Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years
00:00:05 and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron
00:00:12 of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.
00:00:15 He’s also famously one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO, an
00:00:23 identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac and the incident more formally
00:00:30 referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident.
00:00:35 His story, corroborated by several other pilots from my perspective as a curious scientist
00:00:40 and an open minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at
00:00:47 least that I’m aware of.
00:00:49 He’s a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to.
00:00:53 I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many
00:00:58 of the questions that people posted as I could.
00:01:01 And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation and I’m sure if the world wants us to, and
00:01:06 if there’s more questions to be had, we’ll talk on this podcast again.
00:01:10 Quick summary of the sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.
00:01:16 Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
00:01:21 As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena,
00:01:27 and aliens in general is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy
00:01:33 theorists to actual hard evidence.
00:01:36 I’m a scientist first and foremost, but an open minded one, often looking and thinking
00:01:41 outside the box.
00:01:43 I’m often disheartened by the closed mindedness of the scientific community.
00:01:47 And in equal part, I’m disheartened by the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry
00:01:52 and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists.
00:01:56 I believe there’s a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds
00:02:02 should walk.
00:02:03 I think we humans know very little about our world, what’s up there among the stars and
00:02:09 the nature of reality and the nature of our very own minds.
00:02:14 The path to understanding can only be walked humbly.
00:02:17 The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology,
00:02:22 whether human made or alien made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to
00:02:28 every scientist and engineer on this earth.
00:02:31 There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood
00:02:35 and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings.
00:02:41 Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes
00:02:47 and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints
00:02:52 and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations.
00:02:59 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow
00:03:04 on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
00:03:10 As usual, I’ll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
00:03:14 More and more I’m trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less adzy,
00:03:20 more personal, but I give you timestamps so you can skip, but still please do check out
00:03:24 the sponsors by clicking the links in the description, it is honestly the best way to
00:03:29 support this podcast.
00:03:31 This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to support health
00:03:36 and performance.
00:03:37 I drink it every day to make sure I’m not missing any of the nutrition I need.
00:03:41 Now let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting.
00:03:45 I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an 8 hour eating period
00:03:51 of 2 meals, sometimes 24 hours, that’s one dinner to the next.
00:03:57 I’ve been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to
00:04:01 have done.
00:04:03 People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits,
00:04:07 it’s a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life.
00:04:11 Not eating somehow is a reminder that we’re immortal, that every day is precious.
00:04:16 I certainly experienced this with the 24 hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the
00:04:21 48, 72, and even week long fasts.
00:04:25 Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens, it’s delicious, refreshing, just makes
00:04:30 me feel good.
00:04:31 So go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to claim a special offer of free vitamin D for a year.
00:04:38 Again go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast.
00:04:45 This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:04:49 Get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get a discount.
00:04:53 You probably know there’s a show called The Office that I fell in love with, first with
00:04:56 the British version with Ricky Gervais and then the American version with Steve Carell.
00:05:02 ExpressVPN lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100
00:05:07 different countries and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions
00:05:11 of The Office in other countries.
00:05:14 Also it protects you when you do shady things on the internet that you shouldn’t be doing.
00:05:19 Like checking the website of this very podcast that for some reason was not available in
00:05:24 Russia for a long time, not sure if it still is, but if it isn’t you can use ExpressVPN
00:05:29 to access it.
00:05:31 I think of ExpressVPN like a pirate ship, and regular VPN free life as a boring cruise
00:05:37 from one place to another with no excitement in between.
00:05:41 Choose wisely my friends.
00:05:43 Again get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get an extra three months
00:05:48 free and to support this podcast.
00:05:51 This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P help.
00:05:56 Like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane
00:06:00 to notice you.
00:06:02 Check it out at betterhelp.com slash lex.
00:06:04 They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist and
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00:06:14 Now, hard left turn, let me talk about desert islands.
00:06:18 Whatever you think of it, I love the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending
00:06:23 time on an island, alone, with potentially no hope.
00:06:27 The natural question is, if I could, what would I bring to this island?
00:06:31 The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing, the first thing that popped into
00:06:36 my crazy mind which is the Introduction to Algorithms book, also called CLRS for the
00:06:41 first letters of the last name of its four authors.
00:06:44 I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world inside computers
00:06:50 when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess.
00:06:55 I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization.
00:06:59 Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash lex to get a discount and to support
00:07:06 this podcast.
00:07:07 And now, finally, here’s my conversation with David Fravor.
00:07:13 You’re a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School.
00:07:17 Yeah, I am.
00:07:18 Better known as Top Gun.
00:07:20 Yeah.
00:07:21 Let me ask the most ridiculous question, how realistic is the movie Top Gun?
00:07:26 So it’s funny, we used to joke, and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said
00:07:31 this, there’s two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic.
00:07:36 One, there is a place called Top Gun, and number two is they do fly airplanes there.
00:07:43 Other than that, I went through in 97, class 497, and there’s actually a log of every single
00:07:50 person that’s went through, kind of like a SEAL training.
00:07:53 There’s a list.
00:07:54 Because there’s a lot of posers out there, oh, I was a Navy SEAL.
00:07:57 No, you weren’t.
00:07:58 Well, I went to Top Gun.
00:07:59 You can actually go to Top Gun, and matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the
00:08:03 real patch, you have to have gone there.
00:08:07 So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real.
00:08:11 The real ones are controlled.
00:08:13 The people that make them honor that.
00:08:16 And when you go in, they look up your name.
00:08:17 If you want to get one, they look up your name.
00:08:19 You just tell them, they go, okay, here, and they’ll sell them to you.
00:08:21 If you are not on the list, you ain’t get no patch.
00:08:24 Because it is, it’s a pretty big deal to go through, but for me, probably one of the best
00:08:31 experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent.
00:08:36 It’s very, very challenging, but it’s what we all signed up to do.
00:08:41 So it’s, it’s just the entire group that is, when you want to be that, you know, that level,
00:08:49 you know, where you go, everyone really cares, and everyone really wants to be good.
00:08:53 Is it competitive?
00:08:54 Like, what was it, in the movie?
00:08:56 No, it’s, when you go through, it’s, you know, it’s, if anything, it’s more of the
00:09:00 students, you know, and then there’s the instructor side, then the instructor sides are really,
00:09:04 you know, they’re guys that, you know, they just chose to stay up in Fallon.
00:09:09 And it’s extremely difficult job, because they have, they have a very small tolerance
00:09:15 for not being good.
00:09:20 So they’re briefs, the guys when they give a lecture, so let’s just say there’s a fighter
00:09:24 employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones.
00:09:26 It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture.
00:09:30 The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, what they call them murder boards,
00:09:33 where he’s scrutinized by his peers, and he practices, by the time they actually stand
00:09:37 in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized, and
00:09:43 they don’t even turn around, they just click and they know them in order.
00:09:46 And they repeat the same thing over, it’s, and it’s standardized.
00:09:50 So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the school, and there’s
00:09:53 a reason for that, because what they’re doing is they’re training, so when you come out
00:09:58 of Top Gun, you’re called a Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics Instructor, okay?
00:10:01 So you’re SFTI.
00:10:03 When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools on
00:10:07 the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons, and then you visit the squadrons
00:10:11 and train and do upgrade rides and all that.
00:10:13 So there’s a, there’s a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the
00:10:19 course.
00:10:20 It’s, it is literally one of the best things, and it’s not, it’s not a rank based thing,
00:10:23 just think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a, you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander.
00:10:30 The lieutenants, the hierarchy, or at least to be, I don’t know how it is exactly today,
00:10:34 but I imagine it’s the same.
00:10:36 The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank.
00:10:40 So when the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in
00:10:45 the Fallon Ranges, they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise,
00:10:52 and I mean time wise, are the ones that actually make the decision.
00:10:56 And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out
00:11:01 from the staff, they all speak the same language.
00:11:05 It’s and it has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it
00:11:09 was founded.
00:11:11 So it’s just a, it’s an incredible group of individuals.
00:11:14 So there’s a bar of excellence that, that the instructors demand.
00:11:19 Oh, very much so, and they’re held to it.
00:11:22 So it’s not a, hey, I’m now an instructor, so I can do what I want.
00:11:26 There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard.
00:11:29 They have to, and I mean every moment of every day.
00:11:33 So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon and they come down and do, they’re called
00:11:37 site visits where they come down and they’ll come to Lemoore, California, which is where
00:11:40 the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy.
00:11:42 And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on
00:11:47 some of that knowledge, that’s that same high level of standard.
00:11:51 It’s they can’t just drop your guard because you wear the Top Gun patch.
00:11:55 And people know that.
00:11:56 And they wear light blue shirts.
00:11:57 So it’s pretty easy to identify them when they’re out there.
00:12:00 And you know, and then everyone else who’s been through the school, including them, have
00:12:02 the patch on their sleeve.
00:12:04 So there’s a standard that’s expected when you come out of there.
00:12:07 So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years.
00:12:10 Yes.
00:12:11 Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?
00:12:15 Yeah.
00:12:16 So, you know, first I was in, I was enlisted, I was a Marine.
00:12:21 And then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy.
00:12:27 So it’s always better to be lucky than good.
00:12:29 But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I’ve had that dream to fly.
00:12:33 So when I got selected,
00:12:34 You’ve always dreamed of flying.
00:12:36 Yeah.
00:12:37 Since 1969, when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.
00:12:41 I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five.
00:12:46 And I said, wow, yeah, it’s so cool, mom.
00:12:50 And she said, well, you know, they were all pilots.
00:12:53 And then at that point it was like, I’m going to be a pilot.
00:12:56 And if you knew me growing up, cause I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just
00:13:01 like, yeah, right.
00:13:02 I used to joke, I’m going to fly, I’m going to fly jets, I’m going to drop bombs.
00:13:07 And if people that knew me as a kid, they’d be like, yeah, and they’d be like, ah, not
00:13:10 a chance.
00:13:11 And then when I did, I actually had a, it’s a funny story and I’ll get to it, I’ll finish
00:13:15 my career.
00:13:16 But I was at my cousin’s wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood.
00:13:21 We kind of, they had Italian side of the family.
00:13:24 That’s how we grew up.
00:13:25 So it was my house right down the street.
00:13:26 It was my cousin, Chad.
00:13:27 And then right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff.
00:13:31 The guy two doors down from my house, the paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all
00:13:34 knew me.
00:13:35 And I went to my cousin’s wedding and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor.
00:13:40 I go, Mr. Race, how you doing?
00:13:42 He goes, you fly jets, Top Gun and all that.
00:13:44 I go, yes, sir.
00:13:45 He goes, man, I figured you’d be in jail by now.
00:13:48 And it was kind of a, to me, it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on and I kind
00:13:54 of overcame that.
00:13:55 But…
00:13:56 What do you attribute that to?
00:13:57 So you, I’ve heard you before and just now say that it’s better to be lucky than good
00:14:02 and you talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory
00:14:13 maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how’d you pull it off to be like, to be truly
00:14:21 a special person?
00:14:23 The easiest way is one, never, never take no.
00:14:26 Don’t let anyone put you down and say you can’t do it or those.
00:14:30 I mean, I knew, I knew what I was capable of inside, you know, and if I really believe
00:14:34 if you want something and you want to do something, then you can achieve it.
00:14:39 Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball and I really wanted to be in the NBA, there’s
00:14:45 a realism that says I’m five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap and
00:14:49 I’m really not that good at basketball, it’s probably not ever going to happen no matter
00:14:51 how hard I try and practice.
00:14:53 It’s just the way it is.
00:14:54 Or for me to be in the NFL, I’m not fast, you know, I’m not that big, it’s just physically
00:15:02 I’m incapable of doing that.
00:15:04 But there’s things that don’t really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and
00:15:09 strength, but it’s, it’s mental and I’m not saying you have to be a genius and super smart
00:15:15 to be a fighter pilot.
00:15:16 Matter of fact, you don’t.
00:15:17 It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly, 80% solution is typically good
00:15:23 enough because if you overthink it, you’re, you’re behind and then in an air to air fight,
00:15:28 that’s what happens.
00:15:29 People try and overthink it and before you know it, because it’s happening so fast, you
00:15:32 don’t have, you can’t get to the nth degree, you know, six decimal places, 80% solution
00:15:37 is good enough.
00:15:38 You have a really strong gut for the 80% solution, just yeah, I’m a big believer in the 80% solution.
00:15:42 I love that.
00:15:43 If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what, like
00:15:48 if you’re fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it’s like a chess game, but it’s a really,
00:15:52 really fast chess game where you go, I’m doing this and then I know that if I do a maneuver,
00:15:58 if he’s going to counter it correctly, he should do a, if he doesn’t do a, he does some
00:16:03 degree less like BCD and then I know how bad his, his error is and then I capitalize.
00:16:09 So my mind, I don’t have to be perfect, you know, I don’t have to go, I need to go to
00:16:12 47 degrees, nose high.
00:16:14 If I just kind of get above 40, then I’m good and I can watch how it reacts and then I can
00:16:18 adjust for that.
00:16:19 And you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral,
00:16:24 you’re just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage till eventually,
00:16:29 you know, and if you’re really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only rear quarter
00:16:33 where you got to get behind the guy, kind of world war II dog fight and type stuff.
00:16:38 Then it’s, it’s literally, it’s a, it’s a very, very fast chess game that happens at,
00:16:43 you know, 400 knots, 300 knots depends.
00:16:46 So to get to be one of the rare individuals that are able to do that, he just had the
00:16:53 dream and didn’t take no for an answer.
00:16:56 Yeah.
00:16:57 Well, you know, you know, part of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a
00:17:02 fire ready aim guy, you know, he’d smack me and then asked me what I did wrong.
00:17:07 Yeah.
00:17:08 Good parenting.
00:17:09 Um, back then, you know, I, I joke and people look, cause you know, at times it was kind
00:17:13 of tough, you know, cause he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, you know,
00:17:17 I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times.
00:17:20 Uh, but then everyone else in my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was
00:17:24 a kid.
00:17:25 Uh, my, uh, my grandfather who is a big, big part of it.
00:17:29 My mom’s dad, uh, who he taught me a lot and you have a question there that we’ll talk
00:17:35 about, uh, about him, but, uh, huge, huge influence.
00:17:39 Very, very positive.
00:17:40 And a lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught
00:17:45 me.
00:17:46 Um, and, uh, you know, and I figured, you know, it was the first funeral I ever went
00:17:51 to and it was, uh, it was about three miles long and church was overfilling and people
00:17:57 were out.
00:17:58 It was a big guy, dead serious.
00:18:00 And you go, there’s someone asked who died the Pope.
00:18:02 Um, uh, so, so a lot of people love them.
00:18:05 So back to, back to my career question, cause I’m getting down at rabbit hole.
00:18:09 Uh, no, I, when I was at the, I was going to, I was going to stay in the Marines.
00:18:13 I really wanted to go, man.
00:18:14 I love the core.
00:18:15 I think it’s, uh, of all services, it’s that one, everything is in a ball and they’re very,
00:18:20 very professional and it was a great, great organization to join.
00:18:24 Uh, but I went out to the Nimitz on my, uh, freshman cruise after your freshman year at
00:18:30 the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and you, you’re an enlisted person.
00:18:33 You get to experience that half when I already was enlisted.
00:18:35 So it was fine with me.
00:18:36 Because it comes up a lot.
00:18:37 You mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is, what like, yeah.
00:18:41 So Nimitz is, uh, an aircraft carrier.
00:18:43 So it’s, uh, four and a half acres of sovereign us territory that floats around the us oceans
00:18:48 giant thing.
00:18:49 Does it have weapons on it?
00:18:50 Uh, the air wing is really the weapons.
00:18:52 It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part it’s a giant moving airport is what
00:18:58 it is.
00:18:59 So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off.
00:19:01 Um, and I’m like, Oh, and the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a
00:19:06 VF 41 and a 14 squadron, VF 84, uh, an F 14 squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons.
00:19:12 And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a six pilots
00:19:15 and BNs.
00:19:16 So it was really a neat experience.
00:19:17 And I said, I want to do that.
00:19:20 And the way to do it was to not, to, to go in the Navy because there are Marine squadrons
00:19:25 that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based, you know, to
00:19:28 support the Marines.
00:19:29 Cause there are that, that unit, that whole unit, you know, the Marine Corps is that one
00:19:33 surface has it all.
00:19:35 And, um, so when I graduated and I got to, uh, you know, I, I worked hard through primary
00:19:41 and that’s where, you know, I knew Missy, uh, we were in, actually went through together,
00:19:45 Missy Cummings, uh, we went through primary together and then, uh, I went to Kingsville.
00:19:50 We all selected the same time.
00:19:51 I went to Kingsville.
00:19:52 There was another guy, Scott Weidemeyer, uh, the three of us.
00:19:55 So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville and Missy went to Meridian.
00:20:00 So the three of us that we had all went through, we got, we selected out of primary together.
00:20:04 We all ended up going jets and that’s, that’s how, besides from school, I knew her at school
00:20:08 too.
00:20:09 The long story.
00:20:10 I got done, uh, got winged.
00:20:11 It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got
00:20:14 my wings and, uh, through some luck, uh, I ended up getting A6s, uh, on the West coast,
00:20:21 which is a side by side, uh, bomber.
00:20:23 So it’s a pilot on the left seat and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat.
00:20:26 It was built in the sixties.
00:20:28 It is all weather, uh, and it flies low at night and it’s got a terrain mapping radar.
00:20:33 How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for,
00:20:38 for the public?
00:20:39 Yeah, that’s fine.
00:20:40 How many fighter jets are side by side like that?
00:20:43 That was, uh, in the Navy, that was the only one, uh, the Air Force, the F111 was a side
00:20:47 by side, but the Navy, it was the A6 and then there’s the EA6B, which is a derivative of
00:20:52 that.
00:20:53 And now that those are all gone, the EA6B is just went away a few years ago.
00:20:56 And now the, uh, E18G Growler, um, is the replacement for the A6B.
00:21:01 There was never a replacement for the A6, uh, that I flew.
00:21:04 It really became the F18, which, uh, the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise
00:21:10 by fuel, uh, then the Hornet and, uh, the Hornet is the F18.
00:21:16 Is there usually two people in the plane, but they’re usually like in front and behind?
00:21:21 In a, the modern two seaters, yes.
00:21:22 Uh, but most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat.
00:21:26 Single seat, just one person?
00:21:27 One person, with the exception of, I’ll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the
00:21:32 exception of the F15E Strike Eagle and the F18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two
00:21:37 seater and the G is also a two seater, but it’s more of an electronic attack by say full
00:21:42 up fighter bomber.
00:21:44 So most of the time that you’ve flown in your, like I said, 18 year career is, was it two
00:21:51 seater?
00:21:52 That was about half and half.
00:21:53 So I started off in A6 was a two seater.
00:21:55 Then I went to single seat F18s and I flew those, uh, all the way up until 2000 and let
00:22:03 me think 2001 to the end of 2001.
00:22:07 And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets and I’ve flown both of those,
00:22:11 the E’s and the S, but I deployed when I had command of VFA 41, I had the two seat, they
00:22:16 were F squadron.
00:22:18 So you eventually ended up commanding the, the Strike Fighter Squadron 41.
00:22:25 I love the, the name, the Black Aces.
00:22:28 What, uh, is there some parts of that journey that are amazing, parts of it that are tough
00:22:35 that kind of stand out?
00:22:37 To me, it was one, it was a huge honor.
00:22:39 Uh, and I got to serve with, uh, you know, I got pulled up because the, the guy, the,
00:22:44 the people that are exos, cause we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number
00:22:47 one guy.
00:22:49 So the XO becomes the CEO.
00:22:50 So the executive officer becomes the commanding officer.
00:22:53 So I had worked with, uh, now soon to be vice Admiral Weitzel, uh, was the, he was commander
00:23:00 Weitzel at the time was the XO and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little
00:23:04 bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L’more, L’more had been a single seat,
00:23:10 a fighter community, uh, since the forever.
00:23:16 And now all of a sudden you’ve got the F18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators
00:23:19 in the back that are not pilots, they’re weapon systems operators.
00:23:23 And there’s a difference.
00:23:24 Um, and Kenny is a weapon systems operator and, uh, Kenny knew because of my A6 background
00:23:31 that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat, one seat, two seat.
00:23:34 Because when you fly two seat, there’s a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take
00:23:40 the advantage of the weapon systems operator.
00:23:42 And it’s not that one plus one equals two in that environment because it really, there’s
00:23:47 a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the
00:23:51 ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies.
00:23:56 But it does, it does equal more than one.
00:23:58 I would say that one plus one with two people as well as a minimum of 1.5 because you’ve
00:24:04 got an extra head, you’ve got extra eyes, you’ve got someone that can monitor systems.
00:24:09 The airplanes can do two things at once.
00:24:11 I mean, there’s an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.
00:24:14 Can we just pause on that just for me, from like a human factors perspective and also
00:24:18 an AI perspective, what’s, how difficult, uh, so there’s like when there’s two people,
00:24:26 there’s also a third person that’s the AI part, the some level of automation like autopilot
00:24:33 maybe.
00:24:34 That’s correct.
00:24:35 Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions really
00:24:39 quick, 80%, how do you deal with another brain working with you?
00:24:46 And then also the automation, is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn?
00:24:52 And also as that changed throughout your career, I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms
00:24:57 of the automation or perhaps not?
00:24:59 Well, I can tell you, so let’s, let’s start just, no, this is, this is good.
00:25:03 This is good.
00:25:04 And this is, I’m enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other
00:25:07 than a Tic Tac.
00:25:08 So, um, so let’s start with the A6.
00:25:10 The A6 was really an analog airplane, uh, that was built in the sixties.
00:25:15 All right.
00:25:16 And there’s been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between
00:25:21 the pilot and the bombardier navigator.
00:25:23 So we would fly low at night in the mountains.
00:25:26 So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington.
00:25:28 So you’ve got the Cascades and incredible amount of time.
00:25:33 And we would get in the simulators because unlike normally people think terrain following
00:25:37 and there’s the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it’ll, the radar can
00:25:41 see and it’ll fly.
00:25:42 It basically flies a straight line.
00:25:43 So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6
00:25:47 was really manual.
00:25:49 So you do this low level routes where you’re going to, you’re going to fly in the mountains
00:25:52 at night.
00:25:53 You’re going to be at, you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground, ripping through
00:25:56 like fog layers, cause you don’t need to see outside.
00:26:00 You’re literally flying a little TV screen and radar.
00:26:03 What are you looking at most of the time?
00:26:04 So you’re just at a screen.
00:26:05 It’s this really primitive.
00:26:08 If you look at it now, what we did, you’d think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really
00:26:11 fun.
00:26:12 So is it similar to like the FLIR stuff?
00:26:14 Is that, is, no, this thing is totally radar based.
00:26:17 Now the airplane had a FLIR ball as a target recognition and multi sensor was called a
00:26:22 tram.
00:26:23 You’re looking at like basically like dots of hard objects.
00:26:27 No, actually what it is is the, the bomb of your navigator had a radar and he was getting
00:26:31 raw feed off of a pulse radar in front.
00:26:33 Okay.
00:26:34 So it’s just basically mapping the mountain.
00:26:35 So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you’re coming up on it, the front side is
00:26:39 going to be, it’s going to give you a really bright return.
00:26:41 And then the backside, it’s just going to be a giant shadow because you can’t see on
00:26:45 the other side.
00:26:47 So the Bombardier navigators would do that and we, they would have charts and they could
00:26:50 shade their charts knowing that, Hey, if we turn a little bit left here, we can get in
00:26:53 this valley.
00:26:54 We can sneak up this valley and then go around the backside of the mountain, which is what
00:26:57 the airplane would do.
00:26:59 And so, and sorry to interrupt, I’m going to just keep asking dumb questions, I apologize.
00:27:03 But the pilot, can you, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the Bombardier?
00:27:09 Yes.
00:27:10 So you’re, you’re actually just control.
00:27:13 I’m flying the jet.
00:27:14 The throttle’s the stick and I have a, it’s about a, probably a four inch or six inch
00:27:20 wide by maybe four inches, five inches high.
00:27:24 It looks like it’s literally a CRT.
00:27:26 That’s how old it is.
00:27:27 A CRT screen.
00:27:28 And what it would do, what the radar would do is the, the, the Bombardier navigator is
00:27:33 looking at his radar and he’s looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the
00:27:36 airplane.
00:27:37 So he has the range really scoped down cause the radar can see a lot further.
00:27:40 He’s looking at about 12 and a half miles when we’re in the terrain mode where we’re
00:27:43 dodging mountains and stuff.
00:27:45 And what the pilot has is there’s, they’re called range bins and there’s eight of them.
00:27:49 So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and the closest range
00:27:55 bin, it’s a thing and it’ll be like between like a half a mile and or a quarter mile to
00:28:00 three quarters of a mile.
00:28:01 And the next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles.
00:28:04 And then it just keeps going out like that.
00:28:06 So if there’s a mountain in front, let’s say we’re on a flat plane and there’s a mountain
00:28:10 out in the distance at 15 miles.
00:28:12 And we were just driving right at it.
00:28:14 So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar is going
00:28:18 to see it on his scope, my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show
00:28:23 like a big bump, like a mountain.
00:28:25 And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show it.
00:28:29 And I could see that that bump was moving towards me.
00:28:32 And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I’d see the mountain go over
00:28:36 to the right hand side and I could do that, but it wasn’t like a video game.
00:28:41 It’s literally like, if you think of the original Atari’s.
00:28:44 Yeah.
00:28:45 But you build up, I imagine that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual
00:28:51 3D environment based on that little Atari’s solid display.
00:28:56 You’re exactly right.
00:28:57 And you have to, you have to train.
00:28:59 So there’s been studies, as a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people probably argue
00:29:03 with me, but it’s true.
00:29:04 There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST, the
00:29:09 systems trainer, and it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and you just, you
00:29:13 could fly these things and they had terrain that they would inject into the system.
00:29:17 But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, who I’ll
00:29:24 name him, his name’s Chris Sato, he works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad, I think
00:29:32 computer engineering, he’s scary smart.
00:29:36 So Chris could really work, as a matter of fact, all the guys I flew with, so there’s
00:29:40 another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who’s now at SAP, we did our first night traps
00:29:44 together.
00:29:45 The bond between us, I mean, it’s one of those things that you just, you’re never going to
00:29:48 forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together, we were actually the most junior
00:29:51 crew in the squadron.
00:29:55 We’d spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the system,
00:30:01 one because he was extremely brilliant and he had that inquisitive mind of, oh, we can
00:30:05 do all these different things and there’s all these degradation modes.
00:30:10 But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get, because, and it’s,
00:30:15 you almost talk in partials.
00:30:16 So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, I’ve got rising terrain,
00:30:22 that’s just what they say, showing rising terrain at 12 miles.
00:30:25 And I’d see the little bump and I’d say, got it.
00:30:28 This is going to go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads.
00:30:32 So when you first get together, the interaction, it’s almost like you have to rehearse it,
00:30:38 you have to know, and you talk in full sentences.
00:30:42 The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, I’m showing and he’d get like rising out
00:30:50 and before he finished, I’d say, I’ve got it.
00:30:53 So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him like, I mean,
00:31:00 there can be no, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job because I’m literally
00:31:05 looking at this little scope that’s not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain
00:31:09 moving.
00:31:10 Remember the mountain’s here and then it’s going to pop up here and then it’s going to
00:31:12 pop up here because there’s gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up.
00:31:16 Remember it’s an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can’t see all the way
00:31:20 to the left and he’s got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn’t show that.
00:31:25 So he’s telling me, start a left turn, start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that.
00:31:30 So my truck.
00:31:31 And this is all happening quick?
00:31:32 Very quick.
00:31:33 Well, you’re doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed.
00:31:38 How many miles an hour?
00:31:39 Well, 420 is seven miles a minute.
00:31:43 Okay.
00:31:44 Or eight, between seven and eight miles a minute is what you’re flying.
00:31:46 That’s fast.
00:31:47 At night.
00:31:48 I mean, I broke out of clouds.
00:31:49 I mean, I remember him and I flying, we were on, it’s the IR, it’s called an IR route, an
00:31:54 instrument route that’s low, they’re all around the country.
00:31:57 There’s the IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, you’d fly from
00:32:01 the land, you go out over the ocean, turn around and then you could practice actually
00:32:03 coming in on a coastline and we were flying and we ended up in the clouds.
00:32:10 Keep in mind, we’re between 500 and a thousand feet in the mountains and we’re in the clouds.
00:32:13 You can’t see anything.
00:32:14 And I had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they’re called the anti collision
00:32:17 lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you, just gets annoying.
00:32:23 So I turned it off and we were flying, we’re flying, we’re flying.
00:32:26 We break out of that coastal marine layer and poof, we break out and it’s a decent night.
00:32:32 And this is right by Mount St. Helens.
00:32:33 This is kind of where we’re coming in.
00:32:34 So we’re coming in from the east and we’re just north of Mount St. Helens is where the
00:32:37 route goes.
00:32:38 And you look up, you know, cause you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that’s
00:32:41 right next to you, but you’re flying along.
00:32:42 You’re just like, you know, you got to trust and you can see houses, you can see the lights,
00:32:46 they’re above you.
00:32:47 We’re literally below people’s houses flying down these valleys and stuff.
00:32:50 So just incredible experience.
00:32:51 So when you take that and then you move into an F18F.
00:32:55 So now we’re into modern technology that was actually built in this century and you’re
00:33:01 flying.
00:33:02 So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we’re not doing those night low levels, but
00:33:05 that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what you’re doing is you’re
00:33:11 sharing the load.
00:33:13 So most of the communications that go out of the airplane, the WIZO does all the talk
00:33:16 and he’s got actually, he uses his feet.
00:33:18 That’s the weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F.
00:33:21 So he’s going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational
00:33:26 awareness display and it’s linked to all the other airplanes.
00:33:29 Just out of curiosity, what’s the situational awareness display?
00:33:31 Because that term comes up a lot.
00:33:34 Think of it as a God’s eye view.
00:33:35 So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block IIs has about an eight
00:33:39 by 10 display for the WIZOs that they can look at.
00:33:43 The pilot’s is smaller.
00:33:44 It’s down between his, it’s a six by six between his legs and they’re getting ready to redesign
00:33:48 that Boeing is.
00:33:49 But when you looked, it’d be like if you put your airplane and you’re looking down.
00:33:53 So all the stuff, like if your radar seeing bad guys out in front of you, it’d be like
00:33:57 looking down and going, oh, I’m right here.
00:33:58 And now there’s bad guys out here and my wingman is over here.
00:34:01 And it shows everything.
00:34:02 It’s just like, it gives you, you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where
00:34:06 everything’s at.
00:34:07 I can see if one guy’s trying to target another guy, it shows you all this.
00:34:10 It’s an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall
00:34:18 picture of what’s going on because it’s happening so fast and this is where that autonomy piece,
00:34:24 this is the third brain.
00:34:26 So we’re all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion.
00:34:29 It’s pulling stuff together going, oh, this is all this guy.
00:34:31 This is this guy.
00:34:32 This is this guy.
00:34:33 It’s sending it out through the link.
00:34:34 So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network that we don’t
00:34:37 even see.
00:34:38 It just says, that airplane says, hey, I’m over here.
00:34:41 And it tells us and we go, oh, he’s right there.
00:34:43 And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I’m looking at this airplane, this bad guy.
00:34:47 And it shows us, oh, he’s over there and he’s looking at this guy.
00:34:50 I mean, it’s an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot,
00:34:57 but when you look down at stuff, it’s, you know, you can sell the picture really quick.
00:35:00 The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and
00:35:07 gives you a big picture view.
00:35:08 What about the control?
00:35:09 Like, is there, and I apologize as if this is a dumb question, but you know, people use
00:35:15 the high level term of autopilot.
00:35:17 How much is there, let’s use a loose term of AI.
00:35:22 How much automation is there?
00:35:24 How much AI is there in helping you control there?
00:35:27 The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls.
00:35:31 So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly.
00:35:36 And when I say easy, it’s relative because people go, I could do it because I did it
00:35:38 on flight sim.
00:35:40 Real life is a lot different.
00:35:42 In flight sim, you have no apparent fear of death.
00:35:44 You’ll do things on a simulator that you would never do in real life.
00:35:46 But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage, I mean, because you think about
00:35:52 it, you’ve got a radar that’s feeding you data.
00:35:55 You’ve got a targeting pod that’s feeding you data.
00:35:58 All that stuff is hooked to your head because you’ve got a joint helmet mounted cueing system
00:36:01 on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head’s
00:36:05 at looking.
00:36:07 So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right.
00:36:09 The targeting flare will look to the right.
00:36:11 And oh, by the way, the backseater has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he
00:36:15 can do things.
00:36:16 So depending on what sensor he’s controlling, so if he’s got control of the targeting pod
00:36:21 and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left.
00:36:25 But if I have something where I want to lock a guy up that I don’t see, that maybe the
00:36:28 radar didn’t see, but I can get over and now point the radar, you know, get the, because
00:36:31 it’s a phased array radar now, it doesn’t really scan.
00:36:35 There’s all kinds of cool stuff that that technology brings.
00:36:40 Because if you just, if you went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey,
00:36:44 we’re gonna have this helmet and you’re gonna be able to slew everything to your head.
00:36:47 And I don’t mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you’re just gonna map magnetic
00:36:51 resonance and go, oh, look, and I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a
00:36:57 button and transfer, you know, high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, you
00:37:03 know, a JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS bombs that you see
00:37:07 all the time, and then let that thing fly.
00:37:10 And I’m solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes, or, hey, I got it, we’re gonna have
00:37:15 to menstruate coordinates and, you know, you bring back the data and then they do all the
00:37:18 targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it instead of all that.
00:37:22 Now it’s that fast.
00:37:24 So there’s a, okay, I mean, we probably don’t have enough time to talk about the beautiful
00:37:28 fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane.
00:37:33 But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don’t know what they’re
00:37:38 talking about, like me, which is, what is the difference between a human being and an
00:37:46 AI system?
00:37:47 Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane?
00:37:54 Like how much does the human contribute?
00:37:57 Is it possible to have automated flight, for example, like what is the hardest part about
00:38:04 flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot in warfare situations in
00:38:12 flying a fighter jet plane?
00:38:15 So I would say AI systems are usually black and white.
00:38:20 When you write the algorithm for an AI system, it’s really, it’s basically you’re taking
00:38:26 thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you’re doing, right?
00:38:30 So you’ve got this logical math problem.
00:38:32 Math problems are, there’s a line that says I can or I can’t.
00:38:36 And it’s a very finite line, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have
00:38:42 gray areas where we go, eh, maybe, eh, I’ll try it.
00:38:48 So humans can operate within that gray.
00:38:50 So if you took, if you take an airplane and say, and I’ll just take a Hornet for a while,
00:38:53 a Super Hornet, it doesn’t matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance
00:38:57 model of the airplane.
00:38:58 So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy, so it basically says the airplane
00:39:04 can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs, force of
00:39:08 gravity, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then based on the airfoil design
00:39:13 and everything else and how it can pull, here’s how it’s going to fly, because it’s really
00:39:18 physics based.
00:39:19 Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don’t want the airplane
00:39:23 to leave controlled flight, right?
00:39:25 You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope.
00:39:29 Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally
00:39:34 departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is,
00:39:39 that’s where the human goes, can I do this?
00:39:42 I know it’s outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that.
00:39:46 So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes
00:39:51 with digital flight controls, they’re extremely forgiving.
00:39:56 So you can literally, I’ve done things in Super Hornets that literally, even as a pilot
00:40:02 inside the airplane, you’re just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that.
00:40:05 Like it’ll flop ends, which defies most logic, and I guess in a way you could probably program
00:40:11 it, but I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage,
00:40:18 there are things that a human will do that AI won’t.
00:40:23 And I don’t think we’ve got to the point, because how do you map illogical solutions?
00:40:29 Most AI is logical.
00:40:30 It’s based on some type of premise when you write the algorithm to control it.
00:40:36 There’s bounds.
00:40:37 Yeah, there’s this giant mess, like you said, the difference between the simulator and real
00:40:41 life also gets at that somehow.
00:40:44 That there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play.
00:40:51 Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sully landing that plane
00:40:59 famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some?
00:41:04 Well, it’s very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6.
00:41:08 So one is when you’re flying with a crew, there’s standardization.
00:41:13 So you got to remember when Sully flew, when his first officer, that’s the co pilot, showed
00:41:17 up the first time they’d met, and this happens all the time in the commercial world.
00:41:21 There’s six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines, your chance of flying with the same guy all
00:41:25 the time is slim and none.
00:41:26 Where in the Navy, we were crewed.
00:41:29 So I had a primary and a secondary whizzo that flew with me.
00:41:33 For months?
00:41:34 Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment.
00:41:37 Because you want to get to know, trust and all of those things.
00:41:42 It increases the capability of the airplane.
00:41:43 It’s not to say we can’t swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex
00:41:48 missions like a forward air controller, we’re in the air actually controlling ground assets
00:41:53 and supporting ground troops.
00:41:57 If you’re in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you
00:42:02 do that.
00:42:03 You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you’re going to be ineffective.
00:42:07 So when you get to the commercial world, and I’ve got tons of friends that fly commercial,
00:42:13 there is a standardization.
00:42:15 Like we know that at this point, I’m going to put this switch, you’re going to do that.
00:42:18 And everyone, they know their roles.
00:42:20 Captain’s going to do this, first officer’s going to do this.
00:42:23 And they know that when the emergency breaks out, so in Sully’s case, when they take the
00:42:26 birds and they know they’ve got a problem, and if you’ve listened to the cockpit recordings
00:42:30 of the two of them talking, you got to remember, they’re talking to each other when you hear
00:42:35 the full tapes, but they’re also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York
00:42:39 area.
00:42:40 And it’s like, we got a bird strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silence
00:42:44 the alarm.
00:42:45 They silence the alarm.
00:42:46 The first officer is pulling out the book, he’s going through the procedures while Sully’s
00:42:49 actually flying the airplane, knowing that they’ve lost their motors.
00:42:52 And you got to think his decision process, like they’re trying to get him to go into
00:42:54 an airport in New Jersey, and he realizes, not happening, we’re going to put this thing.
00:42:59 And he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane
00:43:03 that he was going to put this thing in the Hudson River.
00:43:05 And he did it flawlessly.
00:43:06 I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck.
00:43:10 The only thing that didn’t survive was the airplane, and it got fished out of the Hudson.
00:43:14 What is it about those human decisions you had to make?
00:43:17 Is that something you put into words or is that just deep down some instinct that you
00:43:22 develop as a pilot over time?
00:43:25 When you train, and aviation is a self cleaning oven.
00:43:28 So if you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have
00:43:33 died by making bad decisions.
00:43:36 So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial industry
00:43:41 and the Navy and the Air Force, for all that, we have what’s called, we have emergency procedures
00:43:47 that we have to know.
00:43:48 Like engines on fire, the first three steps, you just have to know what they are, right?
00:43:52 So they know.
00:43:53 The airline, same type, they go, hey, I know this is, they pull the book out because the
00:43:57 airplanes are designed, they’re built to have some time.
00:44:00 But there’s a point where you have to make a decision and you can’t second guess it.
00:44:03 So when he decided I’m putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn’t all of a sudden
00:44:07 halfway through it go, well, maybe I can get over to that airport.
00:44:10 He looked, he made a quick assessment.
00:44:12 This is that 80% solution where you go, these are not, it’s like a multiple choice test
00:44:18 when you go, oh my God, I don’t really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong,
00:44:22 gone.
00:44:23 So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone.
00:44:26 So what’s my next option?
00:44:28 Well, the Hudson River’s there and that’s probably looking pretty good.
00:44:31 Or what is my other one?
00:44:33 Can I get a restart on the motors?
00:44:34 And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else?
00:44:38 He had to make really, really fast decisions.
00:44:40 And then once they, as they go, that 80% solution, you realize, all right, I’m going into the
00:44:44 Hudson, there’s the 80%, get the book out.
00:44:47 Let’s see if we can get an air start.
00:44:48 Because if you listen to the tapes, they’re trying to get it air started.
00:44:50 The closer he gets to the water, the more he’s going, I’m ditching the airplane.
00:44:55 So the original decision to, this is my best option right now.
00:44:59 This is where I’m going.
00:45:01 And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events, which they tried
00:45:05 to do.
00:45:06 And then he gets to that last minute, he says, we’re going in the water.
00:45:09 They changed the plan.
00:45:10 They secure the airplane.
00:45:11 They do exactly what they’re doing.
00:45:12 And he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson.
00:45:15 But you got to remember, it’s every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research
00:45:22 in the airplane in the simulator.
00:45:23 Where they train to the airplane being broken.
00:45:27 You just lost a motor.
00:45:28 You just lost another motor.
00:45:30 So they go through this extensive training and all these, we used to refer to it in the
00:45:36 Navy as the pain cave where you’re going to get in.
00:45:37 Because you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator, that the airplane
00:45:41 is going to break.
00:45:42 You’re going to lose hydro, and it’s sometimes they’re a problem like, oh, I just lost this
00:45:46 hydraulic system, but I’m having an issue on the other motor.
00:45:48 Well, if I shut down this motor and I’ve got a hydraulics, because there’s two hydraulic
00:45:52 systems, one on each motor.
00:45:54 Well, if I’ve got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system and my right motor is starting
00:45:58 to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down because that’s going
00:46:01 to kill my hydraulic system that’s good.
00:46:04 And now I’m flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics,
00:46:07 the airplane won’t fly.
00:46:08 So it’s a really, they’re challenging problems that you have to think through in real time.
00:46:12 And of course, the weather’s never good.
00:46:14 It’s always dark.
00:46:15 It’s always crappy.
00:46:16 You’re going to break out.
00:46:17 It’s just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you and it’s intended to increase the
00:46:23 level of stress because when things happen, like in Sully’s case, we like to joke it’s
00:46:28 going to STEM power, you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are
00:46:33 literally on instinct like an animal.
00:46:35 Well, if you’ve trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you’re going
00:46:39 to have when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down, you’re running
00:46:45 that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly what to do.
00:46:50 And that’s literally how it happens.
00:46:52 So there’s no, how do I put it?
00:46:54 Fear of death.
00:46:56 Like in Sully’s case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his
00:47:02 decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die?
00:47:05 You know, I can’t speak for him, but I would say there was so much going on at the cockpit
00:47:09 in that time.
00:47:11 His, his mindset was probably, I can do this, I’m trained, I’m going to do the procedures,
00:47:17 I’ve practiced this before, I’ve done these things.
00:47:19 And I, you know, I’m assuming that in his mindset, cause I never thought about when
00:47:23 things were really bad.
00:47:24 You know, if you’re having problems with the airplane that, you know, that I was going
00:47:27 to mort, you know, and, and plant it into the ground, it was always, you know, maybe
00:47:31 it’s an ego thing where you think I can do this.
00:47:32 I mean,
00:47:33 So you never, have you experienced fear during flight, like, I mean, one, one way we just
00:47:43 offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, as he’s walking up to the ring,
00:47:52 he’s like, he starts out basically in fear and, yeah, worried about how things are going
00:47:59 to go.
00:48:00 And it’s purely to put in towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring
00:48:04 is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think
00:48:11 there’s no way anybody could defeat me.
00:48:15 So like, that’s, that’s his experience of overcoming fear.
00:48:18 But do you, did you experience any kind of thing like that?
00:48:23 Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and
00:48:27 then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?
00:48:30 I wouldn’t say I was never afraid.
00:48:32 I think that would be, I can’t, I couldn’t tell you that anyone I know that wasn’t afraid
00:48:36 at one time.
00:48:37 And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it’s just, it’s, it’s usually, especially
00:48:43 when you’re new and you got to go out and it’s nighttime and there’s no moon and the
00:48:47 weather sucks and the deck’s moving, you know, the, the ship’s going up and down because
00:48:51 it will scare the hell out of you.
00:48:53 Can I say that?
00:48:54 You can definitely say that, so it’s about landing and take off that.
00:48:58 That is, if you, even they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know,
00:49:02 guys would go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going
00:49:06 on and people were getting shot down a lot.
00:49:09 The highest, the highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an
00:49:12 aircraft carrier.
00:49:13 How hard is it to land on that?
00:49:15 It seems impossible.
00:49:16 Like for, for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that.
00:49:23 The problem with night is, and there’s different degrees of night, just like day.
00:49:28 I mean, there’s the clear full moon night, you know, where it’s like, woo, you know,
00:49:32 this is not that bad, but you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with
00:49:37 you’re driving in your car and it’s just a, it’s, it’s an overcast dark night and you’re
00:49:43 on a country road with no side lights.
00:49:46 Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of, Oh my God.
00:49:50 Because you, what you’ll do is you’ll out drive your headlights because it is so dark,
00:49:53 you know, and you can get outside of, you get outside of the city and get up into New
00:49:56 Hampshire, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren’t that
00:50:01 good.
00:50:02 It’s, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth
00:50:07 perception.
00:50:09 What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving up and down and left to right.
00:50:16 Yeah, oh, and when it’s really bad, you can actually see it move and we have two systems,
00:50:22 you know, there was a, there’s an automatic system that’s actually, it stabilizes with
00:50:27 the inertials on the ship and then there’s the ILS.
00:50:30 Now civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth
00:50:35 and glide slope.
00:50:36 You know, you come down, it’s like a plus.
00:50:39 On the carrier, it’s not, it’s really just a beam that goes out and it’s considered a
00:50:42 non precision approach.
00:50:43 It’s not stabilized at all that, and I’ve been where you can actually watch the needle
00:50:47 and the, and the tack and needle will move.
00:50:49 There’s all kinds of stuff moving cause the base that it’s all sitting on is doing this
00:50:53 and ships don’t just go up and down.
00:50:55 They, they, they do this.
00:50:56 So the bow goes up and down in the tail, like you normally see a ship and then there’s,
00:51:00 so that’s pitch and then it has roll.
00:51:03 So it’s doing this and then it has heave.
00:51:04 So the whole boat is going up and down while it’s pitching and rolling and you’re gonna
00:51:08 land on that.
00:51:09 Um, so, and it’s, I mean, I remember landing as I was with Chris, uh, Sato and, uh, Chris
00:51:17 and I, we were off the USS ranger, which is now decommissioned.
00:51:19 It’s sitting, getting turned into razorblades, um, we’re flying the old a six and we come
00:51:24 in and it was off of San Diego and it was just ugly night cause San Diego always has
00:51:27 a Marine layer that is about 1200 feet was lower than that, that night and it was pouring
00:51:31 down rain.
00:51:32 It was an El Nino year and there’s thunderstorms all around.
00:51:34 It was just craziest night I’ve ever seen out of San Diego.
00:51:37 And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you’re shaking.
00:51:42 I mean, you literally can’t stop.
00:51:44 And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack.
00:51:48 So it’s right in front of the Island.
00:51:49 So if you see an aircraft carrier with the Island and the number of the ship on it, we’re
00:51:52 sitting right in front of that and we’re looking at the landing area.
00:51:54 So it’s like you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this EA six B
00:52:00 comes in, you know, ugly pass.
00:52:03 He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one.
00:52:05 You never want to catch the first one, which means you were not really high above the back
00:52:09 of the ship when you landed and it comes in and the exhaust on an EA six or an a six actually
00:52:14 points kind of down and it blows and it’s blowing all the standing water on the aircraft.
00:52:19 That’s how hard it’s raining.
00:52:20 And you literally could not see across.
00:52:21 I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white because
00:52:25 of the water being blown off the deck.
00:52:27 And I’m shaking and I, I, I’ll never forget.
00:52:29 I looked over at Chris and I said, Oh my God, I go, Hey dude, man, 10,000 foot runway looks
00:52:33 really good right now.
00:52:35 And I go, and I’m, I’m shaking my hands like this.
00:52:37 And I said, I’m not even, this is, I’m not faking this too.
00:52:40 I know that’s literally, I cannot stop shaking.
00:52:42 I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me, but you, but it scares you afterwards.
00:52:49 You don’t, during it, you’re not, I’m not, you don’t have time to think about that.
00:52:52 You’re doing it.
00:52:53 You got to do is we, you know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what’s that?
00:52:58 The girls baseball movie where he goes, there’s no crying in baseball.
00:53:01 Well, that’s our joke.
00:53:03 There’s no crying in Naval aviation.
00:53:04 I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but you know, there’s only
00:53:08 one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it.
00:53:10 So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it’s,
00:53:14 it’s time to, it’s time to, you know, man up and, and land that, land the jet.
00:53:18 Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what’s
00:53:25 it like to fly an airplane?
00:53:28 What it looks incredible to me as a human, like a descendant of ape.
00:53:34 I sit here on land and look up at you guys.
00:53:38 It seems incredible that human being can do that.
00:53:41 You know what people ask, you know, I’ll be sitting around with my friends and they’re
00:53:43 like, how was it?
00:53:44 I said, it’s the greatest job on the planet.
00:53:47 I said, you know, it’s, it’s an office with a view cause you’re sitting in a glass.
00:53:54 You can do you know, it’s like roller coasters.
00:53:58 You go, Oh, it does all these cool stuff.
00:53:59 So we take people flying every once in a while and it’s like, Oh yeah, I like rollercoaster.
00:54:03 So I go, no, take any rollercoaster coolest rollercoaster you’ve ever been on and multiply
00:54:07 it by a thousand.
00:54:08 And I said, it’s an experience you know, to put your body under, you know, you know, the
00:54:14 jets rated at seven and a half, but it’ll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses depends
00:54:18 on fuel weight.
00:54:19 So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight G’s to be able to do that to your body.
00:54:25 I mean, it takes a toll.
00:54:26 Like I can’t really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that, but would I trade
00:54:31 it?
00:54:32 It’s a dream and how many people get to do that?
00:54:35 You know, professional, I want to be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which
00:54:39 is a very small percentage with, well, I want to fly jets and to fly, you know, at the time
00:54:45 when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had in our squad and we’re brand new at like
00:54:48 literally right out of the factory, I’d come off our first Super Hornet cruise.
00:54:52 We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were building my new jets that
00:54:55 I was going to get.
00:54:56 And I actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it together.
00:55:00 So I’m meeting the people that are putting the jet together that’s going to get delivered
00:55:02 to me in a couple of months that I’m going to fly.
00:55:05 So just, I mean, I’ll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away, I told
00:55:17 myself I wouldn’t, I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command,
00:55:23 your flying really starts to tag to come down.
00:55:26 You know, even if you, when you’re an air wing commander, which is, we call them CAG,
00:55:30 carrier group commander, you’re not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should
00:55:35 you be.
00:55:36 I mean, there’s young people that are coming up and it’s training your relief because that’s
00:55:39 the next generation.
00:55:40 So like currently I have friends of mine that we serve together.
00:55:45 Their kids are flying Super Hornets, right?
00:55:48 So to me, that’s really neat because I watched them when they were little and now, you know,
00:55:53 one of them who was good friends, I won’t get his last name, but Joey, who lived down
00:55:58 the street from us, was a Top Gun instructor and I’m like, hey, Joey’s a Top Gun.
00:56:04 You know?
00:56:05 And I’m like, that’s cool because, you know, I went there and I knew him, he would come
00:56:08 down to my house.
00:56:09 And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know,
00:56:13 because the kids grow up in it.
00:56:14 I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he’s colorblind.
00:56:19 So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL because he had talked about doing
00:56:23 that because he’s an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player.
00:56:29 But he’s, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son’s in his
00:56:34 third year.
00:56:35 So.
00:56:36 But there’s a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this
00:56:42 incredible experience of flying to the younger generation.
00:56:46 So you don’t, you told yourself you’re not going to miss it.
00:56:49 You miss it?
00:56:50 There are days I do.
00:56:52 When I hear jets, like if I’m around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memory
00:56:57 so I can look at it and go, it can’t go on forever.
00:57:01 You know, Tom Brady can’t play football, but there’s going to come a time where he has
00:57:05 to stop.
00:57:06 He seems to have done it for a long time.
00:57:08 But you know, typically when you look at it, you go, I had the opportunity.
00:57:12 And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI that, you know, when will, when will
00:57:18 the last man fighter be built?
00:57:20 You know, and that’s that big question, you know, we just did F 35.
00:57:23 It’s over budget.
00:57:25 It’s seven years late.
00:57:26 There’s all kinds of issues when we try and do it.
00:57:29 And then you look at some of the new stuff that’s coming out that the air force is working
00:57:32 on with smaller, cheaper, uh, a trittable platforms that you can go, Oh, we can, because
00:57:39 if you don’t put a man in the box or a person, because there’s a lot of incredibly talented
00:57:44 women that do this too.
00:57:47 So I’ll just say that as person.
00:57:48 Yeah.
00:57:49 So we say man and he, we mean both men and women because offline you’ve told me about
00:57:54 a lot of incredible women that flown.
00:57:55 So I had, I had three, three female, actually four, one of them didn’t fly anymore.
00:58:01 She actually lives right around here.
00:58:03 She, she’s a, she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn’t fly anymore.
00:58:09 One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she’s one of the most gifted people I’ve ever
00:58:15 met in my life.
00:58:16 She is the vice president of Amazon air.
00:58:17 You can see her on TV, her name’s Sarah, uh, incredible.
00:58:21 And then I had a page who ended up taking command.
00:58:24 She got out of fighters and went into other platforms.
00:58:27 Um, and she was a commanding officer.
00:58:29 And then the other one is a, um, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all
00:58:36 four of the women that were direct.
00:58:38 Uh, I’m hoping not forgetting, I don’t think I’m forgetting someone, uh, incredibly, incredibly
00:58:42 talented, uh, and a great addition to the ready room.
00:58:45 So anyone that gets into the, Oh, you know, women can’t do it.
00:58:48 That’s all total horse crap.
00:58:49 Hey, you know, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done
00:58:53 well by the military nor the Navy.
00:58:56 So women can fly as good as the guys.
00:58:58 Yeah.
00:58:59 You can’t tell if you pass another airplane, you can’t tell if there’s a man or woman in
00:59:02 it.
00:59:03 It comes down to, uh, stick and throttle the ability to, uh, uh, extrapolate where the
00:59:10 vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be.
00:59:12 If you’re fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast.
00:59:15 Anyone has those characteristics, uh, can do it.
00:59:17 And then I think most important besides that there has to be a desire.
00:59:22 And I’m not saying that everyone, if you took, cause we used to track.
00:59:24 So when I ran, we call it the rag, it’s the replacement air group.
00:59:27 It’s where, so the, the super Hornet training squadron, there’s two of them.
00:59:31 There’s one on the East coast at one Oh six.
00:59:33 And there’s one on the West coast, which is VFA one 22, one 22 is the first one.
00:59:37 So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer.
00:59:41 Okay.
00:59:42 So we tracked the last hundred students.
00:59:45 Right.
00:59:46 So everyone goes, ah, it’s funny to hear students talk cause Oh, he’s awesome.
00:59:51 If you took the hundred, there’s three at the top of the list that are just naturally
00:59:54 gifted aviators.
00:59:56 They’re well, well, well above average.
00:59:58 It’s like the person in a math class that sits down in complex math and they just get
01:00:01 it.
01:00:02 You know, at the bottom, there’s the three at the bottom that are going to struggle and
01:00:06 there’s a good chance they won’t get out.
01:00:08 And if they do get out, they’re going to have to work really hard to just maintain kind
01:00:12 of average.
01:00:14 Sometimes it’s just the way your mind works.
01:00:15 Not everyone is good at everything.
01:00:17 If you took the 94 of them in the middle, they’re within one mean deviation of, you
01:00:22 know, it’s there.
01:00:23 They’re all, you know, it’s a, the bell curve doesn’t look real good.
01:00:27 It’s just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone’s right there within one mean
01:00:30 deviation.
01:00:32 And then you have the outliers, usually not on the high side because they’re going to
01:00:35 get through, but the outliers on the low side that don’t make it through.
01:00:39 So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job, as does the Air Force, of screening.
01:00:43 So now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and you started.
01:00:46 Now what you do is you actually go fly Piper Warriors low wing to see, are you adaptable
01:00:51 to this?
01:00:52 And there’s an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you’re
01:00:57 good to go and then they put you into primary.
01:00:59 It’s kind of like a, it’s like a precheck, you know, like the preset, the pre SAT to
01:01:03 go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT?
01:01:05 It’s, it’s, it’s very similar to that, but it’s more of a hand skill.
01:01:09 Can you adapt?
01:01:10 Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not, you know, we, this
01:01:13 is, you know, this is all has depth with all that, uh, where it’s really relative to aviation.
01:01:19 We are two dimensional.
01:01:20 Very two dimensional.
01:01:21 Can you, can you explain that?
01:01:23 So our perception is actually more limited than the, than that of an aviator.
01:01:29 Very much.
01:01:30 And here’s why.
01:01:31 Yeah.
01:01:32 So we look at, uh, let’s look at a tall building.
01:01:33 Let’s look at one world trade center in New York cause that’s the, everyone knows what
01:01:36 it looks like.
01:01:37 Big tall building.
01:01:38 Um, it’s what, maybe 1800 feet tall.
01:01:42 Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like what 20 some hundred feet tall.
01:01:45 It’s not that big.
01:01:46 So a Super Hornet to do a, what a split S is, which is I’m flying, I’m just going to
01:01:51 roll the airplane upside down and then I’m going to do basically a C the letter C I’m
01:01:56 going to go in the top and out the bottom.
01:01:58 So and I’m just against basically a vertical displacement of the airplane.
01:02:01 So I’m going from high to low.
01:02:03 It’s very, very tight and it doesn’t in about roughly about 2,500 feet, give or take a little.
01:02:08 So you go, that is, that is a really tight vertical turn.
01:02:12 Yeah.
01:02:13 For example, the a six in order to do that was about 9,000 feet.
01:02:17 And we look at a building that’s 2000 feet high and think that is tall.
01:02:20 Right.
01:02:21 All right.
01:02:22 So in, in aviation sense, when you’re starting to do vertical displacement numbers going
01:02:25 from 35,000 feet down to 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane,
01:02:30 because the human brain thinks we really are.
01:02:33 We like to be flat.
01:02:34 I see what you mean.
01:02:35 We think 2d.
01:02:36 So if I’m fighting, how you really get an advantage when you’re fighting another airplane
01:02:40 is to work in the vertical, because most people will do like one move in the vertical and
01:02:45 then they want to start to flatten out because that’s where we’re comfortable.
01:02:47 Yeah.
01:02:48 So they’re profound.
01:02:49 Do you still think in like stacks of 2d layers or no, or do you, do you truly start to think
01:02:55 in that third dimension, like the rich 3d world of, uh, like of, of fighting that can,
01:03:03 do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3d nature?
01:03:09 You do because you have to project where you’re going to be.
01:03:11 So you have to know the performance of the airplane knowing that, Hey, if I do this maneuver
01:03:14 that I am going to go, it’s, it’s kind of like when I, when I talk about when we were
01:03:18 chasing the Tic Tac.
01:03:20 So the Tic Tacs coming up and I’m at about, you know, and I’ve been doing this for at
01:03:23 the time, 16 years.
01:03:25 So I’m looking and I’m going, Hey, I’m here.
01:03:27 He’s there on the other side of the circle.
01:03:29 I’m going to do a vertical displacement.
01:03:30 I’m going to go like this.
01:03:31 I’m going to cut across the circle and I’m not going to him.
01:03:33 I’m going out in front of him.
01:03:34 I’m going over here because I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that’s
01:03:37 where he’s going to be.
01:03:38 And I’m trying to, you know, basically join up on him.
01:03:40 But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this?
01:03:44 Because what I did before here and I do this, I’m going to end up over here and he’s going
01:03:47 to be above me.
01:03:48 And then, you know, I have to get that energy back to get up to him.
01:03:51 And when you’re doing a max performance, it’s a trade.
01:03:54 So you have, this is, this is really important when you’re, when you’re fighting airplanes
01:03:59 and you’re really max performing.
01:04:01 So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he’s literally playing with
01:04:05 it.
01:04:06 He’s got a finite amount of energy, right?
01:04:07 He can add some with the motors and stuff, but you’re, what you’re really doing is it’s
01:04:10 a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy, speed for altitude, which gives you
01:04:15 potential energy.
01:04:16 The other piece is, is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance.
01:04:21 Because I know if I do a nice, easy turn, the airplane will make it at what doesn’t
01:04:24 bleed energy.
01:04:25 But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S, that it’s going to cost me energy.
01:04:30 So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I’m going to come out at the
01:04:34 bottom at probably 200 knots.
01:04:35 Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to that, to kinetic and that
01:04:41 kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance
01:04:45 turn.
01:04:46 So you’ve got to constantly evaluate where you’re at and it’s your overall energy package.
01:04:51 So you can have a guy that’s behind you that looks like he’s going to kill you.
01:04:55 But if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet’s just going to
01:04:59 pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds.
01:05:03 It’s overall energy package and that’s that you’ve got to be constantly evaluating where
01:05:08 you’re at.
01:05:09 And this is that 80% solution.
01:05:10 Can I afford to do this or not?
01:05:11 Yes, no.
01:05:12 And you have literally a split second to make the decision.
01:05:13 That’s the most incredible dance of human decision making.
01:05:18 It’s just incredible.
01:05:19 I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me
01:05:23 ask the one last ridiculous, subjective question.
01:05:29 What’s the greatest plane ever made in history?
01:05:35 You don’t get to like…
01:05:36 From Pure Speed, I would say SR71, I think it’s an engineering marvel that was actually
01:05:40 developed in the fifties by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works.
01:05:44 For what that was able to do, and then when you get into history of it, you know how they
01:05:46 actually built…
01:05:49 The CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring
01:05:54 it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia.
01:05:58 To me, that’s an incredible…
01:06:00 Engineering marvel.
01:06:01 I think that like the X15, you know…
01:06:03 By the way, the SR71 still holds the speed record of any plane as far as I can understand.
01:06:13 Yeah.
01:06:14 What’s funny when you get into it is it’s…
01:06:15 Remember, fast is relative.
01:06:18 When I say that, I mean, so if you’re going 3000 miles an hour, a hundred feet above the
01:06:24 ground, you’re going 3000 miles an hour through, you know, that’s how fast you’re going.
01:06:30 When you get up to altitude, there’s an indicated airspeed and there’s, you know, your ground
01:06:34 speed.
01:06:35 So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane.
01:06:38 Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots.
01:06:44 But at 300 knots, you’re really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground.
01:06:48 So you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the
01:06:53 maintenance check flights on them.
01:06:55 So when you’re doing 200, you know, in some odd knots, it’s actually slow for the airplane.
01:07:00 It’s, you know, you’re getting, you know, it’s kind of like, it’s not, you know, there’s
01:07:04 maneuvering speeds.
01:07:05 You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability
01:07:08 of the airfoil.
01:07:09 If I’m below that speed, I’m going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G.
01:07:13 Okay?
01:07:15 So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast?
01:07:19 When you look at an SR71 that’s flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air’s
01:07:24 so thin, you know, just like the X15, you can get to a much higher speed, but the relative
01:07:29 speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low.
01:07:32 So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low.
01:07:36 But because you’re going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that
01:07:40 you’re going 300 knots, you’re screaming.
01:07:43 I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the, well, soon to be Vice Admiral White.
01:07:49 So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78.
01:07:53 I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78 and it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach
01:07:57 too.
01:07:58 And then…
01:07:59 What’s that feel like?
01:08:00 Or is it just like…
01:08:01 When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird because you realize
01:08:04 in your brain, and I did, that there’s no out.
01:08:08 If something happens, I can’t eject.
01:08:10 The ejection would kill me.
01:08:11 Isn’t that kind of liberating in a way?
01:08:13 Or no?
01:08:14 Okay, maybe not.
01:08:15 You always want to push the limit.
01:08:17 You know, it’s like how fast, I could have got it going faster.
01:08:20 It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was fuel limited and
01:08:24 space limited because I’m off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I’m going and I can
01:08:29 see Pebble Beach out in the distance, the whole Monterey Peninsula.
01:08:32 You’re just going fast.
01:08:34 And you’re doing almost 18 miles a minute.
01:08:36 I mean, you’re screaming.
01:08:38 Yeah.
01:08:39 I mean, that’s…
01:08:40 And then you have to turn…
01:08:41 Well, the airplane didn’t have anything on it.
01:08:42 It was a slicked off Super Hornet, so it was basically just the airplane.
01:08:45 No pylons, no pods, no nothing.
01:08:47 And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area.
01:08:50 And I’m trying to get it down below to subsonic.
01:08:53 And there’s a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop
01:08:56 out when you’re going that fast, they don’t, because the Super Hornet really doesn’t have
01:08:59 speed brakes, it deforms the flight controls.
01:09:03 They don’t function.
01:09:04 So you really, you’re trying to maneuver and when you’re going that fast, you can’t turn
01:09:08 because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn.
01:09:14 So it’s just, it’s crazy.
01:09:16 It’s incredible that a human can do this and a human can engineer the system which allows
01:09:21 another human to control that system.
01:09:24 To me, I think it’s a great experience.
01:09:29 Was it sad to see the SR71 go?
01:09:31 I think it was during your career.
01:09:33 I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes?
01:09:37 We would see it flying.
01:09:38 When I was flying Hornets, because West Coast flies and it’s called R2508, which covers
01:09:44 the Navy China Lake area and Edwards.
01:09:47 It’s a huge area.
01:09:48 It’s actually, I think, we had a guy from Switzerland come out because they had Hornets
01:09:51 and he’s like, this is bigger than our whole country, because it’s a pretty big area in
01:09:55 California that you fly, but you would see the SR71s, they had a loop because NASA was
01:09:59 flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they’d go up towards Washington
01:10:03 State and Montana and they’d do a loop.
01:10:05 So you’d see them coming back down, they’d descend above 60,000, they’d get contrails,
01:10:10 the white lines behind airplanes, they’d come down and hit the tanker and then they’d go
01:10:13 back up.
01:10:14 So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.
01:10:18 But I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, because they’re everywhere now,
01:10:27 I mean, you’ve got commercial companies putting satellites up, how much of that need was really
01:10:32 there?
01:10:33 Because you’ve got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn’t
01:10:35 flying around.
01:10:37 It was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work.
01:10:41 So at the time it was needed, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat
01:10:45 of aviation for that time.
01:10:47 I mean, literally we have yet to pass that and then you also ask, well, is there a need
01:10:51 to pass that?
01:10:52 I go, I don’t know, we got stuff in space, so do we need to make an airplane that goes
01:10:55 that fast?
01:10:56 I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don’t have to put a person in,
01:11:00 it does all kinds of crazy stuff.
01:11:01 And all the work with automation, all that kind of stuff.
01:11:05 So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in
01:11:11 my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who’s witnessed a UFO
01:11:19 literally an identified flying object.
01:11:23 And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it?
01:11:27 Like chase it, essentially?
01:11:28 Chase it.
01:11:29 Chase it.
01:11:31 So let me just lay out, I think it’s easier than you telling the story.
01:11:36 Maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories, I understand it.
01:11:41 And then maybe you can correct me.
01:11:43 So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers.
01:11:53 That’s a cruiser.
01:11:54 It’s a cruiser.
01:11:55 It’s a cruiser.
01:11:56 So you can’t land on a.
01:11:57 No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back.
01:11:59 Gotcha.
01:12:00 And it has weapons on it.
01:12:01 Okay, gotcha.
01:12:02 It shoots the missiles up.
01:12:03 But it has a nice radar.
01:12:04 It has an incredible spy one system phased array, four panels.
01:12:08 So it looks in quadrants.
01:12:09 Perfect.
01:12:10 So they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around
01:12:16 at 28,000 feet with speed of what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an
01:12:22 hour.
01:12:23 Don’t know what that’s in knots, but on the coast of California.
01:12:28 And they kept detecting these objects for just about a week.
01:12:32 Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th from the, I guess
01:12:42 it’s from the USS Nimitz.
01:12:45 You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white Tic Tac shaped object with no wings flying
01:12:54 in ways you’ve never thought possible.
01:12:56 And in some interview somewhere, you said, I think it was not from this world.
01:13:01 So there’s a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation.
01:13:07 There’s videos involved.
01:13:09 The video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver has also the visible lights.
01:13:20 You can switch as a TV mode.
01:13:23 So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode.
01:13:27 And Chad Underwood recorded that video.
01:13:30 And those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later.
01:13:33 One of the three videos, the two other videos, go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something
01:13:42 14 and 15 on the East coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects,
01:13:50 but they’re weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences
01:13:57 that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness.
01:14:03 But the differences is actually on the East coast of 2014 case, very few people have spoken
01:14:12 about it.
01:14:13 And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it.
01:14:16 So there’s a mystery to it, but it’s in some sense, it’s a quite simple story without much
01:14:24 resolution to the mystery.
01:14:26 And it’s fascinating.
01:14:29 And there’s a lot of opinions.
01:14:31 There’s division of opinions because it’s a mysterious, I mean, it’s truly is a UFO
01:14:37 in the sense that UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.
01:14:45 So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I’ve gotten wrong, elaborate on some
01:14:51 key things and describe that experience in general.
01:14:54 So here’s what I know.
01:14:55 So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission and they
01:15:03 sent us down.
01:15:04 There’s all kinds of rumors out here.
01:15:05 There’s all kinds of, after this has come out, so originally it was the four of us.
01:15:09 There’s two jets, two people in each jet, they’re F18Fs, okay?
01:15:15 There is no video from our event.
01:15:17 It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing.
01:15:19 And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that’s when Chad
01:15:24 got the video of it.
01:15:25 And we’re like, that’s it.
01:15:26 That’s exactly it.
01:15:27 That’s it.
01:15:28 So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing?
01:15:32 Yeah.
01:15:33 So as we’re flying out, we get vectored.
01:15:35 They come up and tell us, hey, we’re going to cancel training.
01:15:37 This is a USS Princeton.
01:15:38 So this is a Aegis Cruiser.
01:15:40 So we’re talking to one controller who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance
01:15:47 we have on board.
01:15:48 And I laugh because we don’t carry live ordinance in training typically because bad stuff happens.
01:15:52 Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a
01:15:55 good airplane and it’s not good.
01:15:58 So we had what’s called a Catam 9, which is really just a blue two with the AIM 9 seeker
01:16:02 on the front of it, which is an IR missile.
01:16:05 So there’s only two ways to get it off.
01:16:06 You can beat it off with a sledgehammer.
01:16:07 You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the
01:16:11 lugs back in that hold it on.
01:16:13 When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and
01:16:16 breaks that release and it comes off down the rail.
01:16:19 That’s how it works.
01:16:21 So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking.
01:16:24 So as we’re going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left
01:16:30 hand side of me.
01:16:31 So she’s kind of stepped up like this and I’ll use your mic box to start.
01:16:36 So as we’re going out, they’re calling ranges are called bra calls, bearing range and altitude.
01:16:40 And they’re telling us, hey, it’s at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles.
01:16:44 So they’re saying, hey, two, seven, zero, 30, 20,000, that’s all they say.
01:16:49 So we got our radars and we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG 73.
01:16:55 Good piece of gear, APG 79, new one’s way better.
01:16:58 But anyway.
01:16:59 And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it’s useful, but they’re telling
01:17:04 you a location of a thing that you should look at.
01:17:06 They’re telling us they have a contact on their radar.
01:17:08 They don’t know what it is.
01:17:09 They just have a blip.
01:17:10 They have a little blip.
01:17:11 Well, they’ve been watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at
01:17:14 these things as we’re driving.
01:17:15 He says, sir, we’ve been tracking these things for about two weeks.
01:17:17 That’s we had been at sea for two weeks.
01:17:18 This is the first time we’ve had planes airborne.
01:17:21 We want you to go see what these are.
01:17:22 Gotcha.
01:17:23 So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out.
01:17:26 That’s exactly it.
01:17:27 So we start driving out there and as we get down to, he’s going, you know, 20 miles, 15
01:17:34 miles, 10 miles.
01:17:35 And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the
01:17:38 resolution cell of the radar because radars don’t see everything there.
01:17:42 So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right?
01:17:46 So and it’s basically think of a little cube so they can, and the whole sky is made of
01:17:50 all these little cubes and they’re looking.
01:17:52 So if you’re inside a cube with something and you’re both inside the same little cube,
01:17:56 then the radar can only see one thing.
01:17:57 Does that make sense?
01:17:58 Yep.
01:17:59 Yep.
01:18:00 So they call merge plot.
01:18:01 Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he’s right around, something’s around you,
01:18:05 get your head out.
01:18:06 So we’re not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizos, the wizos can look, but everyone
01:18:09 it’s heads out.
01:18:10 When they say merge plot, you’re done looking at your displays inside.
01:18:13 You’re doing this and you’re trying to find it.
01:18:15 So as we look out to the right and you look high and low, because he could be anywhere
01:18:20 from the surface all the way up.
01:18:21 Now keep in mind the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can’t see the surface
01:18:26 and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it’s the thing is
01:18:31 40 feet off the water, the panel, can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see
01:18:35 around the curve, but let’s just say that it can’t at this time.
01:18:40 So you go, is it, you know, where is it at?
01:18:42 So as we’re looking around, we see, now this is a, it’s a clear day.
01:18:47 There’s no clouds and there’s no whitecaps.
01:18:51 It’s just a calm, it’s actually a perfect day.
01:18:54 If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind and you just want to kind
01:18:57 of go out there and you’re not going to get beat up and have whitewater coming out.
01:19:01 It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.
01:19:03 How many miles out do you see?
01:19:04 Like seven, like you see just, it’s a clear day.
01:19:07 It’s 50, it’s unrestricted visibility.
01:19:08 You can see literally all the way to the horizon.
01:19:10 It’s just clear.
01:19:11 It’s nothing.
01:19:12 And we’re basically off the coast.
01:19:13 If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we’re kind of in
01:19:17 between that.
01:19:18 And we’re probably about, by the time this all hits, we’re price, I don’t know, 80, 100,
01:19:25 I don’t know, but somewhere out, it’s pretty far off the coast, but from 20,000 feet, you’d
01:19:30 be amazed.
01:19:31 You can do the calculation.
01:19:32 You can see stuff, you know, you’ll see land 50 miles away, you know, you can see, you
01:19:35 know, and when you’re looking at a continent, it’s really easy to see you’re not looking
01:19:39 at an island.
01:19:40 I mean, you’re looking at Mexico.
01:19:41 And you can see on the whitecaps in the water, if there is any.
01:19:44 Oh yeah, they’re easy.
01:19:45 Yeah.
01:19:46 For us, we look at it because we know if it’s natural wind or, so if it’s a really whitecap
01:19:50 windy day, then the ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it.
01:19:53 It makes it actually easier.
01:19:55 If the ship has to move or it’s got a big weight because it has to make its own wind
01:19:58 when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay.
01:20:02 And it creates what’s called, we call the burble, but when the air flows across the
01:20:05 flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up.
01:20:09 So when you’re coming board to land, it’s going to make you go up a little bit and then
01:20:12 you’re going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stay on glideslope.
01:20:15 So we’re pretty conscious of what’s going on out there with the waves and the wind.
01:20:21 So there’s no waves, there’s no wind, there’s no whitecaps, and we look down and we see
01:20:26 whitewater.
01:20:28 So if you put a piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like, you know, even 20
01:20:33 feet below the surface, it’s big enough.
01:20:35 As the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length.
01:20:38 When they come in, that’s what happens on the shore, when a wave comes in, it hits and
01:20:42 then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can’t go anymore
01:20:45 and then it breaks over the top and that’s where you get the weight.
01:20:49 So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount, you’ll see stuff come in, the wave
01:20:53 will crash and you’ll get whitewater.
01:20:55 You can go out when it’s high tide in any one of the coasts, you can go out here off
01:20:59 of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks and at high tide, I can’t
01:21:03 see the rocks are covered, but there’ll be whitewater around those rocks.
01:21:05 You’ll be able to tell there’s something underneath the surface.
01:21:07 Does that make sense?
01:21:08 Yeah.
01:21:09 So that’s what it was.
01:21:10 We don’t see an object because there’s all kinds of, oh, they saw another craft below
01:21:14 the wave.
01:21:15 We didn’t see anything below the water.
01:21:16 We just saw whitewater.
01:21:18 But the whitewater, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross.
01:21:21 I say it’s about the size of a 737.
01:21:23 So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water so the wave
01:21:27 is breaking over the top and you’re going to get whitewater where the plane is at, you’d
01:21:30 see this kind of shape.
01:21:32 So it looks like a cross.
01:21:34 So as we’re looking down off the right side, the backseater in the other airplane, Jim,
01:21:39 says this is that talking in partials again.
01:21:41 He says, hey, Skipper, do you?
01:21:43 And that’s about what he gets out of his mouth.
01:21:44 And I go, what the hell is that?
01:21:47 In a nice way.
01:21:48 Do you see that essentially is what he’s saying?
01:21:49 So we see the whitewater and that’s what draws our eyes down there.
01:21:51 Otherwise we’d have never seen it.
01:21:53 So we see this whitewater.
01:21:54 I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that.
01:21:56 And then we see this little white tic tac because we’re about 20,000 feet above it and
01:22:01 it’s doing, it’s going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, and it’s abrupt.
01:22:05 It’s very abrupt.
01:22:06 So it’s not like a helicopter, if a helicopter is going sideways and it goes once, it’s going
01:22:11 sideways left and it goes right, what it’ll do is it’ll go, it’s got a speed, it slows
01:22:15 down because there’s inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way.
01:22:18 This thing’s not, it’s like left, right, left, right with no.
01:22:22 So moving in ways that doesn’t feel intuitive to you of the things you’ve seen in the past.
01:22:28 So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it’s a helicopter, right?
01:22:31 So you go, oh, what is, cause when we see it’s moving, we’re like, oh, helicopter.
01:22:36 So the first thing you look for to see if it’s a helicopter when they’re doing that,
01:22:39 because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you’ll get rotor wash.
01:22:43 You see it in the movies when the helicopter’s by the water, it kicks, the water comes up
01:22:47 the sides cause the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that.
01:22:50 It pushes the air down and then it has to come up the sides.
01:22:53 So you see it and you go, well, there’s no, there’s no rotor wash.
01:22:56 What is that thing?
01:22:58 So by this time we’re driving around.
01:22:59 So as we’re, if we were at the six oclock, we’re driving around towards that nine oclock
01:23:02 position and we’re just watching this thing.
01:23:04 And it’s just, it’s still pointing north, south, and it’s going left, right, and it’s
01:23:07 kind of moving around the object.
01:23:09 And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.
01:23:13 So if you’ve got the east, west, and then the north, south kind of across, it’s hanging
01:23:17 out on the southern thing that’s hanging out.
01:23:18 It’s just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it’s crossing over it and it’s going
01:23:21 up.
01:23:22 It’s just kind of, so now we’re like, what the hell is that?
01:23:25 So then I go, hey, I’m going to go check it out.
01:23:28 And the other pilot says, I’m going to stay up here.
01:23:31 And I said, yeah, stay up high.
01:23:32 Because now we get, we get a different perspective.
01:23:35 So she’s up here and I’m down here as I’m descending.
01:23:38 She can watch, because right now all I’m watching is the Tic Tac.
01:23:43 She can watch me and the Tic Tac.
01:23:44 So she gets a God’s eye view of everything that’s going on, which is really important.
01:23:47 You know, you can hear people say it’s high cover, whatever.
01:23:50 She’s watching me, which is, it’s perfect as the story goes on, because it gives us
01:23:55 two perspectives, you know, of a perspective that’s about 8,000 feet above us when that
01:24:00 thing disappears.
01:24:01 And they don’t, you know, because if it’s just like, oh, I lost it and they go, no,
01:24:04 it’s over to the right.
01:24:05 We can still see it.
01:24:06 We all lost it at the same time.
01:24:07 So as we come down, we get to about 12 oclock and I’m descending and it’s an easy descent.
01:24:11 I’m doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering
01:24:15 because I have, I have everything available to me at that speed.
01:24:19 So I’m coming down and as I get to 12 oclock, as the Tic Tac’s doing this, it literally,
01:24:23 it’s like, it’s aware of us and it just goes bloop and it kind of points out towards the
01:24:27 West and starts coming up.
01:24:29 So now it’s obviously knows that we’re there.
01:24:31 Whatever this thing is, it knows that we’re there.
01:24:33 So as we drive around, it’s coming up and I’m just coming down.
01:24:36 We’re just, I’m just watching it.
01:24:37 Now, you gotta remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes.
01:24:39 This is not like we saw it and it was gone or, oh, I saw lights in the sky and they were
01:24:43 gone.
01:24:44 We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers, watch this thing
01:24:50 fly around.
01:24:51 So we’re like, okay.
01:24:52 So I get over to the eight oclock position and I’m a little, I’m a couple thousand feet
01:24:55 above it and it’s about, so I’m probably at about 15 K I think it is.
01:24:59 I think that’s my story is about 15.
01:25:00 It’s just estimating.
01:25:01 So you can see it’s just a really easy descent because.
01:25:05 So what’s 15 K?
01:25:06 15,000 feet.
01:25:07 I thought it was 8,000.
01:25:08 No, the other plane ends up about that.
01:25:12 So they’re still at about 20,000 feet.
01:25:14 So they’re driving around and I’m descending.
01:25:16 They’re staying up there.
01:25:17 So I’m kind of doing this as they drive around.
01:25:20 Okay.
01:25:21 So I’m looking at this thing and it’s about the two oclock position.
01:25:23 We’re about the eight oclock position and I’m like, oh, I’ve got, I’ve got enough altitudes.
01:25:27 I’m going to, I’m going to cut across the circle.
01:25:28 I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I’m going to, I’m going to do this.
01:25:31 He’s like, go for it.
01:25:32 Skip.
01:25:33 Cause I was a skipper.
01:25:34 So I cut across the bottom.
01:25:37 So I’m kind of almost coming out coaltitude as this thing’s coming up, I’m going to meet
01:25:40 it.
01:25:41 And I’m driving and I get to probably it’s, I’m probably about a half mile away, which
01:25:46 you think, well, a half mile is pretty far.
01:25:47 Half mile in aviation isn’t, it’s nothing.
01:25:50 It’s I mean, you can tell there’s a pilot in an airplane.
01:25:52 You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile.
01:25:54 You can see pretty good detail.
01:25:56 So I’m like right there and it’s coming across my nose.
01:25:58 So now I’m basically pointing back towards east.
01:26:00 So I’m cutting across cause I’m going to the three oclock position.
01:26:02 It’s at two oclock and I’m going to meet it at three oclock.
01:26:05 So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears.
01:26:08 So this happens at around, estimating about 12,000 feet.
01:26:11 So they’re at 20.
01:26:12 So they’ve got about 8,000 foot of altitude above us when this happens.
01:26:16 And it just, as it crosses our nose, it just, it accelerates and literally in less than,
01:26:21 you know, probably less than a half second, it just goes and it’s gone.
01:26:24 And so we’re like, and I had the first thing is, dude, did you guys see it?
01:26:28 The other airplane’s like, it’s gone.
01:26:30 We don’t, we have no idea where it’s at.
01:26:32 So we kind of spin around real quick.
01:26:34 I go, well, let’s see what’s down here.
01:26:35 And I turn around and we’re looking for the whitewater and we can’t even, the whitewater’s
01:26:38 gone.
01:26:39 There’s nothing.
01:26:40 It’s literally all blue.
01:26:41 So now you go.
01:26:42 And I remember telling the guy in my backseat, like a dude, I’m, I don’t know about you,
01:26:46 but I’m pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had at the time like 30
01:26:51 some hundred hours of flying.
01:26:52 I’d been doing it for 18 years.
01:26:53 It’s nothing like anything you’ve seen.
01:26:55 No, no.
01:26:56 So as we turn, we go, well, let’s just go back, you know, because now I got to put on
01:27:00 my real hat, which we have to train because we’re getting ready to deploy to overseas.
01:27:06 So we got to get our training done.
01:27:07 So that’s my mindset, especially as a CEO, cause I got to get, I got to get training
01:27:10 out of the flight time because I’m responsible to do that.
01:27:13 So, Hey, let’s go back.
01:27:14 And the, the, the guy who’s going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine squadron.
01:27:19 And so Cheeks is at the, he’s listening to all this happen, you know, cause he’s just
01:27:22 like, cause he, they, when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little
01:27:25 Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F18Cs don’t have as much gas as the Super Hornets.
01:27:30 So he had launched first and they were going to do him.
01:27:33 And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cap point
01:27:36 down South, and we’re going to send, we’ll pass this off to the Super Hornets.
01:27:42 What’s a cap point by the way?
01:27:43 That’s where we hold.
01:27:44 So it’s called a combat air patrol point.
01:27:46 So we’re just going to hold at one end.
01:27:48 He’s going to hold at the other end.
01:27:49 It’s kind of like, Hey, you guys are going to get, it’s, it’s, if it’s a football field,
01:27:53 we’re going to sit on one goal line.
01:27:54 He’s going to sit on the other goal line.
01:27:55 And when they say go, we’re going to run at each other and then try and do something in
01:27:58 the middle of the field and then go back to our set reset points.
01:28:01 Okay.
01:28:02 So you’re talking to him.
01:28:03 He’s, he’s, he’s listening to the, he’s just listening.
01:28:05 We don’t talk to him at all.
01:28:06 He’s just listening.
01:28:07 He just dials up.
01:28:08 Cause they know that we all know the frequencies.
01:28:09 So he’s listening to what’s going on because he’s like, cause they canceled training.
01:28:12 So what else is he going to do?
01:28:13 He’s just going to hang out there and do circles while he’s waiting for him and his wingman.
01:28:16 So they just, they’re listening to all this go on.
01:28:18 And then at this point you move on.
01:28:20 Yeah.
01:28:21 We come back up to train.
01:28:22 We go back as we’re flying back the controller.
01:28:24 Cause we’re talking to the kid on the Princeton, the, the, uh, the, uh, they’re called OSs
01:28:28 or operations specialists.
01:28:29 They’re the ones that run the radars and we’re talking to him and he’s like, Hey, sir, you’re
01:28:34 not going to believe this.
01:28:35 He’s like, that thing is at your cap.
01:28:37 It showed back up.
01:28:38 It just popped up.
01:28:39 You know what I mean?
01:28:40 This is like 60 miles away.
01:28:41 It just reappears.
01:28:42 We’re like, Oh, okay.
01:28:43 So we got the radars out.
01:28:44 We’re looking for it.
01:28:45 Uh, we get out there.
01:28:46 We never see it.
01:28:47 We never see it again.
01:28:48 Uh, we do what we need to do.
01:28:49 We come back to the ship.
01:28:50 Of course, now we’re like, Oh, this is going to be, we’re going to, you know, I told him,
01:28:53 I told him, I go, dude, you know, we’re going to catch, we’re going to catch shit for this.
01:28:56 When we get back to the ship, word’s going to get out and we’re just going to catch maximum
01:28:59 shit.
01:29:00 And we did.
01:29:01 We were joking, you know, so the ship plays movies, we have movies on the boat and they
01:29:05 do 12 hours of movies.
01:29:06 So they repeat cause there’s a day check and a night check.
01:29:08 So the same movies in the morning and night play.
01:29:10 So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy
01:29:14 cause I’ll watch stuff on TV that way too.
01:29:16 I’ll be like, Oh, Hey, I’ve seen this and it, I’ll jump into a movie in the middle and
01:29:19 then I’ll pick it up later and I’ll see the beginning and I’ll put it all together, uh,
01:29:23 because that’s how we have to do it.
01:29:24 Cause we’re so busy.
01:29:25 Well, the movies became, and I, it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day.
01:29:34 Definitely going to catch some shit, but let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions.
01:29:40 So just take him, cause it’s whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened,
01:29:45 it’s, you know, one of the most fascinating things, um, events in recent history.
01:29:55 So whatever it was, it’s interesting to talk about it, different kinds of angles.
01:30:00 There’s no good answers, but it’s interesting to ask some dumb questions here.
01:30:03 Uh, so first of all, you mentioned, see, you saw at some point X, Y, and then, uh, somebody
01:30:10 in the Princeton said, you’re not going to believe this, sir.
01:30:13 It’s at your cap point that that’s a different place.
01:30:16 How the heck did it know what your cap point is?
01:30:18 That’s a good question.
01:30:19 And that’s the one of you to no one, you know, you don’t, we don’t tell it, we don’t broadcast
01:30:23 it, we have a waypoint in the system, but I don’t know.
01:30:27 Maybe it knew where we were going.
01:30:28 Cause we use the same one day after day after day, but it, it obviously knew, but you never
01:30:33 saw it there.
01:30:34 Never saw it there.
01:30:35 Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, Hey, look, we just,
01:30:39 we just chased this thing.
01:30:40 They’re like, what?
01:30:41 I got to chase it.
01:30:42 And they’re like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video.
01:30:46 And he goes, and so, and that’s how he is.
01:30:48 He’s like, I’m going to go.
01:30:49 And he, he was, he, he was determined that he was going to find this thing.
01:30:52 So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn’t out, that they don’t
01:30:56 see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape.
01:30:59 That’s the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver.
01:31:02 I’ll probably overlay the video for people to see.
01:31:05 When he goes out, it’s you know, what he’s looking at on his displays is he has basically
01:31:10 two radar displays up.
01:31:12 He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left
01:31:16 one.
01:31:17 So this is called the Azel display.
01:31:18 And this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you’re at the bottom of
01:31:22 it.
01:31:23 You’re at the bottom of the square.
01:31:24 It’s really taken this.
01:31:25 It’s taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares
01:31:30 it out.
01:31:31 So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this.
01:31:34 They square it off.
01:31:35 So, so he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because when
01:31:39 he’s not trying to lock it.
01:31:40 So the radar is just throwing energy out and getting it, you know, it’s a Doppler radar.
01:31:44 So when it’s in search mode, that’s all it’s doing.
01:31:46 It’s going, oh, I can see you.
01:31:47 And it’s looking for return.
01:31:48 So he gets a return.
01:31:49 So he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square, unless it
01:31:52 builds a track file on it, but a little green square is just sitting there.
01:31:55 It’s not moving because it’s, it’s sitting in one spot in space.
01:32:00 He locks it up when he goes to lock it up.
01:32:01 Now he’s putting a bunch of energy on it, but he’s telling the radar, stare down that
01:32:05 line of sight and whatever’s there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it,
01:32:08 which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is and the direction that it’s going.
01:32:13 Okay.
01:32:14 So the radar is smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it’s been messed with,
01:32:18 it will tell you, it’ll give you indications that I’m being jammed.
01:32:21 So that’s all it is, is you send a signal out, something, it manipulates the signal
01:32:25 either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back and the radar was smart
01:32:29 enough to go, that is not a return that I’m expecting.
01:32:33 Something’s messing with me.
01:32:34 I’m being jammed.
01:32:35 And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does
01:32:38 some stuff.
01:32:39 So you can mean, well, it does, it goes full into, it’s being jammed at about every mode
01:32:43 you can possibly see because everything comes up and this aspect gets along, it’s all kinds
01:32:47 of, I don’t want to get into details, but you can tell it’s being jammed.
01:32:50 So and it’s what it does.
01:32:51 As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right?
01:32:54 Active jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it’s technically an act of
01:32:57 war.
01:32:58 It feels like you should be freaking out at this point, I mean.
01:33:01 So well, he does it and then in the back seat, so they don’t have a stick and throttle, they
01:33:05 have their side stick controllers so they can control all the sensors and they can just
01:33:09 toggle around and do stuff.
01:33:10 So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that azimuth
01:33:15 elevation on the radar to the targeting pod.
01:33:17 Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes,
01:33:22 oh, what’s over there?
01:33:23 And it’ll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked
01:33:25 together.
01:33:27 You can decouple them, but they’re going to automatically couple up.
01:33:30 So when he castles over, it’s a switch, it looks like a castle switch, what’s a castle?
01:33:34 So when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says, instead
01:33:38 of looking at the radar, I want to look at the targeting pod, he sees it on the targeting
01:33:41 pod because the targeting pod’s already looking there.
01:33:44 And now he’s on a passive track because he’s not literally sending any energy out, he’s
01:33:47 just receiving IR energy from the tic tac and then the system itself will track the
01:33:52 pixels and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you’re in.
01:33:56 So it says, oh, and that’s where those little bars you see in the video where the bars come
01:33:58 up left and right.
01:33:59 There’s doing some vision based tracking.
01:34:02 That’s exactly what it is.
01:34:03 So and then he goes through.
01:34:06 Changes zooms, changes the mode.
01:34:08 He goes through all the modes, so there’s a narrow, medium and wide.
01:34:11 So wide is far away, medium and then narrow.
01:34:14 And then there’s the TV mode and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode.
01:34:18 The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode.
01:34:25 So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode.
01:34:28 It’s got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode.
01:34:32 So he goes through all those things and that’s when you see it going from a black background
01:34:35 to a white background.
01:34:36 So you can figure out what the heck is this?
01:34:37 Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes
01:34:40 instead of just staring at it going, what is that thing?
01:34:45 So the video has been out, it actually was on YouTube for years before the government
01:34:50 released it.
01:34:51 It was leaked in 2007?
01:34:54 No, the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email and I had retired.
01:35:00 So this is about, nope, because I was working down in San Diego.
01:35:05 So this is about 2008, early 2009, he sends me a link to strangeland.com, which is not
01:35:15 suitable for work.
01:35:16 Oh yeah, it’s top notch.
01:35:18 And he says, I can remember the email, hey Skip, does this look familiar?
01:35:24 And I look at it, I’m like, how the hell did that get on strangeland.com?
01:35:29 So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube
01:35:35 link to someone.
01:35:36 You don’t send strangeland.com to someone because you don’t know what you’re going to
01:35:40 get.
01:35:41 It’s like Googling kittens.
01:35:42 So it ends up there somehow.
01:35:47 So it gets on YouTube, which was cool because I would go out with my friends and we’d be
01:35:50 drinking and they go, dude, what’s the coolest thing you ever saw flying?
01:35:53 It’s kind of like you were asking what it’s like.
01:35:55 And I go, oh dude, I chased a UFO and they’re like, get out.
01:35:58 And I’m like, no, serious.
01:35:59 This is literally how it happened.
01:36:01 So I was sitting with my friend Matt.
01:36:03 So Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first
01:36:07 night trap.
01:36:08 And we were friends to this day.
01:36:11 Because when you do stuff like people like that, I had to have faith in him, he had to
01:36:15 have faith in me, they become like your brother.
01:36:20 And these are guys that literally, I don’t talk to them on a regular basis, like Chris
01:36:24 who works at Apple.
01:36:26 If Chris called me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help.
01:36:29 I need this.
01:36:30 I’d be like, all right, let’s figure this out and let’s do it.
01:36:32 Because it’s, they’re like family, you do it.
01:36:34 And most Navy guys, we don’t send letters to each other weekly.
01:36:38 You know, I have friends that I haven’t talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door,
01:36:43 you know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes
01:36:47 to catch up.
01:36:48 And then it’s like old times and it’s amazing how fast it’s happened.
01:36:51 So I’m out to dinner with Matt and I’m telling him this story and he’s like, get out of here.
01:36:57 So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco, Paco has fightersweep.com, it’s a blog site.
01:37:05 So Paco’s obsessed, like he is way into UFOs.
01:37:09 So Paco calls me up, he says, dude, I was talking to Matty.
01:37:12 That’s what we call him.
01:37:13 He goes, I was talking to Matty.
01:37:14 He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story.
01:37:18 So I’m like, all right.
01:37:19 I’m going to spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and I’m like, I got to
01:37:24 get a voicemail.
01:37:25 Hey, give me a call.
01:37:26 So I call him up and he answers the phone, but I could hear people in the background
01:37:29 and I go, hey dude, what’s going on?
01:37:30 He goes, hang on, hang on.
01:37:31 I got to put you on speakerphone.
01:37:32 I go, what are you putting me on speakerphone?
01:37:33 He goes, you got to tell the story.
01:37:34 I’m having a dinner party.
01:37:36 You got to tell the story.
01:37:37 So he’s literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table
01:37:40 as I tell a Tic Tac story.
01:37:42 So he calls me up again.
01:37:43 He says, hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff.
01:37:48 Like he wrote about that we call them the shit hot break.
01:37:50 That’s a guy that when you’re laying on a carrier, comes in, turns and gets ready to
01:37:53 land really fast.
01:37:54 Like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and one of the guys, when we were junior
01:37:59 officers on the USS Ranger, one of the department heads in the other squadron is a guy, Nasty.
01:38:04 And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break.
01:38:08 So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there’s another guy,
01:38:13 Mav, was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing.
01:38:20 It’s a good article on how this was and how it kind of forms you in Naval Aviation, kind
01:38:24 of being part of the club.
01:38:26 So he’s like, I got to write about this thing.
01:38:28 I’m like, what do you guys, I got to write about it.
01:38:29 I go, all right.
01:38:30 Because at first I would say no.
01:38:31 I’m like, dude, I don’t want this out there.
01:38:32 Just.
01:38:33 So you haven’t really before then talked about it much.
01:38:36 My wife didn’t even really know the whole story.
01:38:38 Why?
01:38:39 Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some.
01:38:42 You know, it was just, I’ll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two
01:38:47 days.
01:38:48 They played the goofy movies.
01:38:49 There’s a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put.
01:38:52 It was like first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat
01:38:56 and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting protecting the Nimitz
01:38:59 battle group type stuff.
01:39:00 It’s just funny shit like that.
01:39:03 So to me it wasn’t that big of a deal.
01:39:06 It was like, okay, that’s weird.
01:39:07 We’re never going to know what it was.
01:39:08 I want to get out there because this is important because there’s all kinds of rumors.
01:39:12 There’s a group of folks there.
01:39:15 No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.
01:39:20 Nobody looking like me.
01:39:22 No came out on a, no, no one came out of the helicopter.
01:39:26 No one came out on an airplane.
01:39:28 You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified.
01:39:31 What’s funny is all the COs and several of them are still in the Navy.
01:39:36 There’s one that is a, he, I think he just finished up.
01:39:38 He was a captain of an aircraft carrier.
01:39:40 You know, so he’ll end up making Admiral and all that stuff.
01:39:44 Those guys are all my friends.
01:39:45 I talk to them daily.
01:39:47 Just to clarify.
01:39:48 So just for people who don’t know, there’s a story that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton
01:39:56 folks in a helicopter landed.
01:39:59 They showed up, they took the data, quote unquote.
01:40:02 So all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably
01:40:09 deleted it.
01:40:10 So there’s a kind of story to that.
01:40:13 And then from what I’ve seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about
01:40:19 offline, that jokes spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on
01:40:24 these ships, that it might’ve been a joke that started and.
01:40:29 Well, they did.
01:40:30 So here’s the joke.
01:40:31 So they had come down, right?
01:40:33 We had the tapes and they were Chad’s tapes.
01:40:37 So we use those tapes over and over again.
01:40:39 They’re consumable, but remember, I have a budget as a squadron, so I have a budget.
01:40:42 So I have to buy those tapes, all that stuff that we use, I’m accountable for.
01:40:47 And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that’s on them.
01:40:50 So we had the tapes.
01:40:52 So the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what’s called Civic, CVIC,
01:40:59 which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes.
01:41:03 These guys are gonna come, they’re gonna come and get them.
01:41:07 So we’re like, I’m like, oh, whatever.
01:41:09 So we hand them the tapes and then someone, because I have, you know people, shortly after
01:41:15 they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they’re messing
01:41:18 with you, they’re playing a joke.
01:41:20 So I said, oh, well, let’s see how well that goes because I’m a CO and they’re not.
01:41:26 So I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a Lieutenant or Lieutenant JG, so he’s
01:41:31 way junior to me.
01:41:32 And I said, hey, I want my tapes back and he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are
01:41:37 pulling my leg.
01:41:38 I know there’s no one came out.
01:41:40 And I go, and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this
01:41:43 place apart.
01:41:44 That’s literally what I told him.
01:41:46 And I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it’s not gonna
01:41:50 go well.
01:41:52 I said, because this is bullshit and I need those tapes.
01:41:54 Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up, they weren’t in a safe.
01:41:57 He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled them out and handed them to me.
01:42:00 I said, and I basically said a few things to him, like, don’t ever fuck with me again.
01:42:05 And I left, I had the tapes.
01:42:07 So this, no one came out.
01:42:08 There’s no flying going on when all this is happening.
01:42:11 And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.
01:42:15 So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want.
01:42:19 So there’s a rumor or two that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long and there’s
01:42:23 some, one of these petty officers is saying, I saw it, that’s total crap.
01:42:26 The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long.
01:42:28 What you see on the release video is the entire video.
01:42:31 So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me, but you
01:42:38 have mentioned that, like on Roguen, I think that you watched it on a bigger screen.
01:42:45 It felt like it was higher definition.
01:42:47 So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the FLIR
01:42:55 video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high
01:43:01 number of.
01:43:02 I would doubt it.
01:43:03 Because I don’t know where, the stuff that the government released, I don’t know where
01:43:05 they got it.
01:43:06 Okay.
01:43:07 So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like
01:43:11 a rack.
01:43:12 There’s tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard
01:43:15 drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube.
01:43:19 No, it’s just like, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there’s
01:43:24 some quality that gets, it degrades.
01:43:27 So this, you don’t know how many times this has been copied.
01:43:29 So we were looking, the videos I’ve seen are right off the original, they’re Hi8 tapes,
01:43:32 it’s basically pulled off the back of the display, so it’s not filmed with cameras,
01:43:35 it’s literally a digital feed that’s pulled off the back and put onto a Hi8 tape.
01:43:39 That’s how the recorders work.
01:43:40 Now it’s actually digital to digital, it’s not even on tapes anymore, it’s a digital
01:43:44 recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly, because originally we had
01:43:47 little cameras here that shine, so if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.
01:43:52 So it’s a pretty good feed, when you put it on, so instead of looking at it on your tiny
01:43:57 little computer monitor or whatever, I’m looking at it on like a 19 inch, because it was still
01:44:02 normal TVs back there, we had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought,
01:44:06 so we could watch movies.
01:44:07 A nice, huge 19 inch screen.
01:44:11 It’s maybe 20, it was nice.
01:44:13 Wow, that’s huge.
01:44:14 It was gigantic.
01:44:15 I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches.
01:44:20 This is 2005.
01:44:23 So you look at it as this big thing.
01:44:25 You could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say there’s little things coming out
01:44:28 of the bottom of it, you could see those.
01:44:30 It was very clear.
01:44:32 But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, did you get much more information from
01:44:38 the higher, from the clear?
01:44:40 Little things out of the bottom.
01:44:41 We didn’t see those visuals.
01:44:42 So the bottom information.
01:44:43 I got it.
01:44:44 So when you see it, because he’s coming almost coaltitude with it, you can see the bottom
01:44:47 of it.
01:44:48 It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there’s little antennas
01:44:50 hanging out of the bottom.
01:44:51 Kind of like that.
01:44:52 There was two little things out of the bottom.
01:44:53 There’s nothing on the top.
01:44:54 There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature.
01:45:00 You know, it’s all that stuff.
01:45:01 And then the other thing that people didn’t see is they didn’t see the radar display,
01:45:06 which that really raises a classification of it, especially to see what the radar does
01:45:10 when it’s being jammed.
01:45:12 You know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about
01:45:15 2000 and let me think about 2009.
01:45:21 I got a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, hey, he told
01:45:27 me who he was.
01:45:28 He’s still in the government.
01:45:30 I’m friends with him.
01:45:31 And he said, hey, we’re going to investigate your Tic Tac thing.
01:45:35 This is literally five years later.
01:45:37 Yeah.
01:45:38 Five years later.
01:45:39 And I said, OK, whatever.
01:45:41 And he did a pretty good job.
01:45:42 I caught the unofficial official report because it was really never official.
01:45:48 It wasn’t.
01:45:49 But I’ll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests.
01:45:54 So he does the report.
01:45:55 He sent me the report.
01:45:56 And all he said is, hey, I’m going to send you this report.
01:45:58 Please don’t distribute this report.
01:46:01 I said, OK.
01:46:02 The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough
01:46:06 to redact it.
01:46:07 But there’s a few versions of it unredacted and I’m very protective of the other people
01:46:11 that were involved in this.
01:46:13 So Jim has talked, but he’s off the grid.
01:46:15 He doesn’t talk to anyone now.
01:46:17 The pilot of his airplane, she has come out on unidentified, but they don’t release her
01:46:21 name, although people are starting to do it.
01:46:23 And she’s had weird shit happen around her house.
01:46:25 She’s got kids, you know, so I’m very protective of her.
01:46:29 And I’ve told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that the names ever came from you,
01:46:32 I will never talk to you again about this.
01:46:34 And Jeremy’s been really good about it.
01:46:36 And so is George.
01:46:37 And then, but George knew who the names were because he got the report from Senator Reid.
01:46:43 And then the other crew.
01:46:44 So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that
01:46:51 individual, they really don’t have the recollection.
01:46:53 They were just out flying that day and it wasn’t a big deal.
01:46:58 So it’s you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking.
01:47:01 I don’t want people knocking on my door and, you know, and there’s rumors are you talk
01:47:05 to everyone.
01:47:06 You know, you’re about the 23rd person that I’ve talked to total.
01:47:10 And that includes, you know, the newspapers and stuff.
01:47:13 And I’ve been selective because there’s so much, I mean, if I turned down like, I turned
01:47:17 down Russian TV.
01:47:18 I can give you her name when we’re done here.
01:47:21 She called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter, she called
01:47:24 my son and she called my son in law because they’re persistent.
01:47:28 So I’m pretty protected.
01:47:30 I’m very particular.
01:47:31 I mean, the reason I’m talking to you is because I knew we would have a conversation that wasn’t
01:47:34 based just on the tic tac and the incident, but we can actually talk about some of the
01:47:37 science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people involved to go.
01:47:42 Cause I think there’s, you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or Chris
01:47:48 Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that whole thing, that’s to the stars Academy.
01:47:55 That’s the Tom DeLonge group that got started.
01:47:57 So you go, well, you know, cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he’s
01:48:02 actually, when you talk to him, he’s, he’s, he’s very smart and I asked him, how’d you
01:48:07 get into this?
01:48:08 And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of
01:48:12 books when you’re laying in a van as you’re driving to your next gig before you make it
01:48:16 big.
01:48:17 And he goes, and he read, he was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs.
01:48:20 I’m trying to think of the title.
01:48:21 That’s one of the big ones that’s out there real popular.
01:48:23 And so he started just, he started asking more and through his fame with Blink 182 in
01:48:29 the band, he got more and more connected.
01:48:32 You know, if you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence
01:48:36 and he’s part of the Mellon dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.
01:48:43 He knows, he, he, he definitely knows how the government works cause he worked there.
01:48:47 And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he’s one of the first people I’ll go to.
01:48:53 When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me,
01:49:01 I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, Hey, cause they were like, you gotta do it.
01:49:05 Cause I turned to, I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his, his producer
01:49:11 had called me and I’m like, all right, I’ll do it.
01:49:14 Because those guys like, you gotta, you gotta do this for us.
01:49:16 So from my perspective, just to give you some context.
01:49:19 So to me, there seems to be some stigma.
01:49:23 So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today.
01:49:27 And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, of faculty, fellow faculty
01:49:33 at MIT and major universities.
01:49:36 And it feels like there’s some stigma to the subject from, from the scientific community.
01:49:43 A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting,
01:49:48 but you, you don’t even know you, one, you’re afraid to talk about it.
01:49:53 And two, you don’t know what the next steps are, like how can we seriously try to think
01:49:58 about what you saw, how to think about how we further look for things like it, how we
01:50:05 develop systems and plans for how in the future we can immediately collect a lot more data
01:50:14 and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the
01:50:23 best way possible from the scientific perspective.
01:50:25 And I, I just would love to remove stigma from this subject.
01:50:31 Well, I think that’s the first step we have done in this country, an absolutely terrible
01:50:37 job with these things.
01:50:38 So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell.
01:50:42 So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer.
01:50:46 That’s literally what came out.
01:50:48 And then magically the next day it’s a weather balloon and they’re showing your pieces of
01:50:51 mylar and you go, well, that doesn’t look like what they showed us yesterday.
01:50:55 Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there’s that whole series about Project
01:50:58 Blue Book.
01:50:59 But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things.
01:51:01 It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove to the point
01:51:06 where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look.
01:51:10 So there’s always been this, I don’t know if you’d call it an aura around it or a mystique
01:51:15 about UFOs that if you’re talking about them, they’re nuts.
01:51:19 With ours, because I’m not a UFO guy, I’m not a junkie.
01:51:23 If you ask me, do I believe that there’s life outside of Earth, I would say you probably
01:51:29 have a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than we’re the only planet that has
01:51:34 life on it in the universe.
01:51:36 The odds are against it.
01:51:38 If you do just do the math, you have to accept, because there only has to be one other planet
01:51:44 that has life on it and then I win and you lose.
01:51:48 And then more and more science is showing that there’s habitable planets out there,
01:51:52 that yeah, everything we’ve learned so far, we know very little, but everything we’ve
01:51:56 learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets, it seems that
01:52:03 it’s very likely that there’s life out there.
01:52:06 Intelligent life is another topic, but life.
01:52:08 Well, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us
01:52:13 that says, ha ha, we’re it and you go, not so much.
01:52:18 Maybe we’re not so intelligent.
01:52:20 Because we are, it’s just how we learn.
01:52:22 So our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal
01:52:28 combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel.
01:52:33 What if you’re in another planet where you figured out the ability to create a gravity
01:52:39 field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger,
01:52:43 you know, catapults on ships were steam powered and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic.
01:52:48 Roller coasters used to use a chain to get you to the top of the hill.
01:52:50 Now they shoot you with electromagnetics and you’re going.
01:52:53 So there’s a whole new realm of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it’s our ability
01:52:57 to develop the technology to support theory.
01:53:00 You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently theories that Einstein had where
01:53:05 people actually joked about them.
01:53:07 And now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light.
01:53:10 You know, we’ve proven that.
01:53:12 So you look at that way and you go, well, does that mean that, you know, 70 years ago
01:53:15 Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong?
01:53:17 Or do you go, we just didn’t have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find
01:53:22 something that we could, to actually measure.
01:53:24 And you know, and I’ve seen this stuff.
01:53:25 And that’s just a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries.
01:53:29 Look what we’ve done in the last 20 years.
01:53:30 Yeah, it’s crazy.
01:53:31 Let me direct, cause it’s such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science
01:53:35 perspective, you’re, I mean, you’ve spoken, you’ve been brave in, you know, telling your
01:53:43 story, not some dramatic thing, but just telling the things you’ve seen.
01:53:48 Did it encounter, did it impact your career?
01:53:53 Is that why more people haven’t come out?
01:53:55 Like you’ve mentioned Roswell, like how, what advice do you give to people, to the community,
01:54:03 to me as a scientist for ways to go forward about this topic and still have a, you know,
01:54:11 not being put in a bin in society that he’s a loon or she’s a loon or that person.
01:54:16 Mine is to get away from the little green men, just divorce the two little green men.
01:54:23 And you know, and I’ve talked to Lou Elizondo about this, you know, and the group that they’re
01:54:27 working with, which is incredible.
01:54:28 I mean, they’ve got Steve Justice who used to run Skunk Works where they built, you know,
01:54:32 projects.
01:54:33 Now, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director.
01:54:36 He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon.
01:54:38 And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs.
01:54:45 So what’s funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote
01:54:49 the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP.
01:54:53 And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt.
01:54:57 And people go, how do you know that?
01:54:58 I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are, it literally,
01:55:03 I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed.
01:55:05 So he was one.
01:55:07 So that’s why the, that’s why I call it the unofficial official report.
01:55:09 It was never, it was never releasable because people go, oh, I put in a FOIA request and
01:55:13 I didn’t get that.
01:55:14 I go, well, just because you put in a FOIA request and get it, I go, because how much,
01:55:17 how much time do you think that guy is going to spend to get you the information that you
01:55:20 requested if he can’t find it?
01:55:21 I actually got called by the Navy.
01:55:23 I had a commander in the Navy call me about right before the article came out in the New
01:55:29 York Times.
01:55:30 It was, this was starting to come back and she had called me because there’s been, there
01:55:33 was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident.
01:55:35 And I said, do you know of anything?
01:55:38 She called me, she goes, do you know of anything else besides the situation reports that come
01:55:41 off the ship?
01:55:42 And you know, and you got to remember when the situation report comes off the ship, that’s
01:55:45 like third hand.
01:55:46 So we tell someone, they tell someone, that person has to write it up.
01:55:50 So there’s all kinds of inaccuracies in it.
01:55:54 But then there’s the unofficial official report that’s actually pretty well written.
01:55:56 There’s some errors in it, but it was, you know, I didn’t help write it.
01:55:59 I just did it.
01:56:00 And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who’s who in the zoo and
01:56:03 the players.
01:56:07 So she called me and said, is there anything out there?
01:56:09 And I said, officially out there.
01:56:10 She said, yes.
01:56:11 I said, I don’t know anything.
01:56:12 I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one, but I’m not, you know,
01:56:16 if you don’t know about it, I’m not going to tell you because it’s not my job and nor
01:56:19 did I care.
01:56:20 I mean, did, in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou, I mean, did you think about
01:56:26 your impact to your career?
01:56:29 Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other thing, other people
01:56:36 like in the Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing, why aren’t they talking about
01:56:40 this?
01:56:41 Why are people afraid to talk about this?
01:56:42 Well, honestly, the military and the press, there’s a distrust.
01:56:46 I’ll just tell you that right now.
01:56:47 We typically don’t like talking to the press because if I talk to you, you know, especially
01:56:52 when I do, even the TV shows, you know, cause I’ve been on a couple of shows, when you look
01:56:57 at it, you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours.
01:57:00 And then what you see on the screen is five minutes.
01:57:03 Well, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from Autonomous
01:57:07 Vehicles is the clipping happens, yes.
01:57:12 But also the incompetence.
01:57:13 Let me just call out journalists.
01:57:17 They’re not thinking, I mean, so here’s the thing, I have a PhD and I’ve taken painfully
01:57:25 too many classes from like physics, math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the
01:57:32 world.
01:57:33 I read a lot.
01:57:34 That seems to be missing with journalism.
01:57:36 So you’re talking to a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting
01:57:40 way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things
01:57:47 that humans have witnessed in history.
01:57:49 Like you, it might’ve been nothing, who knows what you witnessed might’ve been from a sort
01:57:55 of debunking perspective, might’ve been some kind of trick of mind.
01:57:59 You and others have hallucinated something that could be some simple explanation, but
01:58:05 possibly it was something not of this world and to not do justice to this story from a
01:58:15 scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence.
01:58:20 And so that’s true for journalists, that’s true for other scientists.
01:58:25 It’s just a human nature.
01:58:28 If we see something that we can’t explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it’s
01:58:34 just me and you let it go away and you don’t think about it, maybe it’ll just, you ignore
01:58:40 it.
01:58:41 The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that?
01:58:44 And I want to dig more into it.
01:58:47 And if you look at it or you’re going against the norm, you can get ostracized.
01:58:53 And if you look at, and Einstein’s the perfect example, I mean, when he started coming up
01:58:57 with some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you’re
01:59:02 a nut job.
01:59:03 He’s, he’s literally proving them, but he didn’t have, you know, he proved them in theory,
01:59:09 but he didn’t have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory.
01:59:13 There’s a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim
01:59:18 Gates that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to
01:59:25 experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with, with his theories.
01:59:32 It’s fascinating.
01:59:33 But yes, at the time, it’s kind of crazy what he’s saying.
01:59:36 Yeah.
01:59:37 If you look at it back at the time, don’t we, we look at it now and go, well, the guy
01:59:40 was a walking genius and he was, but if you go back in time when he was doing it, it was
01:59:44 like, what are you talking about?
01:59:47 You know?
01:59:48 But one of the challenges is your eyewitness.
01:59:52 One of the challenges is you’re essentially an eyewitness account.
01:59:56 Like we don’t have good data.
01:59:58 We have very limited data of the incident that you’ve experienced.
02:00:03 So let me kind of dig in, let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there’s,
02:00:10 just to paint more and more of the picture.
02:00:13 One you kind of mentioned, so Tic Tac Shape, let’s break apart two situations.
02:00:18 One is the video.
02:00:19 Let’s look at the actual eye account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your
02:00:23 own eyes.
02:00:25 What’s the, what can you say about the shape of the thing?
02:00:28 Is there interesting aspects outside of the Tic Tac?
02:00:30 Like, is there any appendages?
02:00:33 Is there some texture to it that, no smooth white Tic Tac, you know, we don’t, you don’t
02:00:42 see there’s no, no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could see.
02:00:50 We don’t notice, like I said, we don’t see the little things on the bottom of it until
02:00:53 we see the video in the TV mode when it’s zoomed in, right before it’s shortly, you
02:00:59 kind of see them zoom in.
02:01:00 You don’t see it typically on the YouTube stuff that’s out there, or remember we’re
02:01:05 looking at the original tape, so there’s not, there’s basically no degradation.
02:01:09 But when you saw with your eyes, there’s no kind of appendages.
02:01:12 No, none.
02:01:13 What about, like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions.
02:01:17 So I appreciate you spending your time here.
02:01:19 Let me ask some of them.
02:01:21 Did you, I mean, you chased it, so we flew close to it, relatively speaking.
02:01:26 Was there, did you feel any wake?
02:01:30 Like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?
02:01:36 No.
02:01:37 Nothing.
02:01:38 Nothing.
02:01:39 So another aspect of it, there’s an interesting thing you’ve developed a feel for, for objects
02:01:46 in the air.
02:01:47 Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival?
02:01:53 Or did it, let me ask a few questions around it.
02:01:56 So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised?
02:02:00 Did it feel like it wanted to be seen, almost to show off its capability?
02:02:08 And did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, an air fight against
02:02:15 a sort of like a, I don’t know, a foreign jet?
02:02:20 So one, I think it, I think it knew we were there when we showed up.
02:02:25 It’s just, it’s me.
02:02:27 It’s kind of like an animal.
02:02:28 If you’ve ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it
02:02:30 sees you and you’re on the other side of the field, it’ll actually go no threat and it’ll
02:02:34 start eating.
02:02:35 You know, they don’t put their tail up.
02:02:36 As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it’s there and I’m going to react or I’m
02:02:39 going to move.
02:02:40 So as we were up high and it’s down doing whatever it was doing, you know, which I don’t
02:02:47 know if someone asks, what do you think?
02:02:48 I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something.
02:02:50 I joked on good morning America.
02:02:52 Maybe it’s like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know, and actually
02:02:56 use that clip.
02:02:57 It was kind of funny, but yeah, we’re a little human centric.
02:03:00 We think like it would, it’d show up to talk to us, but maybe he’s talking to the dolphins.
02:03:04 Yeah.
02:03:05 It was to whatever, you know, cause it was hanging around that whitewater and I don’t
02:03:07 know if it was, there’s something there as a seamount.
02:03:09 We just didn’t find it again.
02:03:10 I don’t know.
02:03:11 But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started
02:03:16 mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming
02:03:19 up.
02:03:20 Just, you know, you figure I’m at 20 and it’s coming up and it ends up getting up to 12
02:03:25 where I cut across the circle.
02:03:27 I think it was very aware that we were there because it interacted.
02:03:30 We call it a two circle fight when you’re fighting another airplane.
02:03:34 But you know, was it, was, were we afraid?
02:03:40 I don’t think so.
02:03:41 I mean, and to me it was more curious, you know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that
02:03:44 you would have.
02:03:45 And I always felt to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time
02:03:51 as I’d spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a
02:03:56 safe zone.
02:03:57 I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can’t, if you’re
02:04:01 in the airplane and you feel scared, it’s not the job for you.
02:04:04 You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now.
02:04:08 You know, I am inside, I have the stick, I have the throttles, I’ve got my wizzo in the
02:04:11 back seat, he’s running all the displays.
02:04:14 We are a team.
02:04:15 We’re in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new.
02:04:20 You feel pretty good.
02:04:21 And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate
02:04:26 like it did, like it was like no big deal, you know, for an airplane, if you just put
02:04:30 me from a standstill, let’s just say slow flight, just get me at a hundred knots above
02:04:34 the water.
02:04:35 And for me to, you can’t just start a climb, I’d have to lower the nose, I’d have to accelerate
02:04:39 and then I’d have to start coming up and this thing just like, just did it like it was like
02:04:44 no big deal.
02:04:45 Yeah.
02:04:46 You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was, it like, it’s something that you
02:04:52 would love to fly almost.
02:04:53 So this object, just the curiosity you experienced is like, like what it almost like, what the
02:05:01 heck is that piece of technology and I want to fly it.
02:05:05 Like what made you feel like it’s something that you could fly?
02:05:10 Do you think it’s something that a human could fly?
02:05:13 Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology, because another
02:05:18 perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing.
02:05:26 And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like, I don’t think it was
02:05:32 a projection.
02:05:33 I think it was a real object.
02:05:34 It was an op, a physical hard object that could be flyed.
02:05:37 Oh yeah.
02:05:38 Yeah.
02:05:39 I think all four of us will tell you the same thing.
02:05:40 It wasn’t, it wasn’t, this was not, cause you go, okay, let’s just go on.
02:05:44 It’s a light projection.
02:05:45 Well, if we were both sitting next to each other and we were looking at it from the exact
02:05:50 same angle and all that, and I go, okay, there’s a, in theory you could have that, but with
02:05:54 an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, you know, and they’re, you know, she’s probably
02:05:58 not directly above me.
02:05:59 She’s kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen.
02:06:02 You know, you’re getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear
02:06:06 blue.
02:06:07 You know, if you’ve ever been at sea and I don’t mean like coast, I mean like when you
02:06:10 get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest, it’s incredible.
02:06:15 You know, you’ve got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean that you got pretty
02:06:19 high contrast.
02:06:20 And for this thing just to disappear, it wasn’t, I’m telling you, I would, I mean, I know we,
02:06:29 we all have the same recollection of what happened.
02:06:33 You know, there’s some details because it’s so long ago, but for the most part, we know
02:06:36 what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like, what the hell was that?
02:06:40 What if, I mean, do you think about the thing under the water that’s not often talked about
02:06:45 if there’s something under the water, couldn’t have been something gigantic?
02:06:50 It could be.
02:06:51 What?
02:06:52 Like, do you ever think of this?
02:06:53 Big ship comes up.
02:06:54 I mean, that’s why as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles
02:06:57 and Olympic swimmers.
02:06:59 Like I love that feeling, but I’m also terrified when I swim because the abyss, it could, anything
02:07:04 could be under there.
02:07:06 Like there’s not enough focus on that perhaps because there’s no visibility, but is it,
02:07:12 is there anything interesting to say about the possibility that was anything underneath
02:07:16 there?
02:07:17 Could be.
02:07:18 I mean, think about it.
02:07:19 If you’re going to hide on this planet, what’s the least explored spot on the planet?
02:07:25 Two thirds of it’s the ocean.
02:07:28 There’s literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was a triple
02:07:34 seven that crashed.
02:07:35 You know, they turned, they didn’t go where they’re supposed to and they just disappeared
02:07:38 and they’ve been searching for it and they found pieces of it, but you would think there’s
02:07:42 large objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up,
02:07:46 there’s big pieces that would be, you’d find something, they haven’t found anything except
02:07:49 what floated.
02:07:50 So to hide something underwater I think would be easy.
02:07:54 So okay.
02:07:55 Let’s go a little bit in speculation land, but it’s the best, it’s the best we can do,
02:08:00 which is the basic question of what do you think was it?
02:08:05 So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology?
02:08:11 Is it alien technology?
02:08:13 Is it an unknown physical phenomena?
02:08:16 You know, like a ball lightning, for example, there’s a lot of fascinating things we probably
02:08:20 humans don’t really understand.
02:08:22 Is it like I said, some perception cognition that led you some kind of hallucination that
02:08:29 made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?
02:08:31 Let me put those things on the table.
02:08:33 Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like
02:08:39 that?
02:08:40 What do you think it was?
02:08:41 Definitely.
02:08:42 I don’t think it’s an ice cloud because ice clouds don’t fly around and react to you.
02:08:47 Do I think it was a light?
02:08:49 I’d say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do.
02:08:52 I’d say no.
02:08:53 What do you mean by light?
02:08:54 Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there’s their experience
02:08:59 like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it’s really not,
02:09:04 you know, it’s plasma.
02:09:05 I don’t think so.
02:09:07 So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved.
02:09:09 Maybe not.
02:09:10 I’m not a theoretical physicist and some, you know, I’m not an MIT.
02:09:16 I would say no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it
02:09:21 when this happened, no, I think it was a hard object.
02:09:27 It was aware that we were there.
02:09:28 It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly
02:09:33 what I would do.
02:09:35 You know, it mirrored me.
02:09:36 It wasn’t aggressive.
02:09:37 You know, there’s talk, oh, it flopped behind us.
02:09:39 It was never offensive on us.
02:09:41 It never did that.
02:09:42 It just mirrored us.
02:09:43 So as we’re coming down, it’s just like, you know, you’re kind of, you know, you said you
02:09:47 do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the, when they
02:09:52 get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, cause my roommate in college was
02:09:55 a collegiate wrestler.
02:09:56 So I de facto became a wrestler cause he beat me up every night and we joke.
02:10:01 I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week.
02:10:05 But you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you’re kind of feeling
02:10:08 each other as you walk and boxers do the same thing.
02:10:10 It was doing that same thing.
02:10:11 It’s like, what’s going on as it comes around, as it comes around and then it was like, Hey,
02:10:15 we’re going to get here.
02:10:16 And then when I got too close to it, you know, it decided I’m out of here.
02:10:19 And then it did something that we’ve never seen.
02:10:22 The other question is what if I didn’t cut across the circle, what if I just kept going
02:10:25 around a circle?
02:10:26 We just keep going.
02:10:27 I could have just watched it.
02:10:28 I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and the
02:10:32 joint helmet.
02:10:33 There’s a little camera, but we never use it because it’s nauseating to watch because
02:10:35 you’ve ever put a GoPro on someone’s head where they’re looking around like this all
02:10:38 the time, it’ll nauseate you.
02:10:40 So we never turn that on and all, you know, it’s the one thing I didn’t do is reach down
02:10:44 and hit the switch, you know, and then we didn’t go back and cause our tapes didn’t
02:10:47 have anything cause we didn’t get it on radar.
02:10:51 Because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn’t,
02:10:55 it wouldn’t lock.
02:10:56 The radar wouldn’t lock.
02:10:57 And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let’s try to get some
02:11:04 hints at it.
02:11:05 Do you think it’s human, like advanced human created technology that’s simply top secret
02:11:12 that we’re just not aware of?
02:11:15 Or is it not something not of this world?
02:11:18 So you, if you’d asked me in 2004, I just said, I don’t know if you ask me now.
02:11:26 So we’re coming up on 16 years ago for a technology like that, you know, and let’s assume that
02:11:34 it didn’t have a conventional propulsion system in it because I don’t think it did.
02:11:40 I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds
02:11:44 from what we normally do, then it would start coming out.
02:11:48 But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I understand, you know, and
02:11:53 I don’t speak for the United States government and I never will speak for the United States
02:11:56 government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and
02:11:59 why we classify stuff, you know, is it detrimental to national defense?
02:12:03 But there’s a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that
02:12:06 could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability
02:12:13 to do things, you know, you talk about, you know, are we going to go to Mars?
02:12:17 Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, because remember, these things were
02:12:20 coming down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space, and they
02:12:24 would come down and they would come straight down, they’d hang out at like 20,000 feet
02:12:27 and then three or four hours later, they’d go back up.
02:12:30 You don’t have anything that can come down, hang out and once, you know, and I’m talking
02:12:34 hold out in a spot.
02:12:35 Well, we all know there’s winds.
02:12:36 They’re not drifting like a balloon.
02:12:38 They’re just sitting there and then they would go back up and they tracked up to the, when
02:12:42 I talked to the controller, he’s like, we’ve seen up to 10 of these things.
02:12:46 There’s other guys and it was raining and all this other, let’s just say they tracked
02:12:50 a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up.
02:12:55 So it’s not just propulsion and the way it moves, it’s also fuel.
02:12:59 It’s everything.
02:13:00 So…
02:13:01 The whole of it indicates a kind of technology that’s highly advanced, but you don’t think
02:13:08 in your sense that you actually don’t know, but you know more than a lot of people, in
02:13:14 your sense, the top secret military technology, if you think about skunkworks, if you think
02:13:20 about it like that, cannot be more than 15 years ahead.
02:13:25 I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117.
02:13:32 Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out like it was developed at this time.
02:13:36 It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.
02:13:40 What’s the 117?
02:13:41 That’s the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2, but the stealth fighter.
02:13:44 So you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while.
02:13:51 But I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and
02:13:56 we’re kind of pushing the edge of technology.
02:14:00 This is a giant leap in technology.
02:14:02 You know, and the other one is, do we have the basis to do that?
02:14:06 You know, because usually when you have a technology like that, universities, especially
02:14:10 the one you’re working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top
02:14:15 tier universities, you know, so you’ve got MIT, you’ve got Caltech, you’ve got Stanford,
02:14:19 Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I’m just naming schools, Naval Postgraduate
02:14:24 School is another one.
02:14:27 There’s usually indicators, there’s papers of, hey, this is where we’re going.
02:14:31 I don’t think there’s a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity based propulsion system
02:14:36 that literally, I’ve got an object, because how do you, how much power would it cost to
02:14:41 create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant
02:14:46 orb that we live on?
02:14:48 Also by the way, you mentioned gravity based.
02:14:50 That’s kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what
02:14:56 kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement.
02:15:03 To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane from a physics perspective, but of
02:15:07 course it would seem insane until it’s not.
02:15:13 Because remember, we only know what we know, which is very little.
02:15:19 Someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all?
02:15:27 So you’re saying that if you had to bet money, all your money, it would be something that’s
02:15:32 alien technology, so it’s not human created technology.
02:15:37 Well, I don’t like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don’t think we’ve
02:15:41 developed it.
02:15:42 I don’t think we’ve developed it.
02:15:45 Because the other one, someone asked me, they said, what if there wasn’t, maybe it was just
02:15:48 a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from someplace else.
02:15:53 I mean, we’ve got stuff out there flying around.
02:15:57 So I don’t know.
02:15:59 I mean, I’d like to sit around and talk to some of the giant brains that think this stuff
02:16:03 up.
02:16:04 I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them.
02:16:07 Which topic?
02:16:08 Which you mean for drones?
02:16:11 Just space travel technology.
02:16:14 Because if you look at where we’re going, because everyone talks about Mars, and you’re
02:16:18 okay, and we’re, hey, are we going to be able to colonize?
02:16:20 And I know Elon is big into that.
02:16:22 Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA?
02:16:26 We put humans back up there.
02:16:29 My theory, so it’s funny because I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original
02:16:35 employees at SpaceX.
02:16:37 He’s a friend of mine, and I won’t say his name.
02:16:39 But he knows Elon.
02:16:40 And he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project.
02:16:45 He’s one of the lead guys on that.
02:16:46 So he’s got some great, as a matter of fact, there’s a movie, there’s a book coming out
02:16:49 that comes out in about a year on this.
02:16:51 The original, the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX.
02:16:55 And he’s named in the book.
02:16:56 And they’re supposed to make a movie on it.
02:16:57 So I’m like, hey, who’s going to play it?
02:17:00 But what he’s done, to me, it changed the game, and here’s why.
02:17:04 Because I said, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex.
02:17:10 Which it has become, everything he warned us of, it has become, and it’s really driven
02:17:17 by, there’s the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing.
02:17:23 Those are the big, those are your biggest, and Raytheon’s kind of right, like a subset
02:17:28 of that.
02:17:29 But Raytheon’s pretty big too.
02:17:30 But in US defense, those are the big guys, right?
02:17:32 That’s actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like
02:17:37 that.
02:17:38 And you look at that, and you go, and the way government contracting is working, and
02:17:41 how we charge, and why things cost so much.
02:17:44 And then you go, you got Elon, who’s got an ego, and he doesn’t like to do things a certain
02:17:50 way.
02:17:51 And I’ve talked to the guy that worked there on, because the government likes to have oversight
02:17:54 of contracts, where he was like, no, just tell me what you want, I’ll build it, and
02:17:58 I’ll give you a bill when it’s done.
02:17:59 And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money, because he’s a money
02:18:03 driven guy, which I like, capitalism at its best.
02:18:07 So now you look at the two things.
02:18:08 So you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule, right?
02:18:13 And then you’ve got Boeing.
02:18:15 So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money.
02:18:21 And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters, because they come back and land,
02:18:26 and you don’t have to, like Morton Thicol, we’ve reused them on the space shuttle.
02:18:29 But they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff, because they landed in Saltwater,
02:18:31 and then he had to put them all back together.
02:18:34 Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, go, what do they do?
02:18:36 Do they like rehaul, overhaul, because no, actually they clean them up, and they can
02:18:40 use them again.
02:18:41 They’re reusable systems.
02:18:43 Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here’s a private company.
02:18:47 So being able to put people in the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it’s literally
02:18:50 like sci fi when you watch when they went up.
02:18:52 So I’m a huge fan of what he and his company have been able to do, because the fact that
02:18:59 we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, and oh, by the way, if
02:19:03 you didn’t know, because I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn
02:19:07 Russian.
02:19:08 Right?
02:19:09 And they have to do, it’s what, level five, where the test is a phone call, where they
02:19:14 call you up and they, because they would go, so I went to the pinning, two friends of mine.
02:19:19 The one actually had a mission date, the one got one later.
02:19:21 So it’s cool when you’re watching your friends doing a spacewalk, because I would pull up,
02:19:26 because if I knew what was going on, I’d pull up the NASA thing.
02:19:27 I was in a meeting one day, and I’ve got NASA on and makers out there floating around doing
02:19:32 his stuff.
02:19:33 And I saw one, he’s in the space station while they’re doing a spacewalk, so it’s kind of
02:19:36 cool when you go, oh yeah, I know that dude, he’s up there in space, floating around.
02:19:40 So when you look at what those, they’re capable of doing, and then you go, what Elon is bringing
02:19:47 to the fact that now it’s back in America, it’s actually, to me, it’s cost effective
02:19:56 for us to be able to do more stuff.
02:19:58 I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon?
02:20:01 Is there a reason to go back to the moon?
02:20:03 Personally, I think if they’re really going to go, in years from now, go to Mars, I think
02:20:07 that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology,
02:20:11 to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the
02:20:15 moon.
02:20:17 Because we did this on less than a compact computer in the 60s, which is the whole reason
02:20:22 that I flew, because I’m obsessed.
02:20:24 Matter of fact, I have the giant Lego Apollo at home, and the Lander, and I have one that
02:20:29 my dad built me in 1969, right after that, and Neil Armstrong’s an Ohio boy, and so
02:20:35 am I.
02:20:36 Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a car in Wapakonet, Ohio, at the parade after
02:20:39 he walked on the moon, because his parents didn’t live far from my aunt and uncle in
02:20:42 Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade.
02:20:45 So I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a child.
02:20:48 Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you’ll go out to space one day?
02:20:55 Me?
02:20:56 If I had the opportunity, I’d go in a second.
02:20:58 I am not.
02:20:59 Because, I mean, that’s one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you
02:21:03 know, like people like, I mean, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn’t want to,
02:21:09 in terms of, you’re not kind of a civilian, right, I mean, in a sense that you’re just
02:21:14 a normal person, you’re not a 5G pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up,
02:21:20 there would be somebody like you in the next, like, 20 years.
02:21:24 I’d be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I’d be all over
02:21:27 it.
02:21:28 I’d be like, okay, but, you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you’re alive.
02:21:31 I’d love to hear that discussion with your wife.
02:21:33 Listen, there’s the pros and cons.
02:21:34 She’s, I mean, I’ve known her since high school, so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know.
02:21:40 Most people that know me are like, yeah, you’re pretty much the same person you were in high
02:21:43 school.
02:21:44 You know, I was a class clown and I still am that way.
02:21:47 So let me ask you this question.
02:21:49 So I’m talking to Elon again soon, I’m curious to get your perspective on it.
02:21:57 If I wanted to talk to him about TICTAC, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which
02:22:05 are obviously, just like you said, if there’s something to it, if it can be investigated
02:22:10 somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing
02:22:16 propulsion systems that can get us cheaply out to space.
02:22:21 What should Elon think about this stuff?
02:22:23 What should he do?
02:22:24 What should people like him do?
02:22:25 I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and
02:22:31 go, you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do,
02:22:38 but it’s a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really
02:22:43 in layman’s terms, you know, we can get into what, but that’s what it does.
02:22:48 If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant
02:22:56 amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they’re done, they’re done.
02:23:00 There’s enough to get them back down and that’s it.
02:23:02 There’s not a huge, you know, they’re not coming back and go, oh, I still got three
02:23:05 quarters of a tank.
02:23:06 Let’s bolt them on and do it again.
02:23:07 His system’s not doing that.
02:23:10 But you know, the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons
02:23:15 of money, but you got to remember the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars
02:23:19 for the most part.
02:23:20 There are times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done.
02:23:24 But then when you look at, and I’m just going to throw a few out there, but if you look
02:23:26 at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you’ve got Elon, there’s some big money
02:23:36 out there.
02:23:37 I mean, you’re talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy companies like big companies.
02:23:43 Apple’s another one.
02:23:44 These companies had huge, huge amounts of money.
02:23:47 And then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they’ve got gazillions and gazillions
02:23:52 of dollars.
02:23:53 We’ve got universities.
02:23:54 There’s so much money out there.
02:23:55 If we really wanted to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do
02:23:59 live in a free society, I think there’s enough to go, how do we do this?
02:24:05 And because when you work outside of what the government would want to do, let’s, we’re
02:24:11 not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant.
02:24:16 I will be.
02:24:17 American.
02:24:18 I would never.
02:24:19 Yeah.
02:24:20 I am an American.
02:24:21 You’re talking to somebody born in the Soviet.
02:24:22 I can’t believe you agreed to this.
02:24:23 But, but when I haven’t killed me yet, you’re here and you’ve been here for a while.
02:24:32 No, no, no.
02:24:33 I’m joking.
02:24:34 I’m an American citizen.
02:24:35 I’m actually pretty much American.
02:24:36 But see, when you do that, so you look at, let’s just look at American universities.
02:24:39 Yes.
02:24:40 There are some brilliant minds and we’ll just use MIT because you worked down there.
02:24:43 There’s some brilliant minds, but there’s a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that
02:24:46 are not American citizens.
02:24:48 So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American citizen, it gets
02:24:51 really, really, really hard.
02:24:53 But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money, and they, let’s just say they want
02:24:59 to work together.
02:25:00 They can split it up 50, 50, the two of them when the technology gets developed.
02:25:04 But now I’m not constrained by who has to do the work.
02:25:07 I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because technology
02:25:11 is technology.
02:25:12 And if it gets developed and gets over to where a country gets a hold of it and then
02:25:17 just basically uses it for their own, because you save them all the research time, you don’t
02:25:21 want to do that.
02:25:22 But if we can get to the point where we can, we do it on the International Space Station.
02:25:25 We realize that space was too expensive for one country to do alone.
02:25:29 So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate.
02:25:34 That’s the one thing that the Russians and the U.S. actually work together on.
02:25:38 Think about it.
02:25:39 That’s it.
02:25:40 We work together on space because we realize it’s way too expensive for us to do alone
02:25:43 and effective.
02:25:45 So we’ve got this thing that’s been out there floating around for God, now what is it, like
02:25:47 20 years that thing’s been up there floating around?
02:25:50 So it’s getting old.
02:25:51 We’re going to have to replace parts and do stuff.
02:25:52 But if we can pool the money together and come up with something that would literally
02:25:56 change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of
02:26:01 engineering, because if you develop that technology, you don’t even have to send a man person.
02:26:06 If you can develop a technology that’s so, and with our automation and where we’re progressing
02:26:10 and our competing power to send something out that’s not just floating around when,
02:26:15 you know, that can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface
02:26:20 and come back up.
02:26:21 So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends
02:26:23 data back.
02:26:24 Get an analyzer.
02:26:25 But if I’ve got a technology that can go up there really quick, I’m not worried about
02:26:28 man.
02:26:29 I don’t have life support systems and all that.
02:26:30 But if it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples
02:26:34 and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back.
02:26:38 So we can analyze it here.
02:26:39 That’s a game changer.
02:26:40 It’s a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets.
02:26:44 Exactly.
02:26:45 So in a sense, the Tic Tac is a symbol.
02:26:50 So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there’s a nonzero probability
02:26:56 that it’s alien technology.
02:26:58 In that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the
02:27:06 aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box.
02:27:13 It’s almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion.
02:27:21 We can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way and it’s worthwhile to try.
02:27:27 I think, and I don’t think the money, if you look at a big picture with the amount of money,
02:27:30 some that’s out there floating around these private companies, I think if you said, hey,
02:27:34 I’ve got, let’s just say a hundred million dollars, which really a hundred million dollars
02:27:37 relative to Bezos has got, what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that work.
02:27:41 So if he said, hey, a hundred million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go
02:27:45 and I’m going to put a, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that
02:27:50 says, hey, we’re looking for this technology or a DARPA program.
02:27:53 But what if I just said, hey, who’s to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own
02:27:57 to say, hey, I want to go pool universities because they have fewer restrictions because
02:28:01 it’s not tax dollars.
02:28:02 They don’t have the checks inbound.
02:28:03 They can do whatever they want.
02:28:04 So their money, sorry about that, to go, hey, I’m going to put this out and I’m going
02:28:09 to get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech,
02:28:14 at the schools I mentioned.
02:28:15 And, oh, by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts and I’m going to basically,
02:28:20 I’m going to fund you guys for 10 years.
02:28:23 So you get $10 million a year and I’m going to give you your salaries and we’re going
02:28:26 to do that or whatever the amount works.
02:28:28 So let’s cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right?
02:28:30 To do the research.
02:28:31 But, oh, by the way, the research is, it’s not classified, but it’s controlled.
02:28:36 So we’re not going to publicly just put this out in journals, but if we make a leap that
02:28:40 we think would advance because although those, let’s say there’s 10 of them, those 10 scientists
02:28:45 come up with something and they put out a paper, there might be a number 11 at another
02:28:49 university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kind of had this idea and now you can
02:28:54 get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the mindset.
02:28:59 Because we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it’s like I was
02:29:04 joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls.
02:29:09 And I said, but how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering, how much new math is
02:29:13 really being done?
02:29:14 I said, there’s a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I’m talking Stephen
02:29:18 Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I’m really doing something that’s totally different.
02:29:26 That’s a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody’s converged towards
02:29:30 this local minima or local maxima, whatever you think about it.
02:29:34 And it’s again, same as with the TICTAC, thinking outside the box is not accepted and it probably
02:29:44 should be.
02:29:45 But it’s hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original, he was
02:29:51 out of the box.
02:29:53 He did not think the norm.
02:29:54 That’s true genius.
02:29:55 Had he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories, where would
02:29:59 we be?
02:30:00 Okay, we’re jumping around a little bit.
02:30:03 So we’ve talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, but let me jump back to a
02:30:09 few questions that folks had.
02:30:11 I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual facts
02:30:17 of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart
02:30:25 a little bit because people are just talking past each other, but let me kind of bring
02:30:29 it up.
02:30:30 Mick West, I’ve just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to talk to you
02:30:36 about this world.
02:30:37 And Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to
02:30:44 debunk.
02:30:45 Sort of his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic.
02:30:50 I think it’s very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective
02:30:55 to take the approach he does.
02:30:57 It’s valuable.
02:30:58 And I think no matter what, I think there’s, I hope that people, quote unquote, true believers
02:31:04 are a little bit more open minded to the work of Mick West.
02:31:07 I think it’s quite useful and brilliant work.
02:31:11 So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible
02:31:17 other explanations of the things that were out there.
02:31:21 He has some explanations of the things that you’ve seen in with the Tic Tac, like with
02:31:27 your own eyes.
02:31:28 He says that it’s possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and
02:31:36 so on when you were flying around.
02:31:37 I don’t find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that.
02:31:41 Let me do it right now.
02:31:42 Sure.
02:31:43 So, cause that comes up.
02:31:44 Like how, how did you know it was about 40 feet long?
02:31:45 I go, okay, so 16 years flying against other airplanes, know what stuff looks like.
02:31:53 You know, I’ve looked down on things.
02:31:54 So if I know, I know, here’s the known things.
02:31:56 I know when we saw the Tic Tac, I was at 20,000 feet ish, right around there.
02:32:02 So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like looking down on them cause I’ve
02:32:05 done it for all those years.
02:32:07 I mean, I got a good idea.
02:32:08 So that’s, that’s why I said 40 feet cause it’s about Hornet size.
02:32:11 So and as I go around, you know, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge
02:32:15 distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big, you
02:32:21 know.
02:32:23 So I would argue the fact of, you know, peer experiences, you know, professional observers,
02:32:30 which is what we’re actually trained to do.
02:32:33 And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing.
02:32:38 They’re like, yeah, it’s about size of Hornet.
02:32:40 From a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years do you
02:32:46 find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things.
02:32:53 So like how often do you make mistakes with vision?
02:32:57 You actually, you make vision issues a lot because you’re, and the sad part is, is your
02:33:02 brain believes what your eyes see.
02:33:04 We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly
02:33:08 because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instruments.
02:33:14 Let’s go back to landing at night.
02:33:16 So your eyes assume that the runway and your brain assumes that
02:33:22 the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving.
02:33:26 So if I try and do stuff visually, I would, you die every time, not every time, but you
02:33:31 die close to every time trying to land on a boat.
02:33:34 So we actually use instruments, which are counter to your brain.
02:33:37 So, and there’s actually all kinds of things that we go through in training.
02:33:41 They have this thing, I think they still use it.
02:33:43 It’s called the MSDD multi spatial disorientation device or the spin and puke.
02:33:51 It looks like a giant carousel and you’re in these little modules.
02:33:53 And when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can, you can make
02:33:57 yourself think that I’m descending or climbing, but we were actually only going around in
02:34:01 circles at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk.
02:34:04 But as they spin you around in a little sub thing and slow it down and speed it up, your
02:34:08 body does this and you, you know, and then by visuals of showing you like they can spin
02:34:12 it sideways to the outside wall, but they can show like lines that are, they can make
02:34:16 the line stand still because they’re moving the same velocity.
02:34:18 They can move the other way and you’ll think you’re screaming.
02:34:20 You see it in amusement parks all the time.
02:34:23 You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A, but you’re really not doing, you’re
02:34:28 sitting there.
02:34:29 So we get trained on all that stuff.
02:34:30 So if you, if you want to look at it and go, well, you’re, you’re disoriented or this,
02:34:33 I’d be like, I’d argue going, no, I’m not.
02:34:35 Because you know, when I’m flying the airplane, even as I’m looking at the Tic Tac, I’ve got
02:34:39 a heads up display that tells me what my airplane’s doing.
02:34:42 So I’ve got, I know what I’m doing.
02:34:44 I can look outside.
02:34:45 I’ve got a sense of what I’m doing, but I’m also looking inside to cross check of what
02:34:49 I’m seeing is in reality, what I’m doing.
02:34:51 You actually, your brain gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information.
02:34:56 You have to, you have like supervision, so you’re combining what you’re seeing and adjusting
02:35:01 what the sensors, what you call an instruments are giving you.
02:35:04 And that, that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that, that
02:35:10 adjusts your brain’s interpretation of what you’re saying.
02:35:13 You’d be amazed at how good, so here’s a, here’s another example.
02:35:15 So if we go out over the water, so there’s no land in sight and we’re going to fight.
02:35:20 So when we fight, you know, two airplanes, we’re going to dog fight.
02:35:25 As an instructor and I was for all, most of my time, you have to come back and you have
02:35:30 to recreate it.
02:35:31 So we call it drawing arrows.
02:35:33 So you have to recreate that stuff.
02:35:37 So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would take off and say, all right,
02:35:41 we’re starting heading due east and I know where the sun is at because in the short couple
02:35:47 minutes that we’re going to fight, the sun’s really not going to move much.
02:35:49 It’s going to be in a relative zone.
02:35:50 I know that the sun is at, you know, let’s just say 195 degrees, right?
02:35:56 So I’m starting going east and it’s actually be down off my right hand side.
02:36:00 So now I know as I’m fighting, cause in the water you don’t have any reference.
02:36:03 Like I pass land.
02:36:04 I pass land.
02:36:05 No, you don’t.
02:36:06 And you can’t use clouds cause clouds do move.
02:36:07 But you got to come back cause you go, here’s where I started.
02:36:09 And then you, when, as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355.
02:36:14 And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relative.
02:36:18 So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows so that you can come back
02:36:22 and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened.
02:36:27 And you get really, really good at that.
02:36:28 So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six oclock?
02:36:31 And he went around and he came up here.
02:36:32 I go, because I’m trained to do all that.
02:36:36 And I take all the notes, why I’m flying, you can do it.
02:36:39 But usually it’s, you memorize it all and you get done and then you, as soon as you’re
02:36:42 done, you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get set and you start writing
02:36:45 all your notes down.
02:36:46 Yeah.
02:36:47 And you’re writing it really fast on your card and you go out with a stack of cards
02:36:50 and you stick the new one on your knee board card so you’re ready to go and here’s the
02:36:52 next setup.
02:36:53 It’s kind of, it’s in some way similar to what like at the, at the highest level chess
02:37:00 players do.
02:37:01 I mean, you’re, I mean, they, they, they recap the games.
02:37:07 But the, the richness of the representation that they use in remembering like how the
02:37:13 games evolved.
02:37:15 It’s not like it’s much richer than the actual moves.
02:37:19 It’s like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all
02:37:24 the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved.
02:37:30 It’s more like instinctual from years and years of experience.
02:37:34 So they try to put it into words, but they really can’t.
02:37:37 It’s just.
02:37:38 I understand that.
02:37:39 It’s because for us, if we don’t come back with anything, then there’s no learning to
02:37:42 be had.
02:37:43 Right.
02:37:44 Because the whole thing is the debrief when we get back and we talk about, that’s really
02:37:47 where the learning is.
02:37:49 And it’s the same thing if you want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off,
02:37:52 you try and learn because you’re remembering what you’re doing.
02:37:55 If you play against someone, I’m always a big place, play with someone better than you.
02:37:59 That’s how you learn.
02:38:00 If you’re constantly beating people, you’re not learning anything.
02:38:01 You’re just learning that they’re not good and you’re better.
02:38:04 When you challenge yourself against someone that is better than you, you learn.
02:38:10 So I learned how to fight an airplane with, he’s actually one of my best friends, we’ll
02:38:15 call him Tom.
02:38:16 I won’t give his call sign because I don’t know what his name is.
02:38:19 So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun.
02:38:23 He was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that’s the guy, the training officer is
02:38:28 the main guy at Top Gun.
02:38:30 So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun.
02:38:32 So Tom, when I learned, because I had come out of A6 and we really don’t fight because
02:38:36 it was a bomber.
02:38:37 So I get in F18s and I want to learn how to fight because it’s a whole other side of the
02:38:40 mission.
02:38:41 It’s the F and F fighter attack.
02:38:42 The F18 is fighter attack.
02:38:44 So I had to learn how to fight.
02:38:46 So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who’s going to teach me how to
02:38:49 do it.
02:38:51 And he did.
02:38:52 And I would do something and then he would go, I’d get to a situation where I had never
02:38:56 been.
02:38:57 And then I would go, well, I’m going to do this.
02:38:58 And then he would destroy me and he would come back and go, here’s why you don’t do
02:39:02 that.
02:39:03 And then I would take that knowledge and I would put it in my little basket of tricks.
02:39:06 And over time, because you don’t, no one walks out into that world.
02:39:09 I don’t care how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman.
02:39:13 I am it.
02:39:14 No, it’s a learning process.
02:39:17 And so over all those years, you’ve gotten good.
02:39:22 So what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac?
02:39:29 Low.
02:39:30 Zero.
02:39:31 Well, I mean, I’m not zero.
02:39:34 So maybe 90.
02:39:35 Yeah, I am ninety nine point nine percent.
02:39:37 So point one percent.
02:39:39 My eyes deceive me.
02:39:40 But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people.
02:39:43 So the percentage is even lower.
02:39:45 Yeah.
02:39:46 Look up.
02:39:47 Well, I don’t find that particular debunking case that you said, but I’m glad you put it.
02:39:51 You you said those words out loud.
02:39:55 So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I’m a little
02:40:00 bit more skeptical.
02:40:03 So your eye account, I think, is the most fascinating story.
02:40:06 And that I think that’s inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists
02:40:12 out there on so many levels, just like we said, an engineering level that maybe there’s
02:40:19 propulsion systems we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.
02:40:24 So it’s at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring.
02:40:30 I just want to say that.
02:40:31 But on the video side, it’s like it’s the videos for the Flir video, the go fast and
02:40:43 the gimbal video.
02:40:45 They are only interesting to me to me in the context of your story.
02:40:53 Like without that, they’re kind of low resolution.
02:40:56 It’s like it it’s easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical.
02:41:02 So this is where I’m coming from.
02:41:04 Maybe you can convince me otherwise.
02:41:06 But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that
02:41:12 one of the most amazing video parts of the Flir video for people haven’t seen it is at
02:41:17 the end of it, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen.
02:41:31 And what Mick West says is that, you know, Mick West, probably others, that the way to
02:41:39 explain that is the tracking system.
02:41:42 Like we said, this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object.
02:41:48 The tracking loses it.
02:41:50 And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it’s no longer tracking
02:41:57 it.
02:41:58 So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video.
02:42:04 Looking at your face, you do not.
02:42:07 So can you maybe comment to that to that debunking aspect?
02:42:12 So it’s funny how people can extrapolate stuff who’ve never operated the system.
02:42:18 No, for sure.
02:42:19 And that’s like me going because I’m a big Formula One fan.
02:42:22 You know, that’s like me going, oh, my God, Lewis, what were you doing?
02:42:25 You could have done this with the car and you’d have won the race.
02:42:27 You know, and Lewis Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two time
02:42:30 ways, four time, four or five time world champion.
02:42:33 But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.
02:42:39 Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car.
02:42:43 So I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched.
02:42:45 You got to remember when we looked at this thing, when when Chad came back with the video,
02:42:49 we sat there and watched that.
02:42:50 I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all
02:42:53 right, right.
02:42:54 All right.
02:42:55 Let’s look at this, you know, because you can look and see where the you can see where
02:42:58 the airplane’s going.
02:42:59 You can see if it’s looking left or right.
02:43:00 And if you actually watch all that stuff, it doesn’t do that.
02:43:02 It actually when the vehicle starts to move, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open
02:43:07 up and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod.
02:43:11 The tracking gate will start to open up.
02:43:12 And but the thing when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can’t move fast enough.
02:43:17 It has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around because there’s another theory
02:43:20 that, oh, the pods looking forward when the pod passes underneath the airplane.
02:43:24 So if I’m looking at you and you pass underneath me as it does this, the ball will actually
02:43:28 flip around to kind of finish off and it’ll it’ll it swaps ends because it has, you know,
02:43:33 it’s a gimbal.
02:43:34 It can’t just it’s not free floating.
02:43:38 But there’s a theory on one of them.
02:43:39 Oh, it’s here and it flipped over.
02:43:40 It doesn’t do that when it’s looking out in front.
02:43:41 It stays like this.
02:43:43 So yet another another debunker who doesn’t know this.
02:43:45 So, you know, and Mick has had several theories on other of some of the other videos like
02:43:50 one of them, the go fast as a bird.
02:43:53 And Jeremy Corbell actually did a nice job of saying, no, it’s not because he’s on he’s
02:43:57 on black hot.
02:43:58 So the white object is actually colder than the ocean.
02:44:02 That’s fine.
02:44:03 If they were colder than the ocean, they’d be dead.
02:44:05 So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the
02:44:13 apparent rotation of the object.
02:44:15 That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of.
02:44:22 And Mick West suggests that a flare like reflections or whatever can explain.
02:44:30 Now, because what Mick West doesn’t see is so when they take because I’ve talked to the
02:44:36 one of them, actually, I work with.
02:44:37 So I know him.
02:44:38 I know I talk to him all the time.
02:44:40 So and it’s his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends for the
02:44:46 video, the movie and both of them that go fast in the game were shot by the same person.
02:44:50 Yeah.
02:44:51 OK, so and they were in each other’s wedding.
02:44:54 So that’s how well they know each other.
02:44:55 OK, so what you don’t see is.
02:44:58 So the airplanes, airplanes still super hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new
02:45:03 phased array radar that’s made by Raytheon, things incredible, OK?
02:45:08 It doesn’t usually if it’s if it’s out there and it sees it, it’s real.
02:45:11 So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff.
02:45:13 And then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there.
02:45:16 Well, the targeting pod, there’s heat signature and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something’s
02:45:19 there.
02:45:20 It’s real.
02:45:21 It’s not you’re not picking up some extraneous thing.
02:45:22 So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit,
02:45:27 look at that thing.
02:45:28 And it’s in the wind and it’s going against the wind while it’s doing this.
02:45:32 You know, someone goes, oh, it’s an airplane.
02:45:33 No, if an airplane does this, it’s eventually going to start to change aspect because it’s
02:45:36 in a turn.
02:45:37 This thing doesn’t change aspect.
02:45:38 It just rotates.
02:45:39 It’s just rotating.
02:45:40 Right.
02:45:41 The other thing that you see when you talk to them is so they’re on their radar.
02:45:44 There’s an object that they identify is their number one priority or their launch and steering.
02:45:51 So when they designate that, that’s where the targeting pod is going to look.
02:45:54 That’s what you get on the gimbal video.
02:45:56 There’s five other I think it’s five.
02:45:58 They’re kind of in a V, you know, like a geese would fly that are out in front of it and
02:46:02 they’re actually coming.
02:46:03 They’re out in front of it and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while
02:46:06 they’re filming the gimbal video, which it’s I know Ryan has come out and talked about
02:46:13 it.
02:46:14 But when you see it, you go, you know, if you take it in context because you go, oh,
02:46:19 it’s just the video.
02:46:20 Well, if you take the video with the radar going, no, there’s actually other things out
02:46:23 there because there’s at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the VACAPES.
02:46:29 It actually became, I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time, the
02:46:33 fighter wing.
02:46:34 I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this?
02:46:35 He goes, well, we got a NOTAM out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there’s these
02:46:38 objects out there in the warning area.
02:46:41 So anyone, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area.
02:46:44 All the warning area tells you is that there’s high military traffic and training out here.
02:46:47 It’s probably best not to be here, but there’s nothing that prohibits you from going in there.
02:46:52 So these things have the right, wherever they’re from or whatever they are, you know, cause
02:46:56 people are like, oh, they’re balloons.
02:46:57 Well, balloons float.
02:46:59 Balloons don’t sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location.
02:47:02 They had an airplane because there was two.
02:47:05 There’s the gimbal thing.
02:47:06 That’s a pretty big object.
02:47:08 There’s also, they talk about, it looks like a cube that’s inside of a sphere.
02:47:11 A translucent sphere.
02:47:12 What the hell is that?
02:47:13 And they almost hit one.
02:47:16 It’s almost hit them.
02:47:17 So that’s another, that’s one of the biggest, another biggest account.
02:47:21 It’s like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere.
02:47:27 What do you make of that?
02:47:30 Again, you know, what, I mean, that that’s, that’s the most dangerous thing.
02:47:36 You’re right.
02:47:37 The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go, okay, so this thing passed between
02:47:40 two airplanes and it was, I think it was more than like a hundred feet or something like
02:47:43 that of the airplane that almost hit it.
02:47:45 So what they do is they come back and go, Hey, I had a near midair, what’d you have
02:47:48 a near midair with?
02:47:49 It’s kind of this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it.
02:47:52 And you go, huh?
02:47:53 And you know, so they send out a NOTAM again and they, they do a, what’s called a hazard
02:47:57 report that says, Hey, there’s these objects out there.
02:47:59 We almost hit one here and that gets sent off to the Naval safety center.
02:48:04 What was done?
02:48:05 I mean, what are you going to do?
02:48:06 Can you catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one?
02:48:10 You don’t know because they’ve seen them.
02:48:11 They picked them up like hovering on radar.
02:48:13 And then all of a sudden they’re traveling at really high rates of speed.
02:48:15 So you know, what are you going to do?
02:48:18 Well, and that, let me ask this, cause this is what people kind of think about.
02:48:25 After you witnessed Tic Tac and after this, these incidents, as far as we know, uh, with
02:48:30 the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not, did not react
02:48:39 like what, like did not freak out.
02:48:43 It almost like was like a mundane event.
02:48:46 How do you explain that?
02:48:47 Why didn’t the people on the ship, not the higher ups, why wasn’t there a big freakout?
02:48:53 Or as some people suggest, the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not
02:48:58 letting everyone know that there’s some kind of secret military, uh, uh, you know, like,
02:49:05 like tests.
02:49:06 Yeah.
02:49:07 So let’s talk about, so let’s say you’ve got this cool new toy, which you call it a cool
02:49:11 new toy.
02:49:12 You typically don’t take your cool new toy out into an area where the cool new toy could
02:49:15 get damaged or what if the airplane would have actually hit your cool new toy and you
02:49:19 got two people that are ejecting or dead and you got a, you know, $80 million airplane
02:49:23 that’s now in the bottom of the Atlantic, um, you know, tests are normally done in controlled
02:49:29 environments.
02:49:30 Just, it’s like any test, a lab test or whatever.
02:49:32 When you take things out into the real world, you know, you’re still going to test it in
02:49:36 an area where if something goes wrong.
02:49:38 So when they started and we’ll go back to Elon.
02:49:41 So my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go off, they were out in Kwajalein
02:49:45 and when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket and it ran out of fuel before
02:49:50 it got all the way up and it came falling back down.
02:49:53 Well, when you’re out on an ATOL in the Pacific, if it’s going up above you, the worst case
02:49:58 is going to land on you.
02:49:59 So you’re worried about where else is it going to land and it actually crashed next to the
02:50:02 ATOL and, and, you know, Elon wasn’t happy and threw this guy under the bus.
02:50:08 So that’s a test environment because you don’t know what’s going to happen.
02:50:12 So cause someone said, well, when we chased the Tic Tac, well, it could have been some
02:50:15 secret government thing.
02:50:16 Well, secret government things typically just don’t come out and test to where there’s going
02:50:21 to be.
02:50:22 Unknowing pilots, you can’t control a lot of things.
02:50:24 You’re exactly right.
02:50:25 So you go, you know, it’s, you know, it’s not the Dr. Evil scientist that’s going to
02:50:29 throw shit out there to get, there’s control and there’s reasons that we do it because
02:50:34 a lot of stuff, especially when you get to there’s, there’s, you build something in theory,
02:50:39 you model it, you go, Hey, this is, it looks like it’s going to work.
02:50:43 You get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it.
02:50:47 You know, you like an airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the
02:50:51 ground.
02:50:52 They’ve got things over the pedostatic system that are changing the, what the airplane thinks
02:50:56 is the airspeed talking to it and it’s probably up on Jack.
02:50:59 So the gear up, so it doesn’t, it thinks it’s flying.
02:51:02 It doesn’t know it’s sitting on Jack stands.
02:51:04 And they’re just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system so they can actually
02:51:07 make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, Hey, it looks
02:51:11 like it’s going to work.
02:51:12 And then there’s wind, there’s a bunch of stuff that they do.
02:51:15 That’s a control environment which you can do the testing.
02:51:17 Yeah.
02:51:18 Throwing shit out in the middle of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous
02:51:23 thing that I’ve heard.
02:51:25 Is it possible?
02:51:26 Yes.
02:51:27 Is it more really, is it, is it, is it, is it more likely, it’s more likely they’re not
02:51:33 doing that.
02:51:34 Then the other side of that question is why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the
02:51:40 US government in general, not freak out more at the incredible thing that you’ve seen?
02:51:45 Freak out in the positive way, freak out in the negative way.
02:51:48 Like what are the Russians up to again?
02:51:51 Or more like what is this?
02:51:53 Like more turmoil.
02:51:55 So if you would have put a Chinese flag on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side
02:52:00 of it, and I said, yeah, it had a big Russian flag on the side of it, dude.
02:52:03 Then it would have got a lot of attention.
02:52:04 It would have went high order, right?
02:52:06 If it was, you don’t have to say Russia or China, just say if there was another country’s
02:52:11 emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then it’s
02:52:16 a big deal.
02:52:17 So here’s what’s going on.
02:52:18 So we’re literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup.
02:52:21 Normally they, we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month.
02:52:24 This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when
02:52:27 the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving so we could run home up to the central valley, have Thanksgiving
02:52:31 with our family, and then run back down and do this, okay?
02:52:34 So when I had just taken over, I had had the squadron for a month, right?
02:52:40 So I’m a brand new CO, I’m the most junior guy on the, as far as a commanding officer
02:52:46 goes, for time in the Navy, and actually at the time I think it was the most junior CO
02:52:51 for O5 Command in the Navy, right?
02:52:53 So you go, okay, so I’m out here, I got my squadron, I’m running it, I see this thing,
02:52:59 we catch shit for it.
02:53:00 I have a squadron to run.
02:53:02 I have the, the TICTAC was over here and although an extraordinary event, I have 17 aircrew
02:53:08 and 300 sailors that I’m responsible for, right?
02:53:12 Their wellbeing, making sure they’re fed, making sure they’re happy, they’re birthing,
02:53:17 you know, and I’m working with my Master Chief and I’m working with my XO, SNAP, and we’re
02:53:22 going through all this stuff.
02:53:23 I don’t have a lot of time to worry about the TICTAC.
02:53:28 But people need to talk to me, so you got to remember, you got the captain of the ship,
02:53:32 you got the air wing commander, and you got the Admiral.
02:53:35 Those are the top three.
02:53:36 And you got the CO of the Princeton, who is a major command guy, and that’s really your
02:53:40 big major command.
02:53:41 And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are O5 Command, and you got
02:53:45 the small boys that are out there, which is O5 Command.
02:53:47 So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what’s going on, I’m pretty much in the
02:53:53 top 20 with all my peers, and then I’ve got, obviously, the captain and the admiral, right?
02:53:59 And then he’s got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with.
02:54:02 So you’re responsible for a lot of things.
02:54:04 Yes.
02:54:05 Oh, yeah.
02:54:06 Busy schedule.
02:54:07 Yeah.
02:54:08 There’s missions.
02:54:09 You have to do a lot, get the job done, and there’s no time for silly things.
02:54:13 That’s exactly right.
02:54:14 So, and we’re the integration, you know, when a battle group deploys, especially when you
02:54:20 go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the key.
02:54:24 We take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want, and we can do what we need
02:54:28 to do.
02:54:29 So we’re kind of key players.
02:54:30 So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed up.
02:54:33 So the captain of the ship never said anything to me, the admiral never saying to me, the
02:54:37 people on his staff that I was friends with never saying to me, the other COs that I talked
02:54:40 to on a daily basis never said anything to me, and no one ever came and talked to me,
02:54:44 and I’m the guy that chased it.
02:54:45 So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories, because I don’t know
02:54:48 if people think they’re going to get rich on this because I made a big donut on this.
02:54:52 I can tell you what I got paid for.
02:54:53 I got paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my day going to LA and do a five minute talk
02:54:57 for someone.
02:54:58 And I’m like, and it wasn’t for the talk because I’ll talk for free because you’re not paying
02:55:00 me.
02:55:01 I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because my wife and I got to go because
02:55:08 it was just looked like fun because the whole town gets involved.
02:55:10 And it’s the only time I’ve ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because
02:55:14 it was just, you know, it was fun.
02:55:16 And I got asked and Jeremy and George Knappen went the year before.
02:55:18 So I went with Bob Lazar.
02:55:21 So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife and, you know, we
02:55:24 all hung out kind of, you know, talking not about UFO stuff, but just getting to know
02:55:28 each other as people because, you know, Bob’s like me, the stuff that he talks about is
02:55:33 not the center of his life.
02:55:34 If anything, it ruined his life, you know, he’s just a really, really smart guy.
02:55:40 That’s just like the rest of us trying to get through life.
02:55:42 Yeah, nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lou Elizondo’s resignation
02:55:50 note from his, he was a program director at the ATIP program.
02:55:59 One of the sad things is that he’s mentioned that, you know, people in government just
02:56:04 don’t take this seriously as a threat, like UFOs as a threat, like you said, if it doesn’t
02:56:10 have a Russian label on it, it’s a sad thing to think about that, that we have such a busy
02:56:17 schedule that the anomaly, it doesn’t, is a distraction that we don’t want to deal with
02:56:25 and it kind of just fades into history.
02:56:29 Like literally, it’s kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up, like, and it just
02:56:38 didn’t because they’re not, like when aliens show up, they’re not going to be a thing that’s
02:56:44 on the schedule and if they don’t start killing people, they just kind of show up in some
02:56:50 very nonchalant peaceful way briefly.
02:56:57 People would be like, that’s, I don’t have time for this.
02:57:02 That’s so sad.
02:57:03 That’s so sad.
02:57:04 It’s like anywhere in the world.
02:57:05 So, you know, go back, let’s go back way back, way back in the time machine, you know, there
02:57:11 were people kind of scattered around the globe, you know, and Europe’s a perfect example.
02:57:16 Why does France speak French?
02:57:18 And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish and then you’d
02:57:23 kind of jump over and Germans are German and the Polish people, everyone speaks a different
02:57:27 language because if you look at the way the train kind of subdivide the original people
02:57:31 that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently, right?
02:57:37 You’d be like the US, but see, the US is different.
02:57:39 We all speak English because what happened?
02:57:40 We came over and we started on the east coast and we migrated west.
02:57:44 We won’t get into the, you know, what happened and, you know, because the Native Americans
02:57:48 all spoke different languages, you know, it’s that same type of thing.
02:57:52 So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up, you’re actually, you think about, you’re
02:57:56 an alien.
02:57:57 If I went to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years where, you know,
02:58:02 or a thousand years where travel, we weren’t traveling across oceans at the time.
02:58:05 We were, well, we don’t think we were, but the Vikings probably were because we had limited,
02:58:10 you know, we had to have supplies and the boats weren’t as big.
02:58:12 We had to build them by hand.
02:58:13 We didn’t have power tools and all that stuff.
02:58:15 So, you know, if you show up someplace like when the conquistadors from Spain came over
02:58:19 into South America and you’ve got, you know, the natives, you’re actually an alien, you
02:58:25 know, and then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in a human alien
02:58:30 world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area.
02:58:33 The other, we take what we want.
02:58:38 And that’s what happened.
02:58:39 I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that’s how we are, you know, humans
02:58:45 are, we’re an interesting group.
02:58:48 So you go, now what?
02:58:49 What if something is from someplace else?
02:58:52 Let’s just, let’s just go off the grid and go, let’s say there are little green men.
02:58:57 What are their intentions?
02:58:58 Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo and he said, what do you think
02:59:01 they were here for us?
02:59:02 I said, I don’t know.
02:59:03 He goes, what?
02:59:04 I go, I don’t know.
02:59:05 They were observing.
02:59:06 They’d come down, they’d hang out.
02:59:07 And he goes, well, what if they were prepping the battlefield?
02:59:08 What if they were observing to figure out what we do?
02:59:10 And you go, that’s interesting.
02:59:12 The other theory is maybe there’s a more advanced civilization out here and they just check
02:59:16 in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization that’s
02:59:21 inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above.
02:59:27 Because now these, they become the threatened type.
02:59:29 So you watch us grow until we start getting too much.
02:59:32 You know, it’s kind of like you go, well, cause they always have a tendency to hang
02:59:34 out around nuclear.
02:59:35 Right?
02:59:36 And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced civilization, I’m going to go science
02:59:39 fiction kind of comical.
02:59:40 They come down and watch us and go, look at the, the crazy upright monkeys now have developed
02:59:45 the atom bomb.
02:59:46 Let’s hope they don’t destroy themselves.
02:59:47 Yeah, if I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb.
02:59:52 That’s why the, I mean, there’s certainly an uptick of, what is it, UFO sightings since,
03:00:00 since the nuclear era, since the nuclear era.
03:00:03 Yeah.
03:00:04 You go, hmm.
03:00:07 Let me ask a little bit out there question, maybe it’s a speculation, but maybe touching
03:00:13 on Roswell, do you think it’s possible that there is out of this world aircraft or beings
03:00:26 that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth, like the US government?
03:00:32 Is it possible?
03:00:34 So the one perspective of that, if it’s possible, is it possible to keep a secret like that?
03:00:40 I would say this.
03:00:41 I think it’s very, it’s highly possible because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings
03:00:46 and let’s go, just look at project Blue Book, it was what the, I forget how many thousands
03:00:51 of sightings that there’s a percentage, it’s like 10 or 15% of them, they still can’t explain.
03:00:55 Like our Tic Tac is one of them that, you know, they basically, the government has come
03:00:58 out and said, we don’t know what that was.
03:00:59 Okay.
03:01:00 So, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that we don’t know, and all of these thousands are
03:01:05 still that 15% makes up a pretty big number.
03:01:07 What are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?
03:01:13 And I don’t care if it’s an intact system or you’ve got pieces of it, of a metal that
03:01:18 we can’t explain or some, some biological matter to say the least, it could be intact
03:01:27 or it couldn’t, but the odds of that now are starting to go down that, you know, that could
03:01:32 never happen.
03:01:33 And I’m not talking just the United States, I’m talking the world.
03:01:36 So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone
03:01:40 in the, in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something that is
03:01:46 not from this world?
03:01:47 And I’m not talking a meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed
03:01:52 transport or observation.
03:01:54 Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does
03:01:57 all that stuff.
03:01:58 And we’ve got stuff that just went past Pluto that’s out in the Kuiper belt, you know, there’s,
03:02:02 there’s stuff out there floating around.
03:02:04 And what about ours, it’s going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, cause we’ve
03:02:07 had stuff crash into planets.
03:02:09 So if that’s the case, you would think something is out there that we have something that we
03:02:14 can’t explain.
03:02:15 And according to Lou, there’s stuff that we can’t explain, you know, and I would assume
03:02:19 that Lou who ran a tip has, has seen stuff that he can’t openly talk about because, you
03:02:25 know, cause I had a clearance.
03:02:27 When you have a clearance, you were, you sign your name, you’re bound to that.
03:02:31 And to me, that’s an important oath that you hold to, you know, and this is kind of where,
03:02:36 you know, people have issues with Bob.
03:02:39 So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not.
03:02:42 I’ll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy.
03:02:47 Bob Luzaro.
03:02:48 Yeah.
03:02:49 Yes.
03:02:50 There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked, you know, to
03:02:53 those who will clearance who, you know, are true to the government, you would say he should
03:02:58 have never spoke.
03:02:59 He, he was under an oath to not say anything, but he did.
03:03:02 If you ask Bob, why did you say something?
03:03:05 His, his answer was, I understand there’s an oath, but I felt that the technology could
03:03:10 benefit all of mankind and it shouldn’t be locked away.
03:03:14 And I’ll leave it.
03:03:15 If you believe Bob, that’s, that’s kind of what Bob says.
03:03:17 And that, that’s such a interesting key point.
03:03:21 If there is aircraft, a technology that’s in the possession of the, say the US government,
03:03:28 should they make that publicly known?
03:03:30 This is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature
03:03:37 of human civilization?
03:03:39 Like the, the way we, the way we think about our place in the world, also the, if that
03:03:47 technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict,
03:03:55 should we release that information or not, if you were the government?
03:03:58 So here, well, here’s exactly how.
03:04:00 So for, for classified information, the government is the people that classify it.
03:04:05 So I can’t go, I can’t look at something and go, Oh my God, this Avion bottle is now a
03:04:09 top secret.
03:04:10 I can’t, I don’t have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that.
03:04:13 That’s the guard.
03:04:14 That’s up to the government.
03:04:15 And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life.
03:04:17 So I understand that.
03:04:21 But now you go, there’s reasons stuff is classified.
03:04:24 Okay.
03:04:25 And it has to do with, uh, sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained.
03:04:31 It’s just like the mob.
03:04:32 If I have a spy and I’m a mobster and you’re the counter mobster, but I have a guy on the
03:04:36 inside that’s feeding me information, I can’t do it.
03:04:39 And a perfect example is if you’ve ever seen the, uh, it’s the Tom Cruise movie, what is
03:04:44 it?
03:04:45 Air America or whatever, but he, he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling drugs
03:04:48 for Pablo Escobar and he ended up getting a cargo plane and the government, the CIA
03:04:53 was kind of funding him to do stuff.
03:04:56 That’s how he got hooked up with Pablo, but they put cameras on his airplane and when
03:04:58 Reagan had come out and said, here’s pictures, we have proof that they’re running these drugs.
03:05:03 It didn’t take Pablo long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside of the plane
03:05:06 of this guy he had been working with and that guy ends up dead.
03:05:09 Does that make sense?
03:05:10 So you classify to protect the source, you classify to protect the technology because
03:05:15 if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there’s levels depending
03:05:20 on if it’s a secret or top secret.
03:05:22 There are levels of damage that can be done to the U S government and our wellbeing as
03:05:25 a country.
03:05:26 And we owe it to this because we’re all Americans.
03:05:29 You know, to me, no matter what some people will say, even in this country, this is the
03:05:33 greatest country on the planet.
03:05:35 This is the only country that you have the ability to do what you want to do.
03:05:38 It’s just, don’t be lazy.
03:05:40 And I have stories of people that came over here and started with nothing and they’re,
03:05:46 they’re living the American dream and they’ll tell you, and they didn’t get it because of,
03:05:49 you know, like you, you came over here from Russia, you get no minority status or anything
03:05:56 else.
03:05:57 You get, you’re a white Anglo Saxton Protestant, whatever your religion, but you come over
03:06:03 here.
03:06:04 I kind of knew that from the last, but, um, but you come over here, you basically have
03:06:09 made yourself, you’re educated, you’re working at literally the top research university in
03:06:15 the world.
03:06:16 To be honest, um, I can do whatever the hell I can create a, with a bit of, with a lot
03:06:21 of hard work, I can do quite a, and no one gave it to you.
03:06:25 So, I mean, and I, well, I’m a believer that like that, I mean, we are a community.
03:06:32 So like there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real
03:06:38 thing.
03:06:39 And this is this, I, you know, I joke about being Russian, but I, I’m an American and
03:06:43 this is, I do believe the greatest country on earth.
03:06:46 So there’s a reason the nationalist pride, uh, the pride in your nation is a powerful
03:06:52 thing.
03:06:53 And around that, this secrecy holds value.
03:06:58 But to me, alien technology is bigger than that.
03:07:03 I mean, it’s, it’s not so much a threat as a, you’re holding back something that could
03:07:11 inspire the world, like human knowledge.
03:07:15 So let’s talk in theory.
03:07:16 So I’m going to go back to Bob cause I’ve talked to Bob.
03:07:20 So Bob is a propulsion guy, right?
03:07:23 Right.
03:07:24 Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor.
03:07:26 He built a rocket car, you know, so he did that.
03:07:29 So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let’s just say this is, I’m just talking,
03:07:34 this is Dave’s theory.
03:07:36 I am, I own, I have, I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don’t understand.
03:07:44 And I know it’s a propulsion system.
03:07:46 So now I got to figure it out, right?
03:07:49 So who are you going to go to, right?
03:07:51 You go find someone.
03:07:52 So you go, wait, here’s a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos, which they have
03:07:57 proven who is big into propulsion.
03:08:00 He designs all this.
03:08:01 He builds a shit in his garage, Hey, he’s super smart.
03:08:05 Why don’t we bring him in?
03:08:06 So you hire him on a contract and you go, Hey, we’re going to brief you into a program.
03:08:09 And he goes and works on wherever he says he worked, you know, that’s not important,
03:08:12 but you get access to the technology to try and figure it out.
03:08:15 And then you go, well, you know, Bob comes out and says, you know, like we’re figuring
03:08:19 out these things, but there’s a part where our technology isn’t advanced enough for us
03:08:22 to figure the whole thing out.
03:08:25 So then, you know, and let’s just say Bob doesn’t come out and tell anyone he works
03:08:29 on it until he gets to the point where he’s stagnated.
03:08:33 He’s at a, he’s at a wall.
03:08:34 You go, I can’t do it.
03:08:35 You know, sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind.
03:08:37 So you go find someone else who’s into propulsion, you bring him in and they work, they can’t
03:08:40 figure it out.
03:08:41 Or they get to the point where kind of back to the Einstein theory where, Hey, I’ve got
03:08:44 all these theories on how it works, but we don’t have the technology.
03:08:46 We haven’t advanced enough to actually do what we need to do.
03:08:49 We still have to advance technology more.
03:08:51 So then what do you do?
03:08:52 You shelf it, you go, Hey, good projects over and the contract, you shelf it and you wait
03:08:57 another 10 years and you wait another 10 years until technology and our abilities and our
03:09:02 research advances more and then you go find new people to bring in that are experts in
03:09:06 that field and go, Hey, we want you to work on this thing and here’s what we know about
03:09:09 it so far.
03:09:10 Or you don’t tell them anything because you, cause remember if you, if you reveal someone
03:09:15 else’s research, you can taint their beliefs.
03:09:17 They’ll start to sway in that direction.
03:09:18 So you go, I’m not going to tell you anything.
03:09:20 I’m going to give you this thing and now you tell me what you think.
03:09:23 And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem that maybe Bob and someone else
03:09:27 solved earlier, you can go, Hey, what about this?
03:09:28 You don’t have to tell them where it came from.
03:09:30 What about this?
03:09:31 You can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer.
03:09:35 And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology and you shelve it again.
03:09:39 Do you think that’s the right way to do it?
03:09:41 Because it’s heartbreaking.
03:09:42 I don’t, listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so
03:09:48 on.
03:09:49 The, the alternative approach is to release this to the world and say, there’s a mystery
03:09:56 here.
03:09:57 And then the Elons of the world, the Jeff Bezos, we talked about money, but it’s also
03:10:00 not just money.
03:10:01 It’s like this engine that’s within, we talked about the American dream to say, I’m going
03:10:08 to be the one that cracks this mystery open.
03:10:11 And like, that’s within a lot of us and like money aside, people in their garage just will.
03:10:17 But you’re thinking like a scientist.
03:10:19 Now let me, now let’s shift to, let me think like a country.
03:10:22 So we have country A, B, and C, and you can look at the nuclear arms race.
03:10:26 So we know that Germany was really close.
03:10:28 We know that Russia was getting pretty close.
03:10:31 We just won the race and we were the first ones with it.
03:10:34 And still to this day.
03:10:35 And Germany could have won.
03:10:36 They could have won.
03:10:38 They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they
03:10:41 knew they had the answer.
03:10:43 It’s literally what it comes down to.
03:10:45 Someone was smart enough to realize if that, that got into the hands of the Nazis, that
03:10:49 that would be the end.
03:10:51 And that’s, that’s a tough call to do that, knowing that you have the answer and you can’t
03:10:56 solve the problem because it will go into the wrong end.
03:10:58 And that’s kind of the fear.
03:10:59 When you look at this, you go, okay, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we’ve
03:11:03 got this technology.
03:11:06 If we don’t work on it kind of international space station, like we’re all going to work
03:11:09 on it together in a, you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from
03:11:15 any weapons or anything.
03:11:16 And we’re supposed to, you know, we’ve got the international thing down there.
03:11:17 We’re all going to work together.
03:11:19 If you did it in a, in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out,
03:11:24 because what you don’t want is the, someone stealing information and getting it back to
03:11:27 where, and countries are notorious to do this, Hey, we’re doing it internationally, but we’re
03:11:31 secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first.
03:11:36 That’s the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is
03:11:40 power.
03:11:41 It would, it would literally change the game of the way the world operates and from not
03:11:46 just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it’s got huge, huge.
03:11:52 Yeah.
03:11:53 Yeah.
03:11:54 I, so beautifully, beautifully presented and there’s, I feel like there’s a tension between
03:11:59 those two places, the scientist view of the world and the national security view of the
03:12:04 world.
03:12:05 Let me, let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists
03:12:12 kind of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system that’s
03:12:17 exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets.
03:12:22 And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to almost any conspiracy theory, to the degree
03:12:26 at least that the conspiracy theorists do, but the, there does seem to be, and I tend
03:12:34 to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy.
03:12:41 It seems that the communication, like the three videos that were released and just the
03:12:45 way of DOD in general talks about the things we’ve been talking about, it’s just confused.
03:12:54 There’s contradictory, it’s not inspiring, it’s, it’s suspicious.
03:13:00 It’s just not even the way they released the videos.
03:13:03 You know, the Tic Tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists.
03:13:09 It’s like at the, you know, us going to the moon and it’s inspiring.
03:13:15 I mean, it’s incredible, you know, and, and the way it was released, it was suspicious.
03:13:20 It was like low resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents.
03:13:27 And I mean, why, what is it?
03:13:29 I don’t know how to ask this question, but can government do better?
03:13:32 Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the
03:13:38 public?
03:13:39 I don’t know how, especially in this topic, it’s been hidden for so many years.
03:13:44 And I don’t think, cause I don’t buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that, you
03:13:49 know, when it comes in, like I said, you know, the government has the right to classify stuff.
03:13:53 They classify everything cause they don’t know.
03:13:56 You have something, you don’t know what it is, you don’t know.
03:13:58 So we just go, well, it must be, it must be top secret and let’s put it in a vault.
03:14:01 You know, it’s kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the ark and they put it in,
03:14:05 it’s in the giant army warehouse.
03:14:08 You know, we don’t even know what we have.
03:14:10 So, but I also believe that, you know, and I’ll say this openly, I don’t think that the
03:14:15 American people need to know everything.
03:14:17 I think there’s a reason that stuff is classified for the protection of this country.
03:14:22 And I totally believe in that.
03:14:24 So, you know, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about the storm area 51.
03:14:29 So I’m like, yeah, that’s probably the worst idea you could possibly have is to just storm
03:14:33 a military installation.
03:14:35 It’s just stupid.
03:14:36 There are reasons, there are reasons that we have things that we don’t just let out
03:14:40 to the public.
03:14:41 Because if we do, as soon as you do let someone know that you have something, they immediately
03:14:46 try to counter it.
03:14:48 And perfect example, the U.S. in the 60s developed a bomber, it was a Mach 3 compression lift
03:14:54 bomber called the XB 70.
03:14:56 Okay.
03:14:57 There was three of them built, three of them ever built.
03:14:59 It was a like 60,000 foot high, you know, Mach 3, it was an incredible airplane when
03:15:05 you see it, and there’s actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum.
03:15:08 You know, it would go, the wingtips would fold on, it looks like a Concorde, but it’s
03:15:11 way faster.
03:15:15 When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG 25,
03:15:20 literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber.
03:15:25 And they built an entire fleet of MiG 25s, right?
03:15:29 We built three XB 70s and we scrapped the program, right?
03:15:35 Because now you go, well, the technology is cool, we proved it, but now it becomes obsolete.
03:15:40 So it’s not even worth building a whole fleet of these things.
03:15:43 You know, it’s a chess game.
03:15:44 We do something, they do something, we do something, they do something, and we do something
03:15:48 and then they counter it.
03:15:49 You got to figure out how to defeat it.
03:15:51 So you go, oh, we’ll build something.
03:15:53 So the more we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better.
03:15:58 Actually, personally, I think we talk too much.
03:16:01 And I think the military and the DOD is starting to see that we’re too open.
03:16:07 You announce, hey, we’re building this because there’s a budget line and we live in a free
03:16:10 society, but you don’t have to release all the specs and you don’t have to put everything
03:16:16 in open source.
03:16:18 But that’s a problem when we go to the universities.
03:16:21 If we want to go do work with MIT and you want to partner with MIT and you’re a defense
03:16:24 company and you want to partner, you know, you guys have a rule that if you create it,
03:16:29 then it can be open source because the university owns it and we are an institution of learning.
03:16:34 Where the defense side might go, we don’t really want that published in a paper in Scientific
03:16:38 America.
03:16:39 It’s so heartbreaking.
03:16:40 I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concord’s.
03:16:47 Some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever is
03:16:54 done in secrecy and it sucks because it’s so inspiring and they can’t talk about it.
03:17:01 It is, but some of it’s due to funding.
03:17:03 The US government has deep pockets.
03:17:04 You know, some of this new technology that you develop for an open source and lesson,
03:17:08 this goes back to the original conversation.
03:17:11 We now, there’s enough money in the private sector that individuals control.
03:17:15 Bezos, I’m not talking Amazon.
03:17:19 I’m talking Jeff Bezos, a single individual worth over a hundred billion dollars.
03:17:23 He has the ability to do stuff.
03:17:25 I’ll tell you what, the Gates Foundation with between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren
03:17:31 Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos’s ex wife actually donated a
03:17:36 huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation.
03:17:40 What’s the Gates Foundation worth these days?
03:17:43 These are guys, brilliant, brilliant.
03:17:46 Some of the greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing?
03:17:49 Because they have the ability to, it’s a nonprofit, they can go, hey, I want to fund this.
03:17:52 I want to fund this research.
03:17:53 They can look beyond the conflict between nations.
03:17:56 You can look beyond the conflict of having to have classification.
03:17:59 You could do what you want.
03:18:01 It’s just like, we classify how to do the whole nuclear, how to create a critical mass.
03:18:10 But there’s really smart high school kids that have figured it out mathematically and
03:18:13 they do their science project.
03:18:14 And then the government comes in and says, hey, we got to classify your government because
03:18:17 we just don’t want this out in the public domain, which I understand.
03:18:20 And they never stopped them from free thought and developing that.
03:18:23 It’s just, hey, we really don’t want this out there.
03:18:26 Okay.
03:18:27 So I understand that.
03:18:28 I totally understand that.
03:18:29 But if Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey, we want to do this and they’re going
03:18:33 to work with Bezos and they’re going to work with Elon and we’re going to, I mean, you
03:18:36 think about it.
03:18:37 There’s a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D and I’m not talking
03:18:41 just science like this, I’m talking medical research and all this.
03:18:45 But then you go, well, who gets it?
03:18:46 Because now you’re competing against the companies that actually do it.
03:18:49 You go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds?
03:18:52 I’d say, you know, we have a tendency to go, these are the best that we have.
03:18:58 And I’d say, well, no, that’s the best that we know we have.
03:19:00 But there’s probably people out there that don’t want to work.
03:19:03 There’s brilliant minds that don’t want to do anything with defense because they just
03:19:05 disagree with what it does.
03:19:07 So they go to another path, they can do something else.
03:19:10 And in a sense, like the Elons of the world that Jeff Bezos actually in a certain sense
03:19:17 much better than DOD at finding the brilliant, weird minds out there.
03:19:23 Because they’re not tied to the government.
03:19:24 So when you work a government contract, the government writes, they tell you what they
03:19:28 want and then they work with you on the requirements and they usually have an end in mean.
03:19:33 You know, they have an idea that this is what I want it to be.
03:19:36 Where if you go to like SpaceX, where, you know, they come up with, why don’t we just
03:19:43 land these things on a pad and reuse them?
03:19:46 Well, if the government scientist, if you’re on a government contract says, no, that’s
03:19:49 not the requirements.
03:19:50 We’re not paying for that.
03:19:51 We want you to do this.
03:19:52 You’re kind of controlled.
03:19:53 Or when Elon does it, his company, they can do whatever the hell they want to do because
03:19:57 they have no bounds.
03:19:58 The only bounds they have is the liability if it doesn’t work and it lands on something.
03:20:02 So what do you do?
03:20:03 You go out to Kwajalein and you test it.
03:20:04 And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we clean it up.
03:20:06 No big deal.
03:20:07 We lost some money, but we’ll move on.
03:20:10 It’s, you know, money makes the world go around contrary to what everyone thinks.
03:20:13 But, you know, there’s a lot of money that’s sitting around that you can do a lot of really
03:20:17 cool stuff with.
03:20:18 And I don’t know.
03:20:19 I mean, I’ll guarantee that, what is it, Blue Origin, isn’t that Amazon?
03:20:23 You know, that they’re doing some cool stuff because they have funny.
03:20:26 And I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because they were
03:20:30 building the first test thing and they were limited.
03:20:35 And Elon found this like 400 acre thing, I think it’s about 400 acres down by Waco, Texas.
03:20:42 And he’s like, I go, how, he goes, dude, I worked, he goes, I worked with, he goes, because
03:20:46 he’s done government contract.
03:20:47 He goes, there’s government contract.
03:20:49 And then there’s working at SpaceX with Elon money.
03:20:51 And that’s what he refers to it as, is Elon money, where it was like, don’t, I’ll throw
03:20:55 them and he would throw the money at it and make it happen.
03:20:57 And it’s, I’m talking this fast.
03:20:58 I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this.
03:21:01 I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the private sector vice the
03:21:04 government where there’s the bureaucracy is.
03:21:07 They had a company that was a, basically a tool and die machine shop that did a lot of
03:21:11 their high precision parts for the rockets.
03:21:15 They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies.
03:21:18 And when the economy was down, the guy was actually looking at going out of business.
03:21:22 So the guy I know, he’s telling me the story.
03:21:24 He was talking to the guy, he had to go over there and get something.
03:21:26 And he’s like, holy shit.
03:21:27 He goes, hang on.
03:21:28 So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX, he says, Hey, is Elon there?
03:21:32 Can you get them in the boardroom?
03:21:33 We’ll be there in 20 minutes.
03:21:35 So he grabs this guy who’s literally going to fold his company.
03:21:39 They go over to SpaceX and I may be getting some of this wrong if people are going to
03:21:42 fact check me, but this is pretty close.
03:21:44 They go in the boardroom and he said, literally within like an hour or two, Elon has bought
03:21:52 the guy’s company.
03:21:53 That guy is now a senior VP running his company.
03:21:57 And they’re going to pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing so they can actually build
03:22:01 the parts and they can still contract out to make the money outside.
03:22:05 And it happened like that fast.
03:22:07 It’s not just money, it’s because I’ve witnessed it too with Elon.
03:22:10 I think it’s whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise
03:22:19 to the top, because I’ve also worked for DARPA for research in terms of a source of funding.
03:22:27 There’s a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, being funded by DARPA.
03:22:32 And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of anything is possible, cutting across all
03:22:37 the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy,
03:22:43 the rules, the constraints, all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately.
03:22:48 How much money and time do you waste dealing with your bureaucracy when you could actually
03:22:51 be doing real work?
03:22:53 That’s the difference.
03:22:54 This is why I honestly, when I went back to the industrial defense complex that we were
03:22:58 warned about, when you look at it and go, SpaceX can do something for half the price
03:23:03 ahead of schedule that what Boeing, we’re paying Boeing, and you go, oh, well, this
03:23:08 just came out.
03:23:09 And you go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with this
03:23:12 side?
03:23:13 Because you’ve got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to fly
03:23:17 around in.
03:23:18 It worked like a champ.
03:23:19 It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down.
03:23:23 It worked perfectly.
03:23:25 We’re going to dust it off.
03:23:26 And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and then put to museums, they’re
03:23:32 going to reuse that dragon capsule.
03:23:34 It came down, they’re going to dust it off, put a new coat of paint on it, slap it on
03:23:36 top of another rocket and away it goes.
03:23:39 Holy cow.
03:23:40 It’s amazing.
03:23:41 It’s a shift.
03:23:42 It’s a complete shift in mentality.
03:23:43 And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost.
03:23:47 It’s exciting, especially given putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky or it’s
03:23:54 limitless the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism.
03:23:57 I think it’s exciting.
03:23:58 Yeah.
03:23:59 I think we live in an exciting time right now.
03:24:00 This is everything that’s messed up in the world right now.
03:24:02 Well, this is a hopeful, like there’s so much conflict going on, so much tension.
03:24:08 That’s to me, space exploration at the moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have
03:24:14 a hope for the future, to look up to the sky and we’re humans.
03:24:18 We can solve so many, we can solve all of this.
03:24:22 I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing and I said, this would be great, because
03:24:26 then the government had come out a month ago and said, hey, this does exist.
03:24:30 We’re doing this and we’re going to release more stuff.
03:24:33 And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys before I went on, because they
03:24:38 had called me up to be on Tucker’s show and I’m like, hey, I go, this would be great.
03:24:42 Just come out with this, find the relic of a spaceship, like pull out the Roswell wreckage
03:24:48 if you have it, pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it.
03:24:51 God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with the riots in the cities.
03:24:57 I know it’s an election year and all that, but God, it would be refreshing to not have
03:25:01 to turn on my TV and see everything that is just depressing in the world.
03:25:05 To begin, holy cow, we actually do have this and we’re working on this technology.
03:25:09 Imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft and they pull it out, imagine the innovation that
03:25:14 happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than that.
03:25:19 Just the innovation that happens, the look on Elon Musk’s face, the look on Jeff Bezos’s
03:25:24 face and all the brilliance in years.
03:25:25 It would change the game.
03:25:26 It would change the game.
03:25:27 It would change the game completely.
03:25:28 Let me ask the big question, I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it.
03:25:33 Outside, I mean, one of the things, the fact that you’ve laid your eyes on a UFO probably
03:25:42 opened your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings, there could be other
03:25:48 sightings that have legitimacy to them.
03:25:50 What to you is the, outside of your own sighting, is the most interesting sighting or UFO related
03:25:59 event in history?
03:26:01 I think there’s several.
03:26:03 What is it?
03:26:04 Ramassan Forest in England, the US guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns.
03:26:09 One guy was medically disabled, but they weren’t going to give him and he had help from John
03:26:14 McCain.
03:26:15 His office helped get the guy’s disability reestablished.
03:26:20 I think that’s a big one.
03:26:22 I think there’s people out there that have seen stuff and I’m talking credible because
03:26:27 there’s, you got to remember, there’s a huge chunk of the sightings that get disproven.
03:26:31 They’re actually explainable.
03:26:35 You had sent me the question, the Phoenix lights, I think there’s…
03:26:39 What’s that?
03:26:40 So I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with some of these.
03:26:43 I’m not either, you want a funny story on that.
03:26:46 So I was at a conference, hopefully he doesn’t watch this and get offended, but we had this,
03:26:53 I call it speed dating.
03:26:54 So there was a table, about eight people at a table and we would go sit at the table and
03:26:58 they could ask us questions and then after 10 minutes we moved to the next table.
03:27:02 So I was speed dating all these people that are really into this.
03:27:04 It was kind of funny, but I had sat down and it’s always funny because some people will
03:27:08 try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the dominators away so that if you’re
03:27:13 quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too.
03:27:16 So we got into this and the guy starts naming all these, well, what about this?
03:27:19 What about the Phoenix lights?
03:27:20 I’m like, I don’t know about the Phoenix lights.
03:27:21 What about this event?
03:27:22 I don’t know about that.
03:27:23 He goes, he looks at me and he goes, well, you’re not a UFO guy.
03:27:26 I go, no, I’m not, but I chased one.
03:27:29 So I’m an expert.
03:27:30 Have you?
03:27:31 And you could see him get deflated because I’m kind of a smart ass like that.
03:27:33 Yeah, I mean the firsthand experience from a credible, in some sense these sightings
03:27:38 have to do both with the evidence and the human.
03:27:41 Well, I think part of that is to us, that’s a credibility piece because the four of us
03:27:46 that actually saw it, plus the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video,
03:27:50 none of us are UFO obsessed people.
03:27:53 So when we come out and say, because to me it’s five minutes of my life, I did a lot
03:27:59 of really cool, I’ve had really kind of neat things I’ve been able to do.
03:28:06 But when you look at it and go, to me it’s not the pinnacle of my life.
03:28:14 To other people that they live in the UFO world and it’s like they, if you talk to people
03:28:18 that are really into it, who’ve never seen one, it kills them that they didn’t see one.
03:28:26 When here we are, and what’s unique with ours, which kind of adds that level is we just didn’t
03:28:30 see it.
03:28:31 It wasn’t like, oh look, something in the sky and it was weird.
03:28:34 We actually engaged with it, it was an engaged five minute thing.
03:28:39 And there’s other stories from other countries, like there’s a story in the back when the
03:28:44 Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these things and one of them shot at
03:28:49 some, it shot it because they said shoot at it and it shot it and then it got shot down.
03:28:53 And then they said, don’t ever shoot at them again and don’t chase them, just you can observe
03:28:56 them, but don’t go after them because obviously they have firepower that we can’t control
03:29:00 because if you can make something float around and jam radars at will and do whatever you
03:29:03 want, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful.
03:29:09 You can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around, oh, we got to, now you
03:29:13 got a cyber warfare, you got to take the bug down, you got to take the warfare, so now
03:29:16 we can actually inhibit some type of damage.
03:29:19 So there’s, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights, somebody on I think Reddit said, ask
03:29:25 them any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix lights.
03:29:28 So the interesting thing, like you said with the Tic Tac is that multiple people laid their
03:29:33 eyes on this.
03:29:34 What are your thoughts about the Phoenix lights where many people have seen it?
03:29:37 So here’s the deal with massive sightings.
03:29:39 So the Phoenix lights is unexplainable, although I know the Air Force had said something about
03:29:43 it was an A10 drop in flares.
03:29:44 No, I don’t think so.
03:29:47 Flares don’t burn that long, they just come out and they detract and they go away.
03:29:51 Although on the other hand, there’s, because clouds can do things, so I lived in Central
03:29:55 California for 18 years and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky and it
03:30:01 was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off.
03:30:03 They were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across
03:30:07 and they go land in the Atoll at Kwajalein and then they can check the displacement,
03:30:11 the accuracy and all that stuff, it’s stuff that we do because we’re a superpower.
03:30:16 But when you see them go up, especially if you’ve ever watched a rocket really launch
03:30:19 on a clear night, it’ll have the stream, the glow, and you can tell it’s a rocket, but
03:30:22 if you don’t look up until later when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere
03:30:26 where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, and you can watch this on
03:30:31 TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it’s nice and narrow, narrow, narrow, and then it hits
03:30:34 a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because the
03:30:38 forces aren’t holding that all into one unique thing and it looks really odd and then it’ll
03:30:43 go off because it burns out and then you get stage separation, then you see the next one
03:30:48 go off and then it’s gone.
03:30:51 And people don’t understand that because they didn’t watch it from launch because we used
03:30:53 to sit in our driveway and Vandenberg, it was a three hour drive, but you could sit and
03:30:57 watch it.
03:30:58 You knew they were launching at night, you’d watch, you’d watch and it’s really cool.
03:31:02 If you don’t see anything, what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume, what’s
03:31:06 left, the residue that’s sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing it so you get
03:31:10 these really kind of weird shapes in the sky.
03:31:13 That’s part, but when you go to Phoenix Lights and you go, hey, when a thousand people see
03:31:17 something, are you going to discredit all a thousand people or are you going to try
03:31:19 and explain it away with something else, you know, it’s a weather balloon, it’s a weather
03:31:26 balloon.
03:31:27 Again, just like the Tic Tac, I think is just inspiring for the limitless nature of the
03:31:34 science.
03:31:35 I think more is going to come out.
03:31:37 I think some of the stuff that the To The Stars folks have done.
03:31:42 So there’s a To The Stars Academy.
03:31:44 What are your thoughts about them?
03:31:45 Are they?
03:31:46 I talk to them quite a bit.
03:31:48 I’m not a part of To The Stars Academy.
03:31:52 But I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.
03:31:57 What’s their mission?
03:31:58 What’s their hope?
03:31:59 When they started, their mission was to try and, don’t look at this as little green men,
03:32:06 but let’s look at this as a technology and let’s try and almost reverse engineer and
03:32:11 figure out how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge,
03:32:17 workspace knowledge to go, how would something like this operate?
03:32:20 That’s really their bottom line was to try and use and then couple that with, because
03:32:24 they’ve got the series unidentified, couple that with television to get the word out.
03:32:31 So you’re actually putting something instead of…
03:32:34 Because everyone has a theory, you know, Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories, you know,
03:32:39 it’s kind of off of, oh my God, and I’ve seen the stuff and I’ve seen stuff that I’ve said
03:32:43 taken out of context on shows that I did not talk to.
03:32:48 So there’s all that, because you can take a clip and go, oh, it’s this, it’s that, you
03:32:51 know?
03:32:52 And if I know about stuff like it, you can’t technically use my likeness unless I tell
03:32:55 you you can.
03:32:56 So if I haven’t signed something you can’t do, there was a guy who put something out,
03:32:59 you know, I was in it and I told him, you can take it down and you can talk to lawyers
03:33:01 because I’m not supporting you.
03:33:03 So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that’s not connected to reality.
03:33:07 Because let’s face it, if you’re making TV shows, there’s two reasons to do it.
03:33:10 One, you want to get word out, or two, you want to make money, or three, both.
03:33:15 And so usually it’s, I would say the make money is probably the biggest thing to put
03:33:19 a TV show out.
03:33:20 And the mission of the To The Stars Academy is to not do that, is to try to get some…
03:33:27 When they started and I talked to them, because I’ve talked to Tom and I’ve talked to Lou
03:33:31 and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid
03:33:38 of the stigma that’s tied to UFOs, and let’s look at it from a science base and then use
03:33:43 TV to get the word out on the progress.
03:33:45 And they’ve done some pretty cool things.
03:33:47 I mean, you know, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property
03:33:52 of their government.
03:33:53 They got a bunch from…
03:33:54 It might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of stuff, like, here’s all our records,
03:33:59 what can you do with it?
03:34:00 To try and now pull from country based to a more global based research, which is what
03:34:04 you were talking about, and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government.
03:34:09 I mean, any government, but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some
03:34:13 of the metallurgy, because you go, oh, I found this, we had this piece of metal, what is
03:34:16 it?
03:34:17 And some of the stuff has been explained.
03:34:18 They’ve got some objects, artifacts that have not been explained.
03:34:22 And that’s slowly coming out, you know, and I think…
03:34:24 And your hope is the US government will release some more things?
03:34:27 The US government came out a month ago and said, we have material that we cannot explain
03:34:33 the origin.
03:34:35 They have said that.
03:34:36 They just haven’t released the records from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about.
03:34:39 I’m like, come on, it’s 70 some years old.
03:34:41 I mean, like, let it out.
03:34:43 I think you put it beautifully that in this time, that will be a heck of an inspiring,
03:34:49 hopeful thing to see.
03:34:50 Like people don’t…
03:34:52 Just to distract them.
03:34:53 Right?
03:34:54 Yeah, the division is, I mean, nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps.
03:35:02 Like the idea that there’s life out there.
03:35:05 It would literally change.
03:35:06 I said this a while ago, I think it was the London Sun Times had called me and I said,
03:35:10 you know, personally, I think this is a global issue.
03:35:12 It’s not.
03:35:13 If there is stuff coming down, which we’re pretty sure there is, there’s enough stuff
03:35:16 that we can’t explain.
03:35:18 If there is stuff coming down, then this is not a country based thing and it’s not about
03:35:21 technology and it’s not about who’s going to win the next war because you don’t know
03:35:25 what they’re doing.
03:35:27 So you got really a couple of theories.
03:35:29 One, you’ve got ET or close encounters and the other extreme is you’ve got Independence
03:35:35 Day.
03:35:36 Are you going to prepare and bet on ET and close encounters or do you actually try and
03:35:41 do stuff in case it is Independence Day, you actually have a game plan.
03:35:45 And when you get into Independence Day, that scenario, you know, and I don’t like going
03:35:49 too much into sci fi, but let’s just say in theory that that becomes a reality.
03:35:54 It’s not a US, Russia, China, England, France, Spain, name any country in any continent.
03:36:02 It becomes a global issue and the only way you can deny it, it’s just like Americans.
03:36:07 We all, you know, we’re divided.
03:36:10 We spend that way forever.
03:36:11 So if you think we won’t get through this, we’ll get through it because we’ve had times
03:36:14 just like this before.
03:36:16 Until Nazi Germany pops up.
03:36:17 But Nazi Germany pops up or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center
03:36:20 and then all of a sudden we’re all like united.
03:36:22 We all also have very, very short memories.
03:36:25 Yes, we do.
03:36:27 Exactly.
03:36:28 It’s when you look and go, well, we can do this and you go, no, no, if you think that
03:36:34 everyone on the planet is good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you’re taking.
03:36:41 You know, we said this, there were people during the rise of Hitler, no, no, it’s it’s
03:36:46 OK.
03:36:47 And no, no, it’s OK.
03:36:48 We’re not going to do.
03:36:49 We’re not going to stop.
03:36:50 No, no, it’s OK.
03:36:51 No, no, it’s OK.
03:36:52 No, no, it’s OK.
03:36:53 The only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia.
03:36:59 If he just stuck with the pact with Stalin and not went to the east and had to fight
03:37:03 and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him and he would have put all his
03:37:07 high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally different outcome.
03:37:12 The man in the iron, the man in the high tower, whatever, it’s a Netflix show where Nazi actually
03:37:16 wins it.
03:37:17 And you look, you know, we didn’t know everything that was going on, especially the atrocities
03:37:22 with the concentration camps and what he was doing to the Jews.
03:37:26 I mean, it’s you look at that going, if you really want to see evil and then there’s the
03:37:29 whole side of what Stalin did because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did.
03:37:33 But that never gets the press.
03:37:36 And the thing is, we forget this, we forget this history in our conflicts today.
03:37:41 We forget that there is the nature of evil.
03:37:44 We forget that there’s real evil in the world.
03:37:47 And the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both.
03:37:53 It’s like this interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan, of being both like
03:37:59 kind to each other, compassionate, empathetic, but also being like strong and a bad motherfucker
03:38:08 when you need to, to make sure that you, that like there’s a balance between kindness and
03:38:14 force.
03:38:15 You use force when force is necessary, but you don’t have to walk around like Billy
03:38:19 Badass all the time.
03:38:20 I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with that literally could kick the
03:38:24 shit out of whoever came near them, they never got in fights because one, even people that
03:38:28 didn’t know them, because they were actually nice guys.
03:38:31 You know, they were just good dudes.
03:38:34 But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he’s a nationally ranked
03:38:39 wrestler.
03:38:40 He went to Naval Academy with me, he’s a very, very good friend of mine.
03:38:45 And he is, when you meet him and he wrestled at 190 pounds and he did not lose a match
03:38:51 his senior year until he went to nationals, he just had a bad day.
03:38:54 He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled the shit out of.
03:38:57 And he would cross.
03:38:58 It was funny, we joke about it even with him, because when you meet him, he’s like the nicest
03:39:01 like local, hey dude, you know, hey, how are you doing?
03:39:04 He’s super nice.
03:39:05 And he would cross that ring on a wrestling mat.
03:39:08 As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally different person and he would go
03:39:13 out there and just destroy people.
03:39:15 I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on.
03:39:19 And he would get done and he’s like super humble and they’d raise his hand and he’d
03:39:24 have this blank expression, they’d raise his hand and he’d walk off and as soon as he crossed
03:39:28 the line, he’d look up and smile and go, hey, hi guys, how you doing?
03:39:31 Like he literally just went and could rip someone’s arms off.
03:39:33 But as soon as he crossed the line, he was a totally different person.
03:39:35 He’s like, and he’s that way today.
03:39:37 He won’t even tell you he’s a wrestler.
03:39:40 That’s kind of a symbol of the best of America.
03:39:43 That’s what America is.
03:39:44 Oh, he’s.
03:39:45 That wrestler.
03:39:46 He’s a.
03:39:47 You cross the line, you can be hard, but once you’re off the mat, you’re just a kind human
03:39:53 being.
03:39:54 Yeah.
03:39:55 I know you’re super humble, saying it’s better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring.
03:40:06 The entire trajectory of having a dream, of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell
03:40:11 of a career.
03:40:13 What advice would you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that
03:40:20 listens to this and is inspired, that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to
03:40:27 build the rocket?
03:40:28 Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything?
03:40:34 Yeah.
03:40:35 Yeah.
03:40:36 First, let me start with, and you had a question on, inspirational people.
03:40:43 My grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier, huge funeral, beer delivery guy, was delivering
03:40:49 beer in the 60s riots where the guys in the black neighborhoods where white people didn’t
03:40:55 go.
03:40:56 My grandfather’s Sicilian.
03:40:57 He was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States.
03:41:00 My great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came
03:41:03 over on the boat.
03:41:06 Huge, huge guy and just the nicest, friendliest, would give you the shirt off his back, obviously
03:41:11 proven by his funeral.
03:41:12 I’m talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo,
03:41:17 Ohio.
03:41:18 The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio.
03:41:21 It was literally a mix of who’s who.
03:41:26 He had told me once, because when you’re little, you start looking.
03:41:29 I grew up basically, I was probably middle class, lower middle class.
03:41:32 My dad was a fireman.
03:41:33 You’re not rich.
03:41:34 He’s working for the city.
03:41:35 Paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up.
03:41:37 I was talking to my grandfather one day and he said something to me, and this is literally
03:41:41 how I run my life.
03:41:42 He said, it was about money because you’d see back in the day, if you saw someone in
03:41:45 a Mercedes, that was rare.
03:41:47 They weren’t everywhere.
03:41:48 You couldn’t lease a car, you actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash.
03:41:53 It was a totally different than we are now.
03:41:56 He said, he goes, you know, David, he goes, they’re no better than you and you’re no better
03:42:00 than anyone else.
03:42:01 He goes, you got to remember that.
03:42:02 He goes, everyone’s different.
03:42:03 He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve.
03:42:07 He goes, and if they’re poor, if they’re homeless, he goes, it doesn’t make them a bad person.
03:42:13 That’s who they chose to be and you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on
03:42:17 someone because there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should
03:42:20 never ever do that.
03:42:22 I kept that close to me.
03:42:23 He was a huge influence, my mom’s dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way
03:42:29 I carried myself.
03:42:31 He was one that would say, you can be anything you want to be.
03:42:36 He grew up dirt poor and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my
03:42:41 grandmother and did stuff like that, to him, that was a success.
03:42:45 To me, it was always trying to better and move on.
03:42:48 He was the one, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that anything
03:42:53 is possible.
03:42:55 When I’m four years and 11 months old in 1969 and I’m watching Neil Armstrong walk on the
03:43:00 moon and I’m asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military pilots.
03:43:04 We had an Air National Guard that at the time was flying F100, so I’m dating myself.
03:43:09 I was just fascinated with flight and I just looked at that going, that’s really what I
03:43:12 want to do.
03:43:13 I never lost sight of that.
03:43:14 There was always, I could do this or do that.
03:43:16 When I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted
03:43:20 into Natural Resources at Ohio State and I’m like, if I can’t fly, I’ll go be a forest
03:43:24 ranger because I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for
03:43:27 fires because that’s just, I like that stuff.
03:43:30 It was that or be an oceanographer because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau and
03:43:33 actually that’s my degree.
03:43:34 My undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau, so influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques
03:43:38 Cousteau.
03:43:39 I have an oceanography degree.
03:43:40 I got an MBA from University of Houston, go Cougs, got to mention them.
03:43:45 So you look and people go, what are you going to do with that?
03:43:48 And I said, I got an oceanography degree because I got, well, I’m going to sail on the ocean,
03:43:52 so at least if the ship sinks, I’ll know where I’m at and that was a kind of a running joke
03:43:56 and then…
03:43:57 So these passions and underneath it is the belief that you can be anything you want to
03:44:03 be.
03:44:04 You can.
03:44:05 I told my kids this, when they were young, it was tough, especially for my son.
03:44:09 So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind.
03:44:13 My wife’s brothers are both colorblind.
03:44:15 It’s really color deprived.
03:44:16 Color blind, you see black and white.
03:44:18 He can’t tell.
03:44:19 He has issues with greens, reds, browns.
03:44:20 It’s funny if you’re ever around someone like that because he’ll go, what are you looking
03:44:24 at?
03:44:25 He goes right over there by the red thing.
03:44:26 I’m like, what are you looking at?
03:44:27 I go, this?
03:44:28 He had a hat on one day.
03:44:29 I go, which one are you going to get?
03:44:30 He had a hat in his hand.
03:44:31 It was green.
03:44:32 He goes, I’m going to get the green one.
03:44:33 I go, oh, this one right here.
03:44:34 He goes, no, the one on my head.
03:44:35 I go, Nate, that one’s brown.
03:44:36 He’s like, leave me alone, dad.
03:44:37 He got the brown hat because to him it looked great.
03:44:40 So he couldn’t fly.
03:44:41 He came to me and said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate?
03:44:43 You’re talking to your kids and what do you want to do?
03:44:44 He goes, I want to be a pilot.
03:44:45 Now I got to tell him because he’s looking at me because I’m a pilot, you can’t be a
03:44:50 pilot.
03:44:51 I go, why can’t I be a pilot, I said, because you got eye issues, so you got to redirect.
03:44:57 The other one was because I stopped flying when I was 42 years old and it was my childhood
03:45:02 dream.
03:45:03 So it’s like a pro athlete.
03:45:04 I know exactly what it feels like when Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you
03:45:08 still can do it.
03:45:09 Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever.
03:45:12 So you do and you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when
03:45:17 you have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.
03:45:22 So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids and I said, you know, find
03:45:27 something that you want to do, that you love to do and that you can do your whole life.
03:45:34 And you should be able to do good things for other people.
03:45:37 You want to be able to help other people.
03:45:39 That’s what I said.
03:45:40 So both of my kids and there’s no one in my family, both of my children, one of them
03:45:45 is, my daughter is a doctor doing a residency in internal medicine right now.
03:45:49 And my son is in his third year and they’re both going to be doctors.
03:45:53 And until I look at it as, you know, people go, oh, you got two doctors.
03:45:56 I don’t care.
03:45:57 I told my kids, if you want to be a garbage man or you want to dig ditches, I don’t care.
03:46:01 Just be, be the best ditch digger that you can be, I said, and be happy doing it.
03:46:06 Because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of money, money, money,
03:46:09 money, money, money, money.
03:46:10 That’s what makes the world go round.
03:46:11 But what you realize, and I’ll go back to my grandfather who didn’t have a lot of money
03:46:16 and he was probably one of the most happy people on life.
03:46:18 And unfortunately he died at, he died at 65.
03:46:20 He had a massive heart attack because he didn’t tell that he, he kind of knew it was happening
03:46:24 and he just made the choice to do it and it was devastating to the entire family.
03:46:30 But he didn’t, he didn’t have a lot of money.
03:46:32 But I’ll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there’s nobody
03:46:35 at them.
03:46:36 Yeah.
03:46:37 And my grandfather, who’s a beer delivery guy had, I, I, it literally, it was like three
03:46:41 miles long.
03:46:42 The Pope.
03:46:43 It was crazy.
03:46:44 Yeah.
03:46:45 Who died?
03:46:46 The Pope.
03:46:47 That was because there was like, Hey, he’s a Catholic.
03:46:48 He’s just, you know, Italian.
03:46:49 He goes, you know, who died?
03:46:50 The Pope.
03:46:51 And I go, no, that was my grandfather.
03:46:52 And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister.
03:46:53 And it was like, you know, 30 people.
03:46:54 And I looked at my mother and I said, where’s everybody at?
03:46:57 She goes, Oh, no, this is normal.
03:47:00 This is what a normal funeral looks like.
03:47:02 So it’s, you know, for young kids, bottom line, one, be nice.
03:47:08 Kindness will get you.
03:47:09 I’m a big believer in karma.
03:47:10 Kindness will get you a long way in the world.
03:47:13 You know, it’s easy.
03:47:14 It’s, it’s, it’s easy to be nice.
03:47:15 It doesn’t cost you anything.
03:47:17 I said, you know, and get rid of the hate.
03:47:19 And number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything.
03:47:23 And there’s a, there’s a self realism, like, you know, if you really have trouble with
03:47:27 math, getting a PhD in applied math is probably not something you’re going to be able to do,
03:47:32 but understand yourself, what your own capabilities are.
03:47:35 And you know, inside your heart, don’t let anyone ever tell you what you can and can’t
03:47:38 do.
03:47:39 Just look at yourself and go for it and, and, and you can do anything.
03:47:43 It’s just, it’s, it’s a great, the world’s incredible.
03:47:47 It really is.
03:47:48 Let me ask the last big, ridiculous question.
03:47:52 So you’ve lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.
03:47:59 So let me ask kind of several different ways, the same kind of question.
03:48:06 One, do you, have you pondered your mortality, the finiteness of it?
03:48:12 And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of your, uh, tic tac encounter is,
03:48:20 uh, what do you think is the meaning of this, uh, thing we got going on here?
03:48:25 The meaning of life, human life in this sense.
03:48:31 So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality?
03:48:33 Yes.
03:48:34 Very often.
03:48:36 And I don’t get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do
03:48:40 believe in God.
03:48:42 I’ve just seen too many things in the world that I can’t explain.
03:48:46 And some people will explain it by subconscious, so I’ll give you a story and this kind of
03:48:49 puts in the thing of, do I fear death?
03:48:52 So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with, we were stationed in Japan together
03:48:55 and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins, so there’s a real high cancer
03:49:01 rate for those that served on the base in Atsugi, Japan.
03:49:07 Him and his wife had one son, um, and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday
03:49:12 of cancer.
03:49:14 And I was hanging out with, I’ll call him John, and I was hanging out with John, we
03:49:19 were in oil and gas, he had come to the same company and we were doing an event together
03:49:24 and he was opening up to me because we were actually the demo pilots.
03:49:27 We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff and him and I were sitting there talking
03:49:32 and he was giving me the whole story and how it really changed his look on life that we’re
03:49:39 only here for a finite time and that we’re all going to die.
03:49:42 Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had
03:49:46 moved to a location that would fit their, you know, close to the water where they could
03:49:50 do stuff and I won’t say where, and he was doing what he loved to do and he got diagnosed
03:49:56 with throat cancer.
03:50:00 And I was talking to him, uh, it was probably about maybe two months before he died, um,
03:50:08 and I said, dude, hey, you’re sad, I mean, this is your friend and I’m kind of really
03:50:13 bummed out and this is the guy, this is a guy that’s dying of cancer and here’s what
03:50:18 he tells me.
03:50:19 He says, Dave, dude, we’re all going to die.
03:50:23 He goes, but I have to look at it, I have to make the best of the time that I have.
03:50:28 And I said, I understand that.
03:50:30 And he goes, with the exception of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly, he goes,
03:50:37 I’m okay with dying.
03:50:39 I’ve had a really good life and, um, about, uh, cause actually the original announcement
03:50:47 when he, when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me cause I don’t do Facebook
03:50:51 and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed and about the day before he died,
03:50:57 for some reason I was thinking about him and I had a dream or I think it was a dream or
03:51:03 an altered reality.
03:51:04 You can get into whatever, uh, but he was there, it was just him and I, and I was really
03:51:11 sad in the dream.
03:51:13 I was actually crying and he was there and he was actually in his uniform.
03:51:16 He was in his whites and uh, cause he was a Navy and we were just talking and he looked
03:51:20 at me and he said, and this isn’t my dream.
03:51:22 He’s like, Dave, it’s all going to be okay.
03:51:25 And this is, this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have.
03:51:28 There’s people are gonna think I’m weird about this, but, um, but I, you know, I know what
03:51:32 my dream was and you know, maybe it’s my subconscious creating the dream, but in reality to me,
03:51:37 this was real, that it was put there for a reason.
03:51:40 He’s and he basically explained everything he’s, it’s okay.
03:51:43 I’m going to be fine.
03:51:45 My wife is fine.
03:51:46 He goes, this is, this is what’s meant to be, you know, but you know, and the bottom
03:51:50 line was make use of every day that you have because you don’t know.
03:51:54 And literally two days later, I find out that he passed.
03:51:57 Um, so, but ultimately he accepted the finiteness of it.
03:52:04 He did.
03:52:05 Well, you have to, and it’s like, I talk about, you know, money and job position and this
03:52:08 and that, and I said, you can get in any, you know, you can go to a company.
03:52:11 Just remember when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company.
03:52:15 You have to, I said, if you look, I joke with people at work and I said, I said, you know,
03:52:20 when you ever think that you’re important or this guy has that, I said, when you’re
03:52:22 sitting on 93 or 95, one 28 and you’re sitting in traffic and we’re stopped, which doesn’t
03:52:27 happen right now because of COVID, but normally it’s stopped.
03:52:29 It’s bumper to bumper and you’re sitting here like I was coming down here by the gas tank.
03:52:33 Um, when you’re sitting there, look left and look right, you know, and there can be a Lamborghini
03:52:38 or an S five 50 Mercedes.
03:52:40 And on the other side, there could be some piece of crap car.
03:52:44 We’re all sitting on the same freeway at the same time, trying to do the same thing, which
03:52:48 is just get home so we can be with our family because the most important thing that we have,
03:52:54 it ain’t money.
03:52:55 It ain’t our job.
03:52:56 It’s not our position.
03:52:57 I go, cause when it’s all said and done, you could be, you know, you can be with the exception
03:53:02 of the presidents of the United States.
03:53:04 I mean, name the vice presidents.
03:53:07 Most people can’t and eventually they’re going to die or eventually you’re going to see a
03:53:11 statue of a guy from the 17 hundreds in the Boston area and you’re going to go, I don’t
03:53:15 even know who that guy was.
03:53:17 Did he impact my life?
03:53:18 He probably did, but eventually people forget you realize what’s important now and the one
03:53:23 thing that you have is your family and your close friends and that’s, that’s it.
03:53:29 You can take all the money or everything else.
03:53:31 If you’re down on your luck, you know, who is going to be, we, I just joke, who are your
03:53:34 true friends?
03:53:36 It’s the person.
03:53:37 Well, there’s, there’s a once that I won’t say, but you know, Hey, you’re broke down
03:53:39 on a road in the middle of nowhere and it’s three oclock in the morning, who you going
03:53:43 to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you.
03:53:47 And that’s life.
03:53:48 That is life.
03:53:49 The people you love.
03:53:50 It’s it’s, it’s the people you truly care about.
03:53:53 And contrary to, I have, you know, Oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends.
03:53:57 You got about that many real friends that you can count on and that’s it.
03:54:02 Everything else doesn’t matter.
03:54:03 Oh, it doesn’t matter.
03:54:04 It doesn’t mean you don’t be nice.
03:54:05 I mean, I have, there’s acquaintance friends that I’ll do anything for and they can come
03:54:08 to my house and stuff, but then there’s the people that, you know, you know, like my cousins
03:54:12 who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment’s notice, you know, when, when my
03:54:19 uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right down the street
03:54:23 from me and my cousin Chad and I got two boys, there’s 14 of us, but there’s only two boys.
03:54:28 There’s three of us together and we all grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools,
03:54:32 play football together, all that.
03:54:33 I said, if one of those, if rare Chad ever needs me, if something happens like when my
03:54:38 uncle died, it wasn’t a, it wasn’t an issue if I’m coming home.
03:54:41 Because I’m booking the ticket and I don’t give a shit what it costs because I will be
03:54:44 there to be there with you.
03:54:47 And then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that I’m very, very close with,
03:54:54 you know, you know, if there’s, there’s, I have a handful of people that, you know, I
03:54:59 will drop literally everything.
03:55:01 Even if my wife would be pissed at me at times, she’s like, seriously, I got to do it.
03:55:05 And now she knows, and it’s the same thing with her.
03:55:08 I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her and
03:55:12 she has to go, she would go and I would let her go.
03:55:16 So given all that, I’m honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time.
03:55:24 Dave was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had.
03:55:26 Thank you so much.
03:55:27 It’s a pretty long one.
03:55:28 It’s probably sets the record for the longest one.
03:55:31 So I, I mean, I’m, I’m a loss of words.
03:55:35 One of my favorite conversations.
03:55:36 Thank you so much for talking to me, Dave.
03:55:38 You’re welcome.
03:55:40 Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fravor.
03:55:42 And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.
03:55:48 Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
03:55:53 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and app a podcast,
03:55:58 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
03:56:03 And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere, something incredible
03:56:10 is waiting to be known.
03:56:12 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.