Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens #308

Transcript

00:00:00 How are these interacting with our fighters if they are?

00:00:02 How are they interacting with the weather

00:00:03 and their environment?

00:00:04 How are they interacting with each other?

00:00:06 So can we look at these and how they’re interacting

00:00:08 perhaps as a swarm?

00:00:10 Especially off the East Coast where this is happening

00:00:12 all the time with multiple objects.

00:00:16 The following is a conversation

00:00:18 with Lieutenant Ryan Graves,

00:00:19 former Navy fighter pilot,

00:00:22 including roles as a combat lead,

00:00:24 landing signals officer and rescue mission commander.

00:00:28 He and people in his squadron detected UFOs

00:00:31 on multiple occasions.

00:00:33 And he has been one of the few people

00:00:35 willing to speak publicly about these experiences

00:00:38 and about the importance of investigating these sightings,

00:00:42 especially for national security reasons.

00:00:45 Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering

00:00:48 from WPI and an interest in career roles

00:00:52 in advanced technology development,

00:00:54 including multiagent collaborative autonomy,

00:00:57 machine learning assisted air to air combat,

00:01:00 manned and unmanned teaming technologies,

00:01:03 and most recently, development of materials

00:01:05 through quantum simulation.

00:01:08 This is a Lex Friedman podcast.

00:01:10 To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:01:12 in the description.

00:01:13 And now, dear friends, here’s Ryan Graves.

00:01:18 What did you think of the new Top Gun movie?

00:01:20 How accurate was it?

00:01:21 Let’s start there.

00:01:22 I thought the flying was really accurate.

00:01:25 I thought the type of flying they did

00:01:28 and how they approached the actual mission,

00:01:31 of course, had a lot of liberties.

00:01:33 But one thing that seems to be hard to capture

00:01:35 on these types of things are the chess game that’s going on

00:01:38 while that type of flying is happening.

00:01:40 The chess game between, like in a dog fight,

00:01:42 between the pilots and the enemy,

00:01:45 or between the different pilots?

00:01:47 I’ll even speak to just that particular mission.

00:01:49 They flew there.

00:01:50 And for that particular mission,

00:01:52 it’s kind of a chess game with yourself

00:01:54 to get everything in place.

00:01:56 So what kind of flight they flew

00:01:59 is called a high threat scenario,

00:02:00 which means they have to ingress low

00:02:02 due to the surface to air threats,

00:02:05 the integrated air defense systems that are nearby.

00:02:08 And they have to ingress low and pop up

00:02:09 like we see in the movie.

00:02:11 And in that particular movie,

00:02:12 that was a preplanned strike.

00:02:13 They knew exactly where they were going.

00:02:15 But there’s a scenario where we have to operate

00:02:17 in that type of environment,

00:02:18 and we don’t know exactly where we’re going to strike

00:02:20 or we’re going to be adapting to real time targets.

00:02:23 And so in that scenario, you would have

00:02:25 one of those fighters down low like that

00:02:26 operating as a mission commander,

00:02:28 as a forward air controller.

00:02:30 And he’s out there calling shots,

00:02:32 joining on those other players

00:02:33 in order to ensure they’re pointed at the right target.

00:02:35 So that’s a bit of the chess game that he’ll be playing.

00:02:38 Can you actually describe for people

00:02:40 who haven’t seen the movie what the mission actually is?

00:02:43 Yeah.

00:02:44 What’s involved in the mission?

00:02:45 So in this particular mission,

00:02:47 it’s kind of what we would call a preplanned strike.

00:02:49 So there’s a known location

00:02:51 that’s in a heavily defended area.

00:02:53 And the air crew, in this case,

00:02:55 I believe it was four F18s on the initial package,

00:02:59 their job was to ingress very low down a canyon

00:03:02 to stay out of the radar window of the surface

00:03:05 to air threats.

00:03:06 What does ingress mean?

00:03:07 Ingress means that they’re going to be pushing

00:03:09 from a start location towards the target or the objective.

00:03:13 So there’s an ingress portion of the mission

00:03:15 and an egress portion of the mission.

00:03:16 Oh, okay.

00:03:18 Like the entrance and the exit type of thing.

00:03:21 Got it.

00:03:22 But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit, right?

00:03:24 Cause when we’re entering someplace,

00:03:26 we have the option to enter.

00:03:27 But when we go drop a bomb on location, we’re exiting.

00:03:31 We don’t have that luxury.

00:03:32 We don’t have that option.

00:03:33 So it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level.

00:03:37 Got it.

00:03:38 And so they were flying low to the ground

00:03:40 and then there’s a surface to air missiles

00:03:43 that forced them to have to fly low.

00:03:47 Is that a realistic thing?

00:03:48 It is realistic.

00:03:49 So driving those aircraft in the clutter,

00:03:52 you know, all radar systems or most I should say

00:03:54 are essentially line of sight.

00:03:57 And so they’re going to be limited by the horizon

00:03:59 or any clutter out there.

00:04:00 And even a number of radars, if they are located up high

00:04:03 and looking down towards that aircraft,

00:04:06 the clutter or all the objects such as trees and canyons

00:04:11 can have effect on radar systems.

00:04:13 And so it can be a type of camouflage.

00:04:16 So that’s a camouflage for the radar,

00:04:17 but what about the surface to air missile?

00:04:21 Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles flies so low,

00:04:25 like fly I guess below their level?

00:04:31 As far as I know, you know,

00:04:32 you can fly under any radar right now.

00:04:34 We don’t have necessarily radars

00:04:36 that can look through anything.

00:04:37 So there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself,

00:04:41 but with a larger number of assets

00:04:43 and distributed communication networks,

00:04:45 where those radars are looking,

00:04:47 it makes all the difference.

00:04:48 And I said, they’re ingressing past an IAS

00:04:51 and that’s an integrated air defense system.

00:04:52 And that linking of air defense systems

00:04:55 is what makes it so hard, so complicated

00:04:58 is that the sensors and the weapons

00:05:00 are disassociated from each other.

00:05:02 So that if you took out the target that was shooting at you,

00:05:06 it still has ability to intercept you

00:05:09 from another radar location.

00:05:11 So it’s distributed and it’s stronger that way.

00:05:14 You mean the surface to air missiles,

00:05:18 like it’s a distributed system

00:05:20 in that if you take out one,

00:05:22 they’re still able to sort of integrate information

00:05:26 about your location and strike at you.

00:05:28 Correct.

00:05:29 And there’s a lot of complication that can go,

00:05:30 you know, once we start thinking about

00:05:32 distributed systems like that

00:05:33 and the ability to self heal and repair

00:05:35 and adapt to losses, it’s an interesting area.

00:05:39 Are you responsible for thinking about that

00:05:41 when you’re flying an airplane?

00:05:43 To some degree, when we ingress to an area like that,

00:05:47 we’re presented with information about targets,

00:05:50 air to air or air to surface,

00:05:52 or surface to air, I should say.

00:05:54 And we can essentially see where essentially

00:05:57 the danger zone, if you will, is located.

00:06:00 And so essentially we would stay out of that.

00:06:02 And so having a full picture of the environment

00:06:05 is extremely important because, you know,

00:06:07 at the end of the day, if we go in that circle,

00:06:09 we can die pretty quickly.

00:06:10 So it’s absolutely crucial.

00:06:12 So there’s regions that have higher and lower danger

00:06:16 based on your understanding of the actual,

00:06:17 whatever the surface to air missiles systems are.

00:06:22 So you can kind of know.

00:06:24 That’s interesting.

00:06:25 I wonder how automated that could be too,

00:06:26 especially when you don’t know.

00:06:29 It seems like in the movie they knew

00:06:30 the location of everything.

00:06:33 I imagine that’s less known in most cases.

00:06:37 And also, a lot of those systems

00:06:39 might be a little bit more ghetto

00:06:41 if I can use that technical term.

00:06:43 Like I’ve gotten, ad hoc maybe is the,

00:06:47 I don’t know.

00:06:49 But having just recently visited Ukraine

00:06:52 and seen a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought,

00:06:55 there’s a lot of improvised type of systems.

00:06:58 So you take high tech, like advanced technology,

00:07:01 but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it

00:07:04 is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding

00:07:08 to the uncertainty and the dynamic environment.

00:07:11 And so from an enemy perspective

00:07:13 or whoever’s trying to deal with that kind of system,

00:07:16 it’s hard to figure it out.

00:07:17 Because it’s like me, I played tennis for a long time

00:07:22 and it’s always easier to play,

00:07:24 this is true for all sports,

00:07:25 play tennis against a good tennis player

00:07:27 versus a crappy tennis player.

00:07:29 Because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty.

00:07:32 And that’s really difficult to deal with.

00:07:34 It seemed like in the movie the systems

00:07:36 were really well organized.

00:07:38 And so you could plan.

00:07:40 And there’s a very nice ravine

00:07:41 that went right down the middle of them.

00:07:43 That’s how movies work, isn’t it?

00:07:44 Yeah.

00:07:45 But no, I absolutely agree.

00:07:47 So what you say is a very good point.

00:07:50 And if we were to take a chunk of airspace

00:07:54 and break it up into little bits,

00:07:56 there’d be places that are better to fly

00:07:58 or less good to fly.

00:08:00 And we are seeing that now

00:08:02 with what they call manned unmanned teaming.

00:08:05 We see tactical aircraft or some type of aircraft

00:08:08 or platform that’s being automated.

00:08:11 And it’s not being automated in traditional sense

00:08:13 where people think aircrew are flying them around

00:08:15 to conduct missions.

00:08:16 But it’s very high level objective orientated

00:08:20 mission planning that allows the aircrew

00:08:22 to act more as a mission planner,

00:08:25 mission commander versus having to just pick

00:08:27 the right assets or fly them around

00:08:29 or manipulate them somewhat physically.

00:08:34 So actually going back to the chess thing,

00:08:36 can you elaborate on what you mean

00:08:37 by playing a game of chess with yourself?

00:08:40 What’s, when you’re flying that mission,

00:08:42 what exactly do you mean by that?

00:08:43 Well, there’s a few people you’re usually fighting against

00:08:46 in the air, you know, there’s the bad guys

00:08:48 and then there’s physics and mother nature, right?

00:08:52 So when we’re down at about 100 feet,

00:08:56 it’s a chess game to stay alive for the pilot

00:08:58 and it’s a chess game for the whizzo

00:09:00 to process the information he needs

00:09:02 and then communicate it to all those other aircraft

00:09:04 that were flying around to ensure

00:09:06 that they’re putting their weapons on the right target.

00:09:08 What’s the whizzo?

00:09:09 Wizzo is a weapons systems officer.

00:09:11 He’s a backseater who is not a pilot,

00:09:13 but they’re responsible for radar manipulation

00:09:16 and communications and weapons appointments

00:09:19 of certain natures.

00:09:19 So the chess game is against physics,

00:09:22 against the enemy.

00:09:24 Time.

00:09:25 Time, what about your own psychology, fear, uncertainty?

00:09:31 No.

00:09:32 No, there’s no time for that type of self reflection

00:09:35 while we’re flying.

00:09:36 I want to get to that, but I don’t want to forget

00:09:41 the point that you made about increased randomness

00:09:43 being a tactical advantage.

00:09:45 You know, as we, as you mentioned, you know,

00:09:47 you can introduce autonomy into there

00:09:49 and when you bring autonomy in there

00:09:51 and my expectation would be as we bring different abilities

00:09:55 and machine learning, as we gather more data,

00:09:57 we’re going to be able to bring the tactical environment

00:10:00 around that jet, the war space that it goes into

00:10:03 will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy’s

00:10:05 perspective, where it’ll almost seem like

00:10:08 every tactical environment they go in will be random

00:10:10 and yet very deadly because the system is providing

00:10:13 a new tactical solution essentially

00:10:17 for that particular scenario.

00:10:18 Instead of just training to particular tactics

00:10:21 that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal, right?

00:10:24 But not necessarily the most lethal

00:10:26 because they have to be trainable.

00:10:28 But if we can introduce AI into that

00:10:29 and to have a level of randomness

00:10:32 or at least appearance of randomness due to complexity,

00:10:35 you know, I would consider it like a stochastic

00:10:38 tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters

00:10:40 won’t be able to engage in that fight

00:10:41 because it would be unsafe essentially for anything else.

00:10:45 And I think that’s where we have to drive to

00:10:47 because otherwise it’s always this chicken and mouse

00:10:49 cat game about who’s tactics and who knows what.

00:10:51 But if knowledge is no longer a factor,

00:10:54 it’s going to make things a lot different.

00:10:56 That’s really interesting.

00:10:57 So out of the many things that are part of your expertise,

00:11:03 your journey, you’re also working on autonomous

00:11:06 and semi autonomous systems, the use of AI

00:11:08 and machine learning and manned on man team

00:11:11 and all that kind of stuff.

00:11:12 We’ll talk about it.

00:11:14 But you’re saying sort of when people think about

00:11:17 the use of AI in war, in military systems,

00:11:20 they think about like computer vision for perception

00:11:23 or processing of sensor information

00:11:26 in order to extract from it actionable knowledge

00:11:29 kind of thing.

00:11:30 But you’re saying you could also use it to generate

00:11:33 randomness that’s difficult to work with

00:11:37 in like a game theoretic way.

00:11:39 Like it’s difficult for human operators to respond to.

00:11:43 Exactly.

00:11:44 That’s really interesting.

00:11:45 Okay, so back to Tom Cruise and Tom Gunn.

00:11:49 What about the dog fighting?

00:11:51 What aspects of that were accurate?

00:11:53 So dog fighting is kind of an interesting conversation

00:11:58 because it’s not the most tactically relevant skill set

00:12:00 nowadays by traditional standards

00:12:03 because the ranges with which we engage

00:12:06 and play weapons are very significant.

00:12:09 And so if we’re in a scenario where we’re in a dog fight

00:12:11 like that, a lot of things have probably gone wrong, right?

00:12:15 And that’s kind of how this mission was set up, right?

00:12:17 It was a no win type scenario, most likely.

00:12:21 And so for a dog fight, the aircraft size

00:12:24 and the ranges and the turn radiuses

00:12:25 make it so it’s not very theatrical, right?

00:12:27 The aircraft looks small.

00:12:29 And while it’s intense with the systems I have

00:12:31 and the sensors and what I’m feeling and all that,

00:12:34 if I, you know, we’ve done it and we’ve done it, right?

00:12:36 We take video of that and it’s just like a blue sky

00:12:38 and you see a little dot out there.

00:12:39 So not very interesting.

00:12:40 And so anytime it really looks interesting

00:12:42 in dog fight arena, that’s most likely a fiction

00:12:46 because we really only get close for a millisecond

00:12:49 as we’re dipping past each other at the merge.

00:12:50 You’re breaking my heart, right?

00:12:52 I know, I’m sorry.

00:12:52 You’re breaking my heart.

00:12:54 No, I understand.

00:12:55 In a dog fight, you can go and have fun,

00:12:56 but you know, in a dog fight specifically.

00:12:58 Maybe that was more common in the earlier wars,

00:13:00 the World War II and before that,

00:13:02 where the, is it due to the sort of the range

00:13:06 and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved?

00:13:09 Correct.

00:13:10 And the accuracy of the targeting systems at range.

00:13:12 But there’s also a train of thought

00:13:15 that hasn’t actually been tested out yet,

00:13:16 which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare,

00:13:21 EW and or unmanned assets,

00:13:25 the battle space may get so complex

00:13:27 and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky

00:13:31 or wasted such that you’re gonna be in close

00:13:34 with either IR missiles or guns,

00:13:36 if it’s a no kidding, you know, must defend type scenario.

00:13:40 First of all, what’s electronic warfare?

00:13:42 You know, it’s basically trying to get control

00:13:44 of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest

00:13:47 of whatever operation is going on.

00:13:49 So in the tactical environment,

00:13:51 a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar

00:13:53 or can we deceive the missiles or just, you know,

00:13:55 stop their guide and things of that nature.

00:13:58 Man, it’s a battle in the space of information,

00:14:01 of digital information.

00:14:03 Yeah, well F22 and F35, right?

00:14:05 F22 is a big expensive aircraft

00:14:07 and it was made to be a great fighter.

00:14:10 But the F35 is not as great of a fighter,

00:14:12 but it’s an electronic warfare

00:14:14 and mission commander platform of the future

00:14:18 where information is what’s gonna win the war

00:14:20 instead of the best dog fighter.

00:14:22 And so it’s interesting dichotomy there.

00:14:24 What’s the best airplane ever made, fighter jet ever made?

00:14:27 I know the aviators in the audience are gonna hate my answer

00:14:31 because they’re gonna want that sexy, you know,

00:14:33 muscly F14 Tomcat type fighter

00:14:36 or maybe P51 type aircraft.

00:14:39 But the F35 is maybe not the best dog fighter,

00:14:43 but it doesn’t have to get in a dog fight, right?

00:14:45 It’s like how you’d be the best knife fighters,

00:14:47 not getting a knife fight sometimes.

00:14:49 Lockheed Martin F35 Lightning II, it looks pretty sexy.

00:14:53 There’s two real strengths you can have as a fighter.

00:14:55 You can have the ability to kind of out muscle your fighter,

00:14:59 your opponent and beat them on Gs and power

00:15:02 and raid around on them.

00:15:03 And then there’s the other side of that,

00:15:05 which is you can be overly maneuverable.

00:15:09 You can bleed energy quickly.

00:15:10 And that’s what the F18 was good at

00:15:12 because it had to be heavier to land on aircraft carrier.

00:15:15 We had to give it extra bulk,

00:15:17 but it also needs a special mechanism

00:15:19 to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier.

00:15:21 And so it made it very maneuverable.

00:15:22 And what that leads to a lot of times

00:15:24 is the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight,

00:15:28 which is very good, but if you do make that sharp turn,

00:15:30 you’re gonna bleed a lot of your energy away

00:15:31 and be more susceptible for follow on shots

00:15:33 if that one’s less susceptible.

00:15:35 And so there’s just kind of aggression,

00:15:37 nonaggression game you can play depending on

00:15:39 the type of aircraft you’re fighting.

00:15:40 Where does the F35 land on that spectrum?

00:15:43 The F35 lands somewhere behind the F22s.

00:15:46 So there’ll probably be a row of F22s or F18s

00:15:49 and F35 will be out back,

00:15:50 but it’ll be enabling a lot of the warfare

00:15:52 that’s happening in front of you.

00:15:53 Is it one of the more expensive planes

00:15:55 because of all the stuff on it?

00:15:57 It certainly is, yeah.

00:16:00 In the movie, they have Tom Cruise fly it over Mach 10.

00:16:03 So maybe can you say what are the different speeds,

00:16:08 accelerations feel like, Mach 1, 2, 3, or hypersonic?

00:16:12 Have you ever flown hypersonic?

00:16:14 No.

00:16:16 How tough does it get?

00:16:18 I’m just gonna call out the BS of ejecting at Mach 10

00:16:21 just for the record, because in the movie,

00:16:23 there’s been I think at least one ejection

00:16:25 that was supersonic, and I’ll just say it was not pretty,

00:16:29 but he survived.

00:16:30 So there would have to be some interesting mechanisms

00:16:32 to eject successfully at Mach 10,

00:16:34 but I’ll digress on that for the moment.

00:16:36 Yeah, that seemed very strange.

00:16:37 And he just walked away from it, but anyway, so.

00:16:40 He seemed disheveled.

00:16:44 Okay, it’s Tom Cruise.

00:16:46 It’s like Chuck Norris or something.

00:16:47 Indestructible, yeah.

00:16:48 Indestructible.

00:16:49 He also doesn’t age.

00:16:50 But anyway, so what’s interesting to say

00:16:54 about the experience as you go up?

00:16:58 Does it get more and more difficult?

00:17:00 In the end of the day, crossing the sound barrier

00:17:02 is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway.

00:17:04 You don’t really notice anything.

00:17:07 To cross that, at least in F18,

00:17:08 because we have a lot more weight than most fighters,

00:17:11 typically we’ll do that in a descent.

00:17:13 We’ll do that full afterburner,

00:17:15 just dumping gas into the engine.

00:17:18 And so that’ll get us over the fastest

00:17:19 I think I’ve gone with about 1.28.

00:17:22 But what’s interesting, people realize,

00:17:23 is that if I take that throttle in an afterburner

00:17:26 and I just bring it back, just bring it back to mil,

00:17:29 which is full power, just not afterburner,

00:17:31 the deacceleration is so strong due to the air friction

00:17:34 that it’ll throw you forward in your straps.

00:17:36 Almost, I would say, maybe like 70% as strong almost

00:17:40 as trapping on the boat, it’s pretty strong.

00:17:43 So it’s almost like a reverse car crash

00:17:44 just for the deacceleration.

00:17:45 So the acceleration is usually kind of slow

00:17:48 and you don’t feel anything, of course,

00:17:49 when you’re crossing through it,

00:17:50 but the deacceleration’s pretty violent.

00:17:53 The deacceleration’s violent, huh, okay.

00:17:57 But is there a fundamental difference

00:17:59 between mach one and hypersonic, mach five and so on?

00:18:03 Does it require super special training?

00:18:06 And is that something that’s used often in warfare

00:18:09 or is it not really that necessary?

00:18:10 No, so hypersonic human flight, if it exists,

00:18:13 is not something that’s employed tactically

00:18:16 in any sense right now that I’m aware of.

00:18:19 So I think of hypersonic technology,

00:18:23 I think of missiles and weapons systems

00:18:26 and delivery platform, I don’t think of fighter aircraft

00:18:28 necessarily, I can think of bomber

00:18:31 or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps,

00:18:33 but those would be more efficient, very long range.

00:18:37 So I imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle, honestly.

00:18:40 The thing you experience is the acceleration,

00:18:42 not the actual speed.

00:18:44 There’s been just a small tangent,

00:18:46 a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons,

00:18:49 like missiles from Russia bragging about that.

00:18:54 Is this something that’s a significant concern

00:18:56 or is it just a way to flex

00:18:57 about different kinds of weapons systems?

00:19:00 Hypersonics, I do think pose a challenge

00:19:03 for our detection systems because there are,

00:19:08 you know, there are design considerations

00:19:10 in these sensor systems as always, right?

00:19:12 And when you build them and the technology progresses

00:19:14 to a point where maybe it’s not feasible

00:19:16 to use that technology, you know, there’s a problem.

00:19:18 But with the all domain and kind of cross domain

00:19:22 data linking capabilities we have,

00:19:24 it’s less of, you know, it’s more of an integrated picture,

00:19:29 I’ll say.

00:19:30 And so the hypersonics are really,

00:19:34 what it is is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem?

00:19:36 You’re just shortening the time available to do that.

00:19:39 We call something like that the kill chain, right?

00:19:40 It’s from locating a target and identifying it

00:19:45 and, you know, essentially authorizing its destruction

00:19:48 by whatever means, employing,

00:19:50 and then actually following up to ensure

00:19:52 that you did what you said you were going to do

00:19:54 in some sense, right?

00:19:55 Does it need another reattacks, something of that nature.

00:19:57 And so there’s an old dog fighting framework

00:20:00 you could call it, it’s called the OODA loop

00:20:02 that kind of made its way in the engineering of business now

00:20:04 but the old observe, orientate, decide act

00:20:06 was initially a fighter mechanism in order to get inside

00:20:10 that kill chain of your opponent and break it up

00:20:12 so that he can’t process his kill chain on you.

00:20:17 And so hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows

00:20:19 of opportunity to react to them.

00:20:23 I wanted to, like, how much do you have to shorten it

00:20:25 in order for the defense systems not to work anymore?

00:20:29 It seems like it’s very, you know, I’m both often horrified

00:20:34 by the thought of nuclear war, but at the same time,

00:20:38 wonder what that looks like.

00:20:42 When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems,

00:20:46 I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon

00:20:49 can reach the United States by missile

00:20:51 with the defense systems, but then again,

00:20:55 I also understand that these are extremely

00:20:57 complicated systems, the amount of integration required,

00:21:00 and because you’re not using them,

00:21:03 I mean, there could be, you know,

00:21:07 there’s like an intern somewhere that like forgot

00:21:10 to update the code, the Fortran code

00:21:12 that like is going to make the different,

00:21:15 because you don’t have the opportunity

00:21:16 to really thoroughly test, which is really scary.

00:21:21 Of course, the systems are probably incredible

00:21:24 if they could be tested, but because they can’t be

00:21:26 really thoroughly tested in an actual attack, I wonder.

00:21:32 I guess one assumption there would be that

00:21:35 these hypersonic missiles would only be launched

00:21:37 in the case of an attack.

00:21:39 It’d be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects

00:21:41 that we could use to flex those systems.

00:21:44 Another thing that actually happened,

00:21:46 and I just have a million questions I want to ask you,

00:21:48 it’s fascinating to me, is there’s a bird strike

00:21:51 on the plane, does that happen often?

00:21:53 Yeah, it’s a serious issue.

00:21:54 And it damaged the engine, and they made it seem

00:21:56 like it’s a serious, exactly a serious issue.

00:21:59 I’ve hit birds, I know someone that took a turkey vulture

00:22:03 to the face, through the cockpit, right,

00:22:05 shattered the cockpit, knocked him out.

00:22:08 I think that, actually, I don’t know him personally,

00:22:10 but it was a story I know from the command I was at,

00:22:12 and I believe the backseater had to punch out

00:22:15 and punch them both out because he was unconscious

00:22:17 in the front seat from the bird.

00:22:20 It can kill you from hitting you,

00:22:21 it’s like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour.

00:22:25 It can take out an engine very easily.

00:22:30 Every airport I’ve flown at in the Navy,

00:22:32 I’ve had to check the bird condition, if you will,

00:22:36 to see how many birds, and we’ve had to cancel flights

00:22:38 because there’s too many of them around the airport.

00:22:40 Some airports even have bird radars, military airports.

00:22:43 Is there systems that monitor the bird condition?

00:22:45 There is, yeah, there’s actual radar systems,

00:22:48 and you can go in the, certain bases you have to call up,

00:22:51 and they’ll tell you what it is for the day

00:22:52 or for that hour, and other ones have it

00:22:54 in their weather report that goes out over the radio.

00:22:58 What are some technological solutions to this,

00:23:00 or is this just, because it’s a low probability event,

00:23:06 there’s no real solution for it?

00:23:07 I would say it’s not a low probability event.

00:23:10 This is happening a lot.

00:23:11 Although the hits themselves aren’t necessarily that common,

00:23:15 or I’ll say a catastrophic hit, either a near miss or a hit

00:23:18 or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it

00:23:21 is pretty common, and in fact, it seems stressful.

00:23:24 It is, it’s so common in fact that we know

00:23:26 that you never want to try to go over,

00:23:28 or you never want to go under a bird

00:23:29 if you see it in front of you.

00:23:31 You always want to try to go over it

00:23:32 because what they’ll do immediately if they see you

00:23:34 is, and you startle them, is they’ll bring their wings in

00:23:36 and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path.

00:23:39 It’s interesting, I didn’t know they did that,

00:23:40 but so if you immediately, if you try to go under them,

00:23:43 they’re gonna be dropping into you,

00:23:44 so you typically want to try to go above them.

00:23:45 Is this something you can train for, or no?

00:23:49 Is this one of those things you have to really experience?

00:23:50 It’s a skill set that you somewhat train for

00:23:55 in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense, right?

00:23:57 Being able to react to your environment very quickly

00:23:59 and make decisions quickly, so.

00:24:01 Is that one of the more absurd things,

00:24:04 challenges you have to deal with in flying?

00:24:06 Is there other things, sort of maybe weather conditions,

00:24:10 like harsh weather conditions?

00:24:11 Is there something that we maybe don’t often think about

00:24:14 in terms of the challenges of flying?

00:24:17 Birds, in a way, aren’t a ridiculous threat for us.

00:24:20 It’s a safety threat that anything physical in the air

00:24:25 is something that we really have to be careful about,

00:24:27 whether we’re flying formation off of the aircraft

00:24:29 right next to us or whether it’s a turkey vulture

00:24:32 at 2,000 feet or a flock of 5,000 birds,

00:24:35 like at the runway, we have to wave off, you know?

00:24:37 And although they’re low probability,

00:24:39 a lot of bases will have actual

00:24:41 Environmental Protection Agency employees

00:24:44 that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds

00:24:47 or different animals that may be in the runways

00:24:51 or flying about.

00:24:53 Wow, I didn’t know what a turkey vulture is,

00:24:55 and it really does look like a mix

00:24:57 between a vulture and a turkey.

00:24:58 Turkey.

00:25:00 And look kind of dumb, no offense to turkey vultures.

00:25:06 In that movie, who was the enemy nation?

00:25:08 Was it, I mean, I guess they were implying it’s Iran.

00:25:15 Or was it Russia?

00:25:17 I didn’t think they were implying

00:25:18 any particular nation state, frankly.

00:25:19 I think they did a somewhat decent job

00:25:22 of having some ambiguous fifth generation fighters.

00:25:26 The location and the stockpile,

00:25:30 I get how the story kind of insinuates certain things,

00:25:33 but they seem to do a good job

00:25:34 of not having anything directly pointing to another nation,

00:25:36 which I thought was the good move.

00:25:38 I enjoy these type of movies as an aviator

00:25:42 and as an American, right?

00:25:44 Because it’s a feel good movie,

00:25:45 but we shouldn’t be celebrating going to war

00:25:48 with any particular country, China, Russia,

00:25:51 whoever may have these weapons.

00:25:52 It’s fun to watch,

00:25:53 but it would be an incredibly serious event

00:25:55 to be implying these weapons.

00:25:57 Yeah, and we’ll talk about war in general,

00:26:01 because yeah, the movie’s kind of celebrating

00:26:04 the human side of things

00:26:07 and also the incredible technology involved,

00:26:08 but there’s also the cost of war

00:26:12 and the seriousness of war

00:26:13 and the suffering involved with war,

00:26:16 not just in the fighting,

00:26:17 but in the death of civilians

00:26:18 and all those kinds of things.

00:26:22 Well, you were a Navy pilot.

00:26:24 Let’s talk a little bit more seriously about this,

00:26:26 and you were twice deployed in the Middle East

00:26:28 flying the FAA 18F Super Hornet.

00:26:32 Can you briefly tell the story of your career

00:26:34 as a Navy pilot?

00:26:35 Sure.

00:26:36 So I joined the Navy in 2009, right after college.

00:26:39 I went to, essentially, officer boot camp,

00:26:42 officer of Canada school.

00:26:44 I applied as a pilot, and I got in as a pilot.

00:26:47 That was the advantage of going that way

00:26:48 is that I could essentially choose what I wanted,

00:26:50 and if I got in, great.

00:26:51 If not, I didn’t get stuck doing something else.

00:26:54 So you knew you wanted to be a pilot.

00:26:55 I did.

00:26:57 I joined.

00:26:58 I went through my initial training.

00:26:59 I went through primary flight training

00:27:01 that all aviators go through,

00:27:02 and I did well enough that,

00:27:06 one of the first lessons they teach you in the Navy

00:27:07 is that you can have a great career in the Navy

00:27:10 and you can see the world and do what you want,

00:27:13 but at the end of the day,

00:27:13 it’s all about the needs of the Navy and what they need,

00:27:15 so they may not have the platform you like

00:27:18 or you may not necessarily get to choose

00:27:19 your own adventure here,

00:27:21 but I was lucky enough that there was one jet slot

00:27:24 in my class, and I was lucky enough,

00:27:26 fortunate enough to get it, so.

00:27:28 It was a jet slot.

00:27:29 So yeah, what that means is that I was assigned

00:27:32 actually a tail hook at that point,

00:27:33 which meant I would go train to fly aircraft

00:27:36 that land on aircraft carriers,

00:27:38 and there’s essentially three aircraft

00:27:40 that do that at the time.

00:27:42 There’s the F18 and the E2 and the C2.

00:27:48 C2 is kind of like the mail truck for the boat.

00:27:50 E2 is one of the big radar dish on top,

00:27:54 and then there’s all the F18s.

00:27:55 So E2 is comms, is C2 mail truck?

00:27:59 Yeah.

00:28:00 C2 basically brings all the mail.

00:28:02 They pack on the shore,

00:28:04 and they’re the ones that bring supplies

00:28:05 to the ship via air and people.

00:28:07 Sorry if I missed it.

00:28:08 Is it a plane or is it a helicopter?

00:28:09 It’s a plane.

00:28:10 Okay.

00:28:11 All right, and the F18 is a fighter jet.

00:28:13 Correct.

00:28:14 Okay.

00:28:15 So I selected tail hook,

00:28:16 which meant I could get one of those other ones,

00:28:18 but 80% of them or so are jets,

00:28:20 so I was in a good spot at that point,

00:28:21 and that’s when I went to Merde, Mississippi

00:28:23 to fly my first jet, which was the T45 Gauss Hawk.

00:28:28 Cool, so what kind of plane is that?

00:28:30 Is that what you were doing your training on?

00:28:33 That’s the jet aircraft you get in

00:28:34 before you actually go to the F18.

00:28:37 It is a carrier capable,

00:28:39 so go to the boat for the first time in it during the day,

00:28:42 drop fake bombs, do dog fighting,

00:28:45 low levels, formation flying, day and night.

00:28:49 Oh, it’s a pretty plane.

00:28:51 Yeah, and it looks like a cone so that no one hits it.

00:28:54 Okay, so it’s usually not used for fighting,

00:28:58 it’s used for training?

00:28:59 It’s used for training how to fight.

00:29:01 Got it.

00:29:01 So what was that like?

00:29:03 Was that the first time you were sort of

00:29:04 really getting into it?

00:29:06 Yeah, that was really interesting,

00:29:07 because before that it was a 600 horsepower prop plane.

00:29:10 Going from that to the T45 is one of the biggest jumps

00:29:13 in power and like Navy machine operation.

00:29:17 How much horsepower does the T45 have approximately?

00:29:21 Maybe like 15,000 or so.

00:29:23 So it’s a huge jump from 600 you said horsepower about?

00:29:26 Cool, so it’s a big, big leap.

00:29:28 But it’s a jet, so it performs differently, it’s faster.

00:29:32 What that means, not just because it’s faster,

00:29:34 your whole mind needs to be faster.

00:29:35 Everything happens faster in the air now, right?

00:29:37 Those comms happen faster,

00:29:40 your landing gear has to come up faster,

00:29:41 everything just happens faster in a jet.

00:29:42 So it’s a big jump.

00:29:44 And I’ll never forget going on my first flight

00:29:47 in that aircraft, it was a formation flight for someone else.

00:29:52 And I was just in the back watching

00:29:54 and there was an instructor in the flight.

00:29:55 And so what that means is the instructor

00:29:57 is in a single aircraft and then there’s three

00:29:59 or four other aircraft and they’re learning

00:30:01 how to do joins and they’re learning how to fly in formation.

00:30:04 And as a new student in the back, it’s amazing, right?

00:30:06 Cause you know, photo op time and all this,

00:30:08 like I’m seeing aircraft up close for the first time,

00:30:10 it’s awesome, and on the way back,

00:30:15 we couldn’t get our landing gear down, ironically.

00:30:19 So to make a long story short,

00:30:22 cause it’s overall not that exciting,

00:30:24 we couldn’t get the gear down,

00:30:25 we actually went to go do a control ejection

00:30:27 to the target area where that is,

00:30:29 about 15, 20 miles to the north of the base.

00:30:32 Wait, did you just say that’s not that exciting?

00:30:35 Well.

00:30:36 Cause that to me is pretty exciting.

00:30:38 That, I mean, how, first of all,

00:30:41 I mean, that must be terrifying,

00:30:43 like early on in your careers,

00:30:45 I haven’t seen those things that,

00:30:49 yeah, like how often does that kind of thing happen?

00:30:53 Decent, more than you would think.

00:30:54 More than you would think.

00:30:55 There was no significant panic?

00:30:57 This is like, this understood?

00:30:58 This is what has to be done in this case?

00:31:00 I think I was probably just too dumb

00:31:02 to realize the significance of it,

00:31:03 cause as a new student, you know,

00:31:05 not really appreciating, you know,

00:31:07 just what is ahead of me if we are ejecting.

00:31:10 But at the time it was more, it was just like rote, right?

00:31:12 Cause I was back there,

00:31:12 and then I went from a observer mode to a,

00:31:15 I’m gonna provide you the help that I can provide you

00:31:17 as a member of this crew, you know, mode.

00:31:19 And so it was less about, you know,

00:31:21 on this 20 mile trip and thinking about my,

00:31:25 how vulnerable I am, you know,

00:31:26 we’re going through checklists,

00:31:27 we’re talking to people, we’re getting ready.

00:31:29 So no, it wasn’t fearful.

00:31:32 And the whole time we were doing one of these

00:31:33 to try to get the gear down.

00:31:36 So we’re unloading the jet and then loading it back

00:31:38 to try to get the gear out with the stick.

00:31:41 And it came down, it came down halfway there,

00:31:46 just on its own.

00:31:47 So it came back around and we did like a safety trap

00:31:50 in case there was a problem with the gear.

00:31:52 And that was my first flight, you know,

00:31:55 a little bit of serendipity,

00:31:56 but I’m gonna fast forward a bit.

00:31:57 And I went back to that squad as an instructor

00:32:00 about five or six years later,

00:32:02 and I was an aviation safety officer at this point,

00:32:04 which meant I was responsible for investigating mishaps.

00:32:08 And a student went in and he went in the back seat

00:32:13 of a form flight, just like the one I went on.

00:32:17 And he went out and he ended up ejecting on that flight.

00:32:20 Exact same type of flight.

00:32:21 They went out and they had a runaway trim scenario.

00:32:25 And it caused the aircraft essentially

00:32:26 just inverted itself almost 180 degrees

00:32:29 at about 600 feet over the ground.

00:32:31 And they punched out just slightly outside

00:32:33 the ejection window at about 300, 400 feet or so,

00:32:36 but they were completely fine.

00:32:39 So, you know, and then about two months later,

00:32:42 we had another ejection.

00:32:43 About three months after that, we had another ejection.

00:32:45 So unfortunately, you know, it can be more common

00:32:49 than people think.

00:32:50 What does it feel like to get ejected?

00:32:52 Thankfully, I don’t know.

00:32:53 I can describe it to you.

00:32:55 I can tell you what it’s like from what I’ve heard,

00:32:58 but I truly think it’s one of those things

00:32:59 that you just don’t understand until it happens.

00:33:02 It’s like instantaneous about 250 Gs,

00:33:05 which is only possible because of inertia in our blood.

00:33:07 All right, so you can actually get like 250, 300 Gs

00:33:10 for like a few milliseconds,

00:33:11 and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 Gs

00:33:14 to get you away from the vehicle itself.

00:33:16 And so, you know, you may lose consciousness.

00:33:20 If you do, you know, who knows where you wake up.

00:33:24 You know, you could be in a tree,

00:33:25 you could still be falling, you could be in the water, so.

00:33:28 The physics of that is fascinating, how to eject safely.

00:33:31 Do you know the story about how that was tested at all?

00:33:34 I don’t know the full story,

00:33:35 but there was an airport.

00:33:36 I’m guessing nobody knows the full story.

00:33:39 It’s probably a lot of shady stuff going on.

00:33:41 But anyway, you mean like in the early, early days, or?

00:33:44 They took a flight dock up to a rocket sled

00:33:46 and just see how much their body could take it.

00:33:49 And he turned a lot of his body in the mush

00:33:51 in the process of getting that science done,

00:33:53 but he saved a lot of lives.

00:33:55 People used to be tougher back in the day.

00:33:58 Yeah, that’s how science used to be done.

00:34:04 So how did your training continue?

00:34:05 So how, take me farther through your career

00:34:10 as you worked towards graduating towards the F18s.

00:34:13 So in VT9, where I was a student, there’s two phases.

00:34:16 There’s an intermediate and an advanced.

00:34:19 Intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft.

00:34:22 And at that point, you truly hear,

00:34:23 all right, you’re going jets now,

00:34:25 or you’re gonna go one of the other aircraft

00:34:28 that land on the aircraft carrier.

00:34:30 I was told I was going jets at that point.

00:34:33 And then we go into same squadron,

00:34:35 same aircraft, same instructors,

00:34:36 but it’s called advanced now.

00:34:37 And now we’re learning how to dog fight for the first time.

00:34:41 We’re doing what we call tactical formation,

00:34:44 which is just like aggressive position keeping.

00:34:48 We are doing dog fighting in low levels

00:34:52 and all sorts of great stuff.

00:34:53 So it’s really that first introduction

00:34:55 to that tactical environment

00:34:56 and really putting Gs on the jet

00:34:58 and on your body and maneuvering.

00:35:00 Is there like tactical formation,

00:35:02 is collaborating with other fighter jets a part of that?

00:35:05 It is.

00:35:05 So flying in a, that’s what you mean by formation.

00:35:08 So literally having an awareness.

00:35:11 Is this done for you or are you as a human

00:35:13 supposed to understand like where you are in the formation,

00:35:18 how to maintain formation, all that kind of stuff?

00:35:20 Yeah, there’s a.

00:35:21 Is it done autonomously or manually?

00:35:23 There’s a great autonomy point

00:35:24 on the end of this I’ve thought about.

00:35:25 So, but what we do, it’s all manual.

00:35:27 And so I’m looking at his wing

00:35:29 and I’m looking at different visual checkpoints

00:35:33 that form like a triangle, right?

00:35:34 Like an equal out triangle essentially.

00:35:36 And then as that triangle is no longer equal,

00:35:39 I can tell my relative position against that aircraft.

00:35:42 That’s really cool.

00:35:43 And so that’s what I’m staring at first,

00:35:45 sometimes hours on end, several feet away,

00:35:47 doing one of these if I’m in the weather, that’s all it is.

00:35:50 So you get, it’s almost like, is it peripheral vision

00:35:52 or is it your?

00:35:53 No, we’re staring directly at it.

00:35:54 The peripheral is going on my, on my.

00:35:57 That’s interesting.

00:35:58 Stuff, right?

00:35:59 My sensors and all my instruments.

00:36:01 And so he is my gyroscope at that point, right?

00:36:04 While you’re flying, not looking straight.

00:36:06 Correct, I’m flying like this for hours.

00:36:08 It can hurt your neck.

00:36:09 We don’t like doing this as much.

00:36:11 And I don’t think it’s just me, right?

00:36:13 It’s a weird thing where when you’re like this,

00:36:14 it’s actually harder to fly formation slightly than here

00:36:18 because being in line of your hand movements

00:36:21 and of the aircraft somehow has an effect

00:36:24 on our ability to be more precise and comfortable.

00:36:27 It’s strange.

00:36:28 But so there’s a symmetry to the formation usually.

00:36:32 So one of the people on the other side

00:36:34 really don’t like being on that side.

00:36:37 Is it, does it, who gets like the short straw?

00:36:40 How do you decide which side of the formation you are?

00:36:43 It’s a good question too

00:36:44 because there’s kind of rank in some sense.

00:36:46 So if it’s a four person formation, right?

00:36:49 You have the vision lead who’s qualified

00:36:51 to lead a whole division, but maybe the other ones aren’t.

00:36:53 And he has a dash two and that’s his wingman essentially.

00:36:56 And then in a division, there’s two other aircraft.

00:36:58 And then you have another senior flight leader.

00:37:00 That’s the dash three position.

00:37:02 And then you have dash four, the last one.

00:37:05 And if you were all lined up on one side,

00:37:06 like fingertip, one, two, three, four,

00:37:08 that dash four guy is gonna be at the end of that whip.

00:37:10 So if you’re flying formation,

00:37:12 each one’s making movements relative to the lead.

00:37:15 Dash four is kind of at the end of that error.

00:37:19 And so his movements are kind of like a whip.

00:37:21 It’s very difficult to fly in that position in close.

00:37:23 Can you elaborate?

00:37:24 Is it because of the error, the aerodynamics?

00:37:25 So what’s a whip?

00:37:26 If this is a flight lead and this is dash two,

00:37:28 flight lead is rock steady and just doing his thing.

00:37:30 And flight two is gonna be working that triangle

00:37:32 moving a little bit, right?

00:37:33 And he has this small error bubble

00:37:35 that he’s doing his best to stay.

00:37:37 And then, but dash three is flying off dash two.

00:37:39 And so his error bubble is dash twos plus his own.

00:37:42 And dash four.

00:37:43 So it gets more and more stressful

00:37:44 as you get farther out.

00:37:46 Okay, what’s the experience of that staring

00:37:50 for long periods of time and trying to maintain formation?

00:37:54 How stressful is that?

00:37:56 Because we’re doing that when we drive, staying in lane.

00:38:01 And that becomes, after you get pretty good at it,

00:38:05 it becomes somewhat, it’s still stressful.

00:38:09 Which actually is surprisingly stressful.

00:38:10 When you look at lane keeping systems,

00:38:13 they actually relieve that stress somehow.

00:38:15 And it actually creates a much more pleasant experience

00:38:18 while you’re still able to maintain situational awareness

00:38:20 and stay awake, which is really interesting.

00:38:24 I don’t think people realize how stressful it is

00:38:26 to lane keep when they drive.

00:38:29 So this is even more stressful.

00:38:31 So are you, do you think about that?

00:38:34 Or is this, yeah, I guess how stressful is it

00:38:37 from a psychology perspective?

00:38:39 It’s very stressful.

00:38:41 So I taught students how to do this as well.

00:38:43 And so at our feet, we have two rudders.

00:38:46 And if I’m flying off a flight lead over here,

00:38:48 what you’ll find a lot of times is you’ll be flying,

00:38:51 or like if I’m the instructor and the student’s flying,

00:38:53 I’ll start to notice that he’s having a harder

00:38:55 and harder time keeping position.

00:38:57 What I’ll notice typically is he’s locked out his leg.

00:38:59 They’ll lock out the leg that’s closest

00:39:01 to the aircraft they’re flying against

00:39:03 and push on the rudder subconsciously,

00:39:06 because their whole body’s trying to get away

00:39:07 from the aircraft because they’re so uncomfortable

00:39:08 being close to it.

00:39:09 And so I’ll tell them, I can fix their form

00:39:12 with just a couple of words.

00:39:13 I’ll say, wiggle your toes.

00:39:14 And they’ll wiggle their toes and they’ll realize,

00:39:16 and they’ll loosen all the muscles in their legs

00:39:18 because they realize they’ve been locked up

00:39:19 and their formation flying will get a lot better.

00:39:22 And so, there’s a lot of stress associated with that.

00:39:25 There’s some interesting psychological or visual issues

00:39:32 such as vertigo as you’re flying.

00:39:35 So if you’re flying with him

00:39:36 and then you fly right into a cloud, right?

00:39:38 That’s when it’s very stressful

00:39:39 because you have to be very close

00:39:41 in order to maintain visual

00:39:42 and you might be on a thunderstorm, right?

00:39:44 And so you have to be very tight.

00:39:45 You might start raining and then he’s turning,

00:39:48 but you might not even know that.

00:39:50 You might not even be able to see that turn.

00:39:52 And so all of a sudden you might look

00:39:54 while you’re in a turn thinking you were straight and level

00:39:56 and you look just maybe back at your instruments very quick

00:39:58 and you realize you’re like in a 30 degree turn

00:40:01 and your whole concept of where you are in the world

00:40:03 starts getting very confused.

00:40:05 And you immediately get this sense of, it’s weird.

00:40:09 Like I look at the HUD and it feels,

00:40:12 all my senses are telling me it’s spinning, but it’s not.

00:40:13 And so I have to trust my instruments

00:40:15 even though it feels like it’s spinning.

00:40:17 And the same thing can happen

00:40:18 when you’re flying formation off of someone

00:40:20 and it can be very dangerous and disorientating.

00:40:25 But the point is to try to regain awareness

00:40:28 by trusting the instruments,

00:40:30 like distrust all your human senses

00:40:33 and just use the instruments

00:40:35 to rebuild situational awareness.

00:40:37 Not in this particular case

00:40:39 because our situational awareness is based,

00:40:41 it’s predicated off of our flight lead.

00:40:43 So in a sense, I’m just trusting his movements.

00:40:45 And so he’s my gyroscope, but you’re absolutely right.

00:40:47 And if I was by myself, I would trust my instruments,

00:40:49 but I can’t just stop flying form and trust my instruments

00:40:52 because now I’m gonna hit him.

00:40:52 Oh yeah, you have to pay attention to him.

00:40:54 So he’s my reference.

00:40:56 So the instruments are not helping you significantly

00:40:58 with his positioning.

00:41:00 Not, it’s all completely manual.

00:41:02 So is there a future where some of that is autonomous?

00:41:06 Yeah, and I’ve thought about automating that flight regime.

00:41:10 But when I started thinking about it,

00:41:11 I realized that all the formation keeping that we do

00:41:16 is designed to enhance the aviators

00:41:22 ability to maintain sight, right?

00:41:23 So we fly very tight formation so that we can go in weather

00:41:26 and to reduce groups of traffic coming into the boat.

00:41:30 We fly in one particular position

00:41:33 so that all of the flight crew can look down the line

00:41:36 and see the flight lead.

00:41:38 So everything has based,

00:41:39 everything has to do with the two air crew

00:41:43 visually maintaining sight of each other

00:41:45 and defending each other, right?

00:41:47 In a combat spread, I might be looking,

00:41:49 I may be three miles away from him flying formation

00:41:52 directly beam and looking around

00:41:53 to make sure nothing’s there.

00:41:55 So as I’m looking into automating this process,

00:41:57 I thought, well, sure it’s easy to get a bunch of aircraft

00:42:01 to fly in formation off each other, right?

00:42:03 It’s trivial, but why?

00:42:05 What is the best formation?

00:42:06 Why are they doing that?

00:42:07 And that opened up a much more interesting regime

00:42:10 of operations and flight mechanics.

00:42:12 And that’s when we get back to that kind of stochastic

00:42:14 mindset where we can bring in aircraft close

00:42:16 to do some type of normal flying

00:42:18 or reduce congestion around airports.

00:42:21 But when we consider flying or formation

00:42:23 in a tactical environment,

00:42:24 we can be much more effective

00:42:25 with nontraditional formation keeping

00:42:27 or perhaps no formation keeping perhaps.

00:42:30 So autonomy used for formation keeping,

00:42:32 not for convenience, but for the introduction of randomness.

00:42:36 Like to a real time mission planner, yeah.

00:42:39 And then that’s where you also have some human modification.

00:42:42 So it’s like unmanned teaming enters that picture.

00:42:47 So you use some of the human intuition

00:42:51 and adjustment of this formation.

00:42:53 The formation itself has some uncertainty.

00:42:56 I mean, it’s such an interesting dance.

00:42:57 I think that is the most fascinating application

00:43:02 of artificial intelligence

00:43:04 is when it’s human AI collaboration,

00:43:06 that semi autonomous dance

00:43:09 that you see in these semi autonomous vehicle systems

00:43:12 in terms of cars being driving,

00:43:14 but also in the safety critical situation

00:43:18 of a airplane, of a fighter jet,

00:43:20 especially when you’re flying fast.

00:43:22 I mean, in a split second,

00:43:25 you have to make all these kinds of decisions

00:43:26 and it feels like an AI system can do

00:43:29 as much harm as it can help.

00:43:31 And so to get that right is a really fascinating challenge.

00:43:35 One of the challenges too,

00:43:36 isn’t just the algorithms of the autonomy itself,

00:43:39 but how it senses the environment.

00:43:41 That of course is gonna be what all these decisions

00:43:44 are based off of.

00:43:45 And that’s a challenge in this type of environment.

00:43:48 Well, I gotta ask.

00:43:48 So F18, what’s it like to fly a fighter jet as best?

00:43:53 I mean, what to you is beautiful, powerful?

00:43:58 What do you love about the experience of flying?

00:44:02 For me, and I think I’m an outlier a bit.

00:44:04 It wasn’t necessarily the flying itself, right?

00:44:08 It wasn’t necessarily the soaring over the clouds

00:44:12 and looking down at the earth from upside down.

00:44:16 I came to love that,

00:44:17 but it wasn’t necessarily the passion that drove me there.

00:44:19 I just had no exposure to that.

00:44:21 The only exposure I had was reading

00:44:24 and going in the woods and science fiction and all that.

00:44:28 And so, what seemed to kind of drive me towards that

00:44:31 was just a desire to really be operating as close

00:44:35 to what I thought was the edge of technology or science.

00:44:38 And that’s the path that I chose

00:44:40 to try to get close to that.

00:44:41 I thought that being in a fighter jet

00:44:44 and all the tools and the technology and the knowledge

00:44:50 and the challenges and the failures and victories

00:44:53 that would come with that just seemed like something

00:44:56 that I wanted to be a part of.

00:44:59 And it wasn’t necessarily about the flying,

00:45:00 but it was about the challenge.

00:45:01 And like I said, as a person from a small town,

00:45:06 small high school, being able to get my hands

00:45:09 or even just near something of such technological

00:45:12 significance was kind of empowering for me.

00:45:15 And that’s kind of what bore the love of flight from there.

00:45:18 Becoming, having some level of mastery in the aircraft,

00:45:21 it really feels like an extension of your body.

00:45:24 And once I got there, then kind of the love of flying

00:45:27 kind of followed.

00:45:28 So you sort of, one, is the man mastery over the machine.

00:45:33 And second is the machine is like the greatest thing

00:45:35 that humans have ever created arguably.

00:45:38 The things that Lockheed Martin and others have built.

00:45:41 I mean, the engineering in that.

00:45:46 However you feel about war, which is one of the sad things

00:45:50 about human civilization is war inspires

00:45:54 the engineering of tools that are incredible.

00:45:59 And it’s like, maybe without war,

00:46:02 if we look at human history, we would not build

00:46:04 some of the incredible things we built.

00:46:06 So in order to win wars, to stop wars,

00:46:09 we build these incredible systems

00:46:12 that perhaps propagate war.

00:46:15 And that’s another discussion I’ll ask you about.

00:46:17 But this, to you, this is like, this is a chance

00:46:21 to experience the greatest engineering humans

00:46:24 have ever been able to do.

00:46:28 Like similar, I suppose, that astronauts feel like

00:46:31 when they’re flying.

00:46:31 And I wanted to be an astronaut.

00:46:32 I wanted to take that route.

00:46:34 I was gonna apply to test pilot school.

00:46:38 It just didn’t work out for me.

00:46:39 I ended up having a broken foot during my window.

00:46:42 But long story short, I ended up after my time

00:46:45 in my fleet squadron, and we can get back to the rest

00:46:47 of the timeline if you want,

00:46:48 but I went to be an instructor pilot instead, right?

00:46:54 And then, I was talking about this

00:46:56 with a squadron mate earlier today about how,

00:46:59 I certainly wouldn’t be talking with Lex today

00:47:01 if I ended up going to test pilot school.

00:47:04 I never would have, I never would have had the,

00:47:09 I wouldn’t, maybe recklessness, I don’t know,

00:47:12 but the willingness to have a conversation

00:47:14 about UAP while I was, that led me to the decision

00:47:19 to get out once I went there.

00:47:20 And it kind of enabled me to talk about UAP more publicly.

00:47:26 And if I stayed in the Navy, then I don’t think

00:47:28 that would have happened.

00:47:29 I wouldn’t have been able to if I went that route.

00:47:33 Well, as a small tangent, do you hope to travel

00:47:36 to Mars one day?

00:47:37 Do you think you’ll step foot on Mars one day?

00:47:40 If you asked me that five years ago,

00:47:42 I would have said, yes, I want to.

00:47:44 In fact, I would like to die on Mars.

00:47:48 Now, today, now I have some hesitations

00:47:51 and I have some hesitations

00:47:52 because I’m hopeful and optimistic.

00:47:54 And I think that, you know, I think that we are truly

00:47:57 like on the brink of a very wide technological revolution

00:48:02 that’s going to kind of move us how we used to move

00:48:04 information and data in this last century.

00:48:09 We’re going to be manipulating and managing matter

00:48:11 in that next century.

00:48:12 And so I think that, I think our reach as humans

00:48:15 are going to get a lot wider, a lot faster

00:48:17 than people may realize, or at least.

00:48:19 Wait, are you getting like super ambitious beyond Mars?

00:48:22 Is that what you’re saying?

00:48:23 Well, I mean.

00:48:24 Like Mars seems kind of boring, I want to go beyond that.

00:48:27 Is that what, do you mean the reach of humanity

00:48:31 across all kinds of technologies?

00:48:32 Or do you mean literally across space?

00:48:34 Across space, you know?

00:48:35 So, you know, we’re going to be, I think that

00:48:37 as artificial intelligence and machine learning

00:48:40 start broaching further into the topic of science,

00:48:42 the area of science, and we start working through

00:48:44 new physics, we start working through,

00:48:47 or I should say pass the Einsteinian frameworks

00:48:50 as we kind of get a better idea of what space time is

00:48:53 or isn’t, we may have, we may find, you know,

00:48:56 answers that we didn’t know that we were looking for.

00:48:58 And we may have more opportunity.

00:49:00 And I’m not saying this is something I’m, you know,

00:49:03 betting the farm on, of course, but maybe that’s a road

00:49:06 I want to explore on Earth instead of on Mars.

00:49:09 Maybe there’s technology that can be brought to bear

00:49:12 with new science and harder engineering that is a road

00:49:15 that doesn’t go past Mars to get outside the solar system.

00:49:19 So there are different ways to explore the universe

00:49:22 than the traditional rocket systems.

00:49:26 If we can continue sort of your journey,

00:49:31 you said that you were attracted to the incredibly

00:49:35 advanced technologies of the F18s and just the

00:49:39 fighter jets in general.

00:49:42 Let me ask another question, which seems incredibly

00:49:45 difficult to do, which is landing on a carrier

00:49:50 or taking off from a carrier and landing on a carrier.

00:49:52 So what’s that like?

00:49:54 What are the challenges of that?

00:49:56 Taking off’s pretty easy.

00:49:57 It’s procedurally somewhat complex where there’s a lot

00:50:01 of moving parts, almost like a clock, you know.

00:50:03 You’re almost in a pocket watch.

00:50:04 So then you’re a part of the machinery.

00:50:06 And so long as you press the right buttons

00:50:08 and do the right things, you’re gonna go shooting

00:50:10 off the front.

00:50:11 So there’s like a checklist to follow and there’s

00:50:12 several people involved in that checklist

00:50:14 and you just gotta follow the checklist correctly.

00:50:16 Essentially, yep.

00:50:17 Lots of ways to screw it up, but you’ll know

00:50:19 how to screw it up.

00:50:20 But landing on the back of the boat is a whole

00:50:23 different animal.

00:50:24 There’s a lot more variables.

00:50:26 There’s essentially one or two people responsible

00:50:29 for the success of that.

00:50:31 The landing signal officer who actually represents

00:50:34 a team of specially trained aviators who are responsible

00:50:38 for helping that aviator land on the boat.

00:50:41 And the pilot himself.

00:50:44 And it is a hard task to actually fly precisely enough

00:50:49 to be good at it.

00:50:50 So to fly quote unquote the perfect pass,

00:50:53 you essentially have to fly your head through a one foot

00:50:55 by one foot box.

00:50:57 That’s essentially the target you’re shooting for.

00:51:00 Plus or minus probably about five knots on airspeed,

00:51:02 although we don’t really judge it by airspeed.

00:51:04 It’s something called angle of attack.

00:51:06 But generally pretty tight parameters there.

00:51:09 And you can do everything perfect and still fail.

00:51:11 So when we go to touchdown, we immediately bring

00:51:13 the power up and we rotate as if we were doing,

00:51:17 as if we were bouncing off the deck.

00:51:19 And if we catch it, then we slow down.

00:51:23 And then someone tells us to bring the power back,

00:51:25 which we do, we don’t do it on our own.

00:51:27 Cause it’s such a violent experience.

00:51:30 Think you’re trapped or not, or something breaks

00:51:32 and you bring your throttle back.

00:51:34 And that’s a very serious thing.

00:51:35 It happened to best of us, I’ll admit I’ve done it once.

00:51:38 When I first got to the squadron,

00:51:40 it’s called ease guns land.

00:51:42 And so I came in the boat and I brought the power.

00:51:45 I cracked the power back a little bit

00:51:47 before I’ve been told to her that my aircraft

00:51:49 had finished settling in.

00:51:51 And that was a big faux pas, right?

00:51:52 So, especially as a new guy.

00:51:53 So it’s a very serious business.

00:51:57 There’s a lot of eyes on you

00:51:58 and there’s a lot of ways to screw it up.

00:52:00 But the physical rush of like having a great pass

00:52:03 and then like the crash of into the boat and all that,

00:52:07 the physical sensation from it,

00:52:09 when everything’s going great,

00:52:10 it’s top of the world, it’s a great feeling.

00:52:12 How much of it is feel?

00:52:13 How much of it is instruments?

00:52:16 How much is other people just doing the work for you,

00:52:18 catching you, as long as you do everything right?

00:52:20 There’s a few systems we use.

00:52:21 One is called the BAL.

00:52:23 And the BAL is external to our aircraft.

00:52:26 And it’s B A L L, BAL, like BAL, okay.

00:52:29 It’s a iFloss landing system,

00:52:31 which stands for something very long convoluted.

00:52:33 But essentially it’s a mirror with lights on it.

00:52:35 And you see the light at a different cell

00:52:40 based on your position relative to an ideal glide slope.

00:52:44 So if you’re right on it, you’re right in the middle.

00:52:46 And if you’re below, you’re low.

00:52:48 And as I add power and maneuver the aircraft,

00:52:51 that BAL, I see that BAL rise, I see that BAL low.

00:52:55 It’s a lagging indicator though, right?

00:52:57 And your jet is a lagging engine too, right?

00:53:00 It takes time to spool up the engine.

00:53:01 So that adds to the complexity.

00:53:03 You have to think ahead a bit.

00:53:05 So you don’t want to,

00:53:07 you can’t just bring the power up and leave it there.

00:53:10 You have to bring the power up, touch it, bring it back.

00:53:13 And oh, by the way, your landing area is moving,

00:53:15 not just away from you, but also on an angle, right?

00:53:17 Cause we have an angled deck.

00:53:19 And so you’re constantly doing one of these

00:53:21 to correct yourself as you go.

00:53:23 That seems so stressful.

00:53:24 And every time you do one of those,

00:53:26 maybe it’s a 30 degree angle bank, right?

00:53:28 I’m losing lift, right?

00:53:30 And so I have to compensate with power each time I do that.

00:53:33 So I’m doing another one.

00:53:33 Cause you have to maintain the same level

00:53:36 you’re always lowering.

00:53:38 It’s a constant rate of descent

00:53:39 that’s increasing from about 200 feet per minute

00:53:41 to about 650.

00:53:43 And every time you do this, that’s messing with that.

00:53:45 Okay.

00:53:46 So you have to compensate.

00:53:47 And you’re doing that manually.

00:53:48 Do that manually.

00:53:49 All right.

00:53:50 And then of course, as you come down that glide slope,

00:53:52 it becomes more and more narrow.

00:53:54 And you have to, of course,

00:53:55 modulate your inputs such that they’re smaller and smaller

00:53:58 cause they have a bigger and bigger effect

00:54:00 as you get closer in.

00:54:02 And what happens too, when you get in close is that

00:54:04 right before you cross over,

00:54:06 if this is the boat right here, your table,

00:54:08 right before you kind of get your wings

00:54:10 over the boat itself,

00:54:11 this big wind from the main tower of the boat

00:54:15 is where it dips down.

00:54:16 So the wind actually goes down and it’s called the burble.

00:54:18 And it’ll actually pull the aircraft down,

00:54:19 increase your rate of descent.

00:54:21 So at that particular point,

00:54:22 you need to increase your speed.

00:54:24 You know, increase your power

00:54:26 and try to compensate against that.

00:54:27 And so that’s kind of a third variable

00:54:28 that’s trying to screw you up on your way down.

00:54:31 What’s the most difficult conditions

00:54:34 in which you had to land

00:54:34 or you’ve seen somebody had to land?

00:54:36 Because I think you were also a signal officer as well.

00:54:40 I was, yeah.

00:54:41 I was the head landing signal officer for my squadron.

00:54:44 So you’ve probably seen some tough landings.

00:54:46 I have.

00:54:47 I’ve seen a ramp strike,

00:54:49 which is when a part of the aircraft hits

00:54:52 before the landing area,

00:54:54 which is basically the round out of the boat.

00:54:57 That is before the landing area.

00:54:58 So they basically struck the back of the boat coming in.

00:55:01 It was just their hook.

00:55:02 So it wasn’t their craft.

00:55:04 And they were fine.

00:55:05 That one was kind of ugly.

00:55:07 But it like rips that part of the aircraft.

00:55:09 Absolutely.

00:55:10 And then you land on your bellies, that kind of thing.

00:55:12 In this particular case,

00:55:13 it hit and then it gave

00:55:15 and essentially dragged the hook on the surface after that.

00:55:18 And so he was able to grab a wire at that point.

00:55:21 When does that kind of thing happen?

00:55:22 Is it just a miscalculation by the pilot

00:55:24 or is it weather conditions?

00:55:27 I wouldn’t even call it a miscalculation.

00:55:28 I mean, I’m going to put the blame on the pilot

00:55:30 because he’s the only one in the cockpit.

00:55:31 But then the day he’s reacting to the situations

00:55:34 he’s dealing with.

00:55:35 And so it may be errors or he may be doing the best

00:55:37 with the conditions that he’s been given.

00:55:40 On that particular one,

00:55:42 you just got too high rate of send.

00:55:43 It’s very common.

00:55:44 And that’s what you see it with new pilots.

00:55:45 You see it with older pilots, right?

00:55:47 New ones and complacent ones.

00:55:49 What you see is they’ll try to make the ball go

00:55:52 right where they want it in close.

00:55:54 They think they can beat the game a little bit.

00:55:56 And they try to, and so we have sayings,

00:55:58 we teach pilots as a landing signal officer,

00:56:01 we tell them like, don’t recenter the high ball in close.

00:56:04 It’s one of the rules to live by.

00:56:05 And so when the ball’s up high,

00:56:07 don’t try to bring it back in close

00:56:09 to like the center point when you’re in close.

00:56:11 Cause what you’re doing is you bring the power off

00:56:12 and you’re going to crash right down.

00:56:14 And that’s what happens, right?

00:56:15 Cause you got the burble pulling you down.

00:56:18 You might be correcting, which is decreasing your lift.

00:56:21 And then you have that type of maneuvers.

00:56:23 How are you supposed to do all of this

00:56:25 in harsh weather conditions?

00:56:27 And so that’s the one I wanted to tell you about.

00:56:28 That’s the hardest one.

00:56:29 And what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi lights on,

00:56:33 that’s a really shitty day.

00:56:34 99 taxi lights on, what’s that mean?

00:56:37 Everyone put your taxi lights on

00:56:39 because you’re about to land on the boat.

00:56:43 And you don’t see the boat?

00:56:44 Weather is so bad that the landing signal officer

00:56:46 on the boat can’t see you either.

00:56:48 And you can’t see the boat.

00:56:49 And you won’t be able to see it when you touch down.

00:56:52 So we call that a zero, zero landing.

00:56:55 And you turn on the taxi lights so that the LSO

00:56:57 who has a radio in his hand that looks like a phone

00:57:00 from 1980 is talking directly to the pilot.

00:57:04 And he’s looking at that little light in the rain

00:57:06 and he’s telling them you’re high, you’re low,

00:57:09 power, things like that.

00:57:11 Come right, back to left.

00:57:13 And literally talking him down to land

00:57:15 on the boat right there.

00:57:16 And the pilot, usually it comes as a surprise

00:57:18 to the pilot, the landing,

00:57:18 because he’s just listening to the voice,

00:57:20 can’t see the ball, can’t see the boat.

00:57:21 And all of a sudden you just hit the boat.

00:57:23 You crash, I mean you crash.

00:57:24 We’re going about 1,600 feet per minute descent

00:57:27 at that point.

00:57:28 So you’re going super fast.

00:57:30 So all of this is happening fast.

00:57:32 You don’t know the moment it’s gonna hit.

00:57:37 So you’re just going into the darkness

00:57:40 and just waiting for it to hit.

00:57:41 Maybe not dark though, a lot of times it’s white.

00:57:43 Into the light.

00:57:44 You’re just going into the light.

00:57:46 And then there’s a voice from an 80s phone.

00:57:50 I got it.

00:57:50 This is terrible.

00:57:53 But so you still have to,

00:57:57 so this kind of thing happens.

00:57:59 You still have to land.

00:58:00 Sometimes you just don’t have a place to divert.

00:58:02 But in a sense we’re trained for that

00:58:04 because we do the night landings as well.

00:58:06 And I think you’ll find this interesting,

00:58:07 but I always found that the night landings

00:58:10 where in these particular cases,

00:58:12 you’re usually lined up behind the boat,

00:58:14 maybe 10, 15 miles, whereas the other ones,

00:58:17 it’s like a tight circle, the landing pattern.

00:58:18 And so we can potentially see the boat way out there

00:58:23 if the lights were on, which they’re not.

00:58:25 But we can maybe see like the string of aircraft

00:58:26 in front of us.

00:58:28 But what’s interesting is that it can take a while.

00:58:31 You might be 15 miles out

00:58:32 and your lights are turned down as dim as possible.

00:58:36 You have a cloud deck maybe at six or 7,000 feet

00:58:38 so that the starlight, there’s no moon,

00:58:40 but let’s say the starlight’s blocked out

00:58:42 because just the starlight alone, no moon,

00:58:45 you can see the boat, you can see the water.

00:58:47 But when that goes away, it’s like closing your eyes.

00:58:50 You can’t tell anything.

00:58:52 It could be upside down.

00:58:53 It could be in any position.

00:58:55 And for me, it was almost a meditative process

00:58:58 that I had to snap myself back out of

00:59:00 when I was on like a long straightaway.

00:59:02 And then I would see the light pop up

00:59:05 in the sea of darkness.

00:59:06 No lights anywhere.

00:59:07 Can’t even see the horizon.

00:59:09 And I just see a light out there.

00:59:10 My instruments were telling me, and they’re turned down

00:59:12 as far as they can go, right?

00:59:13 So I can barely see them.

00:59:14 So my eyes can adjust.

00:59:16 And I’m just staring at this light in the distance.

00:59:18 And it’s just very meditative and it’s the hum behind you.

00:59:21 And then at like four miles, you know,

00:59:25 almost like, oh, the light is a little bit bigger.

00:59:26 And you almost kind of have to snap back to it

00:59:28 and be like, oh, I need to like kind of like

00:59:30 look around a little bit and engage my brain,

00:59:32 link it back to my body and like do this thing.

00:59:35 Because you’re going to have to actually land.

00:59:36 Well, is there just, you said you don’t necessarily feel

00:59:40 the romantic notion of the whole thing,

00:59:42 but is there some aspects of flying where you look up

00:59:45 and maybe you see the stars or yeah, that kind of thing

00:59:51 that you just like, holy crap,

00:59:53 how did humans accomplish all of this?

00:59:55 Like, am I actually flying right now?

00:59:58 I used to have those moments on the boat

01:00:00 when I was catching planes land.

01:00:01 I would, they would trap and it’d be nighttime.

01:00:05 And it’s just all this chaos in the middle of the ocean

01:00:07 and nothing.

01:00:07 And I would have these moments where I’d be like,

01:00:09 how the hell did I end up here?

01:00:11 You know, there’s one moment in time next to an aircraft

01:00:13 landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you know,

01:00:16 where did my life, you know,

01:00:17 how did my life go to end up here?

01:00:19 How interesting.

01:00:20 But what I did start to enjoy was the night vision goggles

01:00:24 and putting those on and looking up at the stars

01:00:26 flying around, especially over the ocean.

01:00:29 What do they look like?

01:00:30 And there’s just so many, there’s just so many stars

01:00:33 that, you know, you normally can’t see.

01:00:34 They’re shooting stars all the time.

01:00:36 Almost every flight you’d see them with the goggles on.

01:00:39 And so it was a great pleasure to take advantage

01:00:42 of the lack of light pollution in some cases,

01:00:44 especially on deployment to go grab some goggles at night,

01:00:47 go out some quiet spot in the ship that no one can see me

01:00:51 and just kind of look around, you know.

01:00:52 Yeah, it’s humbling.

01:00:55 Quick break, bathroom break?

01:00:57 Yeah, wouldn’t mind a quick stretch of legs.

01:00:59 You got a few cool patches.

01:01:00 I do, so this is a VFA 11 Red Rippers patch.

01:01:05 Typically going actually on our arm.

01:01:09 So this is actually what we call the Boar’s Head or Arnold.

01:01:12 So this is actually the Boar’s Head

01:01:15 from the Gordon’s Gin bottle.

01:01:18 In 1918, we were in London or the UK somewhere

01:01:22 and we apparently partied with the owner and founder

01:01:25 of Gordon’s Gin and we had a great time

01:01:27 and there’s a signed letter in our ready room

01:01:29 that says we can use the logo in perpetuity.

01:01:32 Oh, nice.

01:01:33 And yeah, so I’d like to give you that patch.

01:01:36 I drank quite a bit of gourd, so this is good.

01:01:39 And I’d like to give you that coin from our squadron.

01:01:44 The Red Rippers, that’s a badass name.

01:01:48 Thank you, brother.

01:01:49 You’re welcome.

01:01:50 So let’s jump around a little bit,

01:01:51 but let me ask you about this one set of experiences

01:01:56 that you had and people in your squadron had.

01:01:59 So you and a few people in the squadron

01:02:00 either detected UFOs on your instruments

01:02:03 or saw them directly.

01:02:05 Tell me the full story of these UFO sightings

01:02:07 and to the smallest technical details,

01:02:10 because I love those.

01:02:12 I’ll do my best.

01:02:13 So we returned from, and when I say we,

01:02:17 I mean, not my squadron, but VFA 11, the Red Rippers.

01:02:21 I was a somewhat junior pilot at the time.

01:02:24 I joined them on deployment in 2012,

01:02:27 where they had been already out there

01:02:29 for about six months or so,

01:02:32 operating in the vicinity of Afghanistan.

01:02:35 I joined them and then we flew back

01:02:37 and still as a relatively new guy,

01:02:39 we came back and we entered

01:02:40 what’s considered a maintenance phase

01:02:42 where we slow down the tactical flying a bit,

01:02:45 kind of recuperate, do some maintenance on the aircraft.

01:02:48 And our particular model of the F18, the lot number,

01:02:53 was plumbed for the particular things

01:02:57 that were needed to upgrade the radar

01:02:59 from what’s known as the ABG 73 to the ABG 79.

01:03:04 And the ABG 73 is a mechanically scanned array radar.

01:03:10 It’s a perfectly fine radar,

01:03:12 but the AESA radar is kind of a magnitude jump

01:03:16 in capability, kind of an analog digital kind of mindset.

01:03:20 So it’s a leap to digital.

01:03:23 ABG 73, so I mean, are these things on a carrier?

01:03:26 Like what are we talking about here?

01:03:28 How big is the radar?

01:03:29 So this is actually the radars in the F18 itself.

01:03:32 Okay, so when you say they were chosen,

01:03:35 this is to test the upgrade to the new, the 79, ABG 79.

01:03:40 Less of a test and more of just,

01:03:42 hey, it’s your turn to get the upgrade.

01:03:43 Like we’re all going to these better radars.

01:03:46 They were building ones off the line with the new radar,

01:03:49 but we were this weird transitionary squadron

01:03:51 in the middle that transitioned

01:03:52 from the older ones to the new ones.

01:03:55 But it’s not particularly rare to fly with different types

01:03:57 of radar because in the,

01:03:59 and we call the fleet replacement squadron,

01:04:01 essentially the training ground for the F18,

01:04:03 you have all sorts of F18s with different radar.

01:04:06 So you are used to having multiple ones,

01:04:09 but in the actual deployable combat squadron, we upgraded.

01:04:14 And when we upgraded, we saw that there were objects

01:04:17 on the radar that we were seeing the next day

01:04:19 with this new radar that weren’t there with the old radar.

01:04:23 And these were sometimes the same day.

01:04:25 You might go on two flights.

01:04:27 The one in the morning might be with the older radar,

01:04:29 the one in the evening with the new radar.

01:04:31 And you’d see the objects with the new radar.

01:04:34 And that’s not overly surprising in some sense.

01:04:37 They are more sensitive.

01:04:39 Perhaps they’re not filtering out everything

01:04:41 they should be yet,

01:04:42 or perhaps there’s some other type of error.

01:04:45 Maybe it needs to be calibrated, whatever.

01:04:47 It was relatively new and we were somewhat used

01:04:50 to there being software problems

01:04:52 with these types of things occasionally,

01:04:53 just like anything else.

01:04:55 And so, okay, maybe this is a radar software malfunction.

01:04:58 We’re getting some false tracks, as we call them.

01:05:02 What were you seeing?

01:05:04 And so what we would see are representations of the objects.

01:05:08 So this is off of our radar.

01:05:09 We’re not seeing a visual image here.

01:05:11 This is kind of like what’s being displayed to us

01:05:13 almost like in a gaming fashion, right?

01:05:15 Like the icon, right?

01:05:16 So the icon is showing us, hey, something is there.

01:05:19 And here’s the parameters I can understand about it.

01:05:21 So this is in the cockpit.

01:05:22 There’s a display that’s showing some visualization

01:05:26 with the radars detecting.

01:05:27 Correct.

01:05:29 And there’s two different ways to do that.

01:05:30 The first one is like the actual data,

01:05:32 like the radar where I am,

01:05:37 it’s showing me the data kind of as if it’s in front of me

01:05:39 and I’m selecting those contacts.

01:05:41 And there’s another screen

01:05:42 called the situational awareness page.

01:05:43 And that’s kind of a God’s eye view

01:05:45 that brings all that data into one spot.

01:05:48 And so I’m gonna talk about this from the SA page,

01:05:51 from the situational awareness page

01:05:53 versus the individual radar ones,

01:05:54 because it’s easier, but.

01:05:55 Can you, sorry to linger on that.

01:05:57 So the individual displays are like first person

01:06:01 and then SA is,

01:06:04 when you say God’s eye view, it’s like from the top,

01:06:06 the integration of all that information

01:06:09 as if it’s looking down onto the earth.

01:06:11 Yes.

01:06:12 Is that a good way to summarize it?

01:06:13 It is, but for the aviator, it’s slightly different

01:06:15 because those two radar displays I talked about

01:06:17 are at the bottom of that display

01:06:20 is kind of representative of where I am.

01:06:22 And so I see what’s in front of me.

01:06:24 Whereas the situational awareness page,

01:06:26 the aircraft is located in the center of that.

01:06:29 And then all around me, based off of the data link

01:06:33 and wherever I’m getting information from,

01:06:35 I can see that whole awareness page.

01:06:37 I can see all the situation.

01:06:38 So I’m gonna kind of talk about this

01:06:41 from the situational awareness page,

01:06:43 which is a top down view, just to kind of frame our minds

01:06:46 instead of jumping around.

01:06:47 And so what we would see out there

01:06:49 is we’d see these indications

01:06:50 that something would be there

01:06:51 and they would have a track file.

01:06:53 That track file, that thing that represents the object

01:06:56 has a line coming out of it.

01:06:57 And that represents,

01:06:58 it’s called the target aspect indicator.

01:07:01 So there’s some tracking from the radar.

01:07:03 Correct, so it’s showing you where the object’s going.

01:07:05 This is all pretty cool that the radar can do all this.

01:07:07 So radar locks in on different objects

01:07:10 and it tracks them over time.

01:07:11 Correct.

01:07:12 That’s coming from the radar.

01:07:13 That’s like a built in feature.

01:07:15 Okay, cool.

01:07:16 So out there we’re seeing it.

01:07:17 We don’t have to necessarily pull things

01:07:18 into our tracker in some sense, right?

01:07:22 It’s all out there

01:07:22 and then we can kind of choose to highlight on stuff

01:07:24 or to kind of focus in on it more so.

01:07:27 But the information should all be out there.

01:07:30 And so we’d see that that target aspect indicator,

01:07:32 that line on a typical aircraft,

01:07:34 it would kind of look like this.

01:07:35 It would be coming out and it would go steady

01:07:37 and if they turned, it would be like boop, boop, boop,

01:07:39 and you see them turn, right?

01:07:41 It’s not magic.

01:07:42 But this object, the target aspect

01:07:44 would kind of be like all over the place,

01:07:46 like kind of randomly in the 360 degrees

01:07:49 from that top down view, that line would be in any place.

01:07:52 So kind of, is it unable to determine the target aspect?

01:07:56 Is it stationary?

01:07:58 And that’s just how it puts it out

01:07:59 and it’s not used to seeing it.

01:08:00 So I’m not saying that’s necessarily super weird,

01:08:02 but it was different than what we were used to seeing

01:08:04 because we weren’t used to seeing stationary objects

01:08:06 out there very much.

01:08:08 And what was also interesting is that

01:08:09 these weren’t just stationary on a zero wind day, right?

01:08:13 These are stationary at 20,000 feet, 15,000 feet,

01:08:17 500 feet with the wind blowing, you know?

01:08:21 And so much like the sea, when we’re up there fighting,

01:08:23 it affects everything.

01:08:24 We consider the wind when we’re shooting missiles,

01:08:27 when we’re flying or fuel considerations,

01:08:29 it’s like operating in that volume of air,

01:08:31 like the ocean, everything’s going with the current.

01:08:34 And so anything that doesn’t go with the current

01:08:36 is immediately kind of identifiable and strange

01:08:38 and that’s why these were initially strangers

01:08:40 because they would be stationary against the wind.

01:08:42 So if you had something like a good drone

01:08:45 in a windy conditions, what would that look like?

01:08:47 Would it not come off as stationary?

01:08:50 Would it sort of float about kind of thing?

01:08:53 No, I think with the drone technology we have today,

01:08:55 they could stay within a pretty tight location.

01:08:57 Well, I meant like DJI drone,

01:09:00 I’m saying like generically speaking,

01:09:03 not a military drone.

01:09:03 No, I have a DJI drone myself even,

01:09:05 and you know, maybe not a hundred knots,

01:09:07 but if that thing’s in 30 or 40 and not winds,

01:09:11 the amount of distance it’s going to be kind of

01:09:15 doing one of these, like that change

01:09:16 is not something I’m gonna detect from maybe many miles away.

01:09:19 Interesting.

01:09:20 So it could look very stationary,

01:09:22 but that wasn’t necessarily,

01:09:24 and what’s interesting about this story

01:09:26 is that there’s not like the one smoking gun, right?

01:09:28 You have to kind of look at everything.

01:09:29 And that’s what I don’t like about the Department of Defense

01:09:34 and just generally people’s take on this

01:09:36 is that everything is kind of based around a single image,

01:09:39 you know, or that one case,

01:09:41 but a lot of the interestingness comes from the duration

01:09:44 or the time it’s been out there,

01:09:45 how they’re interacting relative to other objects out there.

01:09:48 And you don’t get that information

01:09:49 when you just look at a frame for a second, you know?

01:09:52 Everyone kind of bites off on the shiny object, but.

01:09:54 So you yourself, from your particular slice

01:09:57 of things you’ve experienced and seen directly

01:09:59 or indirectly, you’ve kind of built up an intuition

01:10:02 about what are the things that were being seen.

01:10:04 I wouldn’t go that far.

01:10:05 I’ve just been able to eliminate some variables

01:10:10 because of how long I’ve observed it.

01:10:12 So like you said, yes, can a drone stay

01:10:14 in a particular position against the wind like that?

01:10:16 Certainly, but I don’t think it can do that

01:10:18 and then go 0.8 Mach for four hours after that, you know?

01:10:21 And so when you look at outside of that one,

01:10:24 that moment in time, then it eliminates

01:10:27 a lot of the potential things it could be,

01:10:29 at least from my perspective.

01:10:30 So what kind of stuff did you see in the instruments?

01:10:33 We’d see them flying in patterns,

01:10:36 kind of racetrack patterns or circular patterns

01:10:38 or just going kind of straight east.

01:10:42 Occasionally see them supersonic, 1.1, 1.2 Mach,

01:10:46 but typically 0.6 to 0.8 Mach,

01:10:48 just for extremely extended periods of time,

01:10:51 essentially all the time.

01:10:53 And this is airspace where there’s not supposed

01:10:55 to be anything else at all.

01:10:57 And it’s pretty far out there.

01:10:58 It starts 10 miles off the coast, goes like 300 miles.

01:11:01 Can you say the location that we’re talking about?

01:11:03 Off the coast of Virginia Beach.

01:11:05 Got it, and so nobody’s supposed to be out there?

01:11:09 It’s possible for people to be there.

01:11:10 It’s not necessarily restricted,

01:11:12 but it’s well monitored and we’re out there

01:11:14 every day, all day.

01:11:15 And so people know to stay clear.

01:11:17 If a Cessna goes bumbling in there,

01:11:18 everyone’s gonna know about it.

01:11:19 FAA is gonna call them out, gonna tell us about it.

01:11:23 So incursions happen, not a big deal,

01:11:27 but they’re pretty rare, honestly,

01:11:29 because everyone knows the area

01:11:30 and we’ve been operating there for decades.

01:11:32 And what are the trajectories at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach

01:11:35 that these objects were taking?

01:11:38 Typically, they would be in some type of circular pattern

01:11:42 or kind of racetrack pattern when they were at those speeds,

01:11:44 or I just see them kind of,

01:11:46 and it wasn’t always like a mechanical flight description.

01:11:50 And when I say that, I mean like an autopilot

01:11:52 is gonna be just very precise, right?

01:11:54 It’s gonna be locked on straight.

01:11:56 Whereas I could see an airplane,

01:11:57 I could tell if the pilot’s flying it, right?

01:11:59 Because it’s not gonna be perfect.

01:12:01 The computer’s not controlling it.

01:12:02 And these seemed more like that.

01:12:03 Not that they were imprecise,

01:12:05 but that they were even much more erratic than that.

01:12:07 So like, it wasn’t like a straight line in a turn.

01:12:10 It was just kind of like a weird drift like that

01:12:13 in that direction.

01:12:14 So it wasn’t controlled by a dumb computer,

01:12:17 or not disrespect to computers.

01:12:20 So it wasn’t controlled by autopilot kind of technology.

01:12:23 That’s not the sense that I got.

01:12:25 So how many people have seen them in the squadron?

01:12:28 Sort of how many times were they seen?

01:12:31 How many were there times when there’s multiple objects?

01:12:36 Once we started seeing them on the radar enough,

01:12:38 and we would get close enough,

01:12:39 we’d actually see them on our FLIR as well.

01:12:40 So our advanced targeting pod.

01:12:45 It’s essentially a infrared camera

01:12:47 that we use for targeting,

01:12:48 mostly in the air to surface environment.

01:12:51 We don’t use it in the air to air arena.

01:12:52 It’s just not that good of a tool, frankly.

01:12:56 But we would see IR energy emitting from that location

01:13:00 where the radar was dropping us off.

01:13:01 So the radar, we’d lock onto the object

01:13:03 and our sensors would all look there.

01:13:05 And so then we could see that it’s looking

01:13:06 at that right piece of sky,

01:13:08 but there’s energy actually coming from there.

01:13:11 So now we started thinking that, okay,

01:13:12 maybe not radar malfunctions, maybe more,

01:13:14 maybe something is physically here, of course.

01:13:16 And then people started to try to fly by it and see it.

01:13:19 And at this point, I would say maybe 80 to 90%

01:13:22 of our squadron had probably seen one of these

01:13:23 on the radar at this point.

01:13:24 Everyone was aware of it.

01:13:26 There was small communication, I think,

01:13:28 between squadrons of the same area that had the same radar.

01:13:31 So I knew it wasn’t just our squadron

01:13:33 for whatever strange reason,

01:13:35 because other squadrons would be out there

01:13:36 and we would talk to them,

01:13:37 like, hey, careful, there’s an object.

01:13:39 Are you aware of that?

01:13:40 So they would be aware of it.

01:13:42 And then, of course, people would want to go see

01:13:44 what they look like, right?

01:13:45 So people would try to fly by it.

01:13:46 I try to fly by it.

01:13:48 I like how that’s an of course.

01:13:50 Of course.

01:13:51 Of course you don’t want to fly by it.

01:13:53 There’s an argument against that kind of perspective

01:13:57 that maybe the thing is dangerous, so maybe we don’t.

01:14:00 But perhaps that’s part of the reason

01:14:02 you want to fly by it,

01:14:03 is to understand better what it is if it’s a threat.

01:14:05 We have a lot of context now that we didn’t back then.

01:14:08 So it was still, hey, is this a balloon?

01:14:10 Is this a drone at a certain point?

01:14:12 And we’re also aware of potential intelligence gathering

01:14:14 operations that could be going on.

01:14:17 We’re up there flying our tactics.

01:14:18 We’re emitting.

01:14:20 We’re practicing our EW.

01:14:22 We’re turning at particular times.

01:14:24 There’s stuff that can be learned.

01:14:25 It’s not a secret.

01:14:26 And countries keep different fishing vessels and whatnot

01:14:29 in international waters off there.

01:14:31 So it’s not exactly a secret

01:14:32 that we’re being observed out there.

01:14:35 So to think that a foreign nation would want to

01:14:40 somehow intercept information,

01:14:42 whether that’s our radar signals or jamming capabilities

01:14:46 to try to break that down or understand it better,

01:14:49 be ready for that next fight, I mean,

01:14:53 that’s what scares me about this scenario

01:14:55 because we didn’t jump right to aliens or UFOs.

01:14:59 We thought, this is a radar malfunction

01:15:01 we need to be aware of.

01:15:02 It’s a safety issue.

01:15:03 And then this could be a tactical problem right here

01:15:06 because everything we do is based off a crypto

01:15:09 and locations, everything’s classified we do out there.

01:15:13 And so over time, if you gather enough data

01:15:15 about those fights and just monitor them forever,

01:15:17 just like some nations do with other

01:15:21 piece of technology or software,

01:15:24 they could probably learn a lot.

01:15:25 So we have to be cognizant of the fact

01:15:27 and defend against it.

01:15:29 So what can you say about the other characteristics

01:15:32 of these objects like shape, size,

01:15:38 texture, luminosity, how else do you describe object?

01:15:43 Is there something that could be said?

01:15:45 So you said like this is a tech town radar step one.

01:15:47 Now you have FLIR images that can give you a sense

01:15:50 that that’s actually a physical object.

01:15:52 What else can be said about those physical objects?

01:15:55 So eventually someone did see one with their own eyeballs,

01:15:59 multiple people and they saw it

01:16:02 in a somewhat interesting way.

01:16:04 The object presented itself at the exact altitude

01:16:08 and geographic location of the entry points

01:16:11 into our working areas.

01:16:13 So we enter at a very specific point at a certain altitude

01:16:16 and people leave the areas at the same point

01:16:18 at a lower altitude.

01:16:19 Probably one of the busiest pieces of sky

01:16:21 on the eastern seaboard.

01:16:23 So two jets from my squadron went out

01:16:24 and they went flying and they entered the area

01:16:26 and one of these objects went right between the aircraft.

01:16:28 So they’re flying in formation

01:16:30 and the object went between the aircraft.

01:16:32 They went between the object I think.

01:16:33 I don’t think that the object was moving.

01:16:35 I don’t think it aggressively went at them.

01:16:37 I think it was located still there

01:16:39 and then they flew through it.

01:16:41 But they didn’t have it on their radar.

01:16:43 And I think the radar might have been malfunctioning.

01:16:48 I don’t know that for sure.

01:16:48 I would like to look into it

01:16:50 but my supposition is that if their radar was malfunctioning

01:16:53 it would make sense that they wouldn’t avoid the object

01:16:55 that was there

01:16:56 because they knew these were physical at that point.

01:16:59 And we would go up to these objects all the time

01:17:02 and try to see them and couldn’t see them.

01:17:03 And we didn’t know what it was.

01:17:05 Was it, were they just not there or being fooled?

01:17:07 Was something happening?

01:17:08 Were they moving, dropping altitude at the last minute?

01:17:11 We’re going by pretty quick so it’s difficult to tell.

01:17:15 But perhaps if his radar wasn’t working

01:17:16 it wasn’t receiving energy from the jet.

01:17:19 And the jet of course didn’t know that it was there.

01:17:21 And so whatever the case was, they flew right by

01:17:24 and they described it just as a dark gray or black cube

01:17:29 inside a clear translucent sphere.

01:17:31 And the kind of the apex of the cube

01:17:33 or touching the inside of that sphere.

01:17:35 That’s an image that’s haunting.

01:17:39 So what do they think it is?

01:17:41 What did they think at that moment?

01:17:43 That they, is it just this kind of cloud of uncertainty

01:17:47 that they’re just describing a geometric object?

01:17:51 It’s not on radar so it’s unclear what it is.

01:17:55 Yeah, what was the, any kind of other description

01:18:00 they’ve had of it in terms of the intuition

01:18:02 from a pilot’s perspective?

01:18:03 You have to kind of identify what a thing is.

01:18:07 To answer the first part,

01:18:08 they actually canceled the flight and came back

01:18:10 because they were, it’s like if there’s one of these

01:18:12 out here and we’re almost hitting them

01:18:14 and it’s right there, then perhaps we need

01:18:16 to get a different jet with better radar.

01:18:18 So they came back and they’re in their gear

01:18:20 and they’re talking to the front desk

01:18:22 and talking to Skipper and like,

01:18:23 hey, we almost hit one of those damn things out there.

01:18:25 And this kind of was one of those kind of

01:18:28 slight watershed moments where we all were kind of like,

01:18:30 all right, like this is a serious deal now.

01:18:32 Maybe it was a, maybe we thought they were balloons

01:18:35 or drones or malfunctions, or maybe we thought it was fine.

01:18:37 But at the end of the day,

01:18:38 if we’re gonna hit one of these things,

01:18:39 then we need to take care of the situation.

01:18:43 And that’s actually when we started submitting

01:18:46 hazard reports or hazard reps to the Naval Aviation Safety

01:18:52 kind of communication network.

01:18:53 And it’s not like a big proactive thing

01:18:56 where people are gonna go investigate.

01:18:57 It’s more of a data collection mechanism

01:18:59 so that you can kind of share that aggregate data

01:19:01 and make sure that things are progressing.

01:19:04 So it wasn’t a mechanism that would result

01:19:06 in action being taken, but we were hoping

01:19:09 to at least get the message out to whomever

01:19:11 was maybe running a classified program

01:19:12 that we were not aware of or something like that,

01:19:14 that hey, like you could kill somebody here.

01:19:16 Like you’ve grown too big for your bridges here.

01:19:19 Take a step back.

01:19:20 So that was our concern at that point.

01:19:22 That’s kind of where we were thinking this was going.

01:19:25 What’s the protocol for shooting at a thing?

01:19:29 Was there a concern that it’s a direct threat,

01:19:31 not just surveillance, but a thing that could be a threat?

01:19:36 At least from my perspective,

01:19:37 like that never really crossed into my mind.

01:19:39 I thought it was potentially an intelligence failure

01:19:44 that could be being watched and information gathered.

01:19:46 But I didn’t think that it was something

01:19:48 that would proactively engage me in a hostile manner.

01:19:53 It wouldn’t really make sense either too.

01:19:55 It would be shocking to like have one of these objects

01:19:57 take out an F18, but there’s no real tactical advantage

01:19:59 other than fear perhaps.

01:20:01 Psychological, yeah.

01:20:04 I’ve learned a lot about the psychological warfare

01:20:08 in Ukraine as a big part of the war

01:20:11 in terms of when you talk about siege warfare,

01:20:14 about wars that last for many years, for many months,

01:20:17 and then perhaps could extend to years.

01:20:20 But yes, it didn’t seem,

01:20:24 it didn’t fit your conception of a threatening entity.

01:20:29 Correct.

01:20:32 So looking back now from all the pieces of data

01:20:35 you’ve integrated, you’ve personally added,

01:20:39 what do you think it could be?

01:20:41 I don’t know.

01:20:42 I don’t know what it could be.

01:20:44 I think we’ve been able to categorize it successfully

01:20:47 into a few buckets.

01:20:48 We’ve been able to say that this could be US technology

01:20:51 that someone put in the wrong piece of sky

01:20:55 or perhaps was developed and tested in an inappropriate spot

01:21:00 by someone that wasn’t being best practices.

01:21:02 Is there, sorry to interrupt,

01:21:04 is there a sort of modularity to the way

01:21:08 the military operates, the way it’s possible

01:21:10 for one branch not to know about the tests of another?

01:21:13 Yeah, I think it’s perfectly reasonable

01:21:15 to think that that could occur, right?

01:21:17 And so if we just make that assumption,

01:21:19 we can integrate that into our analysis here

01:21:21 and just say, okay, but at the point we’re at now,

01:21:24 we have to assume that that’s not the case, right?

01:21:26 With everything that’s been going on

01:21:27 and the statements have been made and the hearings,

01:21:30 I think that if it was a noncommunication issue,

01:21:35 we’re in big trouble at this point.

01:21:37 What about it being an object from another nation,

01:21:40 from China, from Russia?

01:21:42 Or even one of our allies, perhaps, right?

01:21:44 Maybe that’s, you know, I don’t think it’s controversial

01:21:49 to say that our allies could be gathering information

01:21:51 about us or anything of that nature,

01:21:52 but that would be an extreme case,

01:21:54 but I think it’s just important to say, right?

01:21:55 To not just say Russia or China

01:21:57 and just call them the bad guys

01:21:58 and assume that if they don’t have it, no one can do it.

01:22:01 And so from my perspective, you know, anyone else,

01:22:03 anyone else, and it doesn’t necessarily need

01:22:05 to be a foreign power.

01:22:07 It could be a non government entity, perhaps,

01:22:09 although I think that’s very unlikely.

01:22:10 But again, these are things you must consider

01:22:13 if you kind of throw everything,

01:22:15 everything other than the US under scrutiny.

01:22:18 But you know, from what has been reported

01:22:21 and the behaviors that have been seen,

01:22:23 it would be, I would expect to see remnants

01:22:26 of that technology elsewhere in the economy.

01:22:29 There seems to be too many things

01:22:32 that require advanced technology

01:22:35 that would be beneficial commercially,

01:22:37 as well as in other military applications

01:22:40 for it to be completely locked away

01:22:42 by one of our competitors.

01:22:44 Now I could see us perhaps locking something away

01:22:46 if we’re already in the lead

01:22:47 and having it to pull out as needed.

01:22:50 But for someone that’s perhaps in a power struggle

01:22:53 and they’re in second place,

01:22:55 they might be more aggressive with the development

01:22:57 of different types of technology

01:22:58 willing to accept bigger risks.

01:23:00 Do you think it could be natural phenomena

01:23:03 that we don’t yet understand?

01:23:06 I think that there are a number of things

01:23:08 that this is going to be, right?

01:23:09 I don’t think there’s one thing at the end of the day,

01:23:11 but I certainly think that that is part

01:23:13 of what some of this could be.

01:23:14 I don’t think it’s what we were seeing on the East Coast,

01:23:17 and I don’t think it is related to the Roosevelt incident,

01:23:20 or I’ll even go out and say the Nimitz incident, but.

01:23:22 What’s the Roosevelt incident?

01:23:24 The Roosevelt incident, typically referred to as the gimbal

01:23:28 and or the go fast video.

01:23:29 And then the Nimitz is from what the David Fravor

01:23:33 has witnessed directly and spoken about.

01:23:36 We’ll talk about that as well.

01:23:37 I’d just love to get your sort of interpretation

01:23:42 of those incidents.

01:23:42 But yeah, so in this particular case,

01:23:45 natural phenomena could be a part of the picture,

01:23:48 but you’re saying not the whole picture.

01:23:50 Yes, yes, and we can’t discount it.

01:23:54 Oh, the other thing is what about the failure

01:23:57 of pilot eyesight?

01:24:00 Like sort of some deep mixture of actual direct vision,

01:24:06 human vision system failure, and like psychology.

01:24:10 Like seeing something weird and then filling in the gaps.

01:24:17 Because in order to make sense of the weird.

01:24:20 I’ve tried to expose myself to scenarios like that

01:24:25 that I don’t necessarily think are right,

01:24:28 but I’ve explored them to see if they could have some truth.

01:24:31 And one example is let’s imagine a scenario

01:24:34 where if we’re seeing these objects every day

01:24:35 off the East Coast, I can imagine a technology

01:24:38 or an operation where you had some type

01:24:41 of traditional propulsion system operating drones

01:24:44 in order to gather data like we had discussed.

01:24:47 And I could envision a clever enough adversary

01:24:51 that could perhaps destroy or somehow remove these objects

01:24:54 and replace them with new objects essentially

01:24:56 when we’re not looking, right?

01:24:58 And that accounts for the large airborne time.

01:25:02 And so I explore options like that

01:25:04 and I try to see what evidence and assumptions

01:25:08 need to be made in order to prove or disprove that.

01:25:11 And you would need so much infrastructure.

01:25:14 You’d need so many assets.

01:25:16 And so I try to explore some of those fallacies

01:25:18 and some of those concerns.

01:25:20 And as aviators, we’re trained into many

01:25:23 like actual physical, like eyesight

01:25:24 and kind of illusion training.

01:25:26 So like at nighttime flying,

01:25:28 there’s so many things that can happen

01:25:29 flying with false horizons.

01:25:30 And so we receive hours of training on that type of stuff,

01:25:34 but this just falls outside the category

01:25:37 from my perspective.

01:25:38 What was the visibility conditions

01:25:40 in the times when people were able to see it?

01:25:42 And we just earlier discussed complete nighttime, darkness.

01:25:50 In this case, was it during the day?

01:25:53 It was a perfectly clear day that particular incident, yep.

01:25:57 In a world that’s full of mystery,

01:25:59 I have to ask what do you think is the possibility

01:26:02 that it’s not of this earth origin?

01:26:07 I like the term nonhuman intelligence in a sense,

01:26:11 because again, there’s a lot of assumptions in there

01:26:16 that may cause us to go down the wrong roads.

01:26:20 It could, you know, these could be something

01:26:21 that are weather phenomena of earth, right?

01:26:24 Or something else that is just something we don’t understand

01:26:26 and can’t imagine right now that’s still of this earth.

01:26:30 If we consider extraterrestrials or something

01:26:33 that came from a physical place far away in space time,

01:26:37 you know, that leads us to some detection assumptions

01:26:39 that we would need to make.

01:26:40 And so I just try to not categorize it under anything

01:26:43 and just say, hey, is this demonstrating intelligence?

01:26:47 And start from there as a single object.

01:26:49 What can we learn about it kinematically?

01:26:50 How it’s performing?

01:26:51 What does that mean for its energy source?

01:26:53 What does that mean for the G forces inside?

01:26:56 And then step it out a level and say, okay,

01:26:58 how are these interacting with our fighters?

01:27:00 If they are, how are they interacting with the weather

01:27:02 and their environment?

01:27:03 How are they interacting with each other?

01:27:04 So can we look at these and how they’re interacting

01:27:06 perhaps as a swarm, especially off the East coast

01:27:09 where this is happening all the time with multiple objects.

01:27:12 Right?

01:27:13 And so we might be able to determine some things

01:27:15 about their maybe, you know, sensor capabilities

01:27:17 or the areas of focus, you know, if we can determine

01:27:20 how they’re working in conjunction with each other.

01:27:22 But, you know, seeing one little flash of an object

01:27:25 doesn’t provide that type of insight.

01:27:26 But we have the systems for it, and it’s kind of,

01:27:30 you know, an irony, but it’s a fact of life,

01:27:33 the reality that many of these well deployed,

01:27:36 highly capable systems are held under the military umbrella,

01:27:40 which makes it difficult to provide that data

01:27:42 for scientific analysis.

01:27:44 So there’s probably a lot more data on these objects

01:27:48 that’s not being, that’s not made available,

01:27:51 probably even within the military for analysis.

01:27:54 I think so.

01:27:55 Yeah, I think there’s a lot of data

01:27:57 that could be made available.

01:27:58 And, you know, that’s one of the reasons why, you know,

01:28:01 I’ve been engaged with the American Institute of Aeronautics

01:28:04 and Astronautics to build, you know,

01:28:07 a large resources of cross domain expertise

01:28:10 so that if or when that data is available

01:28:13 or that there’s additional analysis needed, you know,

01:28:15 we can spin up those teams and make that analysis.

01:28:18 So there was a recently a house intelligence subcommittee

01:28:22 hearing on UFOs that you were a part of.

01:28:25 What was the goal of that hearing?

01:28:26 And can you maybe summarize what you heard?

01:28:30 The hearings, from my perspective,

01:28:33 seemed a bit disingenuous, kind of top level.

01:28:36 I think…

01:28:37 Who was it run by, sorry to interrupt,

01:28:39 like who were the people involved

01:28:41 and what was the goal, the stated goal?

01:28:43 Congressman Andre Carson did chair the committee

01:28:46 and he was, I think, ultimately responsible

01:28:48 for bringing it all together.

01:28:49 You know, I think the intent from Congress

01:28:51 was to try to bring light to what has been happening

01:28:54 with the Navy and to help show the American people

01:28:58 that Congress is taking this serious

01:29:00 because something serious is happening.

01:29:02 But, you know, the sense I got seemed a bit disingenuous.

01:29:05 They talked around it a lot.

01:29:06 They, you know, advertised their love of science fiction,

01:29:12 but they, you know, they didn’t treat this,

01:29:14 I would say, in the manner it deserved

01:29:16 as a potential tactical threat

01:29:17 if it’s coming from a foreign power.

01:29:20 And I get it though, at the same day,

01:29:21 they have very specific objectives

01:29:24 within the DOD, right?

01:29:25 They have a very important job.

01:29:27 Their job isn’t necessarily to do exploratory science

01:29:29 for no reason.

01:29:31 So I applaud and I encourage their efforts

01:29:35 on the intelligence side to help understand this,

01:29:38 but my concern is that they play a role

01:29:41 they’re not well suited for, which is doing science.

01:29:44 And the Pentagon has opened a new office

01:29:46 to investigate UFOs called

01:29:47 All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

01:29:50 What do you think about this office?

01:29:52 Do you think it can help alleviate in a way

01:29:55 which this hearing perhaps has failed

01:29:58 to improve more the scientific rigor

01:30:01 and the seriousness of investigating UFOs?

01:30:06 I think that remains to be seen.

01:30:07 I think it’s a step in the right direction,

01:30:09 but it’s a step that was taken

01:30:10 because the previous step didn’t happen, right?

01:30:14 So the AOI MSG was the progeny, essentially,

01:30:18 of the AARO or AERO.

01:30:21 And the name was changed because nothing was happening

01:30:25 and it was essentially just a confusing mess of words

01:30:29 that were created to make this topic unpalatable.

01:30:32 The Airborne Objects Identification

01:30:34 Synchronization Management Group.

01:30:36 Quite the mouthful.

01:30:38 I practice that.

01:30:39 But the new All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office,

01:30:43 from my perspective at least,

01:30:44 at least the perspective that they’re putting out,

01:30:46 they seem to want to be open.

01:30:48 They put out a Twitter handle,

01:30:50 they’re going out on Twitter and communicating,

01:30:52 saying they want to keep this open.

01:30:54 But that’s gonna run into a classification wall.

01:30:57 Well, so Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick seems like an interesting guy.

01:31:03 He does, yes.

01:31:04 So he’s got a, Evan looked in too deeply,

01:31:08 but he seems to have sort of,

01:31:11 he’s coming from like a science research perspective,

01:31:13 like a background.

01:31:15 So he might be, at least in the right mindset,

01:31:22 the right background to kind of lead a serious investigation.

01:31:25 I think so.

01:31:26 I’ll just say generally,

01:31:28 the office has been receptive to AIAA reaching out

01:31:31 in order to collaborate, which has been a positive sign.

01:31:35 Also pass the same kudos to Dr. Spergel

01:31:38 and NASA’s effort as well.

01:31:42 I see these organizations that are standing up,

01:31:44 I do see them as good faith efforts

01:31:47 that are coming about through a lot of difficulty

01:31:51 and negotiation most likely, right?

01:31:53 And I see these as a small door opening

01:31:57 that if we can take advantage of,

01:31:58 can lead to a much more productive relationship

01:32:01 between these organizations.

01:32:03 How do you put pressure on this kind of thing?

01:32:05 Does it come from the civilian leadership?

01:32:08 Does it come from sort of Congress and presidents?

01:32:10 Does it come from the public?

01:32:12 Does the public have any power to put pressure on this?

01:32:15 Or is the giant wall of bureaucracy

01:32:19 going to protect it against any public pressure?

01:32:21 What do you think?

01:32:22 I think we’ve been in that latter state for a while,

01:32:25 but society seems to be a bit different nowadays.

01:32:29 We have the ability to communicate and to group

01:32:32 and to form relationships in a way

01:32:34 that hasn’t been able to be present in the past.

01:32:37 We’ve been able to do research for better or worse

01:32:40 on our own in a way that hasn’t been able to happen before.

01:32:43 And so I sense that people are a bit less willing

01:32:47 to kind of buy the bottom line statement

01:32:49 from those in power as they used to be

01:32:52 back when they didn’t have access to those tools.

01:32:54 And so I do think there is a massive role

01:32:56 for the general society, general populace to play

01:32:59 to show that they are interested in this.

01:33:02 Because it’s not that I don’t think the politicians

01:33:05 or the leaders in the Pentagon,

01:33:07 it’s not that they don’t like this topic necessarily

01:33:10 or think it’s toxic per se,

01:33:12 but they exist in a culture where this has been toxic

01:33:15 and they don’t feel comfortable talking about it.

01:33:16 And these are people that have spent their entire careers

01:33:19 working towards a goal and getting to very high positions

01:33:21 within government.

01:33:22 And so this is very against their nature

01:33:24 to take a stance on a topic like this.

01:33:28 And so the fact that these are standing up,

01:33:30 even if they do have a small budget

01:33:32 or if they struggled a bit at first,

01:33:34 I still think it’s a massive change

01:33:36 and it’s a big step away from that stigma

01:33:38 that has been pervading this topic for so long.

01:33:41 And you’re actually part of alleviating the stigma

01:33:45 for somebody that’s as credible, as intelligent,

01:33:49 as varied in background, able to speak about these things.

01:33:53 That’s a big risk that you took,

01:33:55 but it’s extremely valuable

01:33:56 because it’s alleviating the stigma.

01:33:59 I thank you for saying that,

01:34:00 but it didn’t feel like much of a risk for me.

01:34:03 I didn’t come out about aliens or whatever.

01:34:06 I had a safety problem that I started asking questions about.

01:34:10 And I went down a road

01:34:12 as a Navy trained aviation safety officer, right?

01:34:15 That sent me to school for six weeks

01:34:16 and Pensacola would be a safety officer.

01:34:20 We’re almost hitting these objects

01:34:21 and it’s not something that happened in the past

01:34:23 and we want to understand it, it’s happening right now.

01:34:25 Like these occurrences are still happening.

01:34:28 Aviators are flying right now,

01:34:29 are still flying by these things.

01:34:31 And in fact, I mentioned I was an instructor pilot.

01:34:34 And I had a student call me about eight months ago or so.

01:34:40 And he’s like, hey, sir, I made it to the fleet finally.

01:34:43 I had trained him how to fly.

01:34:44 And then he goes to F18, he goes another year of training.

01:34:47 And then he gets out to his squadron on the East Coast

01:34:50 and he’s flying with a senior member of the base,

01:34:53 NAS Oceana, where the fighters fly out of Senior 0506.

01:34:58 And it was kind of a bad weather day.

01:35:00 And so they said, hey, if the weather’s not good enough

01:35:02 for us to do this dog fighting set,

01:35:04 we’ll go out and do a UAP hunt,

01:35:06 and see if we can’t find any things

01:35:07 or take a look at them.

01:35:09 I don’t know if it was ingest or not,

01:35:10 but I actually would say it’s not ingest

01:35:14 because there were notices that were being briefed

01:35:16 about this being a safety hazard at this point.

01:35:18 And so now that I think about it, it likely wasn’t ingest.

01:35:23 Long story short, they went flying.

01:35:24 The weather was too bad.

01:35:25 They did go on a UFO hunt and they physically saw one.

01:35:28 And he called me up and said,

01:35:30 hey, sir, I saw a Cuban sphere.

01:35:31 They’re still out here years later.

01:35:33 And so it’s almost like a generational issue

01:35:35 for these fighter pilots, at least on East Coast.

01:35:37 But that’s great that they can talk about it, right?

01:35:39 Exactly, exactly.

01:35:41 They feel at least comfortable.

01:35:42 They have a reporting mechanism.

01:35:43 And so that was one of the problems that I noticed

01:35:46 that we have a lot of reporting mechanisms

01:35:48 to take care of safety issues and even tactical issues

01:35:52 when the time’s right in order to keep track

01:35:54 of what’s going on,

01:35:55 but there’s no way to communicate about this.

01:35:59 Sure, we could submit a hazard report,

01:36:00 but nothing’s actually being investigated

01:36:03 and if this is a tactical vulnerability or something more,

01:36:07 it deserves attention.

01:36:09 If I could ask your sort of take your opinion

01:36:13 of the different UFO sightings

01:36:17 that the DOD has released videos on.

01:36:19 So what do you think about the Tic Tac UFO

01:36:22 that David Fravor and others have sighted?

01:36:26 That’s a truly anomalous experience.

01:36:28 I can’t do like mental models in my head

01:36:35 to find potential solutions to discredit that, right?

01:36:39 Like as much as I try, right?

01:36:40 Just as a logical process, as a practice,

01:36:42 I can’t pick it apart in the way

01:36:45 that we were just talking about a moment ago

01:36:46 about thousands of drones being like sent up

01:36:49 in very tricky manners, right?

01:36:50 I can’t really bring myself to a clever solution

01:36:53 that other than just saying the pilots are lying

01:36:56 or it was error, you know?

01:36:57 And I believe, you know, I know Dave Fravor,

01:37:00 you know, I consider him a friend, we talk a lot.

01:37:02 I have zero, zero reason to disbelieve anything he says.

01:37:08 Yeah, I agree with you, but in terms of the actual UFO,

01:37:15 is there something anomalous and interesting to you

01:37:18 about that particular case?

01:37:19 Maybe one interesting aspect there is how much

01:37:24 do I understand about the water surface

01:37:28 and underwater aspects of these UFOs?

01:37:30 It seems like a lot of the discussions

01:37:32 is about the movement of this particular thing

01:37:36 that seems to be weird, anomalous, seems to defy physics,

01:37:40 but what about stuff that’s happening underwater?

01:37:42 That’s interesting to me.

01:37:43 If I had advanced technology, I would certainly

01:37:47 like to operate in part underwater

01:37:49 because you can hide a lot of stuff there.

01:37:51 You think it would be somewhat as easy

01:37:53 as traveling through interstellar space, at least, right?

01:37:56 Yeah.

01:37:56 You know, I wish I had a great answer for that,

01:38:00 but as an aviator, that’s kind of a black box for us.

01:38:04 We don’t have great, what I would call

01:38:06 cross domain tracking, right?

01:38:08 I can’t see something go underwater

01:38:09 and then follow it underwater.

01:38:11 So it’s literally not your domain,

01:38:12 like underwater, like leave that for somebody else.

01:38:15 Yeah, and you know, I use that terminology

01:38:17 because it’s kind of important, right?

01:38:20 Cross domain tracking is something that we haven’t had

01:38:22 to necessarily worry about, right?

01:38:23 Because airplanes operated in the air

01:38:25 and submarines operated underwater

01:38:28 and space planes operate in space, right?

01:38:30 But you know, there’s going to be, you know,

01:38:33 that’s going to blur, I think, as we move along here,

01:38:35 especially in the air and space regime

01:38:38 and being able to perhaps transition my radar contact

01:38:41 at 40,000 feet to another radar system

01:38:44 that can track it up to 200,000 feet,

01:38:47 you know, that might be a value.

01:38:48 And so we seem to be missing that right now.

01:38:51 So what about the go fast and the gimbal videos

01:38:53 that you mentioned earlier?

01:38:54 There was a, like, what’s interesting there to you?

01:38:58 So the gimbal, I’ll talk about that one first.

01:39:01 I was airborne for that one.

01:39:02 The person that recorded it was a good friend of mine,

01:39:05 but I mean, both air crew, I knew both of them,

01:39:07 but the wizard himself, very close friends,

01:39:10 went through a lot of her training together.

01:39:12 We went to the same fleet squadron.

01:39:14 He ended up transitioning to be a pilot

01:39:16 and then came to where I was instructing.

01:39:19 So I got to instruct him a bit on his transition.

01:39:23 And, you know, the way that was,

01:39:25 was we went out on a air to air training mission.

01:39:28 So simulating a air fight against our own guys,

01:39:33 they’re acting like the bad guys

01:39:34 and kind of go head to head against each other.

01:39:36 And when we fly on those missions,

01:39:37 we all fly out together, more or less,

01:39:40 we set up and then we kind of attrite from the fight

01:39:43 as we either, you know, run out of gas or something happens.

01:39:46 And so people usually go back onesies or twosies.

01:39:49 And so the air crew that recorded the gimbal,

01:39:51 they were going back to the boat

01:39:52 and we were on what’s called a workup training event.

01:39:55 And so this is like a month on the boat

01:39:57 where we’re essentially conducting war time operations,

01:40:00 more or less, to stress ourselves out

01:40:03 and to kind of do the last training block

01:40:06 before we go on deployment, essentially.

01:40:07 So it’s pretty high stress.

01:40:09 They actually do send aircraft from like land bases

01:40:12 to kind of try to penetrate

01:40:14 and we’re expected to go intercept them.

01:40:15 And so we’re kind of practicing like we play.

01:40:18 And so he saw these objects on the radar,

01:40:23 the gimbal and a fleet of other aircraft or vehicles.

01:40:27 And they initially thought it was part

01:40:29 of the training exercise that they were sending something

01:40:31 in to try to penetrate the airspace.

01:40:35 And so they, you know, they flew over to it

01:40:37 and as they got close enough to get on the FLIR,

01:40:40 you know, I think everyone has heard their reaction

01:40:43 and they realized that it wasn’t something

01:40:44 they were expecting to see.

01:40:46 Can you actually describe what’s in the video

01:40:47 and what’s the reaction in case they haven’t seen it?

01:40:49 Yeah, a lot of swearing.

01:40:51 But so what you see on the FLIR footage

01:40:53 is a black or white, depending on when you look at it,

01:40:57 object that’s somewhat shaped like a gimbal.

01:40:59 It appears almost as if someone put two plates together

01:41:02 and then there seems to be almost like a small funnel

01:41:05 of IR energy that’s at the top of the bottom

01:41:08 of those plates in a sense.

01:41:09 So almost as if, you know, there’s a stick going in

01:41:12 between two plates, but not that pronounced, right?

01:41:14 So there’s an energy field that kind of went to a funnel

01:41:16 on the top and the bottom,

01:41:17 at least that’s how it’s being portrayed on the FLIR.

01:41:21 There’s a lot of conversation about that being glare,

01:41:23 things of that nature,

01:41:24 but it was actually a very tight IR image.

01:41:26 It just was nondescript shape, which was interesting.

01:41:30 Typically we would see the skin of the aircraft,

01:41:32 we can see the flames coming out of the exhaust,

01:41:35 especially at those ranges.

01:41:37 But…

01:41:38 And there was no flames or there’s no exhaust here.

01:41:39 There was no exhaust, there was no, you know,

01:41:42 there was no outgassing of repellent in any manner, right?

01:41:45 It was just an object that had nothing emitting from it

01:41:48 that was stationary in the sky.

01:41:49 Well, not stationary, but it was moving along a path, right?

01:41:53 It wasn’t falling out of the sky.

01:41:55 And it continued along, if we were to consider it

01:41:58 from a God’s eye view, again, on the SA page,

01:42:01 it continued along in a path.

01:42:02 And from the perspective, that top down view,

01:42:05 it just went in another direction.

01:42:07 So no, just an instantaneous direction change

01:42:10 from that perspective.

01:42:13 You also hear them, you know, very excitedly talking

01:42:15 on the tapes about, you know, whatever the heck this thing is

01:42:18 and look at the SA, there’s a whole formation of them.

01:42:22 And so the SA is a situational awareness page.

01:42:25 And again, it’s a large display that gives

01:42:27 that God’s eye view of all the radar contacts.

01:42:29 So the video is actually showing just one

01:42:32 and then they’re speaking about many of them

01:42:35 on the SA display.

01:42:38 Correct.

01:42:38 And what they essentially saw was,

01:42:40 if we were to consider above the object north,

01:42:42 so kind of offset to the north of the object,

01:42:46 there was a formation of about somewhere

01:42:47 between four and six of these objects

01:42:49 in a rough wedge formation, you know,

01:42:51 so kind of side by side like this.

01:42:54 And again, not in a like autopilot type manner

01:42:57 where it was very stiff.

01:42:58 It was very kind of non mechanical,

01:43:00 the flight mechanics again.

01:43:02 And these objects were in that formation

01:43:04 and they were going along and then they turned

01:43:06 pretty sharply, but they still had a radius of turn

01:43:09 and then went back in the opposite direction.

01:43:11 And during that turn, they were kind of like

01:43:13 all over the place.

01:43:14 Like it wasn’t tight.

01:43:15 They weren’t even like super,

01:43:17 they weren’t flying in a way I would expect them

01:43:18 to be flying in relation to a flight lead.

01:43:20 They were flying as if they were flying close

01:43:23 to each other, but not in formation,

01:43:24 which was kind of strange, right?

01:43:27 And then when they rolled out,

01:43:28 they kind of tightened back up.

01:43:29 Like, so when they basically,

01:43:30 they started that turn and then 180 degrees out,

01:43:32 essentially they start flowing in the opposite direction

01:43:35 and kind of got back in that formation.

01:43:37 And while that was happening,

01:43:38 the gimbal object was proceeding, let’s say left to right.

01:43:41 And as those, the formation kind of turned up to the north

01:43:45 and was just passing back it,

01:43:47 the gimbal just kind of went back in the opposite direction.

01:43:49 So to follow it back in that direction.

01:43:54 And in the FLIR itself, you see the object

01:43:57 changes orientation quite a bit.

01:43:58 So you see it more or less level,

01:44:01 maybe candid about 45 degrees.

01:44:03 And then you see it kind of moving around like this,

01:44:06 almost as if it was a gimbal.

01:44:08 I’ve come to learn after some,

01:44:11 having seen some research online

01:44:13 and people really looking into this,

01:44:15 that it seemed that the object actually climbed

01:44:19 during that maneuver.

01:44:19 And so the reason it looked like it turned immediately

01:44:23 is because it turned like this.

01:44:24 It turned in a vertical fashion like that,

01:44:26 which is pretty interesting.

01:44:28 That’s kind of like another example of a flight mechanics

01:44:31 that we don’t normally operate

01:44:33 because we don’t change our directions

01:44:36 by maneuvering in the vertical.

01:44:37 If we can help it, you’re just killing the fuel.

01:44:41 And so if you’re like a surveillance platform

01:44:44 looking to spend as much time around something,

01:44:46 you’re not gonna climb 500 feet every time you make a turn.

01:44:51 Unless you’re Tom Cruise.

01:44:53 Unless you’re Tom Cruise, naturally.

01:44:54 Okay, so is that one of the more impressive

01:44:57 flight mechanics you’ve seen in video forms

01:45:00 or not the direct eyesight reports,

01:45:03 but like in terms of video evidence that we have?

01:45:05 I think so.

01:45:06 We were seeing a lot of these,

01:45:08 but we weren’t just going on recording them all day.

01:45:10 We just kind of put them in that safety bucket,

01:45:13 be like, all right, there’s objects over there.

01:45:14 We’re just not gonna go near it.

01:45:16 And so we weren’t putting our sensors on them that much.

01:45:19 We were gathering the data kind of secondarily,

01:45:21 but we weren’t primarily focusing on it

01:45:23 to see all the details.

01:45:24 That’s so fascinating because you have a busy day.

01:45:27 You have a lot to do.

01:45:28 All right, well, there’s some weird stuff going on there.

01:45:31 We’re just not gonna go there.

01:45:32 And that says something about human nature,

01:45:37 about the way that bureaucracies function,

01:45:40 the way the military functions.

01:45:41 It fills up your day with busy, important things,

01:45:44 and you don’t get to, I mean, that is something

01:45:48 that I’m in a sort of absurd way worry about,

01:45:52 which is like we fill our days with so much busyness

01:45:56 than when truly beautiful things happen,

01:45:59 whatever they are, truly anomalous things.

01:46:01 We just won’t pay attention

01:46:04 because they don’t fit our busy schedule.

01:46:07 Beautiful, I think that’s right on the nose.

01:46:10 And it’s on my nose because I didn’t give this topic

01:46:13 the attention it deserved until I left, right?

01:46:16 Until I left and I went to be an instructor pilot

01:46:19 where I had more time.

01:46:21 I had more downtime to kind of process and think

01:46:24 and get out of exactly what you just described.

01:46:27 And that’s kind of what broke me out of it

01:46:29 and got me thinking more about it.

01:46:31 Why do you think the DOD released these videos?

01:46:34 It’s a great question.

01:46:36 Did the DOD release it or did they kind of get out

01:46:38 on their own in some sense?

01:46:39 So I don’t know the answer to that question,

01:46:41 but my understanding of the situation

01:46:42 is that the DOD talked about them so much

01:46:45 because they were already out there in a sense.

01:46:47 And so they had a choice where they could have

01:46:50 just straight up lied and said it wasn’t theirs or it was fake.

01:46:52 But again, I think our culture now is too open

01:46:56 and the information moves too freely to do things like that.

01:46:59 And it kind of left them in a pickle

01:47:00 that they had to respond to.

01:47:02 So what was the role of Pentagon’s

01:47:05 Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program, AATIP?

01:47:09 From your perspective, from what you know,

01:47:11 maybe your intuition, is AATIP a real thing that existed?

01:47:14 I was in a position as an aviator

01:47:16 that never would have exposed me to anything like that.

01:47:20 But I was curious about what people knew.

01:47:22 And I think in my mind, maybe you hoped or,

01:47:26 hope someone was looking into this in some sense.

01:47:27 But on the day that Gimbal was recorded,

01:47:30 I heard that they caught something extra interesting

01:47:34 on the FLIR, and I went to the Intel debrief space

01:47:40 to go see the film.

01:47:41 And everyone’s gathered around watching it,

01:47:43 very interesting, and I heard the admiral was coming down.

01:47:45 And so I was like, I’m gonna hang out back quietly,

01:47:48 mind my own business, and just wanna see his reaction,

01:47:50 try to read it to see if this is brand new

01:47:52 or if it is something that they’ve been dealing with.

01:47:55 And you know, he came in and he watched a video

01:47:57 for like five or six seconds,

01:47:58 and he went, mm, and then like turned around and walked out.

01:48:01 And you know, I was like,

01:48:02 he’s definitely seen these before.

01:48:04 There’s no way that you only watch that for a few seconds

01:48:06 and don’t have more interest.

01:48:08 It was, you know, too bizarre.

01:48:09 So kind of going back, does the office exist?

01:48:12 Well, you know, I’ve heard that the admiral essentially

01:48:18 reported back to the Pentagon about that case real time,

01:48:22 essentially, after he left, right?

01:48:23 So he basically went back and I was told he reported that

01:48:26 to either ATEP directly or to other, you know,

01:48:29 somehow the information got there.

01:48:30 So from my perspective and from what I’ve experienced,

01:48:34 it seems like, yes, it was a thing.

01:48:36 But you know, as an aviator,

01:48:38 I wouldn’t know either way, right?

01:48:40 That’s just my experience from what happened.

01:48:41 But it seems like there’s somewhere to report to.

01:48:46 At the time, it seemed like there was at least someplace

01:48:48 to complain to, if not report to.

01:48:50 Let me ask you about sort of people that are taking

01:48:54 a serious look at the videos

01:48:56 and just the different UFO sighting reports.

01:48:59 So there’s a person named Meg West who is a skeptic

01:49:03 and tries to take a skeptical view

01:49:05 on every single piece of evidence on these UFO sightings.

01:49:08 What do you think about his analysis?

01:49:11 He tries to analyze in a way that debunks some of these

01:49:14 videos and assign probabilities to their explanations,

01:49:18 sort of leaning towards things that give a very low

01:49:24 probability to alien extraterrestrial type of explanations

01:49:30 for these UFOs.

01:49:31 What do you think about his approach to these analysis?

01:49:35 Well, two parts to his approach.

01:49:37 One, I commend him for all the good work

01:49:39 and effort he put into it.

01:49:41 I’ve seen him build some models and things of that nature.

01:49:44 And so I think that’s something that’s absolutely needed

01:49:46 in this environment.

01:49:47 No one’s asking anyone to believe anyone here, right?

01:49:51 Trust but verify should certainly be the mantra.

01:49:55 But where I have a disagreement with his approach

01:49:58 is that he’s approaching from a debunker standpoint.

01:50:02 And from my perspective, not speaking for everyone,

01:50:06 but when I hear that, that tells me that you’re driving

01:50:09 towards a particular conclusion,

01:50:12 which has been a very safe process for the past X years.

01:50:16 It’s been like a very safe business to be in

01:50:19 to tell people that they haven’t seen aliens,

01:50:21 but times have changed a little bit.

01:50:23 And the tactics I’ve seen to try to retain that

01:50:30 view on reality has included things such as

01:50:34 completely dismissing what the aircrew are saying.

01:50:36 And I think that is a fallacy to think that

01:50:39 we have to take the human outside of that analysis.

01:50:42 So those are the two things I disagree with.

01:50:45 When you put the night vision on and you look at the stars

01:50:48 and you look out there in the vast cosmos,

01:50:51 only a small fraction of which we can see,

01:50:55 how many intelligent alien civilizations

01:50:57 do you think are out there?

01:50:58 Do you think about this kind of stuff?

01:51:00 I do.

01:51:01 You know, I’m of the theory that we are not

01:51:03 the only people out there.

01:51:04 I think it would be a statistically silly comment

01:51:06 to assume we are, although I get that we are

01:51:09 the only data point that we currently have.

01:51:11 Although I’m willing to jump over that fence

01:51:13 and say that yes, there most likely is

01:51:15 intelligent life elsewhere.

01:51:18 Although I’ll concede that it is a possibility

01:51:19 we are early or it could be limited

01:51:21 or it could be in a manner that we don’t recognize

01:51:25 or can really understand.

01:51:27 I spend so much time thinking about

01:51:30 how we anthropomorphize things on this UFO topic.

01:51:34 And we’ve done it to ourselves with media in a sense.

01:51:36 We’ve trained ourselves what to think about,

01:51:38 what we think is true or what this would be like.

01:51:41 And by doing so, I think we’re closing ourselves off

01:51:44 to a lot of what the possibilities could be

01:51:47 and the things that we could miss.

01:51:50 You beautifully put that the thing that drew you

01:51:54 to fighter jets is the technology.

01:51:57 So if you were to think, to imagine

01:52:00 from an alien perspective, what kind of technologies

01:52:04 would we first encounter as human beings

01:52:07 if we were to meet another alien civilization

01:52:11 in the next few centuries?

01:52:13 What kind of thing would we see?

01:52:15 So you’re now at the cutting edge

01:52:17 and you see the quick progress that’s happening.

01:52:20 That was happening throughout the 20th century,

01:52:21 that’s happening now with greater degrees of autonomy

01:52:24 with robots and that kind of stuff.

01:52:26 What do you think we will encounter?

01:52:28 I think we’re gonna see the ability to manipulate matter

01:52:32 like we used to manipulate information.

01:52:34 Like I think that’s what, whether that means

01:52:38 being able to pop something on the table

01:52:40 that didn’t exist or to influence a chemical reaction

01:52:44 somewhere, but being able to manipulate

01:52:47 and treat matter as if it was information.

01:52:51 And so being able to design specific materials,

01:52:53 being able to move past a lot of the barriers

01:52:57 that seem to limit our progress with things

01:52:59 such as miniaturized fusion or even just fusion in general

01:53:03 is a lot of it is matter based, is material based

01:53:07 and our ability to not manipulate,

01:53:11 we can only discover materials in a sense.

01:53:13 And so I think that a complete mastery

01:53:15 of physical reality would be one of the key traits

01:53:18 of a very intelligent species.

01:53:21 Well, you’re actually working on some,

01:53:22 maybe you can correct me,

01:53:23 but sort of quantum mechanical simulation

01:53:26 to understand materials.

01:53:28 So is that, do you see sort of the early steps

01:53:31 that we’re doing at quantum computing side

01:53:33 to start to simulate, to deeper understand materials,

01:53:37 but maybe to engineer and to mess with materials

01:53:39 at the very low level that aliens will be able to do

01:53:43 and hopefully humans will be able to do soon?

01:53:46 Yeah, I think that’s, you know,

01:53:48 so if we think about how, what materials are made of,

01:53:52 it’s just a collection of atoms,

01:53:53 but each one of those atoms has a lot of data

01:53:55 associated with it.

01:53:56 So if we wanna kind of calculate

01:53:57 how they interact with each other,

01:53:59 it requires a massive amount of computational resources,

01:54:02 so much so that it can’t be done in a lot of cases

01:54:04 with classical computers.

01:54:06 And that’s where quantum computers come in.

01:54:09 Although we don’t have a perfectly functioning

01:54:10 quantum computer at this point,

01:54:13 one of the things that we’re working at

01:54:14 at quantum general materials is to essentially

01:54:16 bridge that gap between what a classical computer can do

01:54:19 as far as simulating materials.

01:54:21 And of course, what a fully functioning quantum computer

01:54:23 would mean for being able to design materials.

01:54:26 And so, you know, having the ability to study matter

01:54:29 at a very fundamental level

01:54:31 and unleashing artificial intelligence

01:54:32 to machine learning on that problem,

01:54:35 I think is, you know, in a sense, you know,

01:54:37 alien in a way that we’re able to advance our science

01:54:40 using, you know, a process that we may not fully understand

01:54:43 with perhaps a non human based intelligence in some sense.

01:54:47 And so we may find patterns in the processes, right?

01:54:50 How does our machine learning output, you know,

01:54:52 can we match behaviors with what we’re observing

01:54:56 with what may be a machine learning algorithm with output,

01:54:58 right?

01:54:58 Can we try to classify the intelligence

01:54:59 in that manner, perhaps?

01:55:02 And so, you know, at GenMatt,

01:55:03 as we’re looking at these materials,

01:55:05 we’re considering what these algorithms

01:55:06 could have used for later on.

01:55:09 Could we perhaps reverse the process

01:55:10 and determine what a unique or anomalous material,

01:55:14 what type of properties it potentially could have?

01:55:17 And you said GenMatt, right?

01:55:19 Mm hmm.

01:55:20 What’s, what is GenMatt?

01:55:22 GenMatt is a quantum general material.

01:55:24 So it’s the company I work for.

01:55:27 We essentially are working on a couple of verticals.

01:55:31 One of them is our quantum chemistry work.

01:55:33 We’re essentially, we’re bridging the gap

01:55:35 between essentially physics and chemistry.

01:55:38 We’re working on those problems and again,

01:55:41 implementing artificial intelligence machine learning

01:55:43 into that process so that we can design those materials

01:55:45 from the ground up.

01:55:47 Additionally, we are what we consider

01:55:50 a vertically integrated material science company,

01:55:52 which means we can generate our own data.

01:55:55 And so within the next quarter coming up,

01:55:59 we are launching a satellite in the space.

01:56:02 They’ll have a fairly advanced hyperspectral sensor

01:56:05 in there, which is intended to be the first launch

01:56:08 that will help us detect different types of materials

01:56:11 using our advanced knowledge of quantum chemistry, right?

01:56:16 We’re gonna be leveraging that experience

01:56:17 in order to better analyze that data.

01:56:19 Oh, interesting.

01:56:20 So materials that are strange or novel out there in space.

01:56:26 Not necessarily, but we’ll be looking back at Earth

01:56:28 to be able to detect mineral deposits on Earth.

01:56:30 Got it, got it.

01:56:31 Getting the greater perspective from out in space

01:56:34 to do analysis of different materials.

01:56:36 Interesting.

01:56:37 Yeah, I was really impressed by the DeepMind.

01:56:40 I got to hang out with DeepMind recently

01:56:41 and they really impressed me

01:56:43 with the possibility of the application,

01:56:45 as you were saying, of machine learning

01:56:47 in the context of quantum mechanical simulation

01:56:50 for materials, so to understand materials.

01:56:53 It’s really, really, really interesting.

01:56:56 So manipulate matter, huh?

01:56:59 I would say the next thing is horses, right?

01:57:02 Or maybe fields.

01:57:03 So manipulating or managing gravity.

01:57:07 Can we maneuver within fields in some manner

01:57:12 that allows us to perhaps move propellant less

01:57:16 or in other manners, right?

01:57:17 And so I think essentially having a deeper understanding

01:57:21 of different fields and being able to interact with them,

01:57:25 I think would be a potential avenue for travel

01:57:29 or advanced travel, right?

01:57:31 Propellant less travel.

01:57:33 Can we quantum entangle gravity fields together

01:57:36 and propel a ship by the gravity field of a planet,

01:57:39 the mass of a planet, and a drive on a ship?

01:57:41 You know, there’s all sorts of interesting things, but.

01:57:44 Yeah, people will look back at people like you

01:57:46 and say, well, they used to fly,

01:57:49 like with this kind of propellant,

01:57:51 it seems like to be a very antiquated way of flying,

01:57:54 and they were very impressed with themselves,

01:57:55 these humans, that they could fly like birds.

01:57:58 It’s like so much energy is used to fly

01:58:02 such short distances from that perspective.

01:58:05 We can only throw so many rocks out the back.

01:58:07 There needs to be a better way.

01:58:08 Exactly.

01:58:09 It just seems dumb, like these.

01:58:12 It’s like Flintstones or something like that.

01:58:14 We’re good at it, but there’s a limit, right?

01:58:16 Like we need to be good.

01:58:18 I mean, that’s an interesting sort of trade off.

01:58:21 How much do you invest in getting really good at it?

01:58:24 I tend to believe the reason why it would be very important

01:58:30 and very powerful to put a human on Mars

01:58:32 is not necessarily for the exploration facet,

01:58:35 but in all the different technologies that come from that.

01:58:39 So there’s something about putting humans

01:58:42 in extreme conditions where we figure out

01:58:45 how to make it less extreme, more comfortable.

01:58:48 And for that, we invent things,

01:58:51 like the DOD sort of helping invent the internet

01:58:55 and all the different technologies we’ve invented.

01:58:58 It’s almost like an indirect consequence

01:59:00 of solving difficult problems,

01:59:01 whether that problem means winning wars

01:59:05 or colonizing other planets.

01:59:07 And so I don’t think Mars will help us figure out

01:59:10 propulsion systems or to crack open physics

01:59:13 to where you can travel close to the speed of light

01:59:16 or faster than the speed of light,

01:59:17 but it will help us figure out

01:59:19 how to build some cool technology here on Earth, I think.

01:59:23 So I’m a big proponent of doing really difficult things,

01:59:27 really difficult engineering things

01:59:28 to see what kind of technologies emerge from that.

01:59:32 But let me ask you this.

01:59:34 Do you think US government is hiding some technology

01:59:39 like alien spacecraft technology?

01:59:44 I have no information either way.

01:59:47 And if you did, you probably wouldn’t tell me.

01:59:49 But my assumptions, like what did my heart tell me?

01:59:52 My heart tells me something’s going on,

01:59:54 but I have no evidence for that.

01:59:56 Maybe that’s me wanting something to go on.

01:59:58 Maybe that’s a human feeling to want to know

02:00:01 that my government’s in control

02:00:03 of what some strange unknown thing is.

02:00:05 What’s your sense if such a thing happened?

02:00:09 Would this kind of information leak?

02:00:12 Would this kind of information be released by the government?

02:00:15 I mean, that’s the worry that you have

02:00:16 is because when you don’t understand a thing

02:00:18 and it’s novel, you want to hide it

02:00:20 so that some kind of enemy doesn’t get access to it

02:00:25 and use it against you.

02:00:27 I wonder if that is the underlying assumption.

02:00:29 It’s the one people always jump to,

02:00:31 that it’s for to maintain secrecy of technology.

02:00:35 And I assume that’s part of it.

02:00:36 I wonder if there’s any other reasons

02:00:38 that we would want to not talk about it.

02:00:40 I imagine that such information would have a shock

02:00:43 to the social economic system of any country,

02:00:46 if not the world.

02:00:48 And so I wonder if perhaps that was part

02:00:50 of the concern as well, how society can react to it.

02:00:53 Maybe we’re anti fragile enough now

02:00:56 with everything that’s going on

02:00:57 and with our communication networks that,

02:01:01 why not now?

02:01:02 I don’t know.

02:01:03 That’s something I think about as well.

02:01:07 Yeah, the effect on the mass psyche of something like this,

02:01:13 that there’s another intelligence out there.

02:01:18 We had trouble enough to deal with a pandemic,

02:01:23 to have something of this scale,

02:01:27 basically having just an inkling of a phenomena

02:01:30 that we have no understanding of

02:01:32 and could lead to complete destruction

02:01:34 of human civilization or a flourishing of it.

02:01:38 And what do you do?

02:01:39 What does a bureaucracy of government do with that?

02:01:42 Especially when they’re the ones holding the range of power

02:01:45 and such a communication would relinquish that power

02:01:48 essentially, to some degree.

02:01:52 Since you think there’s aliens out there

02:01:55 and you’re somebody that’s thought about war quite a bit,

02:02:02 do you think alien civilizations,

02:02:05 when we meet them, would want war?

02:02:08 Would they be a danger to us?

02:02:10 Would they be a friend to us?

02:02:13 What’s your intuition about intelligences out there?

02:02:16 My intuition tells me that when two people like yourself

02:02:21 or myself or anyone get together,

02:02:23 often the output is greater than the individuals.

02:02:26 And when we work together,

02:02:28 we can typically do things that are more impressive

02:02:31 and better than if a single person works alone.

02:02:35 And now I know that war has driven technological progress,

02:02:43 but perhaps there’s other mechanisms that can do so.

02:02:46 But regardless, I wonder if we truly think

02:02:50 about an advanced society that has been perhaps thousands

02:02:53 or millions of years ahead of us,

02:02:55 I would imagine that same truth to be there,

02:02:59 that people working together or creatures working together

02:03:02 is a good thing for society or its society as a whole.

02:03:07 And if we consider that,

02:03:09 as we imagine a society growing and expanding,

02:03:14 in a sense, the ultimate output of a planet

02:03:16 could only be achieved in some senses

02:03:18 if everyone was working towards the same goal.

02:03:21 And there might be wonders and secrets and things

02:03:24 that we can’t imagine just simply because of the timeframes

02:03:27 that we live under and we think in.

02:03:30 But if a planet has a single unit

02:03:33 and it almost is as an entity itself at a certain level,

02:03:36 if everything’s working towards the same output,

02:03:38 I could almost imagine an intelligent species

02:03:40 that approached us planet to planet

02:03:43 instead of person to person,

02:03:44 because that’s how they’ve evolved

02:03:46 and they’ve assumed any intelligent species

02:03:47 would understand that working together is better than not.

02:03:52 And so my heart tells me that at a certain point,

02:03:56 love and caring and the desire to work together

02:04:00 is much more powerful than the technological progress

02:04:03 that war would bring.

02:04:06 I hope so as well.

02:04:08 Well, let me jump to the AI topic that you’ve done.

02:04:11 So you’ve done research and development efforts

02:04:13 focused on multiagent intelligence

02:04:14 for collaborative autonomy,

02:04:16 machine learning AI stuff

02:04:18 that we’ve been talking about for combat,

02:04:21 for air to air combat,

02:04:23 manned, unmanned teaming technologies,

02:04:24 all that kind of stuff.

02:04:26 What’s some interesting ideas in this space

02:04:28 that fascinate you?

02:04:31 Randomness, being able to not predict

02:04:34 what the enemy is doing almost no matter what,

02:04:36 because there’s a level of randomness

02:04:38 that’s within the tactical envelope.

02:04:40 Even if utility of randomness.

02:04:42 The utility of randomness in an increasing.

02:04:44 Sounds like a book you should write.

02:04:46 That would be a good title.

02:04:49 Name my band.

02:04:50 Name your band?

02:04:51 Yeah.

02:04:53 So yeah, can you elaborate that?

02:04:55 So like trying to deeper understand

02:04:57 how you can integrate randomness through AI

02:05:02 in the context of combat.

02:05:03 In order to make yourself,

02:05:06 in order to take away the enemy’s ability

02:05:07 to try to predict what you’re gonna do

02:05:09 to disrupt their technological progress cycles

02:05:13 so that they don’t have a clear target to aim at.

02:05:16 And if you don’t have a clear target to aim at,

02:05:17 it’s hard to hit it.

02:05:18 Additionally, more distribution of assets and capability.

02:05:23 So imagine being able to digitally model

02:05:26 your weapon or your system

02:05:28 or your entire tactical engagement or scenario,

02:05:31 or allow a machine learning

02:05:32 to help you better understand the technology

02:05:35 that you need to build

02:05:36 in order to defeat a particular scenario.

02:05:38 And I’m talking hardware now, not just the tactic itself.

02:05:41 And being able to use large amounts of simulation

02:05:46 and machine learning to build individual assets

02:05:49 that are small boutique using advanced manufacturing

02:05:52 techniques for a mission or for a particular battle.

02:05:56 Instead of just having these large things against an enemy,

02:05:58 you’re building systems and technology for individual cases.

02:06:03 What about manned and unmanned teaming?

02:06:05 So man and machine working together.

02:06:08 Is there interesting ideas there?

02:06:10 I approach it from the position

02:06:13 that the human should be commanding

02:06:17 from the highest level possible, right?

02:06:19 So mission, objective, base, targeting.

02:06:23 And so if, just for an example,

02:06:25 if there’s a building here and I want that building

02:06:27 to go away, that’s the message I wanna communicate.

02:06:29 I don’t wanna tell certain vehicles

02:06:31 to be in a certain spot.

02:06:32 I don’t wanna know how much fuel they have.

02:06:33 I don’t even wanna know

02:06:34 what capabilities they have necessarily.

02:06:36 I just wanna know that I have the ability

02:06:39 to select from a cloud of capabilities

02:06:41 and the right assets are gonna arrive

02:06:43 such that they deal with the contingencies

02:06:46 around the target such as protection systems or EW

02:06:49 and then can prosecute the target

02:06:50 to the high enough probability of satisfaction

02:06:53 that’s needed by the mission commander.

02:06:54 And that’s the power of the human mind

02:06:57 is it’s able to do some of these strategic calculations

02:07:00 but also ethical calculations, all that kind of stuff.

02:07:03 That’s what humans are good at.

02:07:05 Does it worry you a future where we have increasingly

02:07:10 higher autonomy in our weapons systems, in our war?

02:07:14 So you said building.

02:07:16 What about telling a set of fully autonomous drones

02:07:22 to get rid of all the terrorists in the city?

02:07:26 So you said multiple buildings, region,

02:07:29 that kind of, so greater and greater autonomy.

02:07:34 Mm hmm.

02:07:35 So that’s a fear, right?

02:07:38 You’re viewing it from a we can cover more perspective

02:07:41 which is fair and a lot of,

02:07:46 I don’t approach it from that topic.

02:07:48 At least I don’t think of it that way, at least morally.

02:07:52 I think that with the advancement of warfare,

02:07:54 assuming we have a just and moral leadership,

02:07:59 if that’s the case, then I am an advocate

02:08:02 for increased autonomy and technology

02:08:04 because I see it as an ability to be more precise.

02:08:09 And if we trust the moral leadership of our government,

02:08:14 then we would want to be as precise as possible

02:08:17 in order to mitigate effects that we don’t want.

02:08:21 So I know that’s not a satisfying answer

02:08:24 and it leaves us maybe with bad feelings but.

02:08:27 No, because having experienced sort of directly seen

02:08:34 what it looks like when deliberately or carelessly

02:08:41 war leads to the death of a large number of civilians

02:08:44 as it does currently in Ukraine,

02:08:47 the value of precision given ethical leadership

02:08:52 becomes apparent.

02:08:54 So there’s something distinctly unethical

02:08:57 about the murder of civilians in a time of war.

02:09:02 And I think technology helps lessen that.

02:09:05 Of course, all death is terrible

02:09:08 but there’s something about schools, hospitals

02:09:13 being destroyed with everybody inside being killed.

02:09:19 It’s particularly terrible.

02:09:21 It is and you approached it from the angle of

02:09:24 more autonomy enables a wider swath of destruction.

02:09:30 And that’s where we get back into

02:09:32 who’s making the decisions based off of this.

02:09:34 And my hope again would be that we would have the leadership

02:09:38 that would use these things when needed

02:09:40 in the precise way as possible to minimize that.

02:09:42 And I’ve seen that firsthand, I’ve seen that in country,

02:09:45 I’ve seen not blue forces but I’ve seen truck bombs go off

02:09:51 on school buses, driving around Afghanistan

02:09:56 while escorting convoys and it wasn’t easy then

02:09:59 and I’m sure it’s not any easier now

02:10:01 especially after what you’ve just seen.

02:10:03 Do you have thoughts about the current war in Ukraine

02:10:07 maybe from a military perspective,

02:10:09 maybe from the Air Force perspective?

02:10:11 So I can just mention a few things.

02:10:13 There’s the Barakhtar drones that are being used.

02:10:17 They’re unmanned.

02:10:19 I think they have capability to be autonomous

02:10:21 but they’re usually remotely controlled.

02:10:23 They’re used for reconnaissance but they’re also used

02:10:26 by the Ukraine side for reconnaissance

02:10:28 and I think also to destroy different technologies,

02:10:33 tanks and so on, different targets like this.

02:10:36 So there’s also on the Russian side the Orlan 10.

02:10:40 There’s the fighter jets, MiG 29 on the Ukraine side

02:10:44 and the Su 25 on the Russian side.

02:10:46 Is there anything kind of stands out to you

02:10:48 about this particular aspects of what this war looks like

02:10:51 that’s unique to what you’ve experienced?

02:10:54 Maybe not unique but it’s just been absolutely incredible

02:10:56 to see the footage.

02:10:59 We’re watching war on Twitter essentially

02:11:02 and to see these aircraft flying down low,

02:11:06 spitting flares out, getting shot down,

02:11:08 it’s incredible to see this happening live

02:11:12 for everyone to see.

02:11:14 So that’s just kind of a quick meta comment

02:11:16 but as far as the actual,

02:11:18 I think these small form factor UAVs

02:11:20 where they’re just like strapping weapon to it

02:11:22 and flying over and trying to drop it at the right time

02:11:25 or any of these type of commercial applications

02:11:29 of technology into this ad hoc warfare area

02:11:31 is incredibly interesting

02:11:33 because it shows how useful that technology can be

02:11:36 outside of the military.

02:11:38 Especially like DJI, right?

02:11:40 Like there’s obviously a lot of technology in there

02:11:41 is being leveraged for other capabilities

02:11:43 within PLC military or at least we would assume.

02:11:49 What happens if that is more widespread, right?

02:11:52 Like what if we were creating our own drones

02:11:54 and they were being used against us?

02:11:56 Would we want to have some type of kill switch

02:11:57 or something like that, right?

02:11:58 So what I think governments are gonna have to consider

02:12:01 like all these tools that are gonna be easily available

02:12:04 to just any person could be turned into a tool of war

02:12:08 or how do we stop that from being turned against us?

02:12:10 Especially as we look at 10 years from now

02:12:12 when we have a large number of autonomous UAVs

02:12:15 delivering packages and doing everything else

02:12:17 over our country and any one of those

02:12:19 could be potentially a weapon

02:12:20 if we don’t have the proper security.

02:12:22 Well, we’re now in Texas and Texas values its guns

02:12:27 and it sees guns as among other things

02:12:30 a protector of individual freedom.

02:12:33 You could see a future perhaps where,

02:12:35 and I’ve certainly have experienced this in

02:12:38 the empowering nature of this in Ukraine

02:12:41 where you can put the fight for independence

02:12:45 into your own hands by literally strapping explosives

02:12:50 to GGI drones that you purchase on your own salary.

02:12:54 I mean that one of the interesting things

02:12:55 about the voluntary army in Ukraine

02:12:58 is that they’re basically using their own salary

02:13:01 to buy the ammunition to fight for their independence.

02:13:04 It’s the very kind of ideal that sort of people speak about

02:13:07 when they speak about the Second Amendment in this country

02:13:13 that it’s interesting to see

02:13:15 the advanced technology version of that,

02:13:18 especially in Ukraine.

02:13:19 Sort of using computer vision technology

02:13:22 for surveillance and reconnaissance

02:13:25 to try to integrate that information

02:13:29 to discover the targets and all that kind of stuff.

02:13:32 To put that in the hands of civilians

02:13:35 is fascinating to see.

02:13:36 So to sort of fight for their independence,

02:13:38 you could say that to fight against authoritarian regime

02:13:43 of your own government, all that kind of stuff.

02:13:45 It shows you how complicated the war space in the future

02:13:47 is gonna be invading a land like that

02:13:50 where people have that many different types of resources.

02:13:53 It could absolutely change warfare.

02:13:55 I mean hopefully that creates a disincentive to start war.

02:14:00 To go to war with a, yeah,

02:14:04 sort of it changes the nature of guerrilla warfare.

02:14:07 It does, yeah.

02:14:08 I don’t think Putin was expecting to be in that engagement

02:14:11 quite as long as he has, of course,

02:14:14 but it can show you how you can get caught up.

02:14:16 If land wars turn into an inescapable quagmire each time

02:14:22 due to the complications around the society’s ability

02:14:26 to access interesting tools,

02:14:28 it could be a huge demotivator for aggression.

02:14:36 Well, let me ask you about this.

02:14:38 Do you think there will always be war in the world?

02:14:43 Is this just a part of human nature?

02:14:50 I think so.

02:14:51 I think it is.

02:14:53 Until we move past resource limitation,

02:14:59 there’s always gonna be at least

02:15:00 that one particular cause of conflict.

02:15:06 And then we can also consider all our psychological

02:15:10 lizard brain emotions that cause us to act out,

02:15:14 although hopefully we have enough things in place

02:15:18 to stop that from rising to the level of war.

02:15:22 But we have our own biology, our own psychology

02:15:24 and evolution to combat.

02:15:26 But there are pragmatic reasons

02:15:28 to exert violence sometimes, unfortunately,

02:15:30 and one of those cases could be resource limitations.

02:15:33 And so your question was,

02:15:34 do I think there will always be war in this world?

02:15:37 My unfortunate answer is perhaps yes,

02:15:39 but once there’s more than one world

02:15:41 and we’re less resource constrained,

02:15:43 then perhaps there’ll be a valve of sorts for that.

02:15:47 I talked to Jacco on this podcast.

02:15:51 I told him about a song called Brothers in Arms

02:15:55 by Dire Straits, and the question I asked him,

02:15:59 I’d like to ask you the same question,

02:16:01 is like the song goes, do you think we’re fools

02:16:06 to wage war on our brothers in arms?

02:16:09 And Jacco said, our enemy is not our brothers in arms,

02:16:14 they’re the enemy.

02:16:16 And so this kind of notion that we’re all human,

02:16:21 that’s a notion, that’s a luxury you can have,

02:16:25 but there is good and bad in this world, according to Jacco.

02:16:29 I hear that anger and hate when I was in Ukraine

02:16:34 amongst some people, where there was a sense

02:16:40 where you could be brothers and sisters,

02:16:42 you can have family, you can have love

02:16:45 from Ukraine to Russia, but now that everything’s changed

02:16:50 and generational hate for some people have taken over.

02:16:54 So I guess the question is, when you think about the enemy,

02:17:00 is there hate there?

02:17:02 Do you acknowledge that they’re human?

02:17:04 I had never had any hate or discontent

02:17:07 when I was doing my job, I’ll say,

02:17:10 but I was also never in a true life or death situation

02:17:14 where they were gonna kill me if I didn’t kill them.

02:17:17 But I think that environment isn’t one born out of hate,

02:17:22 being in that type of scenario,

02:17:24 in a sense it’s how to be alive, right?

02:17:26 I mean, our natural state is to be fighting

02:17:28 for our survival in a sense.

02:17:30 And so I think there’s great power and strength

02:17:33 and clarity perhaps in that, and it’s not always born out

02:17:36 of hate, but out of necessity,

02:17:38 and we can’t always control that.

02:17:41 And I think as we focus on ourselves so much,

02:17:45 we only dance on that pinhead when we find ourselves

02:17:48 fighting for things that we need,

02:17:50 and we’re always taking from someone else at this point.

02:17:53 And so as someone that’s been in combat

02:17:56 and very high above it, I’ll say, right,

02:17:58 where I didn’t feel like I was in particular danger,

02:18:03 I rationalized it and I made my way through it,

02:18:06 knowing that there were people on the other side

02:18:08 that were going to die that were on our side than not.

02:18:12 So it was always a very human thing.

02:18:15 It was never a reaction, emotional reaction of any sense.

02:18:21 So you were able to see the basic, it’s human versus human.

02:18:27 There’s some aspect of war that is basically

02:18:32 one people fighting each other.

02:18:36 Yes, at the end of the day, especially I would say

02:18:40 in aviation, tactical aviation, there’s almost a kinship

02:18:44 with your enemies in a sense, because you know them

02:18:48 in a sense, right, you know what they’ve been through,

02:18:51 you know what training they’ve been through,

02:18:52 you know where they failed, and you know what type

02:18:55 of person they are, because it’s a very unique person

02:18:57 that does that job and usually can spot them.

02:18:59 I guess it’s the kind of respect you have

02:19:02 for the craftsmanship of the job that’s taken on.

02:19:06 Certainly, and that person didn’t come out

02:19:08 in his $100 million jet because I pissed him off.

02:19:12 It’s not an emotional response.

02:19:13 We’re both there, maybe because we chose to be in some sense,

02:19:17 but at the behest of someone else

02:19:20 and outside of our control and power.

02:19:22 And so in a sense for me, it’s almost a challenge

02:19:25 that we’ve engaged upon agreeably,

02:19:27 but that’s such a romantic version that I have the luxury

02:19:30 to have being high in my castle in the jet up there,

02:19:34 not on the ground.

02:19:35 So I understand that it’s a bit more romantic

02:19:37 than perhaps, you know, someone on the ground

02:19:40 experiencing all the horrors down there,

02:19:42 because everything looks very small from above.

02:19:46 And that’s another aspect of war with greater autonomy

02:19:50 when you’re controlling the mission versus,

02:19:53 you know, have a Genghis Khan type of intimacy

02:19:58 in terms of the actual experience of war

02:20:01 where you directly have, you murder with a sword

02:20:05 versus a gun versus a remotely controlled drone

02:20:09 versus a strategic mission assignment

02:20:12 to an autonomous drone that executes.

02:20:14 Abstracted away until it’s just a small decision.

02:20:18 And my worry is the people without a voice

02:20:26 are completely forgotten and silenced

02:20:29 in all of these calculations.

02:20:31 I spoke to a lot of people, poor people that feel like

02:20:36 they’ve never really had a voice

02:20:37 and they’re too easily forgotten,

02:20:40 even within the country of Ukraine.

02:20:42 It’s the big city versus the rural divide, you know.

02:20:48 It’s easy to forget the people

02:20:49 that don’t have a Twitter account

02:20:52 and that their basic existence is just trying to survive,

02:20:57 trying to put food on the table

02:20:58 and they don’t have anything else, anything else.

02:21:02 And they are the ones that truly feel the pain of war,

02:21:06 of the supply chain going down,

02:21:08 of the food supplies going down,

02:21:10 of a cold winter without power.

02:21:15 You’re still young, but you’ve seen some things.

02:21:18 So let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat

02:21:22 and give advice to young people,

02:21:25 whether they’re fascinated by technology

02:21:29 or fascinated by fighter jets,

02:21:31 whether they’re fascinated by sort of engineering

02:21:35 or the way the stars look at night.

02:21:38 What advice would you give them?

02:21:40 How to have a career they can be proud of

02:21:42 or how to have a life they can be proud of?

02:21:45 I’d suggest that they don’t fear looking foolish.

02:21:49 I spent a large portion of my life

02:21:52 considering the laughter or the comments

02:21:56 at my statements as indication

02:21:59 that I shouldn’t pursue that.

02:22:02 And so I kind of woke up to that fact a bit later,

02:22:05 but I would advise that people trust in themselves

02:22:11 and trust in the things that they care about.

02:22:12 It doesn’t matter if they’re good at it.

02:22:15 All that matters is that they find something

02:22:17 that they can apply love and care to

02:22:20 and they will grow better at it

02:22:22 and then most likely make the world better because of it.

02:22:25 And don’t be afraid to look stupid.

02:22:27 Don’t be afraid to look stupid.

02:22:30 Yeah, that’s one of the things that I think

02:22:31 as you get older, you’re expected to be,

02:22:34 to have it all figured out

02:22:36 and so you are afraid to take on new things.

02:22:39 But I think as long as you’re always,

02:22:40 okay, looking stupid and having a beginner’s mind,

02:22:43 you can get really, really far even later on in life.

02:22:47 So this isn’t just advice for young people.

02:22:48 This is really advice for everybody.

02:22:55 Maybe a dark question,

02:22:56 but has there been a difficult time in your life,

02:23:01 a really dark place you’ve gone in your mind

02:23:04 that stands out that you had to really overcome?

02:23:08 I would suggest that I’ve been pretty firm ground

02:23:13 for most of my life.

02:23:14 I haven’t had too many personal tragedies.

02:23:18 I’ll say that have really defined me.

02:23:22 Certainly none that I would think are outside the norm.

02:23:25 So there was no truly low point.

02:23:29 Actually, I have one and it’s tough for me

02:23:30 because I’ve spent most of my life beating motions

02:23:33 and high emotional responses out of my system

02:23:38 because that’s what flying is, right?

02:23:40 It’s keeping a steady line and doing what you need to do.

02:23:44 In fact, there’s been studies

02:23:45 that show reduced adrenaline production in fighter pilots

02:23:49 for a number of years after they get out.

02:23:50 But getting out of the Navy was difficult for me.

02:23:54 And I wasn’t expecting it to be.

02:23:56 A lot of bravado and machoism, of course, in the military,

02:23:59 especially in fighter community.

02:24:01 And we all have our plans made up to get out

02:24:03 and none of it really accounts

02:24:06 for any type of mental health or anything like that.

02:24:08 It’s all very much, where am I gonna get my paycheck from?

02:24:11 Where am I gonna move to?

02:24:12 And whether it’s the Navy or just individuals,

02:24:16 truly understanding the difference that makes.

02:24:18 And when I got out, it was difficult for me.

02:24:21 I think a lot of guys in that job, when they get out,

02:24:23 they almost, at least I had anxiety when I got out

02:24:26 because I was so used to being highly involved

02:24:29 in something that just was I was always involved with

02:24:35 that when I got out,

02:24:36 I didn’t know how to fill that space essentially.

02:24:38 And while I wouldn’t say it was an overly

02:24:41 traumatic experience, I think it’s one

02:24:43 that’s not accounted for enough

02:24:45 that people that are getting out,

02:24:46 so I would encourage them to take it serious

02:24:49 and actually think about it and respect the change

02:24:51 because it is a big one.

02:24:53 Well, if I may say, you found a place in nature currently,

02:24:58 a home, is there, can you speak to that

02:25:01 being a source of happiness for you?

02:25:04 Absolutely.

02:25:04 An escape from the world?

02:25:06 Certainly, it very much is.

02:25:08 Was it deliberate that you found it there?

02:25:11 That’s home for me.

02:25:12 So, I moved back up to the Boston area

02:25:14 and my wife and I had an idea after moving

02:25:18 about eight or nine times in the Navy

02:25:20 of kind of what we wanted just generally.

02:25:23 And it was all really about the land

02:25:25 and not about the house,

02:25:26 we just wanted privacy and to be nearby.

02:25:29 And so we ended up finding a lot of land,

02:25:31 a parcel of land, we put a house on it

02:25:34 and it provides me with a sense of peace

02:25:36 that I think I can only get when I’m in nature.

02:25:40 And a sense of clarity that helps me think,

02:25:43 helps me relax, maybe it’s so relaxing

02:25:45 that helps me think, I don’t know.

02:25:46 But being surrounded by nature and birds and animals

02:25:50 for me has always allowed me to,

02:25:54 I don’t know, feel most in touch

02:25:55 with my own thoughts in a sense.

02:25:59 It just provides clarity.

02:26:01 And so this little sanctuary you could say I’ve built

02:26:04 allows me to interface via a fiber line at my house

02:26:08 but also feel like I’m a million miles away sometimes,

02:26:12 which is the best of both worlds.

02:26:13 A, you can just walk outside to escape at all.

02:26:16 Yes.

02:26:17 To experience life as hundreds of generations

02:26:21 of human species have experienced it.

02:26:23 Maybe it’s the dichotomy, my desire for the fastness

02:26:26 of technology and experience compared

02:26:28 with the most basic baseline that we have.

02:26:32 Isn’t that strange?

02:26:33 How do you square that?

02:26:34 I don’t know.

02:26:36 How drawn you are to the cutting edge

02:26:39 and still the calm you find in nature.

02:26:41 I think it makes sense.

02:26:42 Nature is vastly superior to almost all of our technology.

02:26:45 From a technology perspective?

02:26:46 Yeah, it is.

02:26:48 And so in a way, it’s being surrounded

02:26:49 by perfection in a lot of senses.

02:26:53 In the military and in general,

02:26:55 have you contemplated your mortality?

02:26:57 Have you been afraid of death?

02:26:59 What’s your relationship like with death?

02:27:01 Well, I was willing to accept an oversized amount of risk,

02:27:06 I’ll say, when I was younger as an aviator.

02:27:08 Not in the jet, but just that was my life.

02:27:10 I felt like I was gonna live forever.

02:27:13 And going out in the war, strangely,

02:27:15 didn’t really change that because as an aviator,

02:27:19 again, we’re riding up high on our horse up there.

02:27:21 So there were times when I was in situations

02:27:25 that could have resulted in death from flying

02:27:28 or from emergency in the aircraft.

02:27:31 But I’ll be honest, I never really kind of sat down

02:27:35 to think about the mortality of it afterwards.

02:27:39 I feel like I kind of signed a check at the beginning

02:27:41 and it was my job to perform as well as I could.

02:27:44 And if something happened in that,

02:27:46 then I better damn well be sure

02:27:47 I would do my best at the time then.

02:27:50 So I maybe didn’t personally reflect on it

02:27:53 as much as I one would think,

02:27:57 because once you get in that machine,

02:27:58 it doesn’t give you a lot of time

02:28:00 to sit back and philosophize on your current situation.

02:28:05 And the same, just like we weren’t seeing these,

02:28:06 or when we seen these objects off the coast,

02:28:08 we weren’t necessarily examining them every day, right?

02:28:10 We’d put them into that bucket

02:28:11 because it wasn’t something

02:28:12 that was gonna kill us right away.

02:28:14 And thinking about death when you’re so close to it

02:28:17 all the time would be debilitating.

02:28:20 It would probably make you worse at your job.

02:28:22 It would.

02:28:25 Well, maybe you can think about death

02:28:26 when you look out, when you go out into nature

02:28:28 and think like the fact that this whole ride ends,

02:28:32 it’s such a weird thing.

02:28:34 And the old makes way to new.

02:28:37 And that’s all throughout nature.

02:28:39 And if you just look at the cruelty of nature

02:28:42 or the beauty of nature, however you think about it,

02:28:44 the fact that the big thing eats the little thing

02:28:49 over and over, and that’s just how it progresses.

02:28:53 And that’s how adaptation happens.

02:28:55 Death is a requirement for evolution.

02:28:59 And whether evolution allows us

02:29:02 to see objective reality or not,

02:29:04 it still gives you some interesting thoughts

02:29:06 about perspectives of death,

02:29:08 and especially considering it’s a biological necessity

02:29:11 as far as evolution is concerned.

02:29:13 Yeah, it’s weird.

02:29:14 It’s weird that there’s been like 100 billion people

02:29:18 that lived before us,

02:29:20 and that you and I will be forgotten.

02:29:22 This whole thing we’re doing now is meaningless

02:29:24 in that sense, but at the same time,

02:29:26 it feels deeply meaningful somehow.

02:29:31 I guess that’s the question I wanna ask.

02:29:32 When you go out to nature with family,

02:29:37 what do you think is the meaning of it all?

02:29:38 What’s the meaning of life?

02:29:42 Or maybe when you put on the night goggles,

02:29:44 the night vision goggles and look up at the stars,

02:29:48 why are we here?

02:29:50 I can’t speak for everyone,

02:29:51 but at least the way I interpret it,

02:29:55 or at least I feel like I interpret my way here,

02:29:58 my job is, I feel like my role is just to be curious

02:30:02 about the environment in a manner that allows us

02:30:04 to understand as much as possible.

02:30:07 I think that the human mind,

02:30:09 whether it’s just the mass inside our skull,

02:30:12 or whether there’s some type of quantum interactions

02:30:15 going on, our mind has incredible ability

02:30:18 to output new information in a universe

02:30:23 that is somewhat stale of information, right?

02:30:27 Our minds are somewhat unique in that we can imagine

02:30:30 and perceive things that could never ever

02:30:33 have possibly naturally occurred,

02:30:35 and yet we can make it happen.

02:30:36 We can instantiate that with enough belief

02:30:38 that it’s true and it can happen.

02:30:40 And so for me, I feel like I just need to encourage that,

02:30:44 to encourage interaction with reality

02:30:47 such that it leaves us a newer and grander interactions

02:30:50 with this universe.

02:30:52 And all that starts with a little bit of curiosity.

02:30:55 Exactly.

02:30:57 Ryan, you’re an incredible person.

02:30:59 You’ve done so many things,

02:31:00 and there’s so much still ahead of you.

02:31:03 Thank you for being brave enough to talk about UFOs

02:31:07 and doing it so seriously,

02:31:09 and thank you for pushing forward

02:31:10 on all these fronts in terms of technology.

02:31:12 So from just the fighter jets, the engineering of that,

02:31:17 to the AIML applications in the combat setting,

02:31:21 that’s super interesting, and then now quantum.

02:31:24 I can’t wait to see what you do next.

02:31:26 Thank you so much for sitting down and talking today.

02:31:28 It was an honor.

02:31:29 It was my pleasure.

02:31:29 Thank you, Lex.

02:31:31 Thanks for listening to this conversation

02:31:33 with Lieutenant Ryan Graves.

02:31:34 To support this podcast,

02:31:36 please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:31:39 And now, let me leave you with some words from Buzz Aldrin.

02:31:43 Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline.

02:31:47 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.