospace programs that maybe we don't know a whole lot about. But this UFO thing, I mean, we've seen throughout history these like sorts of ups and downs of public interest in UFOs. And we came up on another one of those in the last couple years. I don't know if you think it's on the downslide now or where it is. But I mean, nonetheless, it never really goes away, right? Yeah, I think it never did go away. But I do think that the American people are sort of inundated with news, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And because we're

inundated with news, and on top of that, the UFO community, just my opinion, is like 90% grifter. who are always promising that like something big is going to happen next week, or next book, or next show, or next podcast. Tune in next time, kids. Exactly. And I think that a lot of people have just burned out on it, you know. But that said, so I was in a PBS documentary about UFOs a few weeks ago that we actually recorded like six months ago.

And I really appreciated how the documentary approached it. It was Nova. They were very skeptical, but willing to listen, you know, and which tends to be my approach. Usually on the party pooper that gets invited onto these shows, but this time I wasn't. But after that, I did a Q&A on their YouTube channel with Ryan Graves, who was the Navy lieutenant who wasn't the person who recorded the gimbal footage,

but he was present when the gimbal footage was recorded. And according to Graves, that was one of multiple sightings that they had. off of Virginia Beach in like 2013, 2014 timeframe when they were doing training off the coast of Virginia Beach in sort of a blocked off area. And according to grades, they saw these things just about every day. And some of the stuff he said was really interesting

and not something that I've heard covered in the media a lot. First and foremost, these sightings, as far as he's concerned, seemed to start when the Super Hornet got a radar upgrade. So for a long time there, the Super Hornet was running an older mechanically scanned array radar. Back in the 2000s, we upgraded it to an active electronically scanned array radar. These are, you know, generational leaps and capability and infidelity for target tracking, even very small targets. They're so powerful that they can assess, you know, differences in barometric pressure.

So sometimes it's important to look at other sensors to make sure that what you're seeing is really there and not, you know, an environmental or a weather. phenomena. So according to Graves, they could detect these objects on the radar pretty much as soon as the new radars were installed. So then they went to try to close with them to try to figure out what they were. And the most interesting case he told me about was when he was flying towards one, he detected it on his radar, so he's flying toward it, has no visual on it. So he looks to his Fleer, which is a forward-looking infrared camera. That's what the gimbal footage was recorded with. And the Fleer could see whatever this unusual object was. and the radar could see whatever the object was,

but he had no visual on it. He saw nothing with his naked eye. And then as he got close, he said it was an Ame 9x, pretty sure it was an Ame 9L, regardless, sidewinder missile. I don't think they had Ame 9X's on the Super Hornet back then. The missile started whining. Now the sidewinder is an infrared-guided weapon.

So when it gets a heat track that it says that it could chase after and potentially engage, it'll walk in the pilot's headset to let them know, it's got a weapons gray block, it can go after a target. So he's seeing it on radar, he's seeing it on his forward-looking infrared camera, and now, independent of either of those systems, his weapons also tracking an infrared heat source that it says that it could engage. But he never saw anything with his eyes.

And that's really interesting to me. That's something that I have trouble explaining away. That's part of the issue that I've always had with this, that if you're a highly trained pilot, you have access to all these sensors, all this high-tech equipment, if you see something totally bizarre on your instruments, is it more plausible that something from outer space is coming down to Earth and doing something that violates all of our known laws of physics? or is it more possible that your instruments are broken or not calibrated, right,

or they're being spoofed, meaning somebody is out there trying to trick them through electronic means? Exactly. And I think that question or, you know, that line of thought begs us to separate this topic into two questions. The first question needs to be, is there something? Like, is there something that pilots are seeing and interacting with? is there something that we can't identify that's operating in American airspace? Because if there is, we need to engage and address that. The second separate question is, where is it from?

Right. It could be from China. It could be from Saturn. But regardless, that question in my mind is separate from the, is there something? Right. Is there something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the question, is there something is a tough one to answer for the same reason

why the New Jersey drone question is a tough one to answer. because of the noise on the channel. There are thousands and thousands of reports of UFOs and UAP. And there are at this point, you know, dozens if not hundreds of military aviators reporting seeing UFOs or UAP. But they're still humans. There's still people that are capable of making mistakes. They're still operating in a very stressful environment.

And, you know, when something is a mile away from you and it's more or less stationary and you're traveling at 500 knots, you've got a second or two to try to assess what it is as you zoom by, right? So it's important to remember that these pilots are people. They're well-trained people who have a lot of experience in assessing

relative motion and things like that because you use that to determine where an aircraft is likely to go in basic fighter maneuvers, things like that. But they are still people. So that's why it's so important to focus on the sensor data. And Jack nailed it 100%.

If you see something on one sensor and not on the others, that's an artifact. That's a glitch. That's just a problem with the sensor. If you have independent sensors that detect something simultaneously, well, then something is there. It doesn't mean it's an alien.

It doesn't even mean it's a drum. You know what I mean? It could be... But there's a phenomenon. Yeah. It could be ball lightning. But there's something there, right? Right.

More data that we're able to collect from those sensors, it gives us the ability to look for patterns. And then we can use that looking back historically, but only so long because active electronically scanned array radars, for instance, weren't really a thing in fighter jets until the 21st century, you know. But like whether it's a radar frequency, whether it's certain, you know, infrared light, if there's a pattern that we can identify, we can use that to look for things in the future,

and that helps us narrow it down. We get to go, all right, we figured out that this one thing is a weird aurora and it's not aliens or drones. So now we know whenever we see that again, we can cross that out, right? That's not an unusual phenomenon anymore. And that's the way that we get to the answer eventually is by sort of weeding through all those. But the only way we can do that is if we get consistent quantitative data. And that's tough because you don't have the same sensors everywhere, you know? Like you're going to use an ANAPG 79 here and a 63 there.

It's interesting that you said that these sightings started when they, they installed the new radar, which is an interesting inflection point, right? That's what Grave said, but Commander Fravor, which was the Tick-Tac incident, that happened about 10 years prior. Okay, okay. And that was pre-new radar, but I always have a but. So the Nimitz incident was back in 2004. That's when Commander Fraver saw the Tick-Tac.

And they saw it with their eyes, right? They did see it with their eyes. Yes. And it's worth noting that was one of the first deployment workups in that carrier strike group, the Nimitz carrier strike group, that was using integrated target tracking data across all the platforms. Effectively kind of creating that Killweb we were talking about earlier, an early version of it where the Super Hornets might not have had a radar with the fidelity required to identify and track something like this, but the Aegis ships, the destroyers and cruisers, did. So that's why they had target data that they were also able to release along with the fighter jets. In effect, you know, you might not have been able to spot this on radar. The Super Hornets may not have been able to intercept.

Were it not for the fact that they had fire control radar integrated across sort of the battle space? I can't say for sure that they wouldn't. But it does kind of point to that same idea that you need a pretty capable radar array with pretty high fidelity to be able to figure out something's out there. It's, you know, I mean, it brings up more questions and answers, right? So, I mean, is it possible that the government is red-teaming these new radar systems, right? But it is, I mean, I even have problems with that too, because, I mean, okay, yeah, we want to test our radar systems under the most realistic conditions possible. But am I not going to brief the pilots on that? Like, I don't want to cause an accident and get a pilot killed over this.

That's exactly how I feel. You know, obviously there is historical precedent for pretty disruptive red teaming, you know, red cell. Yeah, yeah. But it's not, it's, it is anything but common practice, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess, though, I will also say this, whatever it is, and I'm not, I honestly don't have, I have no idea. Like, normally I'd be like, I think it's probably this. I genuinely, whatever those tiny fraction of a percent of really unusual sightings are, I really don't know what they are.

I am the opposite of convinced that they're alien, but I also don't know what they are. So maybe they're alien. I have a lot of trouble buying the idea that it's red teaming, even though there is historical precedent for it. But whatever the explanation is going to be a weird one, right? Whatever's going on is weird. So by nature, the explanation is going to have to be weird too. Red teaming is more realistic than Martians. I don't think it's more realistic than China.

depending on the circumstances and the environment of the siding. I don't think China's flying anything off of Virginia Beach, but certainly in some places. A good example, and I'm not sure if I've talked about this with you guys before, but back in 2018, the Navy filed a patent for laser-induced plasma filament hologram countermeasures for missiles. The idea is basically just using a laser to superheat the air a couple hundred meters away from the aircraft to produce a plasma ball. that's a significant heat signature to confuse an inbound infrared guided missile.

Now, the Army has used this technology to create what they call, like, floating flashbangs. And there's videos of them doing it in a laboratory setting about 10 years ago where they can even relay human voice. It sounds mechanical, but it's a ball of light that's just talking, you know. That is more likely to me than a physical craft that defeats inertia, you know, that being broadcast from, a submarine or an aircraft. But again, to your point, you don't do that against a carrier strike group without telling anybody. Right. Right. And so then the other, you know, maybe speculation is these new radar systems come online, these new technologies, are they able to see something that previously we just couldn't see before? Is that what's happening? And I guess what frustrates me

is that my answer is I don't know. Yeah, yeah. And that drives me nuts, you know? So, according to Graves, because there is, I forgot who it was, I think McWest, presented a pretty viable explanation for the gimbal footage,

where he was saying the weird way that the object moves might be attributed to the way the gimbal camera actually moves as it's kind of staying locked on it, which you can't, you couldn't dispute that with what's released,

But according to Graves, the classified version of that footage includes the radar telemetry that shows the relative distance to that object was only three or four miles, not, you know, 40 miles or something like that. But until we actually see any of that data, it's just like a thing a guy told me. Don't get me wrong. Ryan Graves is a very credible witness, you know. He still works within the defense apparatus for a number of defense contractors. I don't question his credibility, but it is just a thing a guy told me.

And until we can actually see this data and go, yeah, I think that this is this and this isn't this, it frustrates the hell out of me that I don't have a reasonable explanation, you know? And I mean, the third option, of course, is that, you know, is it all basically a disinformation campaign either targeted on our adversaries or, you know, to conceal some of these things that we're testing? to what extent does that play into it? I think it all right. I guess the best way I can answer that is that if I were, if I were testing some kind of advanced technology that really seems to like blur the edges of what physics can do, the very first thing I would do,

if I were flying that over Iran or China or Russia, would be to fly it over Kansas City and be like, yeah, me too, guys. It was crazy. Nobody knows what that thing is. right? What a mystery. It is a good plausible deniability type explanation, which is interesting.

But anytime I kind of start going down the rabbit hole of those types of conspiracies, I always run into this wall, which is sort of the government's competence and ability to keep these kinds of secrets. It would have to be a very compartmentalized program. I spoke to somebody who, I'll just say, works in an office where they basically do what's called, you know, Alex, called Mildek, military deception. And he was like, brother, if we had 10 times the budget we actually have, we still wouldn't be able to do what you're talking about.

Yeah. You know, like, at the end, you know, just like trying to fake the moon landing, right? There would be so many people involved that you couldn't keep secret. But that's where our human pattern recognition habits can really be. benefit an I.O. campaign. And what I mean by that is just like with the New Jersey drones, for maybe a handful of them were exotic, really crazy looking things. But then pretty soon, every 737 and every quadcopter were sort of lumped into that category. And the DOD can absolutely benefit from that as well, right? So we know that the Defense Department is testing classified

aircraft. As a matter of fact, right now, we know better than we usually do, because we know that since 2020 at least there's been one or three flying prototypes of the next generation air dominance fighter that to date there's been not a single picture of. We know the B-21 Raider is conducting flight tests. We know the RQ180 exists and we don't even know if that's what it's called. We just know it's a big crazy-looking flying wing that flies at very high altitude and there's been a few pictures of. Then we've got, you know, the stealth black hawks that were used in the bin Laden raid that we still haven't seen pictures of, we haven't seen any evidence of.

There are claims that there was a second production run because those were two prototype rotorcraft. We still haven't seen any of those. So we know objectively that the United States Department of Defense is testing classified aircraft and is even operating, you know, boutique ones. But I don't mean like a deployment ready force, but certainly a handful of pretty exotic prototypes, especially when you think about, you know,

the technology emerging in. new fighters. The NGAD prototypes and testing are not the most advanced aerospace technology we can build. Through the most advanced aerospace technology, we can cram into a jet that fits under a certain price point that we can mass produce, that we know will perform reliably. Like an iPhone, you know, this isn't the latest and greatest telephone technology. It's what met the price point, what they could build, when they had the resources for, what they knew they could build a million of and move the products. That's what production. fighters are. But that doesn't mean technology demonstrators for platforms like the SR-72

Project Mayhem, which was an Air Force Research Lab effort that was very similar. You know, these types of really exotic programs definitely exist. They're definitely being tested. And they do benefit from that cloud cover of bullshit. Right. You know, that kind of floats just beneath them. Even if it's not a counterintelligence program, the UFO hysteria is something they're able to blend into. Exactly. You know, and we've even seen it over the years with like what UFOs look like in pop culture. You know, they were saucers, you know, back in the 50s. But then by the time I was a kid, they were triangles, you know what I mean? And now, because we know airplanes can look like that, now there are cubes with spheres inside them and stuff like that, you know. It changes with the

times. And I think that that says something about them probably being more in our heads. than in our skies, in the vast majority of cases. I want to bring the saucers back. I think it's time for the saucers to make a comeback. I want to see them. Let's do it. On the cover of popular mechanics again, let's do this. Let's do it.

As a matter of fact, I have. I'm going to do it. Shameless plug. This was my first ever popular. Yeah, there you go. Awesome. And it's on GAD, what we were just talking about. This artwork was by a guy named Rodrigo of Vela.

He is incredible. Find him on Instagram. He's a really cool. What's that aircraft called? So this is like a concept of the NGAD, the next generation air dominance fighter. So this is the one you say that they're flying, but we haven't seen yet. Exactly. No shit, okay.

Rodriguez Avella is an artist who made this. And it was a really, really cool experience where I got to say, well, it shouldn't have standing vertical tail surfaces. You know, we're going to want to have recessed jet inlets. And Rodriguez was able to produce this, which is incredible. incredible, you know. And Rodrigo's work is the most stolen in the aerospace community. If you see, like, YouTube thumbnails of, like, airplanes that don't exist. It's almost always his artwork that was stolen.

So I'm glad I got a chance to kind of plug them on here. That's awesome. So tell us what you're working on right now. Any other big pieces, big news items that you're working on that you want people to know about? So actually, I just finished recording a video about Iran's new drone aircraft carrier. which is hilarious, to be honest. It's not, they took a cargo vessel that was built back in the year 2000 by Hyundai Heavy Industries, and they spent the last two years just kind of building a flight deck on top of it,

and then they unveiled it as their terrifying new drone carrier this past week. You know, operating drones off of it that have a combat radius of like 30 miles. It is, it's military theater at its finest. It's not as good as like North Korean generals. The Iranians are good for that. Yeah, but it's nice to have something lighthearted to talk about lately. And I've also got some good stuff coming out about the F-15EX over on my YouTube channel, which is sandbox with two-xes.

The F-15EX is just, it's a hot rod of a fighter. It doesn't need stealth. In fact, according to recent reports put out by the director of operational testing and evaluation, the F-15EX has proven to be what they call operationally feasible against fifth-generation adversary aircraft. So we pitted the F-15-E-X against surrogate adversary stealth fighters, aggressor F-35s. And it can, it's got the detection power with its APG-82 radar, that it can spot very small targets very far out. So the F-15 EX might not be stealth, but it's definitely still got a place in warfare. And I've got a deep dive about that coming out

pretty soon. Cool, cool. You mentioned your YouTube channel, like where else can people go to find you? But you can find my written work on sandbox news.com, that's sandbox with two X's. And you can find me on pretty much every social media platform at Alex Howling's 52. I post long form videos on YouTube and increasingly shorts lately. But I also post sort of my own, a little bit less professional analysis on my TikTok, which is at Alex Hollings 52. But if you're not on TikTok, I don't blame you. I don't want to be.

It's just, it's where you want to. Stay off a commie app, guys. Don't do it. We will have links down the description for all of Alex's work. And also take two seconds. I want to remind you guys, there's also a link down there to our Patreon. You can go and subscribe for $5 a month. And you get access to all of the Team House episodes and Eyes On episodes add free.

And if you go, what is it, $10, D for the patch? $10. If you become a $10 member, you get a patch sent to you in the mail. There you go. And if you don't want to be a Patreon member and you want to buy a patch or a sticker of our logo, there's a new merch website. That link is also in the description. Yeah, we got new merch.

It's pretty cool. I'm buying some merch. I'm in. We'll send you something. And then we will also be back on Wednesday with Jessica, who served with the CST program. She's a special operation soldier. So we're excited to have her in studio in a couple days. Alex? Yeah, Dee.

There's a question from. There's a recent IZON episode where we were talking about like the viability of aircraft carriers and how they're not really viable anymore when it comes to China. What are your, and that was Andy Milburn saying that blasphemous, blaspheming the aircraft carriers. What are your thoughts on that, Alex? Well, you know, it's not that far off from the Air Force's recent 2050 assessment where they also think forward operating bases will be a thing of the past. because of the constant threat of long-range, ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile strikes, right? The answer can't be more effective air defense because you can always have a saturation attack. The more, let's say you've got 100 interceptors to bring down threats,

all they have to do is send 101 missiles. So you build 200 interceptors, all they have to do is send 201 missiles. So to some extent, the only solution is distance. The Air Force believes you need strategic ranges for pretty much everything, and that would also mean carrier flight operations would have to take place north of 1,000 miles by a wide margin, maybe 1,500, 2,000 miles away from your intended target. And right now we do not have aircraft that can cover that sort of distance. So the future of aircraft carriers in a high-end fight is tenuous.

It's tough to target them at that range and at the speed that aircraft carriers move, but it's feasible. However, aircraft carriers will have a long and illustrious history ahead of them for force projection in smaller regional conflicts and for posturing and things like that. If we were to go to war with China today, we would lose some carriers. There is no real debate about that. Every war game carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Navy shows losing one, if not two, carriers. in a conflict like that. But the fact that we're doing these war games right now is how we sort of come up with the strategy

to prevent that from happening. So you need bigger aircraft that can fly a whole lot further to solve the aircraft carrier problem. But what we use carriers for today, which is primarily asymmetric conflicts, you know, regional conflicts where we're sending assets in there to be a show of force, all of the ways that we use aircraft carriers today

and have for the past 50, years will remain viable for a very long time to come. But there will be edge cases like war with China where we need to pull them back and rely on strategic assets to sort of bore a hole through their defenses that we can start sailing carriers into. And that's a pretty tough nut to crack. Last plug from me, please guys check out, We Defy the Lost Chapters of Special Forces history, my new book. Look, even Alex has it. It must be good. Go check it out, guys. talks about some of the lesser known or totally unknown to the public aspects of Special Forces history. It's on Amazon now.

And thank you everyone who already read it and reviewed it. And I've gotten a lot of great feedback from you guys. So thank you for that. Alex, always a pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on the show tonight. Hey, it's always a blast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to catch up on some of these issues.

I mean, I only like tangentially touch aerospace stuff. but like you're really deep into it. So it's interesting to pick your brain about some of these topics. Yeah, I love the opportunity because my wife is sick of hearing it. So, you know, I'm happy to come on. Yeah, yeah, no, my girlfriend's sick of hearing about this stuff, I'm sure. There's one more question. Hold on one second.

I'm sorry. Jesus, I should be prepared. V asks, you versus Elon one-on-one, no guns or space lasers. just hand to hand who wins. I would fold that old man in half. I'm not a fighter anymore. I'm a lover, but there was a time when I was a fighter, and there was never a time for Elon Musk.

You can't tell from this stupid Zoom call, but like Alex is a huge dude. Like, I've met you numerous times in person and like, holy shit. I appreciate it. I'm not, you know, I'm a dad now, so I've gotten a lot softer, but I definitely am still confident in my ability to fold him into a brochure and put him in the glove box of the Tesla. Jason Lyons, maybe not so much. Jason's a huge dude too.

Jason's a monster. He is a huge guy. There's one more, Norm Anderson said the solution is submarines. Submarines are honestly the solution to almost every problem that ails the U.S. military. The problem that we're running into is that we can't really build them for a very reasonable price or at a reasonable time. Right, right. That's the real challenge. But I am a big fan of submarines, especially, you know, the new Columbia class is an engineering marvel in almost every sense of the word.

It's tough to get past the sticker shock, you know. But once you try to swallow the idea of spending $15, $16 billion on a boat, it's not a starts getting really cool, you know. We'll have to do a submarine episode in the future. So Alex, thank you for joining us tonight. Well, I'm sure we'll have you on again down the line as new things develop. New shit has come to life. Yeah, I'm over to it.

Always happy. Thanks a lot for happening. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it. We'll see all of you guys on Wednesday for Patreon subscribers and Friday for people who are not. Yeah. So if you're a Patreon member, you can actually, you go, watch these shows live, ask questions and all that, and you will see them a couple days later

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