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


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The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years
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and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron
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of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.
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He's also famously one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO, an
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identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac and the incident more formally
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referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident.
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His story, corroborated by several other pilots from my perspective as a curious scientist
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and an open minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at
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least that I'm aware of.
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He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to.
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I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many
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of the questions that people posted as I could.
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And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure if the world wants us to, and
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if there's more questions to be had, we'll talk on this podcast again.
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Quick summary of the sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.
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Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena,
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and aliens in general is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy
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theorists to actual hard evidence.
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I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open minded one, often looking and thinking
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outside the box.
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I'm often disheartened by the closed mindedness of the scientific community.
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And in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry
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and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists.
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I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds
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should walk.
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I think we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars and
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the nature of reality and the nature of our very own minds.
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The path to understanding can only be walked humbly.
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The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology,
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whether human made or alien made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to
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every scientist and engineer on this earth.
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There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood
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and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings.
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Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes
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and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints
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and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow
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on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.
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As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
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More and more I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less adzy,
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more personal, but I give you timestamps so you can skip, but still please do check out
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the sponsors by clicking the links in the description, it is honestly the best way to
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support this podcast.
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This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all in one daily drink to support health
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and performance.
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I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need.
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00:03:41.800
Now let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting.
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I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an 8 hour eating period
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of 2 meals, sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next.
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I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to
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have done.
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People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits,
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it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life.
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Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal, that every day is precious.
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I certainly experienced this with the 24 hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the
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48, 72, and even week long fasts.
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Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens, it's delicious, refreshing, just makes
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me feel good.
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So go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to claim a special offer of free vitamin D for a year.
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Again go to athleticgreens.com slash lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast.
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This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Get it at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get a discount.
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You probably know there's a show called The Office that I fell in love with, first with
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the British version with Ricky Gervais and then the American version with Steve Carell.
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ExpressVPN lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100
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different countries and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions
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of The Office in other countries.
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Also it protects you when you do shady things on the internet that you shouldn't be doing.
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Like checking the website of this very podcast that for some reason was not available in
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Russia for a long time, not sure if it still is, but if it isn't you can use ExpressVPN
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to access it.
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I think of ExpressVPN like a pirate ship, and regular VPN free life as a boring cruise
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from one place to another with no excitement in between.
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Choose wisely my friends.
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Again get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash lexpod to get an extra three months
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free and to support this podcast.
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This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P help.
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Like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane
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to notice you.
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Now, hard left turn, let me talk about desert islands.
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Whatever you think of it, I love the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending
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time on an island, alone, with potentially no hope.
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The natural question is, if I could, what would I bring to this island?
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The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing, the first thing that popped into
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my crazy mind which is the Introduction to Algorithms book, also called CLRS for the
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first letters of the last name of its four authors.
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I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world inside computers
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when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess.
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I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization.
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Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash lex to get a discount and to support
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00:07:06.240
this podcast.
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00:07:07.920
And now, finally, here's my conversation with David Fravor.
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You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School.
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Yeah, I am.
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Better known as Top Gun.
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Yeah.
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Let me ask the most ridiculous question, how realistic is the movie Top Gun?
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So it's funny, we used to joke, and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said
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this, there's two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic.
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One, there is a place called Top Gun, and number two is they do fly airplanes there.
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Other than that, I went through in 97, class 497, and there's actually a log of every single
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person that's went through, kind of like a SEAL training.
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There's a list.
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Because there's a lot of posers out there, oh, I was a Navy SEAL.
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No, you weren't.
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Well, I went to Top Gun.
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You can actually go to Top Gun, and matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the
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real patch, you have to have gone there.
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So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real.
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The real ones are controlled.
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The people that make them honor that.
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And when you go in, they look up your name.
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If you want to get one, they look up your name.
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You just tell them, they go, okay, here, and they'll sell them to you.
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If you are not on the list, you ain't get no patch.
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Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go through, but for me, probably one of the best
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experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent.
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It's very, very challenging, but it's what we all signed up to do.
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So it's, it's just the entire group that is, when you want to be that, you know, that level,
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you know, where you go, everyone really cares, and everyone really wants to be good.
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Is it competitive?
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Like, what was it, in the movie?
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No, it's, when you go through, it's, you know, it's, if anything, it's more of the
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students, you know, and then there's the instructor side, then the instructor sides are really,
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you know, they're guys that, you know, they just chose to stay up in Fallon.
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And it's extremely difficult job, because they have, they have a very small tolerance
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for not being good.
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So they're briefs, the guys when they give a lecture, so let's just say there's a fighter
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employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones.
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It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture.
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The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, what they call them murder boards,
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where he's scrutinized by his peers, and he practices, by the time they actually stand
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in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized, and
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they don't even turn around, they just click and they know them in order.
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And they repeat the same thing over, it's, and it's standardized.
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So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the school, and there's
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a reason for that, because what they're doing is they're training, so when you come out
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of Top Gun, you're called a Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics Instructor, okay?
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So you're SFTI.
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When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools on
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the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons, and then you visit the squadrons
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and train and do upgrade rides and all that.
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So there's a, there's a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the
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course.
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It's, it is literally one of the best things, and it's not, it's not a rank based thing,
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just think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a, you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander.
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The lieutenants, the hierarchy, or at least to be, I don't know how it is exactly today,
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but I imagine it's the same.
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The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank.
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So when the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in
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the Fallon Ranges, they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise,
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and I mean time wise, are the ones that actually make the decision.
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And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out
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from the staff, they all speak the same language.
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It's and it has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it
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was founded.
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So it's just a, it's an incredible group of individuals.
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So there's a bar of excellence that, that the instructors demand.
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Oh, very much so, and they're held to it.
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So it's not a, hey, I'm now an instructor, so I can do what I want.
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There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard.
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They have to, and I mean every moment of every day.
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So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon and they come down and do, they're called
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site visits where they come down and they'll come to Lemoore, California, which is where
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the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy.
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And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on
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some of that knowledge, that's that same high level of standard.
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It's they can't just drop your guard because you wear the Top Gun patch.
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And people know that.
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And they wear light blue shirts.
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So it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there.
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And you know, and then everyone else who's been through the school, including them, have
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the patch on their sleeve.
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So there's a standard that's expected when you come out of there.
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So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years.
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Yes.
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Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?
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Yeah.
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So, you know, first I was in, I was enlisted, I was a Marine.
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And then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy.
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So it's always better to be lucky than good.
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But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I've had that dream to fly.
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So when I got selected,
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You've always dreamed of flying.
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Yeah.
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Since 1969, when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.
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I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five.
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And I said, wow, yeah, it's so cool, mom.
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And she said, well, you know, they were all pilots.
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And then at that point it was like, I'm going to be a pilot.
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And if you knew me growing up, cause I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just
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like, yeah, right.
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I used to joke, I'm going to fly, I'm going to fly jets, I'm going to drop bombs.
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And if people that knew me as a kid, they'd be like, yeah, and they'd be like, ah, not
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a chance.
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And then when I did, I actually had a, it's a funny story and I'll get to it, I'll finish
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my career.
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But I was at my cousin's wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood.
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We kind of, they had Italian side of the family.
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That's how we grew up.
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So it was my house right down the street.
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It was my cousin, Chad.
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And then right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff.
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The guy two doors down from my house, the paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all
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knew me.
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And I went to my cousin's wedding and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor.
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I go, Mr. Race, how you doing?
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He goes, you fly jets, Top Gun and all that.
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I go, yes, sir.
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He goes, man, I figured you'd be in jail by now.
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And it was kind of a, to me, it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on and I kind
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of overcame that.
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But...
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What do you attribute that to?
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So you, I've heard you before and just now say that it's better to be lucky than good
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and you talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory
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maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how'd you pull it off to be like, to be truly
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a special person?
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The easiest way is one, never, never take no.
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Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it or those.
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I mean, I knew, I knew what I was capable of inside, you know, and if I really believe
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if you want something and you want to do something, then you can achieve it.
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Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball and I really wanted to be in the NBA, there's
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a realism that says I'm five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap and
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I'm really not that good at basketball, it's probably not ever going to happen no matter
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how hard I try and practice.
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It's just the way it is.
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Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast, you know, I'm not that big, it's just physically
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I'm incapable of doing that.
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But there's things that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and
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strength, but it's, it's mental and I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart
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to be a fighter pilot.
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Matter of fact, you don't.
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It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly, 80% solution is typically good
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enough because if you overthink it, you're, you're behind and then in an air to air fight,
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that's what happens.
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People try and overthink it and before you know it, because it's happening so fast, you
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don't have, you can't get to the nth degree, you know, six decimal places, 80% solution
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is good enough.
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You have a really strong gut for the 80% solution, just yeah, I'm a big believer in the 80% solution.
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I love that.
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If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what, like
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if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really,
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really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this and then I know that if I do a maneuver,
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if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do a, if he doesn't do a, he does some
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degree less like BCD and then I know how bad his, his error is and then I capitalize.
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So my mind, I don't have to be perfect, you know, I don't have to go, I need to go to
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47 degrees, nose high.
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If I just kind of get above 40, then I'm good and I can watch how it reacts and then I can
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adjust for that.
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And you, and you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral,
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you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage till eventually,
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you know, and if you're really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only rear quarter
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where you got to get behind the guy, kind of world war II dog fight and type stuff.
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Then it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at,
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you know, 400 knots, 300 knots depends.
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So to get to be one of the rare individuals that are able to do that, he just had the
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dream and didn't take no for an answer.
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, you know, part of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a
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fire ready aim guy, you know, he'd smack me and then asked me what I did wrong.
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Yeah.
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Good parenting.
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Um, back then, you know, I, I joke and people look, cause you know, at times it was kind
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of tough, you know, cause he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, you know,
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I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times.
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Uh, but then everyone else in my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was
link |
00:17:24.240
a kid.
link |
00:17:25.240
Uh, my, uh, my grandfather who is a big, big part of it.
link |
00:17:29.700
My mom's dad, uh, who he taught me a lot and you have a question there that we'll talk
link |
00:17:35.560
about, uh, about him, but, uh, huge, huge influence.
link |
00:17:39.480
Very, very positive.
link |
00:17:40.480
And a lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught
link |
00:17:45.720
me.
link |
00:17:46.720
Um, and, uh, you know, and I figured, you know, it was the first funeral I ever went
link |
00:17:51.320
to and it was, uh, it was about three miles long and church was overfilling and people
link |
00:17:57.160
were out.
link |
00:17:58.160
It was a big guy, dead serious.
link |
00:18:00.240
And you go, there's someone asked who died the Pope.
link |
00:18:02.520
Um, uh, so, so a lot of people love them.
link |
00:18:05.440
So back to, back to my career question, cause I'm getting down at rabbit hole.
link |
00:18:09.600
Uh, no, I, when I was at the, I was going to, I was going to stay in the Marines.
link |
00:18:13.080
I really wanted to go, man.
link |
00:18:14.600
I love the core.
link |
00:18:15.600
I think it's, uh, of all services, it's that one, everything is in a ball and they're very,
link |
00:18:20.440
very professional and it was a great, great organization to join.
link |
00:18:24.400
Uh, but I went out to the Nimitz on my, uh, freshman cruise after your freshman year at
link |
00:18:30.120
the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and you, you're an enlisted person.
link |
00:18:33.080
You get to experience that half when I already was enlisted.
link |
00:18:35.640
So it was fine with me.
link |
00:18:36.640
Because it comes up a lot.
link |
00:18:37.640
You mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is, what like, yeah.
link |
00:18:41.320
So Nimitz is, uh, an aircraft carrier.
link |
00:18:43.640
So it's, uh, four and a half acres of sovereign us territory that floats around the us oceans
link |
00:18:48.200
giant thing.
link |
00:18:49.200
Does it have weapons on it?
link |
00:18:50.840
Uh, the air wing is really the weapons.
link |
00:18:52.780
It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part it's a giant moving airport is what
link |
00:18:58.040
it is.
link |
00:18:59.040
So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off.
link |
00:19:01.760
Um, and I'm like, Oh, and the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a
link |
00:19:06.040
VF 41 and a 14 squadron, VF 84, uh, an F 14 squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons.
link |
00:19:12.480
And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a six pilots
link |
00:19:15.800
and BNs.
link |
00:19:16.800
So it was really a neat experience.
link |
00:19:17.800
And I said, I want to do that.
link |
00:19:20.800
And the way to do it was to not, to, to go in the Navy because there are Marine squadrons
link |
00:19:25.160
that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based, you know, to
link |
00:19:28.680
support the Marines.
link |
00:19:29.680
Cause there are that, that unit, that whole unit, you know, the Marine Corps is that one
link |
00:19:33.580
surface has it all.
link |
00:19:35.480
And, um, so when I graduated and I got to, uh, you know, I, I worked hard through primary
link |
00:19:41.480
and that's where, you know, I knew Missy, uh, we were in, actually went through together,
link |
00:19:45.720
Missy Cummings, uh, we went through primary together and then, uh, I went to Kingsville.
link |
00:19:50.120
We all selected the same time.
link |
00:19:51.200
I went to Kingsville.
link |
00:19:52.200
There was another guy, Scott Weidemeyer, uh, the three of us.
link |
00:19:55.600
So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville and Missy went to Meridian.
link |
00:20:00.160
So the three of us that we had all went through, we got, we selected out of primary together.
link |
00:20:04.120
We all ended up going jets and that's, that's how, besides from school, I knew her at school
link |
00:20:08.160
too.
link |
00:20:09.160
The long story.
link |
00:20:10.160
I got done, uh, got winged.
link |
00:20:11.160
It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got
link |
00:20:14.600
my wings and, uh, through some luck, uh, I ended up getting A6s, uh, on the West coast,
link |
00:20:21.440
which is a side by side, uh, bomber.
link |
00:20:23.360
So it's a pilot on the left seat and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat.
link |
00:20:26.320
It was built in the sixties.
link |
00:20:28.320
It is all weather, uh, and it flies low at night and it's got a terrain mapping radar.
link |
00:20:33.200
How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for,
link |
00:20:38.900
for the public?
link |
00:20:39.900
Yeah, that's fine.
link |
00:20:40.900
How many fighter jets are side by side like that?
link |
00:20:43.360
That was, uh, in the Navy, that was the only one, uh, the Air Force, the F111 was a side
link |
00:20:47.960
by side, but the Navy, it was the A6 and then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of
link |
00:20:52.560
that.
link |
00:20:53.560
And now that those are all gone, the EA6B is just went away a few years ago.
link |
00:20:56.560
And now the, uh, E18G Growler, um, is the replacement for the A6B.
link |
00:21:01.880
There was never a replacement for the A6, uh, that I flew.
link |
00:21:04.960
It really became the F18, which, uh, the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise
link |
00:21:10.400
by fuel, uh, then the Hornet and, uh, the Hornet is the F18.
link |
00:21:16.040
Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually like in front and behind?
link |
00:21:21.120
In a, the modern two seaters, yes.
link |
00:21:22.840
Uh, but most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat.
link |
00:21:26.320
Single seat, just one person?
link |
00:21:27.980
One person, with the exception of, I'll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the
link |
00:21:32.400
exception of the F15E Strike Eagle and the F18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two
link |
00:21:37.880
seater and the G is also a two seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say full
link |
00:21:42.440
up fighter bomber.
link |
00:21:44.400
So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18 year career is, was it two
link |
00:21:51.560
seater?
link |
00:21:52.560
That was about half and half.
link |
00:21:53.560
So I started off in A6 was a two seater.
link |
00:21:55.940
Then I went to single seat F18s and I flew those, uh, all the way up until 2000 and let
link |
00:22:03.400
me think 2001 to the end of 2001.
link |
00:22:07.800
And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets and I've flown both of those,
link |
00:22:11.120
the E's and the S, but I deployed when I had command of VFA 41, I had the two seat, they
link |
00:22:16.720
were F squadron.
link |
00:22:18.040
So you eventually ended up commanding the, the Strike Fighter Squadron 41.
link |
00:22:25.920
I love the, the name, the Black Aces.
link |
00:22:28.920
What, uh, is there some parts of that journey that are amazing, parts of it that are tough
link |
00:22:35.560
that kind of stand out?
link |
00:22:37.000
To me, it was one, it was a huge honor.
link |
00:22:39.640
Uh, and I got to serve with, uh, you know, I got pulled up because the, the guy, the,
link |
00:22:44.880
the people that are exos, cause we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number
link |
00:22:47.840
one guy.
link |
00:22:49.000
So the XO becomes the CEO.
link |
00:22:50.400
So the executive officer becomes the commanding officer.
link |
00:22:53.200
So I had worked with, uh, now soon to be vice Admiral Weitzel, uh, was the, he was commander
link |
00:23:00.400
Weitzel at the time was the XO and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little
link |
00:23:04.840
bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L'more, L'more had been a single seat,
link |
00:23:10.400
a fighter community, uh, since the forever.
link |
00:23:16.100
And now all of a sudden you've got the F18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators
link |
00:23:19.860
in the back that are not pilots, they're weapon systems operators.
link |
00:23:23.480
And there's a difference.
link |
00:23:24.760
Um, and Kenny is a weapon systems operator and, uh, Kenny knew because of my A6 background
link |
00:23:31.360
that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat, one seat, two seat.
link |
00:23:34.880
Because when you fly two seat, there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take
link |
00:23:40.080
the advantage of the weapon systems operator.
link |
00:23:42.680
And it's not that one plus one equals two in that environment because it really, there's
link |
00:23:47.120
a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the
link |
00:23:51.840
ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies.
link |
00:23:56.040
But it does, it does equal more than one.
link |
00:23:58.560
I would say that one plus one with two people as well as a minimum of 1.5 because you've
link |
00:24:04.680
got an extra head, you've got extra eyes, you've got someone that can monitor systems.
link |
00:24:09.440
The airplanes can do two things at once.
link |
00:24:11.000
I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.
link |
00:24:14.320
Can we just pause on that just for me, from like a human factors perspective and also
link |
00:24:18.960
an AI perspective, what's, how difficult, uh, so there's like when there's two people,
link |
00:24:26.480
there's also a third person that's the AI part, the some level of automation like autopilot
link |
00:24:33.000
maybe.
link |
00:24:34.000
That's correct.
link |
00:24:35.000
Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions really
link |
00:24:39.960
quick, 80%, how do you deal with another brain working with you?
link |
00:24:46.360
And then also the automation, is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn?
link |
00:24:52.260
And also as that changed throughout your career, I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms
link |
00:24:57.240
of the automation or perhaps not?
link |
00:24:59.040
Well, I can tell you, so let's, let's start just, no, this is, this is good.
link |
00:25:03.320
This is good.
link |
00:25:04.320
And this is, I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other
link |
00:25:07.280
than a Tic Tac.
link |
00:25:08.280
So, um, so let's start with the A6.
link |
00:25:10.760
The A6 was really an analog airplane, uh, that was built in the sixties.
link |
00:25:15.840
All right.
link |
00:25:16.840
And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between
link |
00:25:21.320
the pilot and the bombardier navigator.
link |
00:25:23.720
So we would fly low at night in the mountains.
link |
00:25:26.680
So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington.
link |
00:25:28.960
So you've got the Cascades and incredible amount of time.
link |
00:25:33.160
And we would get in the simulators because unlike normally people think terrain following
link |
00:25:37.400
and there's the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it'll, the radar can
link |
00:25:41.640
see and it'll fly.
link |
00:25:42.640
It basically flies a straight line.
link |
00:25:43.680
So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6
link |
00:25:47.480
was really manual.
link |
00:25:49.700
So you do this low level routes where you're going to, you're going to fly in the mountains
link |
00:25:52.360
at night.
link |
00:25:53.360
You're going to be at, you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground, ripping through
link |
00:25:56.920
like fog layers, cause you don't need to see outside.
link |
00:26:00.600
You're literally flying a little TV screen and radar.
link |
00:26:03.080
What are you looking at most of the time?
link |
00:26:04.320
So you're just at a screen.
link |
00:26:05.640
It's this really primitive.
link |
00:26:08.160
If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really
link |
00:26:11.360
fun.
link |
00:26:12.360
So is it similar to like the FLIR stuff?
link |
00:26:14.120
Is that, is, no, this thing is totally radar based.
link |
00:26:17.760
Now the airplane had a FLIR ball as a target recognition and multi sensor was called a
link |
00:26:22.360
tram.
link |
00:26:23.360
You're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects.
link |
00:26:27.320
No, actually what it is is the, the bomb of your navigator had a radar and he was getting
link |
00:26:31.440
raw feed off of a pulse radar in front.
link |
00:26:33.680
Okay.
link |
00:26:34.680
So it's just basically mapping the mountain.
link |
00:26:35.920
So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is
link |
00:26:39.840
going to be, it's going to give you a really bright return.
link |
00:26:41.900
And then the backside, it's just going to be a giant shadow because you can't see on
link |
00:26:45.680
the other side.
link |
00:26:47.740
So the Bombardier navigators would do that and we, they would have charts and they could
link |
00:26:50.800
shade their charts knowing that, Hey, if we turn a little bit left here, we can get in
link |
00:26:53.880
this valley.
link |
00:26:54.880
We can sneak up this valley and then go around the backside of the mountain, which is what
link |
00:26:57.880
the airplane would do.
link |
00:26:59.200
And so, and sorry to interrupt, I'm going to just keep asking dumb questions, I apologize.
link |
00:27:03.600
But the pilot, can you, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the Bombardier?
link |
00:27:09.160
Yes.
link |
00:27:10.780
So you're, you're actually just control.
link |
00:27:13.240
I'm flying the jet.
link |
00:27:14.240
The throttle's the stick and I have a, it's about a, probably a four inch or six inch
link |
00:27:20.480
wide by maybe four inches, five inches high.
link |
00:27:24.560
It looks like it's literally a CRT.
link |
00:27:26.880
That's how old it is.
link |
00:27:27.880
A CRT screen.
link |
00:27:28.880
And what it would do, what the radar would do is the, the, the Bombardier navigator is
link |
00:27:33.160
looking at his radar and he's looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the
link |
00:27:36.520
airplane.
link |
00:27:37.520
So he has the range really scoped down cause the radar can see a lot further.
link |
00:27:40.440
He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode where we're
link |
00:27:43.360
dodging mountains and stuff.
link |
00:27:45.280
And what the pilot has is there's, they're called range bins and there's eight of them.
link |
00:27:49.360
So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and the closest range
link |
00:27:55.320
bin, it's a thing and it'll be like between like a half a mile and or a quarter mile to
link |
00:28:00.600
three quarters of a mile.
link |
00:28:01.600
And the next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles.
link |
00:28:04.680
And then it just keeps going out like that.
link |
00:28:06.300
So if there's a mountain in front, let's say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain
link |
00:28:10.900
out in the distance at 15 miles.
link |
00:28:12.720
And we were just driving right at it.
link |
00:28:14.940
So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar is going
link |
00:28:18.360
to see it on his scope, my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show
link |
00:28:23.400
like a big bump, like a mountain.
link |
00:28:25.640
And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show it.
link |
00:28:29.440
And I could see that that bump was moving towards me.
link |
00:28:32.320
And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over
link |
00:28:36.240
to the right hand side and I could do that, but it wasn't like a video game.
link |
00:28:41.460
It's literally like, if you think of the original Atari's.
link |
00:28:44.440
Yeah.
link |
00:28:45.440
But you build up, I imagine that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual
link |
00:28:51.960
3D environment based on that little Atari's solid display.
link |
00:28:56.600
You're exactly right.
link |
00:28:57.600
And you have to, you have to train.
link |
00:28:59.100
So there's been studies, as a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people probably argue
link |
00:29:03.160
with me, but it's true.
link |
00:29:04.280
There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST, the
link |
00:29:09.160
systems trainer, and it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and you just, you
link |
00:29:13.680
could fly these things and they had terrain that they would inject into the system.
link |
00:29:17.680
But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, who I'll
link |
00:29:24.720
name him, his name's Chris Sato, he works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad, I think
link |
00:29:32.760
computer engineering, he's scary smart.
link |
00:29:36.720
So Chris could really work, as a matter of fact, all the guys I flew with, so there's
link |
00:29:40.760
another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP, we did our first night traps
link |
00:29:44.320
together.
link |
00:29:45.320
The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things that you just, you're never going to
link |
00:29:48.440
forget, but Chris and I, when we started flying together, we were actually the most junior
link |
00:29:51.680
crew in the squadron.
link |
00:29:55.480
We'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the system,
link |
00:30:01.560
one because he was extremely brilliant and he had that inquisitive mind of, oh, we can
link |
00:30:05.720
do all these different things and there's all these degradation modes.
link |
00:30:10.080
But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get, because, and it's,
link |
00:30:15.280
you almost talk in partials.
link |
00:30:16.800
So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, I've got rising terrain,
link |
00:30:22.800
that's just what they say, showing rising terrain at 12 miles.
link |
00:30:25.640
And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, got it.
link |
00:30:28.680
This is going to go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads.
link |
00:30:32.280
So when you first get together, the interaction, it's almost like you have to rehearse it,
link |
00:30:38.400
you have to know, and you talk in full sentences.
link |
00:30:42.240
The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, I'm showing and he'd get like rising out
link |
00:30:50.880
and before he finished, I'd say, I've got it.
link |
00:30:53.320
So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him like, I mean,
link |
00:31:00.800
there can be no, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job because I'm literally
link |
00:31:05.200
looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain
link |
00:31:09.240
moving.
link |
00:31:10.240
Remember the mountain's here and then it's going to pop up here and then it's going to
link |
00:31:12.560
pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up.
link |
00:31:16.400
Remember it's an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can't see all the way
link |
00:31:20.680
to the left and he's got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn't show that.
link |
00:31:25.640
So he's telling me, start a left turn, start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that.
link |
00:31:30.740
So my truck.
link |
00:31:31.740
And this is all happening quick?
link |
00:31:32.960
Very quick.
link |
00:31:33.960
Well, you're doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed.
link |
00:31:38.960
How many miles an hour?
link |
00:31:39.960
Well, 420 is seven miles a minute.
link |
00:31:43.040
Okay.
link |
00:31:44.040
Or eight, between seven and eight miles a minute is what you're flying.
link |
00:31:46.560
That's fast.
link |
00:31:47.560
At night.
link |
00:31:48.560
I mean, I broke out of clouds.
link |
00:31:49.560
I mean, I remember him and I flying, we were on, it's the IR, it's called an IR route, an
link |
00:31:54.400
instrument route that's low, they're all around the country.
link |
00:31:57.320
There's the IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, you'd fly from
link |
00:32:01.160
the land, you go out over the ocean, turn around and then you could practice actually
link |
00:32:03.820
coming in on a coastline and we were flying and we ended up in the clouds.
link |
00:32:10.320
Keep in mind, we're between 500 and a thousand feet in the mountains and we're in the clouds.
link |
00:32:13.760
You can't see anything.
link |
00:32:14.760
And I had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they're called the anti collision
link |
00:32:17.960
lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you, just gets annoying.
link |
00:32:23.880
So I turned it off and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying.
link |
00:32:26.680
We break out of that coastal marine layer and poof, we break out and it's a decent night.
link |
00:32:32.200
And this is right by Mount St. Helens.
link |
00:32:33.640
This is kind of where we're coming in.
link |
00:32:34.640
So we're coming in from the east and we're just north of Mount St. Helens is where the
link |
00:32:37.240
route goes.
link |
00:32:38.440
And you look up, you know, cause you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's
link |
00:32:41.180
right next to you, but you're flying along.
link |
00:32:42.920
You're just like, you know, you got to trust and you can see houses, you can see the lights,
link |
00:32:46.680
they're above you.
link |
00:32:47.680
We're literally below people's houses flying down these valleys and stuff.
link |
00:32:50.080
So just incredible experience.
link |
00:32:51.780
So when you take that and then you move into an F18F.
link |
00:32:55.500
So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century and you're
link |
00:33:01.680
flying.
link |
00:33:02.680
So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we're not doing those night low levels, but
link |
00:33:05.520
that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what you're doing is you're
link |
00:33:11.720
sharing the load.
link |
00:33:13.080
So most of the communications that go out of the airplane, the WIZO does all the talk
link |
00:33:16.420
and he's got actually, he uses his feet.
link |
00:33:18.600
That's the weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F.
link |
00:33:21.920
So he's going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational
link |
00:33:26.840
awareness display and it's linked to all the other airplanes.
link |
00:33:29.640
Just out of curiosity, what's the situational awareness display?
link |
00:33:31.880
Because that term comes up a lot.
link |
00:33:34.400
Think of it as a God's eye view.
link |
00:33:35.920
So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block IIs has about an eight
link |
00:33:39.800
by 10 display for the WIZOs that they can look at.
link |
00:33:43.320
The pilot's is smaller.
link |
00:33:44.320
It's down between his, it's a six by six between his legs and they're getting ready to redesign
link |
00:33:48.520
that Boeing is.
link |
00:33:49.560
But when you looked, it'd be like if you put your airplane and you're looking down.
link |
00:33:53.640
So all the stuff, like if your radar seeing bad guys out in front of you, it'd be like
link |
00:33:57.000
looking down and going, oh, I'm right here.
link |
00:33:58.640
And now there's bad guys out here and my wingman is over here.
link |
00:34:01.600
And it shows everything.
link |
00:34:02.600
It's just like, it gives you, you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where
link |
00:34:06.760
everything's at.
link |
00:34:07.760
I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy, it shows you all this.
link |
00:34:10.760
It's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall
link |
00:34:18.660
picture of what's going on because it's happening so fast and this is where that autonomy piece,
link |
00:34:24.880
this is the third brain.
link |
00:34:26.460
So we're all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion.
link |
00:34:29.500
It's pulling stuff together going, oh, this is all this guy.
link |
00:34:31.600
This is this guy.
link |
00:34:32.600
This is this guy.
link |
00:34:33.600
It's sending it out through the link.
link |
00:34:34.600
So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network that we don't
link |
00:34:37.920
even see.
link |
00:34:38.920
It just says, that airplane says, hey, I'm over here.
link |
00:34:41.080
And it tells us and we go, oh, he's right there.
link |
00:34:43.500
And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I'm looking at this airplane, this bad guy.
link |
00:34:47.960
And it shows us, oh, he's over there and he's looking at this guy.
link |
00:34:50.440
I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot,
link |
00:34:57.160
but when you look down at stuff, it's, you know, you can sell the picture really quick.
link |
00:35:00.440
The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and
link |
00:35:07.160
gives you a big picture view.
link |
00:35:08.680
What about the control?
link |
00:35:09.680
Like, is there, and I apologize as if this is a dumb question, but you know, people use
link |
00:35:15.240
the high level term of autopilot.
link |
00:35:17.560
How much is there, let's use a loose term of AI.
link |
00:35:22.720
How much automation is there?
link |
00:35:24.160
How much AI is there in helping you control there?
link |
00:35:27.560
The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls.
link |
00:35:31.600
So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly.
link |
00:35:36.120
And when I say easy, it's relative because people go, I could do it because I did it
link |
00:35:38.800
on flight sim.
link |
00:35:40.600
Real life is a lot different.
link |
00:35:42.400
In flight sim, you have no apparent fear of death.
link |
00:35:44.240
You'll do things on a simulator that you would never do in real life.
link |
00:35:46.840
But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage, I mean, because you think about
link |
00:35:52.680
it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data.
link |
00:35:55.760
You've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data.
link |
00:35:58.120
All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got a joint helmet mounted cueing system
link |
00:36:01.640
on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head's
link |
00:36:05.640
at looking.
link |
00:36:07.000
So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right.
link |
00:36:09.800
The targeting flare will look to the right.
link |
00:36:11.320
And oh, by the way, the backseater has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he
link |
00:36:15.960
can do things.
link |
00:36:16.960
So depending on what sensor he's controlling, so if he's got control of the targeting pod
link |
00:36:21.600
and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left.
link |
00:36:25.000
But if I have something where I want to lock a guy up that I don't see, that maybe the
link |
00:36:28.160
radar didn't see, but I can get over and now point the radar, you know, get the, because
link |
00:36:31.600
it's a phased array radar now, it doesn't really scan.
link |
00:36:35.160
There's all kinds of cool stuff that that technology brings.
link |
00:36:40.520
Because if you just, if you went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey,
link |
00:36:44.400
we're gonna have this helmet and you're gonna be able to slew everything to your head.
link |
00:36:47.560
And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're just gonna map magnetic
link |
00:36:51.200
resonance and go, oh, look, and I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a
link |
00:36:57.520
button and transfer, you know, high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, you
link |
00:37:03.240
know, a JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS bombs that you see
link |
00:37:07.520
all the time, and then let that thing fly.
link |
00:37:10.040
And I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes, or, hey, I got it, we're gonna have
link |
00:37:15.480
to menstruate coordinates and, you know, you bring back the data and then they do all the
link |
00:37:18.940
targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it instead of all that.
link |
00:37:22.720
Now it's that fast.
link |
00:37:24.320
So there's a, okay, I mean, we probably don't have enough time to talk about the beautiful
link |
00:37:28.580
fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane.
link |
00:37:33.400
But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don't know what they're
link |
00:37:38.960
talking about, like me, which is, what is the difference between a human being and an
link |
00:37:46.000
AI system?
link |
00:37:47.320
Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane?
link |
00:37:54.000
Like how much does the human contribute?
link |
00:37:57.360
Is it possible to have automated flight, for example, like what is the hardest part about
link |
00:38:04.240
flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot in warfare situations in
link |
00:38:12.280
flying a fighter jet plane?
link |
00:38:15.360
So I would say AI systems are usually black and white.
link |
00:38:20.640
When you write the algorithm for an AI system, it's really, it's basically you're taking
link |
00:38:26.680
thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing, right?
link |
00:38:30.400
So you've got this logical math problem.
link |
00:38:32.840
Math problems are, there's a line that says I can or I can't.
link |
00:38:36.760
And it's a very finite line, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have
link |
00:38:42.860
gray areas where we go, eh, maybe, eh, I'll try it.
link |
00:38:48.360
So humans can operate within that gray.
link |
00:38:50.120
So if you took, if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while,
link |
00:38:53.680
a Super Hornet, it doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance
link |
00:38:57.840
model of the airplane.
link |
00:38:58.920
So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy, so it basically says the airplane
link |
00:39:04.360
can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs, force of
link |
00:39:08.680
gravity, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and then based on the airfoil design
link |
00:39:13.400
and everything else and how it can pull, here's how it's going to fly, because it's really
link |
00:39:18.040
physics based.
link |
00:39:19.160
Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane
link |
00:39:23.960
to leave controlled flight, right?
link |
00:39:25.920
You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope.
link |
00:39:29.720
Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally
link |
00:39:34.840
departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is,
link |
00:39:39.880
that's where the human goes, can I do this?
link |
00:39:42.600
I know it's outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that.
link |
00:39:46.400
So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes
link |
00:39:51.800
with digital flight controls, they're extremely forgiving.
link |
00:39:56.320
So you can literally, I've done things in Super Hornets that literally, even as a pilot
link |
00:40:02.320
inside the airplane, you're just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that.
link |
00:40:05.760
Like it'll flop ends, which defies most logic, and I guess in a way you could probably program
link |
00:40:11.880
it, but I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage,
link |
00:40:18.320
there are things that a human will do that AI won't.
link |
00:40:23.200
And I don't think we've got to the point, because how do you map illogical solutions?
link |
00:40:29.400
Most AI is logical.
link |
00:40:30.600
It's based on some type of premise when you write the algorithm to control it.
link |
00:40:36.120
There's bounds.
link |
00:40:37.120
Yeah, there's this giant mess, like you said, the difference between the simulator and real
link |
00:40:41.960
life also gets at that somehow.
link |
00:40:44.080
That there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play.
link |
00:40:51.720
Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sully landing that plane
link |
00:40:59.120
famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some?
link |
00:41:04.800
Well, it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6.
link |
00:41:08.040
So one is when you're flying with a crew, there's standardization.
link |
00:41:13.240
So you got to remember when Sully flew, when his first officer, that's the co pilot, showed
link |
00:41:17.120
up the first time they'd met, and this happens all the time in the commercial world.
link |
00:41:21.560
There's six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines, your chance of flying with the same guy all
link |
00:41:25.960
the time is slim and none.
link |
00:41:26.960
Where in the Navy, we were crewed.
link |
00:41:29.280
So I had a primary and a secondary whizzo that flew with me.
link |
00:41:33.960
For months?
link |
00:41:34.960
Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment.
link |
00:41:37.880
Because you want to get to know, trust and all of those things.
link |
00:41:42.000
It increases the capability of the airplane.
link |
00:41:43.880
It's not to say we can't swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex
link |
00:41:48.360
missions like a forward air controller, we're in the air actually controlling ground assets
link |
00:41:53.480
and supporting ground troops.
link |
00:41:57.040
If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you
link |
00:42:02.480
do that.
link |
00:42:03.480
You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you're going to be ineffective.
link |
00:42:07.000
So when you get to the commercial world, and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial,
link |
00:42:13.360
there is a standardization.
link |
00:42:15.120
Like we know that at this point, I'm going to put this switch, you're going to do that.
link |
00:42:18.440
And everyone, they know their roles.
link |
00:42:20.520
Captain's going to do this, first officer's going to do this.
link |
00:42:23.060
And they know that when the emergency breaks out, so in Sully's case, when they take the
link |
00:42:26.720
birds and they know they've got a problem, and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings
link |
00:42:30.600
of the two of them talking, you got to remember, they're talking to each other when you hear
link |
00:42:35.640
the full tapes, but they're also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York
link |
00:42:39.120
area.
link |
00:42:40.560
And it's like, we got a bird strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silence
link |
00:42:44.280
the alarm.
link |
00:42:45.280
They silence the alarm.
link |
00:42:46.280
The first officer is pulling out the book, he's going through the procedures while Sully's
link |
00:42:49.240
actually flying the airplane, knowing that they've lost their motors.
link |
00:42:52.000
And you got to think his decision process, like they're trying to get him to go into
link |
00:42:54.920
an airport in New Jersey, and he realizes, not happening, we're going to put this thing.
link |
00:42:59.120
And he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane
link |
00:43:03.120
that he was going to put this thing in the Hudson River.
link |
00:43:05.560
And he did it flawlessly.
link |
00:43:06.560
I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck.
link |
00:43:10.280
The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, and it got fished out of the Hudson.
link |
00:43:14.960
What is it about those human decisions you had to make?
link |
00:43:17.400
Is that something you put into words or is that just deep down some instinct that you
link |
00:43:22.560
develop as a pilot over time?
link |
00:43:25.000
When you train, and aviation is a self cleaning oven.
link |
00:43:28.660
So if you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have
link |
00:43:33.720
died by making bad decisions.
link |
00:43:36.720
So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial industry
link |
00:43:41.480
and the Navy and the Air Force, for all that, we have what's called, we have emergency procedures
link |
00:43:47.740
that we have to know.
link |
00:43:48.740
Like engines on fire, the first three steps, you just have to know what they are, right?
link |
00:43:52.660
So they know.
link |
00:43:53.660
The airline, same type, they go, hey, I know this is, they pull the book out because the
link |
00:43:57.840
airplanes are designed, they're built to have some time.
link |
00:44:00.880
But there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second guess it.
link |
00:44:03.760
So when he decided I'm putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn't all of a sudden
link |
00:44:07.440
halfway through it go, well, maybe I can get over to that airport.
link |
00:44:10.920
He looked, he made a quick assessment.
link |
00:44:12.840
This is that 80% solution where you go, these are not, it's like a multiple choice test
link |
00:44:18.280
when you go, oh my God, I don't really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong,
link |
00:44:22.320
gone.
link |
00:44:23.320
So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone.
link |
00:44:26.720
So what's my next option?
link |
00:44:28.160
Well, the Hudson River's there and that's probably looking pretty good.
link |
00:44:31.520
Or what is my other one?
link |
00:44:33.060
Can I get a restart on the motors?
link |
00:44:34.800
And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else?
link |
00:44:38.300
He had to make really, really fast decisions.
link |
00:44:40.960
And then once they, as they go, that 80% solution, you realize, all right, I'm going into the
link |
00:44:44.880
Hudson, there's the 80%, get the book out.
link |
00:44:47.080
Let's see if we can get an air start.
link |
00:44:48.080
Because if you listen to the tapes, they're trying to get it air started.
link |
00:44:50.340
The closer he gets to the water, the more he's going, I'm ditching the airplane.
link |
00:44:55.180
So the original decision to, this is my best option right now.
link |
00:44:59.600
This is where I'm going.
link |
00:45:01.240
And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events, which they tried
link |
00:45:05.700
to do.
link |
00:45:06.920
And then he gets to that last minute, he says, we're going in the water.
link |
00:45:09.560
They changed the plan.
link |
00:45:10.600
They secure the airplane.
link |
00:45:11.600
They do exactly what they're doing.
link |
00:45:12.600
And he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson.
link |
00:45:15.280
But you got to remember, it's every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research
link |
00:45:22.160
in the airplane in the simulator.
link |
00:45:23.960
Where they train to the airplane being broken.
link |
00:45:27.180
You just lost a motor.
link |
00:45:28.440
You just lost another motor.
link |
00:45:30.120
So they go through this extensive training and all these, we used to refer to it in the
link |
00:45:36.000
Navy as the pain cave where you're going to get in.
link |
00:45:37.640
Because you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator, that the airplane
link |
00:45:41.680
is going to break.
link |
00:45:42.680
You're going to lose hydro, and it's sometimes they're a problem like, oh, I just lost this
link |
00:45:46.300
hydraulic system, but I'm having an issue on the other motor.
link |
00:45:48.840
Well, if I shut down this motor and I've got a hydraulics, because there's two hydraulic
link |
00:45:52.640
systems, one on each motor.
link |
00:45:54.040
Well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system and my right motor is starting
link |
00:45:58.160
to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down because that's going
link |
00:46:01.920
to kill my hydraulic system that's good.
link |
00:46:04.300
And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics,
link |
00:46:07.560
the airplane won't fly.
link |
00:46:08.560
So it's a really, they're challenging problems that you have to think through in real time.
link |
00:46:12.640
And of course, the weather's never good.
link |
00:46:14.560
It's always dark.
link |
00:46:15.840
It's always crappy.
link |
00:46:16.840
You're going to break out.
link |
00:46:17.840
It's just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you and it's intended to increase the
link |
00:46:23.120
level of stress because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's
link |
00:46:28.800
going to STEM power, you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are
link |
00:46:33.000
literally on instinct like an animal.
link |
00:46:35.320
Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you're going
link |
00:46:39.120
to have when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down, you're running
link |
00:46:45.480
that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly what to do.
link |
00:46:50.560
And that's literally how it happens.
link |
00:46:52.120
So there's no, how do I put it?
link |
00:46:54.920
Fear of death.
link |
00:46:56.160
Like in Sully's case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his
link |
00:47:02.000
decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die?
link |
00:47:05.520
You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say there was so much going on at the cockpit
link |
00:47:09.340
in that time.
link |
00:47:11.000
His, his mindset was probably, I can do this, I'm trained, I'm going to do the procedures,
link |
00:47:17.440
I've practiced this before, I've done these things.
link |
00:47:19.880
And I, you know, I'm assuming that in his mindset, cause I never thought about when
link |
00:47:23.400
things were really bad.
link |
00:47:24.680
You know, if you're having problems with the airplane that, you know, that I was going
link |
00:47:27.160
to mort, you know, and, and plant it into the ground, it was always, you know, maybe
link |
00:47:31.000
it's an ego thing where you think I can do this.
link |
00:47:32.920
I mean,
link |
00:47:33.920
So you never, have you experienced fear during flight, like, I mean, one, one way we just
link |
00:47:43.960
offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, as he's walking up to the ring,
link |
00:47:52.080
he's like, he starts out basically in fear and, yeah, worried about how things are going
link |
00:47:59.800
to go.
link |
00:48:00.800
And it's purely to put in towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring
link |
00:48:04.440
is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think
link |
00:48:11.400
there's no way anybody could defeat me.
link |
00:48:15.800
So like, that's, that's his experience of overcoming fear.
link |
00:48:18.720
But do you, did you experience any kind of thing like that?
link |
00:48:23.000
Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and
link |
00:48:27.400
then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?
link |
00:48:30.880
I wouldn't say I was never afraid.
link |
00:48:32.840
I think that would be, I can't, I couldn't tell you that anyone I know that wasn't afraid
link |
00:48:36.880
at one time.
link |
00:48:37.880
And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just, it's, it's usually, especially
link |
00:48:43.400
when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the
link |
00:48:47.120
weather sucks and the deck's moving, you know, the, the ship's going up and down because
link |
00:48:51.560
it will scare the hell out of you.
link |
00:48:53.840
Can I say that?
link |
00:48:54.840
You can definitely say that, so it's about landing and take off that.
link |
00:48:58.480
That is, if you, even they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know,
link |
00:49:02.800
guys would go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going
link |
00:49:06.000
on and people were getting shot down a lot.
link |
00:49:09.440
The highest, the highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an
link |
00:49:12.960
aircraft carrier.
link |
00:49:13.960
How hard is it to land on that?
link |
00:49:15.360
It seems impossible.
link |
00:49:16.360
Like for, for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that.
link |
00:49:23.200
The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day.
link |
00:49:28.520
I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, woo, you know,
link |
00:49:32.800
this is not that bad, but you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with
link |
00:49:37.880
you're driving in your car and it's just a, it's, it's an overcast dark night and you're
link |
00:49:43.000
on a country road with no side lights.
link |
00:49:46.040
Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of, Oh my God.
link |
00:49:50.200
Because you, what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark,
link |
00:49:53.820
you know, and you can get outside of, you get outside of the city and get up into New
link |
00:49:56.120
Hampshire, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that
link |
00:50:01.080
good.
link |
00:50:02.080
It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth
link |
00:50:07.520
perception.
link |
00:50:09.960
What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving up and down and left to right.
link |
00:50:16.080
Yeah, oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move and we have two systems,
link |
00:50:22.040
you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually, it stabilizes with
link |
00:50:27.560
the inertials on the ship and then there's the ILS.
link |
00:50:30.880
Now civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth
link |
00:50:35.340
and glide slope.
link |
00:50:36.340
You know, you come down, it's like a plus.
link |
00:50:39.080
On the carrier, it's not, it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a
link |
00:50:42.000
non precision approach.
link |
00:50:43.640
It's not stabilized at all that, and I've been where you can actually watch the needle
link |
00:50:47.800
and the, and the tack and needle will move.
link |
00:50:49.720
There's all kinds of stuff moving cause the base that it's all sitting on is doing this
link |
00:50:53.920
and ships don't just go up and down.
link |
00:50:55.680
They, they, they do this.
link |
00:50:56.760
So the bow goes up and down in the tail, like you normally see a ship and then there's,
link |
00:51:00.480
so that's pitch and then it has roll.
link |
00:51:03.120
So it's doing this and then it has heave.
link |
00:51:04.680
So the whole boat is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling and you're gonna
link |
00:51:08.640
land on that.
link |
00:51:09.640
Um, so, and it's, I mean, I remember landing as I was with Chris, uh, Sato and, uh, Chris
link |
00:51:17.000
and I, we were off the USS ranger, which is now decommissioned.
link |
00:51:19.680
It's sitting, getting turned into razorblades, um, we're flying the old a six and we come
link |
00:51:24.400
in and it was off of San Diego and it was just ugly night cause San Diego always has
link |
00:51:27.920
a Marine layer that is about 1200 feet was lower than that, that night and it was pouring
link |
00:51:31.980
down rain.
link |
00:51:32.980
It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around.
link |
00:51:34.720
It was just craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego.
link |
00:51:37.840
And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking.
link |
00:51:42.120
I mean, you literally can't stop.
link |
00:51:44.400
And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack.
link |
00:51:48.000
So it's right in front of the Island.
link |
00:51:49.000
So if you see an aircraft carrier with the Island and the number of the ship on it, we're
link |
00:51:52.560
sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area.
link |
00:51:54.940
So it's like you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this EA six B
link |
00:52:00.600
comes in, you know, ugly pass.
link |
00:52:03.580
He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one.
link |
00:52:05.760
You never want to catch the first one, which means you were not really high above the back
link |
00:52:09.000
of the ship when you landed and it comes in and the exhaust on an EA six or an a six actually
link |
00:52:14.800
points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft.
link |
00:52:19.280
That's how hard it's raining.
link |
00:52:20.280
And you literally could not see across.
link |
00:52:21.640
I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white because
link |
00:52:25.400
of the water being blown off the deck.
link |
00:52:27.600
And I'm shaking and I, I, I'll never forget.
link |
00:52:29.920
I looked over at Chris and I said, Oh my God, I go, Hey dude, man, 10,000 foot runway looks
link |
00:52:33.800
really good right now.
link |
00:52:35.400
And I go, and I'm, I'm shaking my hands like this.
link |
00:52:37.240
And I said, I'm not even, this is, I'm not faking this too.
link |
00:52:40.040
I know that's literally, I cannot stop shaking.
link |
00:52:42.520
I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me, but you, but it scares you afterwards.
link |
00:52:49.480
You don't, during it, you're not, I'm not, you don't have time to think about that.
link |
00:52:52.280
You're doing it.
link |
00:52:53.280
You got to do is we, you know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what's that?
link |
00:52:58.080
The girls baseball movie where he goes, there's no crying in baseball.
link |
00:53:01.720
Well, that's our joke.
link |
00:53:03.160
There's no crying in Naval aviation.
link |
00:53:04.520
I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but you know, there's only
link |
00:53:08.240
one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it.
link |
00:53:10.320
So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it's,
link |
00:53:14.800
it's time to, it's time to, you know, man up and, and land that, land the jet.
link |
00:53:18.680
Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what's
link |
00:53:25.200
it like to fly an airplane?
link |
00:53:28.600
What it looks incredible to me as a human, like a descendant of ape.
link |
00:53:34.360
I sit here on land and look up at you guys.
link |
00:53:38.080
It seems incredible that human being can do that.
link |
00:53:41.200
You know what people ask, you know, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're
link |
00:53:43.520
like, how was it?
link |
00:53:44.520
I said, it's the greatest job on the planet.
link |
00:53:47.920
I said, you know, it's, it's an office with a view cause you're sitting in a glass.
link |
00:53:54.640
You can do you know, it's like roller coasters.
link |
00:53:58.160
You go, Oh, it does all these cool stuff.
link |
00:53:59.340
So we take people flying every once in a while and it's like, Oh yeah, I like rollercoaster.
link |
00:54:03.120
So I go, no, take any rollercoaster coolest rollercoaster you've ever been on and multiply
link |
00:54:07.320
it by a thousand.
link |
00:54:08.320
And I said, it's an experience you know, to put your body under, you know, you know, the
link |
00:54:14.560
jets rated at seven and a half, but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses depends
link |
00:54:18.480
on fuel weight.
link |
00:54:19.480
So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight G's to be able to do that to your body.
link |
00:54:25.960
I mean, it takes a toll.
link |
00:54:26.960
Like I can't really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that, but would I trade
link |
00:54:31.960
it?
link |
00:54:32.960
It's a dream and how many people get to do that?
link |
00:54:35.080
You know, professional, I want to be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which
link |
00:54:39.080
is a very small percentage with, well, I want to fly jets and to fly, you know, at the time
link |
00:54:45.360
when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had in our squad and we're brand new at like
link |
00:54:48.520
literally right out of the factory, I'd come off our first Super Hornet cruise.
link |
00:54:52.320
We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were building my new jets that
link |
00:54:55.720
I was going to get.
link |
00:54:56.720
And I actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it together.
link |
00:55:00.080
So I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet together that's going to get delivered
link |
00:55:02.980
to me in a couple of months that I'm going to fly.
link |
00:55:05.600
So just, I mean, I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away, I told
link |
00:55:17.700
myself I wouldn't, I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command,
link |
00:55:23.480
your flying really starts to tag to come down.
link |
00:55:26.840
You know, even if you, when you're an air wing commander, which is, we call them CAG,
link |
00:55:30.560
carrier group commander, you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should
link |
00:55:35.600
you be.
link |
00:55:36.600
I mean, there's young people that are coming up and it's training your relief because that's
link |
00:55:39.380
the next generation.
link |
00:55:40.380
So like currently I have friends of mine that we serve together.
link |
00:55:45.340
Their kids are flying Super Hornets, right?
link |
00:55:48.240
So to me, that's really neat because I watched them when they were little and now, you know,
link |
00:55:53.460
one of them who was good friends, I won't get his last name, but Joey, who lived down
link |
00:55:58.780
the street from us, was a Top Gun instructor and I'm like, hey, Joey's a Top Gun.
link |
00:56:04.480
You know?
link |
00:56:05.480
And I'm like, that's cool because, you know, I went there and I knew him, he would come
link |
00:56:08.220
down to my house.
link |
00:56:09.220
And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know,
link |
00:56:13.340
because the kids grow up in it.
link |
00:56:14.340
I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind.
link |
00:56:19.000
So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL because he had talked about doing
link |
00:56:23.660
that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player.
link |
00:56:29.320
But he's, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his
link |
00:56:34.580
third year.
link |
00:56:35.580
So.
link |
00:56:36.580
But there's a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this
link |
00:56:42.420
incredible experience of flying to the younger generation.
link |
00:56:46.180
So you don't, you told yourself you're not going to miss it.
link |
00:56:49.860
You miss it?
link |
00:56:50.860
There are days I do.
link |
00:56:52.020
When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memory
link |
00:56:57.580
so I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever.
link |
00:57:01.660
You know, Tom Brady can't play football, but there's going to come a time where he has
link |
00:57:05.560
to stop.
link |
00:57:06.560
He seems to have done it for a long time.
link |
00:57:08.500
But you know, typically when you look at it, you go, I had the opportunity.
link |
00:57:12.720
And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI that, you know, when will, when will
link |
00:57:18.460
the last man fighter be built?
link |
00:57:20.860
You know, and that's that big question, you know, we just did F 35.
link |
00:57:23.620
It's over budget.
link |
00:57:25.020
It's seven years late.
link |
00:57:26.820
There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it.
link |
00:57:29.180
And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the air force is working
link |
00:57:32.540
on with smaller, cheaper, uh, a trittable platforms that you can go, Oh, we can, because
link |
00:57:39.740
if you don't put a man in the box or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented
link |
00:57:44.820
women that do this too.
link |
00:57:47.220
So I'll just say that as person.
link |
00:57:48.460
Yeah.
link |
00:57:49.460
So we say man and he, we mean both men and women because offline you've told me about
link |
00:57:54.040
a lot of incredible women that flown.
link |
00:57:55.620
So I had, I had three, three female, actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore.
link |
00:58:01.660
She actually lives right around here.
link |
00:58:03.540
She, she's a, she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore.
link |
00:58:09.060
One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she's one of the most gifted people I've ever
link |
00:58:15.020
met in my life.
link |
00:58:16.020
She is the vice president of Amazon air.
link |
00:58:17.540
You can see her on TV, her name's Sarah, uh, incredible.
link |
00:58:21.140
And then I had a page who ended up taking command.
link |
00:58:24.860
She got out of fighters and went into other platforms.
link |
00:58:27.380
Um, and she was a commanding officer.
link |
00:58:29.380
And then the other one is a, um, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all
link |
00:58:36.100
four of the women that were direct.
link |
00:58:38.100
Uh, I'm hoping not forgetting, I don't think I'm forgetting someone, uh, incredibly, incredibly
link |
00:58:42.820
talented, uh, and a great addition to the ready room.
link |
00:58:45.780
So anyone that gets into the, Oh, you know, women can't do it.
link |
00:58:48.280
That's all total horse crap.
link |
00:58:49.420
Hey, you know, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done
link |
00:58:53.380
well by the military nor the Navy.
link |
00:58:56.020
So women can fly as good as the guys.
link |
00:58:58.540
Yeah.
link |
00:58:59.540
You can't tell if you pass another airplane, you can't tell if there's a man or woman in
link |
00:59:02.500
it.
link |
00:59:03.500
It comes down to, uh, stick and throttle the ability to, uh, uh, extrapolate where the
link |
00:59:10.820
vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be.
link |
00:59:12.860
If you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast.
link |
00:59:15.460
Anyone has those characteristics, uh, can do it.
link |
00:59:17.880
And then I think most important besides that there has to be a desire.
link |
00:59:22.140
And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, cause we used to track.
link |
00:59:24.780
So when I ran, we call it the rag, it's the replacement air group.
link |
00:59:27.980
It's where, so the, the super Hornet training squadron, there's two of them.
link |
00:59:31.580
There's one on the East coast at one Oh six.
link |
00:59:33.500
And there's one on the West coast, which is VFA one 22, one 22 is the first one.
link |
00:59:37.740
So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer.
link |
00:59:41.500
Okay.
link |
00:59:42.500
So we tracked the last hundred students.
link |
00:59:45.060
Right.
link |
00:59:46.060
So everyone goes, ah, it's funny to hear students talk cause Oh, he's awesome.
link |
00:59:51.000
If you took the hundred, there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally
link |
00:59:54.880
gifted aviators.
link |
00:59:56.220
They're well, well, well above average.
link |
00:59:58.040
It's like the person in a math class that sits down in complex math and they just get
link |
01:00:01.500
it.
link |
01:00:02.500
You know, at the bottom, there's the three at the bottom that are going to struggle and
link |
01:00:06.660
there's a good chance they won't get out.
link |
01:00:08.540
And if they do get out, they're going to have to work really hard to just maintain kind
link |
01:00:12.740
of average.
link |
01:00:14.120
Sometimes it's just the way your mind works.
link |
01:00:15.340
Not everyone is good at everything.
link |
01:00:17.180
If you took the 94 of them in the middle, they're within one mean deviation of, you
link |
01:00:22.820
know, it's there.
link |
01:00:23.820
They're all, you know, it's a, the bell curve doesn't look real good.
link |
01:00:27.060
It's just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone's right there within one mean
link |
01:00:30.620
deviation.
link |
01:00:32.300
And then you have the outliers, usually not on the high side because they're going to
link |
01:00:35.260
get through, but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through.
link |
01:00:39.140
So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job, as does the Air Force, of screening.
link |
01:00:43.060
So now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and you started.
link |
01:00:46.520
Now what you do is you actually go fly Piper Warriors low wing to see, are you adaptable
link |
01:00:51.860
to this?
link |
01:00:52.860
And there's an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you're
link |
01:00:57.160
good to go and then they put you into primary.
link |
01:00:59.220
It's kind of like a, it's like a precheck, you know, like the preset, the pre SAT to
link |
01:01:03.500
go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT?
link |
01:01:05.140
It's, it's, it's very similar to that, but it's more of a hand skill.
link |
01:01:09.100
Can you adapt?
link |
01:01:10.100
Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not, you know, we, this
link |
01:01:13.860
is, you know, this is all has depth with all that, uh, where it's really relative to aviation.
link |
01:01:19.040
We are two dimensional.
link |
01:01:20.860
Very two dimensional.
link |
01:01:21.860
Can you, can you explain that?
link |
01:01:23.380
So our perception is actually more limited than the, than that of an aviator.
link |
01:01:29.020
Very much.
link |
01:01:30.020
And here's why.
link |
01:01:31.020
Yeah.
link |
01:01:32.020
So we look at, uh, let's look at a tall building.
link |
01:01:33.380
Let's look at one world trade center in New York cause that's the, everyone knows what
link |
01:01:36.500
it looks like.
link |
01:01:37.500
Big tall building.
link |
01:01:38.500
Um, it's what, maybe 1800 feet tall.
link |
01:01:42.540
Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like what 20 some hundred feet tall.
link |
01:01:45.380
It's not that big.
link |
01:01:46.620
So a Super Hornet to do a, what a split S is, which is I'm flying, I'm just going to
link |
01:01:51.380
roll the airplane upside down and then I'm going to do basically a C the letter C I'm
link |
01:01:56.060
going to go in the top and out the bottom.
link |
01:01:58.180
So and I'm just against basically a vertical displacement of the airplane.
link |
01:02:01.240
So I'm going from high to low.
link |
01:02:03.780
It's very, very tight and it doesn't in about roughly about 2,500 feet, give or take a little.
link |
01:02:08.780
So you go, that is, that is a really tight vertical turn.
link |
01:02:12.540
Yeah.
link |
01:02:13.540
For example, the a six in order to do that was about 9,000 feet.
link |
01:02:17.180
And we look at a building that's 2000 feet high and think that is tall.
link |
01:02:20.500
Right.
link |
01:02:21.500
All right.
link |
01:02:22.500
So in, in aviation sense, when you're starting to do vertical displacement numbers going
link |
01:02:25.920
from 35,000 feet down to 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane,
link |
01:02:30.780
because the human brain thinks we really are.
link |
01:02:33.700
We like to be flat.
link |
01:02:34.700
I see what you mean.
link |
01:02:35.700
We think 2d.
link |
01:02:36.700
So if I'm fighting, how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane
link |
01:02:40.780
is to work in the vertical, because most people will do like one move in the vertical and
link |
01:02:45.380
then they want to start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable.
link |
01:02:47.940
Yeah.
link |
01:02:48.940
So they're profound.
link |
01:02:49.940
Do you still think in like stacks of 2d layers or no, or do you, do you truly start to think
link |
01:02:55.460
in that third dimension, like the rich 3d world of, uh, like of, of fighting that can,
link |
01:03:03.860
do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3d nature?
link |
01:03:09.220
You do because you have to project where you're going to be.
link |
01:03:11.200
So you have to know the performance of the airplane knowing that, Hey, if I do this maneuver
link |
01:03:14.780
that I am going to go, it's, it's kind of like when I, when I talk about when we were
link |
01:03:18.660
chasing the Tic Tac.
link |
01:03:20.100
So the Tic Tacs coming up and I'm at about, you know, and I've been doing this for at
link |
01:03:23.700
the time, 16 years.
link |
01:03:25.660
So I'm looking and I'm going, Hey, I'm here.
link |
01:03:27.880
He's there on the other side of the circle.
link |
01:03:29.380
I'm going to do a vertical displacement.
link |
01:03:30.820
I'm going to go like this.
link |
01:03:31.820
I'm going to cut across the circle and I'm not going to him.
link |
01:03:33.780
I'm going out in front of him.
link |
01:03:34.780
I'm going over here because I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that's
link |
01:03:37.900
where he's going to be.
link |
01:03:38.900
And I'm trying to, you know, basically join up on him.
link |
01:03:40.980
But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this?
link |
01:03:44.820
Because what I did before here and I do this, I'm going to end up over here and he's going
link |
01:03:47.540
to be above me.
link |
01:03:48.540
And then, you know, I have to get that energy back to get up to him.
link |
01:03:51.620
And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade.
link |
01:03:54.540
So you have, this is, this is really important when you're, when you're fighting airplanes
link |
01:03:59.120
and you're really max performing.
link |
01:04:01.240
So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he's literally playing with
link |
01:04:05.180
it.
link |
01:04:06.180
He's got a finite amount of energy, right?
link |
01:04:07.380
He can add some with the motors and stuff, but you're, what you're really doing is it's
link |
01:04:10.220
a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy, speed for altitude, which gives you
link |
01:04:15.160
potential energy.
link |
01:04:16.640
The other piece is, is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance.
link |
01:04:21.020
Because I know if I do a nice, easy turn, the airplane will make it at what doesn't
link |
01:04:24.320
bleed energy.
link |
01:04:25.620
But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S, that it's going to cost me energy.
link |
01:04:30.080
So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I'm going to come out at the
link |
01:04:34.040
bottom at probably 200 knots.
link |
01:04:35.540
Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to that, to kinetic and that
link |
01:04:41.340
kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance
link |
01:04:45.900
turn.
link |
01:04:46.900
So you've got to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's your overall energy package.
link |
01:04:51.500
So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you.
link |
01:04:55.360
But if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going to
link |
01:04:59.780
pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds.
link |
01:05:03.820
It's overall energy package and that's that you've got to be constantly evaluating where
link |
01:05:08.340
you're at.
link |
01:05:09.340
And this is that 80% solution.
link |
01:05:10.340
Can I afford to do this or not?
link |
01:05:11.340
Yes, no.
link |
01:05:12.340
And you have literally a split second to make the decision.
link |
01:05:13.340
That's the most incredible dance of human decision making.
link |
01:05:18.060
It's just incredible.
link |
01:05:19.060
I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me
link |
01:05:23.260
ask the one last ridiculous, subjective question.
link |
01:05:29.820
What's the greatest plane ever made in history?
link |
01:05:35.740
You don't get to like...
link |
01:05:36.740
From Pure Speed, I would say SR71, I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually
link |
01:05:40.540
developed in the fifties by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works.
link |
01:05:44.220
For what that was able to do, and then when you get into history of it, you know how they
link |
01:05:46.980
actually built...
link |
01:05:49.240
The CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring
link |
01:05:54.480
it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia.
link |
01:05:58.740
To me, that's an incredible...
link |
01:06:00.700
Engineering marvel.
link |
01:06:01.700
I think that like the X15, you know...
link |
01:06:03.700
By the way, the SR71 still holds the speed record of any plane as far as I can understand.
link |
01:06:13.260
Yeah.
link |
01:06:14.260
What's funny when you get into it is it's...
link |
01:06:15.660
Remember, fast is relative.
link |
01:06:18.260
When I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3000 miles an hour, a hundred feet above the
link |
01:06:24.260
ground, you're going 3000 miles an hour through, you know, that's how fast you're going.
link |
01:06:30.220
When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's, you know, your ground
link |
01:06:34.860
speed.
link |
01:06:35.860
So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane.
link |
01:06:38.900
Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots.
link |
01:06:44.820
But at 300 knots, you're really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground.
link |
01:06:48.820
So you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the
link |
01:06:53.780
maintenance check flights on them.
link |
01:06:55.500
So when you're doing 200, you know, in some odd knots, it's actually slow for the airplane.
link |
01:07:00.500
It's, you know, you're getting, you know, it's kind of like, it's not, you know, there's
link |
01:07:04.060
maneuvering speeds.
link |
01:07:05.100
You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability
link |
01:07:08.980
of the airfoil.
link |
01:07:09.980
If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G.
link |
01:07:13.540
Okay?
link |
01:07:15.620
So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast?
link |
01:07:19.940
When you look at an SR71 that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air's
link |
01:07:24.500
so thin, you know, just like the X15, you can get to a much higher speed, but the relative
link |
01:07:29.500
speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low.
link |
01:07:32.700
So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low.
link |
01:07:36.260
But because you're going fast to get enough air over your pedostatic system to show that
link |
01:07:40.140
you're going 300 knots, you're screaming.
link |
01:07:43.380
I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the, well, soon to be Vice Admiral White.
link |
01:07:49.000
So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78.
link |
01:07:53.940
I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78 and it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach
link |
01:07:57.740
too.
link |
01:07:58.740
And then...
link |
01:07:59.740
What's that feel like?
link |
01:08:00.740
Or is it just like...
link |
01:08:01.740
When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird because you realize
link |
01:08:04.740
in your brain, and I did, that there's no out.
link |
01:08:08.220
If something happens, I can't eject.
link |
01:08:10.500
The ejection would kill me.
link |
01:08:11.700
Isn't that kind of liberating in a way?
link |
01:08:13.740
Or no?
link |
01:08:14.740
Okay, maybe not.
link |
01:08:15.740
You always want to push the limit.
link |
01:08:17.660
You know, it's like how fast, I could have got it going faster.
link |
01:08:20.180
It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was fuel limited and
link |
01:08:24.260
space limited because I'm off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I'm going and I can
link |
01:08:29.740
see Pebble Beach out in the distance, the whole Monterey Peninsula.
link |
01:08:32.820
You're just going fast.
link |
01:08:34.220
And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute.
link |
01:08:36.780
I mean, you're screaming.
link |
01:08:38.340
Yeah.
link |
01:08:39.340
I mean, that's...
link |
01:08:40.340
And then you have to turn...
link |
01:08:41.340
Well, the airplane didn't have anything on it.
link |
01:08:42.460
It was a slicked off Super Hornet, so it was basically just the airplane.
link |
01:08:45.060
No pylons, no pods, no nothing.
link |
01:08:47.500
And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area.
link |
01:08:50.460
And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic.
link |
01:08:53.620
And there's a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop
link |
01:08:56.980
out when you're going that fast, they don't, because the Super Hornet really doesn't have
link |
01:08:59.860
speed brakes, it deforms the flight controls.
link |
01:09:03.700
They don't function.
link |
01:09:04.700
So you really, you're trying to maneuver and when you're going that fast, you can't turn
link |
01:09:08.540
because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn.
link |
01:09:14.420
So it's just, it's crazy.
link |
01:09:16.300
It's incredible that a human can do this and a human can engineer the system which allows
link |
01:09:21.980
another human to control that system.
link |
01:09:24.940
To me, I think it's a great experience.
link |
01:09:29.460
Was it sad to see the SR71 go?
link |
01:09:31.660
I think it was during your career.
link |
01:09:33.260
I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes?
link |
01:09:37.660
We would see it flying.
link |
01:09:38.660
When I was flying Hornets, because West Coast flies and it's called R2508, which covers
link |
01:09:44.060
the Navy China Lake area and Edwards.
link |
01:09:47.240
It's a huge area.
link |
01:09:48.240
It's actually, I think, we had a guy from Switzerland come out because they had Hornets
link |
01:09:51.680
and he's like, this is bigger than our whole country, because it's a pretty big area in
link |
01:09:55.020
California that you fly, but you would see the SR71s, they had a loop because NASA was
link |
01:09:59.580
flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington
link |
01:10:03.380
State and Montana and they'd do a loop.
link |
01:10:05.540
So you'd see them coming back down, they'd descend above 60,000, they'd get contrails,
link |
01:10:10.420
the white lines behind airplanes, they'd come down and hit the tanker and then they'd go
link |
01:10:13.580
back up.
link |
01:10:14.580
So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.
link |
01:10:18.380
But I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, because they're everywhere now,
link |
01:10:27.980
I mean, you've got commercial companies putting satellites up, how much of that need was really
link |
01:10:32.780
there?
link |
01:10:33.780
Because you've got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't
link |
01:10:35.460
flying around.
link |
01:10:37.380
It was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work.
link |
01:10:41.380
So at the time it was needed, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat
link |
01:10:45.740
of aviation for that time.
link |
01:10:47.220
I mean, literally we have yet to pass that and then you also ask, well, is there a need
link |
01:10:51.340
to pass that?
link |
01:10:52.340
I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space, so do we need to make an airplane that goes
link |
01:10:55.940
that fast?
link |
01:10:56.940
I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in,
link |
01:11:00.620
it does all kinds of crazy stuff.
link |
01:11:01.780
And all the work with automation, all that kind of stuff.
link |
01:11:05.380
So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in
link |
01:11:11.260
my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO
link |
01:11:19.460
literally an identified flying object.
link |
01:11:23.540
And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it?
link |
01:11:27.900
Like chase it, essentially?
link |
01:11:28.900
Chase it.
link |
01:11:29.900
Chase it.
link |
01:11:31.420
So let me just lay out, I think it's easier than you telling the story.
link |
01:11:36.060
Maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories, I understand it.
link |
01:11:41.260
And then maybe you can correct me.
link |
01:11:43.540
So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers.
link |
01:11:53.000
That's a cruiser.
link |
01:11:54.000
It's a cruiser.
link |
01:11:55.000
It's a cruiser.
link |
01:11:56.000
So you can't land on a.
link |
01:11:57.000
No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back.
link |
01:11:59.500
Gotcha.
link |
01:12:00.500
And it has weapons on it.
link |
01:12:01.500
Okay, gotcha.
link |
01:12:02.500
It shoots the missiles up.
link |
01:12:03.500
But it has a nice radar.
link |
01:12:04.500
It has an incredible spy one system phased array, four panels.
link |
01:12:08.460
So it looks in quadrants.
link |
01:12:09.940
Perfect.
link |
01:12:10.940
So they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around
link |
01:12:16.460
at 28,000 feet with speed of what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an
link |
01:12:22.780
hour.
link |
01:12:23.780
Don't know what that's in knots, but on the coast of California.
link |
01:12:28.180
And they kept detecting these objects for just about a week.
link |
01:12:32.140
Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th from the, I guess
link |
01:12:42.300
it's from the USS Nimitz.
link |
01:12:45.300
You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white Tic Tac shaped object with no wings flying
link |
01:12:54.020
in ways you've never thought possible.
link |
01:12:56.820
And in some interview somewhere, you said, I think it was not from this world.
link |
01:13:01.940
So there's a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation.
link |
01:13:07.660
There's videos involved.
link |
01:13:09.460
The video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver has also the visible lights.
link |
01:13:20.060
You can switch as a TV mode.
link |
01:13:23.060
So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode.
link |
01:13:27.100
And Chad Underwood recorded that video.
link |
01:13:30.300
And those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later.
link |
01:13:33.300
One of the three videos, the two other videos, go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something
link |
01:13:42.460
14 and 15 on the East coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects,
link |
01:13:50.840
but they're weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences
link |
01:13:57.840
that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness.
link |
01:14:03.980
But the differences is actually on the East coast of 2014 case, very few people have spoken
link |
01:14:12.180
about it.
link |
01:14:13.300
And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it.
link |
01:14:16.760
So there's a mystery to it, but it's in some sense, it's a quite simple story without much
link |
01:14:24.500
resolution to the mystery.
link |
01:14:26.780
And it's fascinating.
link |
01:14:29.060
And there's a lot of opinions.
link |
01:14:31.580
There's division of opinions because it's a mysterious, I mean, it's truly is a UFO
link |
01:14:37.300
in the sense that UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.
link |
01:14:45.420
So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I've gotten wrong, elaborate on some
link |
01:14:51.080
key things and describe that experience in general.
link |
01:14:54.140
So here's what I know.
link |
01:14:55.220
So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission and they
link |
01:15:03.540
sent us down.
link |
01:15:04.540
There's all kinds of rumors out here.
link |
01:15:05.540
There's all kinds of, after this has come out, so originally it was the four of us.
link |
01:15:09.740
There's two jets, two people in each jet, they're F18Fs, okay?
link |
01:15:15.320
There is no video from our event.
link |
01:15:17.380
It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing.
link |
01:15:19.740
And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad
link |
01:15:24.160
got the video of it.
link |
01:15:25.300
And we're like, that's it.
link |
01:15:26.580
That's exactly it.
link |
01:15:27.580
That's it.
link |
01:15:28.580
So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing?
link |
01:15:32.980
Yeah.
link |
01:15:33.980
So as we're flying out, we get vectored.
link |
01:15:35.780
They come up and tell us, hey, we're going to cancel training.
link |
01:15:37.380
This is a USS Princeton.
link |
01:15:38.580
So this is a Aegis Cruiser.
link |
01:15:40.360
So we're talking to one controller who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance
link |
01:15:47.580
we have on board.
link |
01:15:48.580
And I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance in training typically because bad stuff happens.
link |
01:15:52.300
Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a
link |
01:15:55.300
good airplane and it's not good.
link |
01:15:58.100
So we had what's called a Catam 9, which is really just a blue two with the AIM 9 seeker
link |
01:16:02.060
on the front of it, which is an IR missile.
link |
01:16:05.460
So there's only two ways to get it off.
link |
01:16:06.660
You can beat it off with a sledgehammer.
link |
01:16:07.900
You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the
link |
01:16:11.380
lugs back in that hold it on.
link |
01:16:13.180
When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and
link |
01:16:16.860
breaks that release and it comes off down the rail.
link |
01:16:19.340
That's how it works.
link |
01:16:21.300
So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking.
link |
01:16:24.020
So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left
link |
01:16:30.380
hand side of me.
link |
01:16:31.700
So she's kind of stepped up like this and I'll use your mic box to start.
link |
01:16:36.580
So as we're going out, they're calling ranges are called bra calls, bearing range and altitude.
link |
01:16:40.220
And they're telling us, hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles.
link |
01:16:44.980
So they're saying, hey, two, seven, zero, 30, 20,000, that's all they say.
link |
01:16:49.880
So we got our radars and we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG 73.
link |
01:16:55.320
Good piece of gear, APG 79, new one's way better.
link |
01:16:58.340
But anyway.
link |
01:16:59.340
And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it's useful, but they're telling
link |
01:17:04.060
you a location of a thing that you should look at.
link |
01:17:06.780
They're telling us they have a contact on their radar.
link |
01:17:08.580
They don't know what it is.
link |
01:17:09.580
They just have a blip.
link |
01:17:10.580
They have a little blip.
link |
01:17:11.580
Well, they've been watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at
link |
01:17:14.540
these things as we're driving.
link |
01:17:15.540
He says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks.
link |
01:17:17.300
That's we had been at sea for two weeks.
link |
01:17:18.900
This is the first time we've had planes airborne.
link |
01:17:21.380
We want you to go see what these are.
link |
01:17:22.700
Gotcha.
link |
01:17:23.700
So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out.
link |
01:17:26.980
That's exactly it.
link |
01:17:27.980
So we start driving out there and as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15
link |
01:17:34.020
miles, 10 miles.
link |
01:17:35.020
And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the
link |
01:17:38.620
resolution cell of the radar because radars don't see everything there.
link |
01:17:42.920
So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right?
link |
01:17:46.260
So and it's basically think of a little cube so they can, and the whole sky is made of
link |
01:17:50.140
all these little cubes and they're looking.
link |
01:17:52.440
So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube,
link |
01:17:56.320
then the radar can only see one thing.
link |
01:17:57.780
Does that make sense?
link |
01:17:58.780
Yep.
link |
01:17:59.780
Yep.
link |
01:18:00.780
So they call merge plot.
link |
01:18:01.780
Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around, something's around you,
link |
01:18:05.340
get your head out.
link |
01:18:06.340
So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizos, the wizos can look, but everyone
link |
01:18:09.700
it's heads out.
link |
01:18:10.700
When they say merge plot, you're done looking at your displays inside.
link |
01:18:13.740
You're doing this and you're trying to find it.
link |
01:18:15.940
So as we look out to the right and you look high and low, because he could be anywhere
link |
01:18:20.380
from the surface all the way up.
link |
01:18:21.820
Now keep in mind the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can't see the surface
link |
01:18:26.180
and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the thing is
link |
01:18:31.220
40 feet off the water, the panel, can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see
link |
01:18:35.780
around the curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time.
link |
01:18:40.340
So you go, is it, you know, where is it at?
link |
01:18:42.820
So as we're looking around, we see, now this is a, it's a clear day.
link |
01:18:47.660
There's no clouds and there's no whitecaps.
link |
01:18:51.420
It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day.
link |
01:18:54.460
If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind and you just want to kind
link |
01:18:57.940
of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have whitewater coming out.
link |
01:19:01.180
It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.
link |
01:19:03.020
How many miles out do you see?
link |
01:19:04.460
Like seven, like you see just, it's a clear day.
link |
01:19:07.380
It's 50, it's unrestricted visibility.
link |
01:19:08.900
You can see literally all the way to the horizon.
link |
01:19:10.540
It's just clear.
link |
01:19:11.720
It's nothing.
link |
01:19:12.720
And we're basically off the coast.
link |
01:19:13.820
If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in
link |
01:19:17.940
between that.
link |
01:19:18.940
And we're probably about, by the time this all hits, we're price, I don't know, 80, 100,
link |
01:19:25.900
I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast, but from 20,000 feet, you'd
link |
01:19:30.500
be amazed.
link |
01:19:31.500
You can do the calculation.
link |
01:19:32.500
You can see stuff, you know, you'll see land 50 miles away, you know, you can see, you
link |
01:19:35.700
know, and when you're looking at a continent, it's really easy to see you're not looking
link |
01:19:39.460
at an island.
link |
01:19:40.460
I mean, you're looking at Mexico.
link |
01:19:41.460
And you can see on the whitecaps in the water, if there is any.
link |
01:19:44.460
Oh yeah, they're easy.
link |
01:19:45.460
Yeah.
link |
01:19:46.460
For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or, so if it's a really whitecap
link |
01:19:50.860
windy day, then the ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it.
link |
01:19:53.660
It makes it actually easier.
link |
01:19:55.540
If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight because it has to make its own wind
link |
01:19:58.540
when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay.
link |
01:20:02.100
And it creates what's called, we call the burble, but when the air flows across the
link |
01:20:05.420
flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up.
link |
01:20:09.740
So when you're coming board to land, it's going to make you go up a little bit and then
link |
01:20:12.420
you're going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stay on glideslope.
link |
01:20:15.740
So we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind.
link |
01:20:21.840
So there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no whitecaps, and we look down and we see
link |
01:20:26.540
whitewater.
link |
01:20:28.420
So if you put a piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like, you know, even 20
link |
01:20:33.420
feet below the surface, it's big enough.
link |
01:20:35.220
As the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length.
link |
01:20:38.900
When they come in, that's what happens on the shore, when a wave comes in, it hits and
link |
01:20:42.140
then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go anymore
link |
01:20:45.980
and then it breaks over the top and that's where you get the weight.
link |
01:20:49.520
So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount, you'll see stuff come in, the wave
link |
01:20:53.220
will crash and you'll get whitewater.
link |
01:20:55.180
You can go out when it's high tide in any one of the coasts, you can go out here off
link |
01:20:59.800
of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks and at high tide, I can't
link |
01:21:03.420
see the rocks are covered, but there'll be whitewater around those rocks.
link |
01:21:05.660
You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface.
link |
01:21:07.500
Does that make sense?
link |
01:21:08.500
Yeah.
link |
01:21:09.500
So that's what it was.
link |
01:21:10.500
We don't see an object because there's all kinds of, oh, they saw another craft below
link |
01:21:14.500
the wave.
link |
01:21:15.500
We didn't see anything below the water.
link |
01:21:16.740
We just saw whitewater.
link |
01:21:18.180
But the whitewater, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross.
link |
01:21:21.100
I say it's about the size of a 737.
link |
01:21:23.020
So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water so the wave
link |
01:21:27.860
is breaking over the top and you're going to get whitewater where the plane is at, you'd
link |
01:21:30.820
see this kind of shape.
link |
01:21:32.520
So it looks like a cross.
link |
01:21:34.940
So as we're looking down off the right side, the backseater in the other airplane, Jim,
link |
01:21:39.420
says this is that talking in partials again.
link |
01:21:41.500
He says, hey, Skipper, do you?
link |
01:21:43.180
And that's about what he gets out of his mouth.
link |
01:21:44.700
And I go, what the hell is that?
link |
01:21:47.100
In a nice way.
link |
01:21:48.100
Do you see that essentially is what he's saying?
link |
01:21:49.100
So we see the whitewater and that's what draws our eyes down there.
link |
01:21:51.700
Otherwise we'd have never seen it.
link |
01:21:53.140
So we see this whitewater.
link |
01:21:54.140
I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that.
link |
01:21:56.460
And then we see this little white tic tac because we're about 20,000 feet above it and
link |
01:22:01.020
it's doing, it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, and it's abrupt.
link |
01:22:05.740
It's very abrupt.
link |
01:22:06.740
So it's not like a helicopter, if a helicopter is going sideways and it goes once, it's going
link |
01:22:11.740
sideways left and it goes right, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed, it slows
link |
01:22:15.220
down because there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way.
link |
01:22:18.760
This thing's not, it's like left, right, left, right with no.
link |
01:22:22.100
So moving in ways that doesn't feel intuitive to you of the things you've seen in the past.
link |
01:22:28.100
So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right?
link |
01:22:31.980
So you go, oh, what is, cause when we see it's moving, we're like, oh, helicopter.
link |
01:22:36.800
So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that,
link |
01:22:39.780
because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash.
link |
01:22:43.820
You see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water, it kicks, the water comes up
link |
01:22:47.020
the sides cause the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that.
link |
01:22:50.380
It pushes the air down and then it has to come up the sides.
link |
01:22:53.380
So you see it and you go, well, there's no, there's no rotor wash.
link |
01:22:56.700
What is that thing?
link |
01:22:58.420
So by this time we're driving around.
link |
01:22:59.820
So as we're, if we were at the six oclock, we're driving around towards that nine oclock
link |
01:23:02.700
position and we're just watching this thing.
link |
01:23:04.340
And it's just, it's still pointing north, south, and it's going left, right, and it's
link |
01:23:07.460
kind of moving around the object.
link |
01:23:09.460
And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.
link |
01:23:13.360
So if you've got the east, west, and then the north, south kind of across, it's hanging
link |
01:23:17.260
out on the southern thing that's hanging out.
link |
01:23:18.820
It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's crossing over it and it's going
link |
01:23:21.380
up.
link |
01:23:22.380
It's just kind of, so now we're like, what the hell is that?
link |
01:23:25.420
So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out.
link |
01:23:28.900
And the other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here.
link |
01:23:31.260
And I said, yeah, stay up high.
link |
01:23:32.860
Because now we get, we get a different perspective.
link |
01:23:35.360
So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending.
link |
01:23:38.880
She can watch, because right now all I'm watching is the Tic Tac.
link |
01:23:43.060
She can watch me and the Tic Tac.
link |
01:23:44.660
So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important.
link |
01:23:47.740
You know, you can hear people say it's high cover, whatever.
link |
01:23:50.540
She's watching me, which is, it's perfect as the story goes on, because it gives us
link |
01:23:55.620
two perspectives, you know, of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that
link |
01:24:00.300
thing disappears.
link |
01:24:01.300
And they don't, you know, because if it's just like, oh, I lost it and they go, no,
link |
01:24:04.340
it's over to the right.
link |
01:24:05.340
We can still see it.
link |
01:24:06.340
We all lost it at the same time.
link |
01:24:07.860
So as we come down, we get to about 12 oclock and I'm descending and it's an easy descent.
link |
01:24:11.060
I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering
link |
01:24:15.500
because I have, I have everything available to me at that speed.
link |
01:24:19.740
So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 oclock, as the Tic Tac's doing this, it literally,
link |
01:24:23.620
it's like, it's aware of us and it just goes bloop and it kind of points out towards the
link |
01:24:27.900
West and starts coming up.
link |
01:24:29.680
So now it's obviously knows that we're there.
link |
01:24:31.700
Whatever this thing is, it knows that we're there.
link |
01:24:33.940
So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down.
link |
01:24:36.260
We're just, I'm just watching it.
link |
01:24:37.260
Now, you gotta remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes.
link |
01:24:39.760
This is not like we saw it and it was gone or, oh, I saw lights in the sky and they were
link |
01:24:43.460
gone.
link |
01:24:44.460
We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers, watch this thing
link |
01:24:50.100
fly around.
link |
01:24:51.100
So we're like, okay.
link |
01:24:52.140
So I get over to the eight oclock position and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet
link |
01:24:55.600
above it and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15 K I think it is.
link |
01:24:59.060
I think that's my story is about 15.
link |
01:25:00.460
It's just estimating.
link |
01:25:01.460
So you can see it's just a really easy descent because.
link |
01:25:05.180
So what's 15 K?
link |
01:25:06.180
15,000 feet.
link |
01:25:07.180
I thought it was 8,000.
link |
01:25:08.180
No, the other plane ends up about that.
link |
01:25:12.700
So they're still at about 20,000 feet.
link |
01:25:14.500
So they're driving around and I'm descending.
link |
01:25:16.780
They're staying up there.
link |
01:25:17.780
So I'm kind of doing this as they drive around.
link |
01:25:20.460
Okay.
link |
01:25:21.460
So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two oclock position.
link |
01:25:23.700
We're about the eight oclock position and I'm like, oh, I've got, I've got enough altitudes.
link |
01:25:27.140
I'm going to, I'm going to cut across the circle.
link |
01:25:28.700
I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to, I'm going to do this.
link |
01:25:31.700
He's like, go for it.
link |
01:25:32.700
Skip.
link |
01:25:33.700
Cause I was a skipper.
link |
01:25:34.740
So I cut across the bottom.
link |
01:25:37.240
So I'm kind of almost coming out coaltitude as this thing's coming up, I'm going to meet
link |
01:25:40.780
it.
link |
01:25:41.780
And I'm driving and I get to probably it's, I'm probably about a half mile away, which
link |
01:25:46.260
you think, well, a half mile is pretty far.
link |
01:25:47.700
Half mile in aviation isn't, it's nothing.
link |
01:25:50.020
It's I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane.
link |
01:25:52.580
You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile.
link |
01:25:54.500
You can see pretty good detail.
link |
01:25:56.320
So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose.
link |
01:25:58.600
So now I'm basically pointing back towards east.
link |
01:26:00.300
So I'm cutting across cause I'm going to the three oclock position.
link |
01:26:02.980
It's at two oclock and I'm going to meet it at three oclock.
link |
01:26:05.760
So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears.
link |
01:26:08.880
So this happens at around, estimating about 12,000 feet.
link |
01:26:11.900
So they're at 20.
link |
01:26:12.900
So they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude above us when this happens.
link |
01:26:16.220
And it just, as it crosses our nose, it just, it accelerates and literally in less than,
link |
01:26:21.060
you know, probably less than a half second, it just goes and it's gone.
link |
01:26:24.560
And so we're like, and I had the first thing is, dude, did you guys see it?
link |
01:26:28.700
The other airplane's like, it's gone.
link |
01:26:30.740
We don't, we have no idea where it's at.
link |
01:26:32.740
So we kind of spin around real quick.
link |
01:26:34.020
I go, well, let's see what's down here.
link |
01:26:35.460
And I turn around and we're looking for the whitewater and we can't even, the whitewater's
link |
01:26:38.620
gone.
link |
01:26:39.620
There's nothing.
link |
01:26:40.620
It's literally all blue.
link |
01:26:41.620
So now you go.
link |
01:26:42.620
And I remember telling the guy in my backseat, like a dude, I'm, I don't know about you,
link |
01:26:46.860
but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had at the time like 30
link |
01:26:51.740
some hundred hours of flying.
link |
01:26:52.740
I'd been doing it for 18 years.
link |
01:26:53.740
It's nothing like anything you've seen.
link |
01:26:55.740
No, no.
link |
01:26:56.740
So as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on
link |
01:27:00.900
my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to overseas.
link |
01:27:06.340
So we got to get our training done.
link |
01:27:07.440
So that's my mindset, especially as a CEO, cause I got to get, I got to get training
link |
01:27:10.700
out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that.
link |
01:27:13.100
So, Hey, let's go back.
link |
01:27:14.540
And the, the, the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine squadron.
link |
01:27:19.100
And so Cheeks is at the, he's listening to all this happen, you know, cause he's just
link |
01:27:22.580
like, cause he, they, when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little
link |
01:27:25.780
Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F18Cs don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets.
link |
01:27:30.960
So he had launched first and they were going to do him.
link |
01:27:33.260
And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cap point
link |
01:27:36.140
down South, and we're going to send, we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets.
link |
01:27:42.100
What's a cap point by the way?
link |
01:27:43.460
That's where we hold.
link |
01:27:44.460
So it's called a combat air patrol point.
link |
01:27:46.700
So we're just going to hold at one end.
link |
01:27:48.180
He's going to hold at the other end.
link |
01:27:49.900
It's kind of like, Hey, you guys are going to get, it's, it's, if it's a football field,
link |
01:27:53.500
we're going to sit on one goal line.
link |
01:27:54.720
He's going to sit on the other goal line.
link |
01:27:55.900
And when they say go, we're going to run at each other and then try and do something in
link |
01:27:58.660
the middle of the field and then go back to our set reset points.
link |
01:28:01.020
Okay.
link |
01:28:02.020
So you're talking to him.
link |
01:28:03.020
He's, he's, he's listening to the, he's just listening.
link |
01:28:05.520
We don't talk to him at all.
link |
01:28:06.520
He's just listening.
link |
01:28:07.520
He just dials up.
link |
01:28:08.520
Cause they know that we all know the frequencies.
link |
01:28:09.520
So he's listening to what's going on because he's like, cause they canceled training.
link |
01:28:12.860
So what else is he going to do?
link |
01:28:13.860
He's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting for him and his wingman.
link |
01:28:16.700
So they just, they're listening to all this go on.
link |
01:28:18.820
And then at this point you move on.
link |
01:28:20.340
Yeah.
link |
01:28:21.340
We come back up to train.
link |
01:28:22.340
We go back as we're flying back the controller.
link |
01:28:24.220
Cause we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, the, the, uh, the, uh, they're called OSs
link |
01:28:28.780
or operations specialists.
link |
01:28:29.780
They're the ones that run the radars and we're talking to him and he's like, Hey, sir, you're
link |
01:28:34.220
not going to believe this.
link |
01:28:35.220
He's like, that thing is at your cap.
link |
01:28:37.060
It showed back up.
link |
01:28:38.060
It just popped up.
link |
01:28:39.060
You know what I mean?
link |
01:28:40.060
This is like 60 miles away.
link |
01:28:41.060
It just reappears.
link |
01:28:42.060
We're like, Oh, okay.
link |
01:28:43.060
So we got the radars out.
link |
01:28:44.060
We're looking for it.
link |
01:28:45.060
Uh, we get out there.
link |
01:28:46.060
We never see it.
link |
01:28:47.060
We never see it again.
link |
01:28:48.060
Uh, we do what we need to do.
link |
01:28:49.240
We come back to the ship.
link |
01:28:50.240
Of course, now we're like, Oh, this is going to be, we're going to, you know, I told him,
link |
01:28:53.020
I told him, I go, dude, you know, we're going to catch, we're going to catch shit for this.
link |
01:28:56.060
When we get back to the ship, word's going to get out and we're just going to catch maximum
link |
01:28:59.500
shit.
link |
01:29:00.500
And we did.
link |
01:29:01.500
We were joking, you know, so the ship plays movies, we have movies on the boat and they
link |
01:29:05.500
do 12 hours of movies.
link |
01:29:06.660
So they repeat cause there's a day check and a night check.
link |
01:29:08.540
So the same movies in the morning and night play.
link |
01:29:10.560
So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy
link |
01:29:14.860
cause I'll watch stuff on TV that way too.
link |
01:29:16.580
I'll be like, Oh, Hey, I've seen this and it, I'll jump into a movie in the middle and
link |
01:29:19.660
then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put it all together, uh,
link |
01:29:23.660
because that's how we have to do it.
link |
01:29:24.660
Cause we're so busy.
link |
01:29:25.660
Well, the movies became, and I, it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day.
link |
01:29:34.020
Definitely going to catch some shit, but let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions.
link |
01:29:40.460
So just take him, cause it's whatever, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened,
link |
01:29:45.860
it's, you know, one of the most fascinating things, um, events in recent history.
link |
01:29:55.260
So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about it, different kinds of angles.
link |
01:30:00.180
There's no good answers, but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here.
link |
01:30:03.660
Uh, so first of all, you mentioned, see, you saw at some point X, Y, and then, uh, somebody
link |
01:30:10.540
in the Princeton said, you're not going to believe this, sir.
link |
01:30:13.780
It's at your cap point that that's a different place.
link |
01:30:16.320
How the heck did it know what your cap point is?
link |
01:30:18.340
That's a good question.
link |
01:30:19.340
And that's the one of you to no one, you know, you don't, we don't tell it, we don't broadcast
link |
01:30:23.980
it, we have a waypoint in the system, but I don't know.
link |
01:30:27.300
Maybe it knew where we were going.
link |
01:30:28.300
Cause we use the same one day after day after day, but it, it obviously knew, but you never
link |
01:30:33.140
saw it there.
link |
01:30:34.380
Never saw it there.
link |
01:30:35.380
Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, Hey, look, we just,
link |
01:30:39.480
we just chased this thing.
link |
01:30:40.480
They're like, what?
link |
01:30:41.480
I got to chase it.
link |
01:30:42.480
And they're like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video.
link |
01:30:46.740
And he goes, and so, and that's how he is.
link |
01:30:48.500
He's like, I'm going to go.
link |
01:30:49.500
And he, he was, he, he was determined that he was going to find this thing.
link |
01:30:52.420
So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn't out, that they don't
link |
01:30:56.940
see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape.
link |
01:30:59.740
That's the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver.
link |
01:31:02.580
I'll probably overlay the video for people to see.
link |
01:31:05.980
When he goes out, it's you know, what he's looking at on his displays is he has basically
link |
01:31:10.580
two radar displays up.
link |
01:31:12.460
He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left
link |
01:31:16.620
one.
link |
01:31:17.620
So this is called the Azel display.
link |
01:31:18.620
And this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of
link |
01:31:22.780
it.
link |
01:31:23.780
You're at the bottom of the square.
link |
01:31:24.780
It's really taken this.
link |
01:31:25.900
It's taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares
link |
01:31:30.100
it out.
link |
01:31:31.100
So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this.
link |
01:31:34.740
They square it off.
link |
01:31:35.740
So, so he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it because when
link |
01:31:39.560
he's not trying to lock it.
link |
01:31:40.700
So the radar is just throwing energy out and getting it, you know, it's a Doppler radar.
link |
01:31:44.560
So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing.
link |
01:31:46.100
It's going, oh, I can see you.
link |
01:31:47.460
And it's looking for return.
link |
01:31:48.740
So he gets a return.
link |
01:31:49.820
So he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square, unless it
link |
01:31:52.780
builds a track file on it, but a little green square is just sitting there.
link |
01:31:55.860
It's not moving because it's, it's sitting in one spot in space.
link |
01:32:00.140
He locks it up when he goes to lock it up.
link |
01:32:01.940
Now he's putting a bunch of energy on it, but he's telling the radar, stare down that
link |
01:32:05.320
line of sight and whatever's there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it,
link |
01:32:08.900
which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is and the direction that it's going.
link |
01:32:13.820
Okay.
link |
01:32:14.820
So the radar is smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with,
link |
01:32:18.580
it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.
link |
01:32:21.780
So that's all it is, is you send a signal out, something, it manipulates the signal
link |
01:32:25.460
either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back and the radar was smart
link |
01:32:29.360
enough to go, that is not a return that I'm expecting.
link |
01:32:33.060
Something's messing with me.
link |
01:32:34.060
I'm being jammed.
link |
01:32:35.060
And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does
link |
01:32:38.280
some stuff.
link |
01:32:39.280
So you can mean, well, it does, it goes full into, it's being jammed at about every mode
link |
01:32:43.460
you can possibly see because everything comes up and this aspect gets along, it's all kinds
link |
01:32:47.500
of, I don't want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed.
link |
01:32:50.800
So and it's what it does.
link |
01:32:51.800
As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right?
link |
01:32:54.420
Active jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it's technically an act of
link |
01:32:57.980
war.
link |
01:32:58.980
It feels like you should be freaking out at this point, I mean.
link |
01:33:01.020
So well, he does it and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle, they
link |
01:33:05.860
have their side stick controllers so they can control all the sensors and they can just
link |
01:33:09.620
toggle around and do stuff.
link |
01:33:10.880
So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that azimuth
link |
01:33:15.660
elevation on the radar to the targeting pod.
link |
01:33:17.780
Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes,
link |
01:33:22.460
oh, what's over there?
link |
01:33:23.460
And it'll stare because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked
link |
01:33:25.860
together.
link |
01:33:27.060
You can decouple them, but they're going to automatically couple up.
link |
01:33:30.140
So when he castles over, it's a switch, it looks like a castle switch, what's a castle?
link |
01:33:34.200
So when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says, instead
link |
01:33:38.180
of looking at the radar, I want to look at the targeting pod, he sees it on the targeting
link |
01:33:41.500
pod because the targeting pod's already looking there.
link |
01:33:44.020
And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out, he's
link |
01:33:47.540
just receiving IR energy from the tic tac and then the system itself will track the
link |
01:33:52.980
pixels and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in.
link |
01:33:56.180
So it says, oh, and that's where those little bars you see in the video where the bars come
link |
01:33:58.780
up left and right.
link |
01:33:59.780
There's doing some vision based tracking.
link |
01:34:02.120
That's exactly what it is.
link |
01:34:03.860
So and then he goes through.
link |
01:34:06.300
Changes zooms, changes the mode.
link |
01:34:08.580
He goes through all the modes, so there's a narrow, medium and wide.
link |
01:34:11.460
So wide is far away, medium and then narrow.
link |
01:34:14.420
And then there's the TV mode and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode.
link |
01:34:18.500
The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode.
link |
01:34:25.860
So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode.
link |
01:34:28.300
It's got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode.
link |
01:34:32.180
So he goes through all those things and that's when you see it going from a black background
link |
01:34:35.020
to a white background.
link |
01:34:36.020
So you can figure out what the heck is this?
link |
01:34:37.260
Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes
link |
01:34:40.740
instead of just staring at it going, what is that thing?
link |
01:34:45.300
So the video has been out, it actually was on YouTube for years before the government
link |
01:34:50.140
released it.
link |
01:34:51.140
It was leaked in 2007?
link |
01:34:54.460
No, the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email and I had retired.
link |
01:35:00.560
So this is about, nope, because I was working down in San Diego.
link |
01:35:05.020
So this is about 2008, early 2009, he sends me a link to strangeland.com, which is not
link |
01:35:15.300
suitable for work.
link |
01:35:16.300
Oh yeah, it's top notch.
link |
01:35:18.260
And he says, I can remember the email, hey Skip, does this look familiar?
link |
01:35:24.300
And I look at it, I'm like, how the hell did that get on strangeland.com?
link |
01:35:29.940
So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube
link |
01:35:35.300
link to someone.
link |
01:35:36.620
You don't send strangeland.com to someone because you don't know what you're going to
link |
01:35:40.620
get.
link |
01:35:41.620
It's like Googling kittens.
link |
01:35:42.620
So it ends up there somehow.
link |
01:35:47.140
So it gets on YouTube, which was cool because I would go out with my friends and we'd be
link |
01:35:50.940
drinking and they go, dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying?
link |
01:35:53.780
It's kind of like you were asking what it's like.
link |
01:35:55.420
And I go, oh dude, I chased a UFO and they're like, get out.
link |
01:35:58.140
And I'm like, no, serious.
link |
01:35:59.140
This is literally how it happened.
link |
01:36:01.100
So I was sitting with my friend Matt.
link |
01:36:03.040
So Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first
link |
01:36:07.420
night trap.
link |
01:36:08.800
And we were friends to this day.
link |
01:36:11.060
Because when you do stuff like people like that, I had to have faith in him, he had to
link |
01:36:15.660
have faith in me, they become like your brother.
link |
01:36:20.980
And these are guys that literally, I don't talk to them on a regular basis, like Chris
link |
01:36:24.860
who works at Apple.
link |
01:36:26.600
If Chris called me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help.
link |
01:36:29.580
I need this.
link |
01:36:30.580
I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out and let's do it.
link |
01:36:32.540
Because it's, they're like family, you do it.
link |
01:36:34.660
And most Navy guys, we don't send letters to each other weekly.
link |
01:36:38.940
You know, I have friends that I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door,
link |
01:36:43.180
you know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes
link |
01:36:47.220
to catch up.
link |
01:36:48.220
And then it's like old times and it's amazing how fast it's happened.
link |
01:36:51.820
So I'm out to dinner with Matt and I'm telling him this story and he's like, get out of here.
link |
01:36:57.780
So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco, Paco has fightersweep.com, it's a blog site.
link |
01:37:05.480
So Paco's obsessed, like he is way into UFOs.
link |
01:37:09.700
So Paco calls me up, he says, dude, I was talking to Matty.
link |
01:37:12.700
That's what we call him.
link |
01:37:13.700
He goes, I was talking to Matty.
link |
01:37:14.700
He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story.
link |
01:37:18.460
So I'm like, all right.
link |
01:37:19.460
I'm going to spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and I'm like, I got to
link |
01:37:24.020
get a voicemail.
link |
01:37:25.020
Hey, give me a call.
link |
01:37:26.020
So I call him up and he answers the phone, but I could hear people in the background
link |
01:37:29.540
and I go, hey dude, what's going on?
link |
01:37:30.540
He goes, hang on, hang on.
link |
01:37:31.540
I got to put you on speakerphone.
link |
01:37:32.540
I go, what are you putting me on speakerphone?
link |
01:37:33.540
He goes, you got to tell the story.
link |
01:37:34.540
I'm having a dinner party.
link |
01:37:36.420
You got to tell the story.
link |
01:37:37.420
So he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table
link |
01:37:40.100
as I tell a Tic Tac story.
link |
01:37:42.440
So he calls me up again.
link |
01:37:43.440
He says, hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff.
link |
01:37:48.260
Like he wrote about that we call them the shit hot break.
link |
01:37:50.500
That's a guy that when you're laying on a carrier, comes in, turns and gets ready to
link |
01:37:53.940
land really fast.
link |
01:37:54.940
Like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and one of the guys, when we were junior
link |
01:37:59.840
officers on the USS Ranger, one of the department heads in the other squadron is a guy, Nasty.
link |
01:38:04.220
And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break.
link |
01:38:08.780
So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there's another guy,
link |
01:38:13.700
Mav, was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing.
link |
01:38:20.380
It's a good article on how this was and how it kind of forms you in Naval Aviation, kind
link |
01:38:24.980
of being part of the club.
link |
01:38:26.420
So he's like, I got to write about this thing.
link |
01:38:28.180
I'm like, what do you guys, I got to write about it.
link |
01:38:29.980
I go, all right.
link |
01:38:30.980
Because at first I would say no.
link |
01:38:31.980
I'm like, dude, I don't want this out there.
link |
01:38:32.980
Just.
link |
01:38:33.980
So you haven't really before then talked about it much.
link |
01:38:36.500
My wife didn't even really know the whole story.
link |
01:38:38.860
Why?
link |
01:38:39.860
Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some.
link |
01:38:42.700
You know, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two
link |
01:38:47.300
days.
link |
01:38:48.300
They played the goofy movies.
link |
01:38:49.300
There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put.
link |
01:38:52.260
It was like first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat
link |
01:38:56.460
and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting protecting the Nimitz
link |
01:38:59.820
battle group type stuff.
link |
01:39:00.820
It's just funny shit like that.
link |
01:39:03.820
So to me it wasn't that big of a deal.
link |
01:39:06.180
It was like, okay, that's weird.
link |
01:39:07.180
We're never going to know what it was.
link |
01:39:08.820
I want to get out there because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors.
link |
01:39:12.340
There's a group of folks there.
link |
01:39:15.380
No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.
link |
01:39:20.460
Nobody looking like me.
link |
01:39:22.060
No came out on a, no, no one came out of the helicopter.
link |
01:39:26.140
No one came out on an airplane.
link |
01:39:28.220
You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified.
link |
01:39:31.060
What's funny is all the COs and several of them are still in the Navy.
link |
01:39:36.060
There's one that is a, he, I think he just finished up.
link |
01:39:38.660
He was a captain of an aircraft carrier.
link |
01:39:40.980
You know, so he'll end up making Admiral and all that stuff.
link |
01:39:44.180
Those guys are all my friends.
link |
01:39:45.180
I talk to them daily.
link |
01:39:47.220
Just to clarify.
link |
01:39:48.220
So just for people who don't know, there's a story that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton
link |
01:39:56.100
folks in a helicopter landed.
link |
01:39:59.140
They showed up, they took the data, quote unquote.
link |
01:40:02.400
So all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably
link |
01:40:09.460
deleted it.
link |
01:40:10.460
So there's a kind of story to that.
link |
01:40:13.180
And then from what I've seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about
link |
01:40:19.060
offline, that jokes spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on
link |
01:40:24.420
these ships, that it might've been a joke that started and.
link |
01:40:29.100
Well, they did.
link |
01:40:30.220
So here's the joke.
link |
01:40:31.740
So they had come down, right?
link |
01:40:33.120
We had the tapes and they were Chad's tapes.
link |
01:40:37.100
So we use those tapes over and over again.
link |
01:40:39.320
They're consumable, but remember, I have a budget as a squadron, so I have a budget.
link |
01:40:42.940
So I have to buy those tapes, all that stuff that we use, I'm accountable for.
link |
01:40:47.060
And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's on them.
link |
01:40:50.940
So we had the tapes.
link |
01:40:52.460
So the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what's called Civic, CVIC,
link |
01:40:59.100
which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes.
link |
01:41:03.820
These guys are gonna come, they're gonna come and get them.
link |
01:41:07.060
So we're like, I'm like, oh, whatever.
link |
01:41:09.420
So we hand them the tapes and then someone, because I have, you know people, shortly after
link |
01:41:15.340
they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they're messing
link |
01:41:18.820
with you, they're playing a joke.
link |
01:41:20.820
So I said, oh, well, let's see how well that goes because I'm a CO and they're not.
link |
01:41:26.340
So I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a Lieutenant or Lieutenant JG, so he's
link |
01:41:31.020
way junior to me.
link |
01:41:32.020
And I said, hey, I want my tapes back and he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are
link |
01:41:37.460
pulling my leg.
link |
01:41:38.460
I know there's no one came out.
link |
01:41:40.100
And I go, and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this
link |
01:41:43.420
place apart.
link |
01:41:44.420
That's literally what I told him.
link |
01:41:46.420
And I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it's not gonna
link |
01:41:50.780
go well.
link |
01:41:52.020
I said, because this is bullshit and I need those tapes.
link |
01:41:54.540
Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up, they weren't in a safe.
link |
01:41:57.940
He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled them out and handed them to me.
link |
01:42:00.700
I said, and I basically said a few things to him, like, don't ever fuck with me again.
link |
01:42:05.220
And I left, I had the tapes.
link |
01:42:07.100
So this, no one came out.
link |
01:42:08.540
There's no flying going on when all this is happening.
link |
01:42:11.380
And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.
link |
01:42:15.260
So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want.
link |
01:42:19.640
So there's a rumor or two that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long and there's
link |
01:42:23.380
some, one of these petty officers is saying, I saw it, that's total crap.
link |
01:42:26.340
The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long.
link |
01:42:28.480
What you see on the release video is the entire video.
link |
01:42:31.740
So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me, but you
link |
01:42:38.220
have mentioned that, like on Roguen, I think that you watched it on a bigger screen.
link |
01:42:45.620
It felt like it was higher definition.
link |
01:42:47.740
So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the FLIR
link |
01:42:55.220
video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high
link |
01:43:01.620
number of.
link |
01:43:02.620
I would doubt it.
link |
01:43:03.620
Because I don't know where, the stuff that the government released, I don't know where
link |
01:43:05.980
they got it.
link |
01:43:06.980
Okay.
link |
01:43:07.980
So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like
link |
01:43:11.140
a rack.
link |
01:43:12.140
There's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard
link |
01:43:15.300
drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube.
link |
01:43:19.100
No, it's just like, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's
link |
01:43:24.700
some quality that gets, it degrades.
link |
01:43:27.060
So this, you don't know how many times this has been copied.
link |
01:43:29.000
So we were looking, the videos I've seen are right off the original, they're Hi8 tapes,
link |
01:43:32.580
it's basically pulled off the back of the display, so it's not filmed with cameras,
link |
01:43:35.860
it's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back and put onto a Hi8 tape.
link |
01:43:39.560
That's how the recorders work.
link |
01:43:40.800
Now it's actually digital to digital, it's not even on tapes anymore, it's a digital
link |
01:43:44.540
recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly, because originally we had
link |
01:43:47.580
little cameras here that shine, so if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.
link |
01:43:52.140
So it's a pretty good feed, when you put it on, so instead of looking at it on your tiny
link |
01:43:57.460
little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on like a 19 inch, because it was still
link |
01:44:02.260
normal TVs back there, we had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought,
link |
01:44:06.260
so we could watch movies.
link |
01:44:07.420
A nice, huge 19 inch screen.
link |
01:44:11.220
It's maybe 20, it was nice.
link |
01:44:13.820
Wow, that's huge.
link |
01:44:14.820
It was gigantic.
link |
01:44:15.820
I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches.
link |
01:44:20.980
This is 2005.
link |
01:44:23.380
So you look at it as this big thing.
link |
01:44:25.820
You could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say there's little things coming out
link |
01:44:28.940
of the bottom of it, you could see those.
link |
01:44:30.620
It was very clear.
link |
01:44:32.320
But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, did you get much more information from
link |
01:44:38.620
the higher, from the clear?
link |
01:44:40.700
Little things out of the bottom.
link |
01:44:41.700
We didn't see those visuals.
link |
01:44:42.700
So the bottom information.
link |
01:44:43.700
I got it.
link |
01:44:44.700
So when you see it, because he's coming almost coaltitude with it, you can see the bottom
link |
01:44:47.060
of it.
link |
01:44:48.060
It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there's little antennas
link |
01:44:50.380
hanging out of the bottom.
link |
01:44:51.380
Kind of like that.
link |
01:44:52.380
There was two little things out of the bottom.
link |
01:44:53.800
There's nothing on the top.
link |
01:44:54.800
There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature.
link |
01:45:00.380
You know, it's all that stuff.
link |
01:45:01.580
And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display,
link |
01:45:06.260
which that really raises a classification of it, especially to see what the radar does
link |
01:45:10.040
when it's being jammed.
link |
01:45:12.620
You know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about
link |
01:45:15.820
2000 and let me think about 2009.
link |
01:45:21.060
I got a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, hey, he told
link |
01:45:27.540
me who he was.
link |
01:45:28.540
He's still in the government.
link |
01:45:30.140
I'm friends with him.
link |
01:45:31.140
And he said, hey, we're going to investigate your Tic Tac thing.
link |
01:45:35.580
This is literally five years later.
link |
01:45:37.500
Yeah.
link |
01:45:38.500
Five years later.
link |
01:45:39.620
And I said, OK, whatever.
link |
01:45:41.220
And he did a pretty good job.
link |
01:45:42.220
I caught the unofficial official report because it was really never official.
link |
01:45:48.500
It wasn't.
link |
01:45:49.740
But I'll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests.
link |
01:45:54.500
So he does the report.
link |
01:45:55.540
He sent me the report.
link |
01:45:56.740
And all he said is, hey, I'm going to send you this report.
link |
01:45:58.660
Please don't distribute this report.
link |
01:46:01.220
I said, OK.
link |
01:46:02.620
The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough
link |
01:46:06.800
to redact it.
link |
01:46:07.800
But there's a few versions of it unredacted and I'm very protective of the other people
link |
01:46:11.100
that were involved in this.
link |
01:46:13.240
So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid.
link |
01:46:15.500
He doesn't talk to anyone now.
link |
01:46:17.380
The pilot of his airplane, she has come out on unidentified, but they don't release her
link |
01:46:21.980
name, although people are starting to do it.
link |
01:46:23.260
And she's had weird shit happen around her house.
link |
01:46:25.140
She's got kids, you know, so I'm very protective of her.
link |
01:46:29.340
And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that the names ever came from you,
link |
01:46:32.580
I will never talk to you again about this.
link |
01:46:34.580
And Jeremy's been really good about it.
link |
01:46:36.000
And so is George.
link |
01:46:37.540
And then, but George knew who the names were because he got the report from Senator Reid.
link |
01:46:43.900
And then the other crew.
link |
01:46:44.900
So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that
link |
01:46:51.820
individual, they really don't have the recollection.
link |
01:46:53.820
They were just out flying that day and it wasn't a big deal.
link |
01:46:58.300
So it's you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking.
link |
01:47:01.780
I don't want people knocking on my door and, you know, and there's rumors are you talk
link |
01:47:05.600
to everyone.
link |
01:47:06.600
You know, you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total.
link |
01:47:10.020
And that includes, you know, the newspapers and stuff.
link |
01:47:13.340
And I've been selective because there's so much, I mean, if I turned down like, I turned
link |
01:47:17.540
down Russian TV.
link |
01:47:18.540
I can give you her name when we're done here.
link |
01:47:21.660
She called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter, she called
link |
01:47:24.940
my son and she called my son in law because they're persistent.
link |
01:47:28.380
So I'm pretty protected.
link |
01:47:30.380
I'm very particular.
link |
01:47:31.380
I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is because I knew we would have a conversation that wasn't
link |
01:47:34.080
based just on the tic tac and the incident, but we can actually talk about some of the
link |
01:47:37.780
science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people involved to go.
link |
01:47:42.740
Cause I think there's, you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or Chris
link |
01:47:48.020
Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that whole thing, that's to the stars Academy.
link |
01:47:55.580
That's the Tom DeLonge group that got started.
link |
01:47:57.260
So you go, well, you know, cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's
link |
01:48:02.860
actually, when you talk to him, he's, he's, he's very smart and I asked him, how'd you
link |
01:48:07.500
get into this?
link |
01:48:08.500
And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of
link |
01:48:12.260
books when you're laying in a van as you're driving to your next gig before you make it
link |
01:48:16.480
big.
link |
01:48:17.480
And he goes, and he read, he was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs.
link |
01:48:20.300
I'm trying to think of the title.
link |
01:48:21.300
That's one of the big ones that's out there real popular.
link |
01:48:23.740
And so he started just, he started asking more and through his fame with Blink 182 in
link |
01:48:29.900
the band, he got more and more connected.
link |
01:48:32.340
You know, if you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence
link |
01:48:36.380
and he's part of the Mellon dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.
link |
01:48:43.160
He knows, he, he, he definitely knows how the government works cause he worked there.
link |
01:48:47.700
And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to.
link |
01:48:53.740
When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me,
link |
01:49:01.460
I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, Hey, cause they were like, you gotta do it.
link |
01:49:05.820
Cause I turned to, I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his, his producer
link |
01:49:11.060
had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it.
link |
01:49:14.100
Because those guys like, you gotta, you gotta do this for us.
link |
01:49:16.220
So from my perspective, just to give you some context.
link |
01:49:19.260
So to me, there seems to be some stigma.
link |
01:49:23.260
So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today.
link |
01:49:27.140
And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, of faculty, fellow faculty
link |
01:49:33.780
at MIT and major universities.
link |
01:49:36.020
And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from, from the scientific community.
link |
01:49:43.380
A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting,
link |
01:49:48.180
but you, you don't even know you, one, you're afraid to talk about it.
link |
01:49:53.900
And two, you don't know what the next steps are, like how can we seriously try to think
link |
01:49:58.480
about what you saw, how to think about how we further look for things like it, how we
link |
01:50:05.580
develop systems and plans for how in the future we can immediately collect a lot more data
link |
01:50:14.420
and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the
link |
01:50:23.140
best way possible from the scientific perspective.
link |
01:50:25.620
And I, I just would love to remove stigma from this subject.
link |
01:50:31.060
Well, I think that's the first step we have done in this country, an absolutely terrible
link |
01:50:37.420
job with these things.
link |
01:50:38.480
So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell.
link |
01:50:42.000
So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer.
link |
01:50:46.360
That's literally what came out.
link |
01:50:48.020
And then magically the next day it's a weather balloon and they're showing your pieces of
link |
01:50:51.300
mylar and you go, well, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday.
link |
01:50:55.380
Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series about Project
link |
01:50:58.180
Blue Book.
link |
01:50:59.180
But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things.
link |
01:51:01.120
It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove to the point
link |
01:51:06.440
where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look.
link |
01:51:10.380
So there's always been this, I don't know if you'd call it an aura around it or a mystique
link |
01:51:15.560
about UFOs that if you're talking about them, they're nuts.
link |
01:51:19.020
With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy, I'm not a junkie.
link |
01:51:23.160
If you ask me, do I believe that there's life outside of Earth, I would say you probably
link |
01:51:29.440
have a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than we're the only planet that has
link |
01:51:34.760
life on it in the universe.
link |
01:51:36.840
The odds are against it.
link |
01:51:38.580
If you do just do the math, you have to accept, because there only has to be one other planet
link |
01:51:44.280
that has life on it and then I win and you lose.
link |
01:51:48.300
And then more and more science is showing that there's habitable planets out there,
link |
01:51:52.280
that yeah, everything we've learned so far, we know very little, but everything we've
link |
01:51:56.040
learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets, it seems that
link |
01:52:03.480
it's very likely that there's life out there.
link |
01:52:06.720
Intelligent life is another topic, but life.
link |
01:52:08.960
Well, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us
link |
01:52:13.760
that says, ha ha, we're it and you go, not so much.
link |
01:52:18.680
Maybe we're not so intelligent.
link |
01:52:20.980
Because we are, it's just how we learn.
link |
01:52:22.840
So our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal
link |
01:52:28.760
combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel.
link |
01:52:33.060
What if you're in another planet where you figured out the ability to create a gravity
link |
01:52:39.320
field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger,
link |
01:52:43.240
you know, catapults on ships were steam powered and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic.
link |
01:52:48.560
Roller coasters used to use a chain to get you to the top of the hill.
link |
01:52:50.840
Now they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going.
link |
01:52:53.920
So there's a whole new realm of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it's our ability
link |
01:52:57.760
to develop the technology to support theory.
link |
01:53:00.480
You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently theories that Einstein had where
link |
01:53:05.800
people actually joked about them.
link |
01:53:07.080
And now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light.
link |
01:53:10.560
You know, we've proven that.
link |
01:53:12.000
So you look at that way and you go, well, does that mean that, you know, 70 years ago
link |
01:53:15.600
Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong?
link |
01:53:17.920
Or do you go, we just didn't have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find
link |
01:53:22.260
something that we could, to actually measure.
link |
01:53:24.600
And you know, and I've seen this stuff.
link |
01:53:25.600
And that's just a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries.
link |
01:53:29.040
Look what we've done in the last 20 years.
link |
01:53:30.640
Yeah, it's crazy.
link |
01:53:31.640
Let me direct, cause it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science
link |
01:53:35.600
perspective, you're, I mean, you've spoken, you've been brave in, you know, telling your
link |
01:53:43.280
story, not some dramatic thing, but just telling the things you've seen.
link |
01:53:48.000
Did it encounter, did it impact your career?
link |
01:53:53.080
Is that why more people haven't come out?
link |
01:53:55.240
Like you've mentioned Roswell, like how, what advice do you give to people, to the community,
link |
01:54:03.380
to me as a scientist for ways to go forward about this topic and still have a, you know,
link |
01:54:11.480
not being put in a bin in society that he's a loon or she's a loon or that person.
link |
01:54:16.880
Mine is to get away from the little green men, just divorce the two little green men.
link |
01:54:23.720
And you know, and I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this, you know, and the group that they're
link |
01:54:27.400
working with, which is incredible.
link |
01:54:28.400
I mean, they've got Steve Justice who used to run Skunk Works where they built, you know,
link |
01:54:32.960
projects.
link |
01:54:33.960
Now, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director.
link |
01:54:36.560
He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon.
link |
01:54:38.520
And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs.
link |
01:54:45.220
So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote
link |
01:54:49.640
the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP.
link |
01:54:53.640
And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt.
link |
01:54:57.280
And people go, how do you know that?
link |
01:54:58.280
I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are, it literally,
link |
01:55:03.040
I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed.
link |
01:55:05.600
So he was one.
link |
01:55:07.120
So that's why the, that's why I call it the unofficial official report.
link |
01:55:09.600
It was never, it was never releasable because people go, oh, I put in a FOIA request and
link |
01:55:13.520
I didn't get that.
link |
01:55:14.520
I go, well, just because you put in a FOIA request and get it, I go, because how much,
link |
01:55:17.480
how much time do you think that guy is going to spend to get you the information that you
link |
01:55:20.320
requested if he can't find it?
link |
01:55:21.600
I actually got called by the Navy.
link |
01:55:23.320
I had a commander in the Navy call me about right before the article came out in the New
link |
01:55:29.080
York Times.
link |
01:55:30.080
It was, this was starting to come back and she had called me because there's been, there
link |
01:55:33.000
was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident.
link |
01:55:35.480
And I said, do you know of anything?
link |
01:55:38.000
She called me, she goes, do you know of anything else besides the situation reports that come
link |
01:55:41.680
off the ship?
link |
01:55:42.680
And you know, and you got to remember when the situation report comes off the ship, that's
link |
01:55:45.780
like third hand.
link |
01:55:46.780
So we tell someone, they tell someone, that person has to write it up.
link |
01:55:50.880
So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it.
link |
01:55:54.180
But then there's the unofficial official report that's actually pretty well written.
link |
01:55:56.760
There's some errors in it, but it was, you know, I didn't help write it.
link |
01:55:59.360
I just did it.
link |
01:56:00.400
And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the zoo and
link |
01:56:03.720
the players.
link |
01:56:07.600
So she called me and said, is there anything out there?
link |
01:56:09.120
And I said, officially out there.
link |
01:56:10.720
She said, yes.
link |
01:56:11.720
I said, I don't know anything.
link |
01:56:12.720
I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one, but I'm not, you know,
link |
01:56:16.720
if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because it's not my job and nor
link |
01:56:19.760
did I care.
link |
01:56:20.760
I mean, did, in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou, I mean, did you think about
link |
01:56:26.720
your impact to your career?
link |
01:56:29.360
Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other thing, other people
link |
01:56:36.080
like in the Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing, why aren't they talking about
link |
01:56:40.200
this?
link |
01:56:41.200
Why are people afraid to talk about this?
link |
01:56:42.680
Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust.
link |
01:56:46.200
I'll just tell you that right now.
link |
01:56:47.840
We typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, you know, especially
link |
01:56:52.920
when I do, even the TV shows, you know, cause I've been on a couple of shows, when you look
link |
01:56:57.320
at it, you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours.
link |
01:57:00.840
And then what you see on the screen is five minutes.
link |
01:57:03.480
Well, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from Autonomous
link |
01:57:07.040
Vehicles is the clipping happens, yes.
link |
01:57:12.340
But also the incompetence.
link |
01:57:13.640
Let me just call out journalists.
link |
01:57:17.880
They're not thinking, I mean, so here's the thing, I have a PhD and I've taken painfully
link |
01:57:25.680
too many classes from like physics, math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the
link |
01:57:32.200
world.
link |
01:57:33.200
I read a lot.
link |
01:57:34.640
That seems to be missing with journalism.
link |
01:57:36.000
So you're talking to a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting
link |
01:57:40.920
way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things
link |
01:57:47.600
that humans have witnessed in history.
link |
01:57:49.800
Like you, it might've been nothing, who knows what you witnessed might've been from a sort
link |
01:57:55.240
of debunking perspective, might've been some kind of trick of mind.
link |
01:57:59.360
You and others have hallucinated something that could be some simple explanation, but
link |
01:58:05.840
possibly it was something not of this world and to not do justice to this story from a
link |
01:58:15.360
scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence.
link |
01:58:20.840
And so that's true for journalists, that's true for other scientists.
link |
01:58:25.340
It's just a human nature.
link |
01:58:28.360
If we see something that we can't explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's
link |
01:58:34.080
just me and you let it go away and you don't think about it, maybe it'll just, you ignore
link |
01:58:40.040
it.
link |
01:58:41.800
The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that?
link |
01:58:44.560
And I want to dig more into it.
link |
01:58:47.260
And if you look at it or you're going against the norm, you can get ostracized.
link |
01:58:53.920
And if you look at, and Einstein's the perfect example, I mean, when he started coming up
link |
01:58:57.320
with some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you're
link |
01:59:02.640
a nut job.
link |
01:59:03.640
He's, he's literally proving them, but he didn't have, you know, he proved them in theory,
link |
01:59:09.120
but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory.
link |
01:59:13.560
There's a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim
link |
01:59:18.280
Gates that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to
link |
01:59:25.380
experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with, with his theories.
link |
01:59:32.200
It's fascinating.
link |
01:59:33.200
But yes, at the time, it's kind of crazy what he's saying.
link |
01:59:36.640
Yeah.
link |
01:59:37.640
If you look at it back at the time, don't we, we look at it now and go, well, the guy
link |
01:59:40.320
was a walking genius and he was, but if you go back in time when he was doing it, it was
link |
01:59:44.800
like, what are you talking about?
link |
01:59:47.320
You know?
link |
01:59:48.320
But one of the challenges is your eyewitness.
link |
01:59:52.420
One of the challenges is you're essentially an eyewitness account.
link |
01:59:56.340
Like we don't have good data.
link |
01:59:58.760
We have very limited data of the incident that you've experienced.
link |
02:00:03.920
So let me kind of dig in, let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's,
link |
02:00:10.880
just to paint more and more of the picture.
link |
02:00:13.120
One you kind of mentioned, so Tic Tac Shape, let's break apart two situations.
link |
02:00:18.640
One is the video.
link |
02:00:19.920
Let's look at the actual eye account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your
link |
02:00:23.820
own eyes.
link |
02:00:25.320
What's the, what can you say about the shape of the thing?
link |
02:00:28.300
Is there interesting aspects outside of the Tic Tac?
link |
02:00:30.800
Like, is there any appendages?
link |
02:00:33.300
Is there some texture to it that, no smooth white Tic Tac, you know, we don't, you don't
link |
02:00:42.320
see there's no, no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could see.
link |
02:00:50.680
We don't notice, like I said, we don't see the little things on the bottom of it until
link |
02:00:53.800
we see the video in the TV mode when it's zoomed in, right before it's shortly, you
link |
02:00:59.760
kind of see them zoom in.
link |
02:01:00.760
You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there, or remember we're
link |
02:01:05.840
looking at the original tape, so there's not, there's basically no degradation.
link |
02:01:09.960
But when you saw with your eyes, there's no kind of appendages.
link |
02:01:12.680
No, none.
link |
02:01:13.680
What about, like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions.
link |
02:01:17.240
So I appreciate you spending your time here.
link |
02:01:19.560
Let me ask some of them.
link |
02:01:21.560
Did you, I mean, you chased it, so we flew close to it, relatively speaking.
link |
02:01:26.200
Was there, did you feel any wake?
link |
02:01:30.160
Like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?
link |
02:01:36.240
No.
link |
02:01:37.240
Nothing.
link |
02:01:38.240
Nothing.
link |
02:01:39.240
So another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've developed a feel for, for objects
link |
02:01:46.580
in the air.
link |
02:01:47.580
Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival?
link |
02:01:53.160
Or did it, let me ask a few questions around it.
link |
02:01:56.080
So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised?
link |
02:02:00.040
Did it feel like it wanted to be seen, almost to show off its capability?
link |
02:02:08.080
And did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, an air fight against
link |
02:02:15.480
a sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet?
link |
02:02:20.280
So one, I think it, I think it knew we were there when we showed up.
link |
02:02:25.000
It's just, it's me.
link |
02:02:27.000
It's kind of like an animal.
link |
02:02:28.000
If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it
link |
02:02:30.920
sees you and you're on the other side of the field, it'll actually go no threat and it'll
link |
02:02:34.440
start eating.
link |
02:02:35.440
You know, they don't put their tail up.
link |
02:02:36.440
As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there and I'm going to react or I'm
link |
02:02:39.320
going to move.
link |
02:02:40.800
So as we were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing, you know, which I don't
link |
02:02:47.440
know if someone asks, what do you think?
link |
02:02:48.440
I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something.
link |
02:02:50.160
I joked on good morning America.
link |
02:02:52.080
Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know, and actually
link |
02:02:56.000
use that clip.
link |
02:02:57.000
It was kind of funny, but yeah, we're a little human centric.
link |
02:03:00.200
We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us, but maybe he's talking to the dolphins.
link |
02:03:04.360
Yeah.
link |
02:03:05.360
It was to whatever, you know, cause it was hanging around that whitewater and I don't
link |
02:03:07.560
know if it was, there's something there as a seamount.
link |
02:03:09.300
We just didn't find it again.
link |
02:03:10.300
I don't know.
link |
02:03:11.880
But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started
link |
02:03:16.720
mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming
link |
02:03:19.880
up.
link |
02:03:20.880
Just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12
link |
02:03:25.800
where I cut across the circle.
link |
02:03:27.200
I think it was very aware that we were there because it interacted.
link |
02:03:30.140
We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane.
link |
02:03:34.360
But you know, was it, was, were we afraid?
link |
02:03:40.520
I don't think so.
link |
02:03:41.520
I mean, and to me it was more curious, you know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that
link |
02:03:44.680
you would have.
link |
02:03:45.680
And I always felt to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time
link |
02:03:51.240
as I'd spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a
link |
02:03:56.740
safe zone.
link |
02:03:57.740
I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can't, if you're
link |
02:04:01.880
in the airplane and you feel scared, it's not the job for you.
link |
02:04:04.620
You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now.
link |
02:04:08.120
You know, I am inside, I have the stick, I have the throttles, I've got my wizzo in the
link |
02:04:11.600
back seat, he's running all the displays.
link |
02:04:14.280
We are a team.
link |
02:04:15.280
We're in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new.
link |
02:04:20.720
You feel pretty good.
link |
02:04:21.720
And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate
link |
02:04:26.320
like it did, like it was like no big deal, you know, for an airplane, if you just put
link |
02:04:30.160
me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight, just get me at a hundred knots above
link |
02:04:34.800
the water.
link |
02:04:35.800
And for me to, you can't just start a climb, I'd have to lower the nose, I'd have to accelerate
link |
02:04:39.520
and then I'd have to start coming up and this thing just like, just did it like it was like
link |
02:04:44.620
no big deal.
link |
02:04:45.620
Yeah.
link |
02:04:46.620
You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was, it like, it's something that you
link |
02:04:52.360
would love to fly almost.
link |
02:04:53.960
So this object, just the curiosity you experienced is like, like what it almost like, what the
link |
02:05:01.880
heck is that piece of technology and I want to fly it.
link |
02:05:05.080
Like what made you feel like it's something that you could fly?
link |
02:05:10.640
Do you think it's something that a human could fly?
link |
02:05:13.700
Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology, because another
link |
02:05:18.160
perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing.
link |
02:05:26.920
And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like, I don't think it was
link |
02:05:32.320
a projection.
link |
02:05:33.320
I think it was a real object.
link |
02:05:34.320
It was an op, a physical hard object that could be flyed.
link |
02:05:37.400
Oh yeah.
link |
02:05:38.400
Yeah.
link |
02:05:39.400
I think all four of us will tell you the same thing.
link |
02:05:40.880
It wasn't, it wasn't, this was not, cause you go, okay, let's just go on.
link |
02:05:44.960
It's a light projection.
link |
02:05:45.960
Well, if we were both sitting next to each other and we were looking at it from the exact
link |
02:05:50.080
same angle and all that, and I go, okay, there's a, in theory you could have that, but with
link |
02:05:54.640
an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, you know, and they're, you know, she's probably
link |
02:05:58.560
not directly above me.
link |
02:05:59.800
She's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen.
link |
02:06:02.680
You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear
link |
02:06:06.760
blue.
link |
02:06:07.760
You know, if you've ever been at sea and I don't mean like coast, I mean like when you
link |
02:06:10.640
get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest, it's incredible.
link |
02:06:15.480
You know, you've got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean that you got pretty
link |
02:06:19.160
high contrast.
link |
02:06:20.800
And for this thing just to disappear, it wasn't, I'm telling you, I would, I mean, I know we,
link |
02:06:29.880
we all have the same recollection of what happened.
link |
02:06:33.120
You know, there's some details because it's so long ago, but for the most part, we know
link |
02:06:36.560
what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like, what the hell was that?
link |
02:06:40.480
What if, I mean, do you think about the thing under the water that's not often talked about
link |
02:06:45.080
if there's something under the water, couldn't have been something gigantic?
link |
02:06:50.480
It could be.
link |
02:06:51.480
What?
link |
02:06:52.480
Like, do you ever think of this?
link |
02:06:53.480
Big ship comes up.
link |
02:06:54.480
I mean, that's why as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles
link |
02:06:57.840
and Olympic swimmers.
link |
02:06:59.160
Like I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss, it could, anything
link |
02:07:04.040
could be under there.
link |
02:07:06.080
Like there's not enough focus on that perhaps because there's no visibility, but is it,
link |
02:07:12.760
is there anything interesting to say about the possibility that was anything underneath
link |
02:07:16.560
there?
link |
02:07:17.560
Could be.
link |
02:07:18.560
I mean, think about it.
link |
02:07:19.560
If you're going to hide on this planet, what's the least explored spot on the planet?
link |
02:07:25.480
Two thirds of it's the ocean.
link |
02:07:28.080
There's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was a triple
link |
02:07:34.840
seven that crashed.
link |
02:07:35.840
You know, they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared
link |
02:07:38.640
and they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it, but you would think there's
link |
02:07:42.320
large objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up,
link |
02:07:46.600
there's big pieces that would be, you'd find something, they haven't found anything except
link |
02:07:49.480
what floated.
link |
02:07:50.480
So to hide something underwater I think would be easy.
link |
02:07:54.720
So okay.
link |
02:07:55.720
Let's go a little bit in speculation land, but it's the best, it's the best we can do,
link |
02:08:00.000
which is the basic question of what do you think was it?
link |
02:08:05.040
So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology?
link |
02:08:11.880
Is it alien technology?
link |
02:08:13.720
Is it an unknown physical phenomena?
link |
02:08:16.880
You know, like a ball lightning, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things we probably
link |
02:08:20.440
humans don't really understand.
link |
02:08:22.440
Is it like I said, some perception cognition that led you some kind of hallucination that
link |
02:08:29.040
made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?
link |
02:08:31.240
Let me put those things on the table.
link |
02:08:33.600
Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like
link |
02:08:39.520
that?
link |
02:08:40.520
What do you think it was?
link |
02:08:41.520
Definitely.
link |
02:08:42.520
I don't think it's an ice cloud because ice clouds don't fly around and react to you.
link |
02:08:47.480
Do I think it was a light?
link |
02:08:49.080
I'd say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do.
link |
02:08:52.280
I'd say no.
link |
02:08:53.280
What do you mean by light?
link |
02:08:54.720
Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there's their experience
link |
02:08:59.840
like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it's really not,
link |
02:09:04.000
you know, it's plasma.
link |
02:09:05.240
I don't think so.
link |
02:09:07.240
So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved.
link |
02:09:09.760
Maybe not.
link |
02:09:10.760
I'm not a theoretical physicist and some, you know, I'm not an MIT.
link |
02:09:16.280
I would say no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it
link |
02:09:21.880
when this happened, no, I think it was a hard object.
link |
02:09:27.240
It was aware that we were there.
link |
02:09:28.620
It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly
link |
02:09:33.560
what I would do.
link |
02:09:35.180
You know, it mirrored me.
link |
02:09:36.180
It wasn't aggressive.
link |
02:09:37.720
You know, there's talk, oh, it flopped behind us.
link |
02:09:39.840
It was never offensive on us.
link |
02:09:41.320
It never did that.
link |
02:09:42.680
It just mirrored us.
link |
02:09:43.680
So as we're coming down, it's just like, you know, you're kind of, you know, you said you
link |
02:09:47.920
do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the, when they
link |
02:09:52.840
get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, cause my roommate in college was
link |
02:09:55.980
a collegiate wrestler.
link |
02:09:56.980
So I de facto became a wrestler cause he beat me up every night and we joke.
link |
02:10:01.640
I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week.
link |
02:10:05.760
But you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you're kind of feeling
link |
02:10:08.480
each other as you walk and boxers do the same thing.
link |
02:10:10.840
It was doing that same thing.
link |
02:10:11.840
It's like, what's going on as it comes around, as it comes around and then it was like, Hey,
link |
02:10:15.640
we're going to get here.
link |
02:10:16.640
And then when I got too close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here.
link |
02:10:19.920
And then it did something that we've never seen.
link |
02:10:22.220
The other question is what if I didn't cut across the circle, what if I just kept going
link |
02:10:25.240
around a circle?
link |
02:10:26.240
We just keep going.
link |
02:10:27.240
I could have just watched it.
link |
02:10:28.240
I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and the
link |
02:10:32.440
joint helmet.
link |
02:10:33.440
There's a little camera, but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch because
link |
02:10:35.920
you've ever put a GoPro on someone's head where they're looking around like this all
link |
02:10:38.600
the time, it'll nauseate you.
link |
02:10:40.860
So we never turn that on and all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down
link |
02:10:44.200
and hit the switch, you know, and then we didn't go back and cause our tapes didn't
link |
02:10:47.840
have anything cause we didn't get it on radar.
link |
02:10:51.800
Because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't,
link |
02:10:55.520
it wouldn't lock.
link |
02:10:56.520
The radar wouldn't lock.
link |
02:10:57.520
And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try to get some
link |
02:11:04.440
hints at it.
link |
02:11:05.760
Do you think it's human, like advanced human created technology that's simply top secret
link |
02:11:12.240
that we're just not aware of?
link |
02:11:15.160
Or is it not something not of this world?
link |
02:11:18.620
So you, if you'd asked me in 2004, I just said, I don't know if you ask me now.
link |
02:11:26.120
So we're coming up on 16 years ago for a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that
link |
02:11:34.760
it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it because I don't think it did.
link |
02:11:40.720
I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds
link |
02:11:44.760
from what we normally do, then it would start coming out.
link |
02:11:48.060
But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I understand, you know, and
link |
02:11:53.280
I don't speak for the United States government and I never will speak for the United States
link |
02:11:56.160
government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and
link |
02:11:59.020
why we classify stuff, you know, is it detrimental to national defense?
link |
02:12:03.400
But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that
link |
02:12:06.680
could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability
link |
02:12:13.960
to do things, you know, you talk about, you know, are we going to go to Mars?
link |
02:12:17.080
Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, because remember, these things were
link |
02:12:20.120
coming down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space, and they
link |
02:12:24.400
would come down and they would come straight down, they'd hang out at like 20,000 feet
link |
02:12:27.640
and then three or four hours later, they'd go back up.
link |
02:12:30.000
You don't have anything that can come down, hang out and once, you know, and I'm talking
link |
02:12:34.620
hold out in a spot.
link |
02:12:35.620
Well, we all know there's winds.
link |
02:12:36.720
They're not drifting like a balloon.
link |
02:12:38.020
They're just sitting there and then they would go back up and they tracked up to the, when
link |
02:12:42.320
I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10 of these things.
link |
02:12:46.180
There's other guys and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked
link |
02:12:50.120
a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up.
link |
02:12:55.320
So it's not just propulsion and the way it moves, it's also fuel.
link |
02:12:59.280
It's everything.
link |
02:13:00.280
So...
link |
02:13:01.280
The whole of it indicates a kind of technology that's highly advanced, but you don't think
link |
02:13:08.200
in your sense that you actually don't know, but you know more than a lot of people, in
link |
02:13:14.600
your sense, the top secret military technology, if you think about skunkworks, if you think
link |
02:13:20.200
about it like that, cannot be more than 15 years ahead.
link |
02:13:25.240
I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117.
link |
02:13:32.480
Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out like it was developed at this time.
link |
02:13:36.480
It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.
link |
02:13:40.000
What's the 117?
link |
02:13:41.000
That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2, but the stealth fighter.
link |
02:13:44.560
So you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while.
link |
02:13:51.520
But I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and
link |
02:13:56.440
we're kind of pushing the edge of technology.
link |
02:14:00.000
This is a giant leap in technology.
link |
02:14:02.400
You know, and the other one is, do we have the basis to do that?
link |
02:14:06.160
You know, because usually when you have a technology like that, universities, especially
link |
02:14:10.360
the one you're working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top
link |
02:14:15.300
tier universities, you know, so you've got MIT, you've got Caltech, you've got Stanford,
link |
02:14:19.480
Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools, Naval Postgraduate
link |
02:14:24.680
School is another one.
link |
02:14:27.400
There's usually indicators, there's papers of, hey, this is where we're going.
link |
02:14:31.360
I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity based propulsion system
link |
02:14:36.260
that literally, I've got an object, because how do you, how much power would it cost to
link |
02:14:41.040
create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant
link |
02:14:46.980
orb that we live on?
link |
02:14:48.400
Also by the way, you mentioned gravity based.
link |
02:14:50.560
That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what
link |
02:14:56.080
kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement.
link |
02:15:03.240
To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane from a physics perspective, but of
link |
02:15:07.320
course it would seem insane until it's not.
link |
02:15:13.880
Because remember, we only know what we know, which is very little.
link |
02:15:19.280
Someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all?
link |
02:15:27.360
So you're saying that if you had to bet money, all your money, it would be something that's
link |
02:15:32.560
alien technology, so it's not human created technology.
link |
02:15:37.320
Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't think we've
link |
02:15:41.360
developed it.
link |
02:15:42.360
I don't think we've developed it.
link |
02:15:45.280
Because the other one, someone asked me, they said, what if there wasn't, maybe it was just
link |
02:15:48.080
a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from someplace else.
link |
02:15:53.640
I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around.
link |
02:15:57.600
So I don't know.
link |
02:15:59.800
I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the giant brains that think this stuff
link |
02:16:03.800
up.
link |
02:16:04.800
I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them.
link |
02:16:07.680
Which topic?
link |
02:16:08.920
Which you mean for drones?
link |
02:16:11.240
Just space travel technology.
link |
02:16:14.120
Because if you look at where we're going, because everyone talks about Mars, and you're
link |
02:16:18.040
okay, and we're, hey, are we going to be able to colonize?
link |
02:16:20.760
And I know Elon is big into that.
link |
02:16:22.080
Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA?
link |
02:16:26.060
We put humans back up there.
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02:16:29.720
My theory, so it's funny because I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original
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02:16:35.520
employees at SpaceX.
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02:16:37.160
He's a friend of mine, and I won't say his name.
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02:16:39.920
But he knows Elon.
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02:16:40.920
And he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project.
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02:16:45.280
He's one of the lead guys on that.
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02:16:46.360
So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, there's a movie, there's a book coming out
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02:16:49.760
that comes out in about a year on this.
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02:16:51.440
The original, the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX.
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02:16:55.080
And he's named in the book.
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02:16:56.080
And they're supposed to make a movie on it.
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02:16:57.600
So I'm like, hey, who's going to play it?
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02:17:00.120
But what he's done, to me, it changed the game, and here's why.
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02:17:04.920
Because I said, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex.
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02:17:10.480
Which it has become, everything he warned us of, it has become, and it's really driven
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02:17:17.000
by, there's the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing.
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02:17:23.840
Those are the big, those are your biggest, and Raytheon's kind of right, like a subset
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02:17:28.040
of that.
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02:17:29.040
But Raytheon's pretty big too.
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02:17:30.040
But in US defense, those are the big guys, right?
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02:17:32.400
That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like
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02:17:37.440
that.
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02:17:38.440
And you look at that, and you go, and the way government contracting is working, and
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02:17:41.760
how we charge, and why things cost so much.
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02:17:44.240
And then you go, you got Elon, who's got an ego, and he doesn't like to do things a certain
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02:17:50.840
way.
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02:17:51.840
And I've talked to the guy that worked there on, because the government likes to have oversight
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02:17:54.680
of contracts, where he was like, no, just tell me what you want, I'll build it, and
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02:17:58.040
I'll give you a bill when it's done.
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02:17:59.560
And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money, because he's a money
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02:18:03.280
driven guy, which I like, capitalism at its best.
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02:18:07.520
So now you look at the two things.
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02:18:08.880
So you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule, right?
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02:18:13.280
And then you've got Boeing.
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02:18:15.560
So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money.
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02:18:21.440
And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters, because they come back and land,
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02:18:26.000
and you don't have to, like Morton Thicol, we've reused them on the space shuttle.
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02:18:29.320
But they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff, because they landed in Saltwater,
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02:18:31.960
and then he had to put them all back together.
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02:18:34.000
Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, go, what do they do?
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02:18:36.840
Do they like rehaul, overhaul, because no, actually they clean them up, and they can
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02:18:40.440
use them again.
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02:18:41.440
They're reusable systems.
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02:18:43.660
Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company.
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02:18:47.040
So being able to put people in the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it's literally
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02:18:50.680
like sci fi when you watch when they went up.
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02:18:52.840
So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been able to do, because the fact that
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02:18:59.520
we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, and oh, by the way, if
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02:19:03.560
you didn't know, because I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn
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02:19:07.880
Russian.
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02:19:08.880
Right?
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02:19:09.880
And they have to do, it's what, level five, where the test is a phone call, where they
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02:19:14.040
call you up and they, because they would go, so I went to the pinning, two friends of mine.
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02:19:19.720
The one actually had a mission date, the one got one later.
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02:19:21.800
So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a spacewalk, because I would pull up,
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02:19:26.080
because if I knew what was going on, I'd pull up the NASA thing.
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02:19:27.960
I was in a meeting one day, and I've got NASA on and makers out there floating around doing
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02:19:32.960
his stuff.
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02:19:33.960
And I saw one, he's in the space station while they're doing a spacewalk, so it's kind of
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02:19:36.280
cool when you go, oh yeah, I know that dude, he's up there in space, floating around.
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02:19:40.780
So when you look at what those, they're capable of doing, and then you go, what Elon is bringing
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02:19:47.940
to the fact that now it's back in America, it's actually, to me, it's cost effective
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02:19:56.300
for us to be able to do more stuff.
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02:19:58.400
I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon?
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02:20:01.960
Is there a reason to go back to the moon?
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02:20:03.360
Personally, I think if they're really going to go, in years from now, go to Mars, I think
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02:20:07.160
that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology,
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02:20:11.760
to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the
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02:20:15.600
moon.
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02:20:17.480
Because we did this on less than a compact computer in the 60s, which is the whole reason
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02:20:22.680
that I flew, because I'm obsessed.
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02:20:24.000
Matter of fact, I have the giant Lego Apollo at home, and the Lander, and I have one that
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02:20:29.720
my dad built me in 1969, right after that, and Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy, and so
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02:20:35.400
am I.
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02:20:36.400
Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a car in Wapakonet, Ohio, at the parade after
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02:20:39.680
he walked on the moon, because his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle in
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02:20:42.680
Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade.
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02:20:45.140
So I've been obsessed with this since I was a child.
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02:20:48.440
Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you'll go out to space one day?
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02:20:55.440
Me?
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02:20:56.440
If I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second.
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02:20:58.880
I am not.
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02:20:59.880
Because, I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you
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02:21:03.960
know, like people like, I mean, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to,
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02:21:09.880
in terms of, you're not kind of a civilian, right, I mean, in a sense that you're just
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02:21:14.320
a normal person, you're not a 5G pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up,
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02:21:20.360
there would be somebody like you in the next, like, 20 years.
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02:21:24.280
I'd be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I'd be all over
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02:21:27.080
it.
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02:21:28.080
I'd be like, okay, but, you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you're alive.
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02:21:31.200
I'd love to hear that discussion with your wife.
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02:21:33.000
Listen, there's the pros and cons.
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02:21:34.880
She's, I mean, I've known her since high school, so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know.
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02:21:40.800
Most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person you were in high
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02:21:43.280
school.
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02:21:44.280
You know, I was a class clown and I still am that way.
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02:21:47.600
So let me ask you this question.
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02:21:49.560
So I'm talking to Elon again soon, I'm curious to get your perspective on it.
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02:21:57.240
If I wanted to talk to him about TICTAC, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which
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02:22:05.240
are obviously, just like you said, if there's something to it, if it can be investigated
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02:22:10.160
somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing
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02:22:16.120
propulsion systems that can get us cheaply out to space.
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02:22:21.520
What should Elon think about this stuff?
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02:22:23.460
What should he do?
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02:22:24.520
What should people like him do?
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02:22:25.960
I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and
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02:22:31.560
go, you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do,
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02:22:38.360
but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really
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02:22:43.760
in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does.
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02:22:48.780
If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant
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02:22:56.500
amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they're done, they're done.
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02:23:00.460
There's enough to get them back down and that's it.
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02:23:02.200
There's not a huge, you know, they're not coming back and go, oh, I still got three
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02:23:05.020
quarters of a tank.
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02:23:06.020
Let's bolt them on and do it again.
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02:23:07.560
His system's not doing that.
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02:23:10.720
But you know, the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons
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02:23:15.200
of money, but you got to remember the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars
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02:23:19.200
for the most part.
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02:23:20.200
There are times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done.
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02:23:24.040
But then when you look at, and I'm just going to throw a few out there, but if you look
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02:23:26.600
at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you've got Elon, there's some big money
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02:23:36.120
out there.
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02:23:37.120
I mean, you're talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy companies like big companies.
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02:23:43.280
Apple's another one.
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02:23:44.280
These companies had huge, huge amounts of money.
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02:23:47.800
And then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they've got gazillions and gazillions
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02:23:52.120
of dollars.
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02:23:53.120
We've got universities.
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02:23:54.120
There's so much money out there.
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02:23:55.160
If we really wanted to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do
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02:23:59.880
live in a free society, I think there's enough to go, how do we do this?
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02:24:05.720
And because when you work outside of what the government would want to do, let's, we're
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02:24:11.400
not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant.
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02:24:16.160
I will be.
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02:24:17.160
American.
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02:24:18.160
I would never.
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02:24:19.160
Yeah.
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02:24:20.160
I am an American.
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02:24:21.160
You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet.
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02:24:22.160
I can't believe you agreed to this.
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02:24:23.160
But, but when I haven't killed me yet, you're here and you've been here for a while.
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02:24:32.040
No, no, no.
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02:24:33.040
I'm joking.
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02:24:34.040
I'm an American citizen.
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02:24:35.040
I'm actually pretty much American.
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02:24:36.040
But see, when you do that, so you look at, let's just look at American universities.
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02:24:39.680
Yes.
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02:24:40.680
There are some brilliant minds and we'll just use MIT because you worked down there.
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02:24:43.840
There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that
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02:24:46.880
are not American citizens.
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02:24:48.160
So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American citizen, it gets
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02:24:51.760
really, really, really hard.
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02:24:53.960
But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money, and they, let's just say they want
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02:24:59.140
to work together.
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02:25:00.500
They can split it up 50, 50, the two of them when the technology gets developed.
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02:25:04.580
But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work.
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02:25:07.120
I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because technology
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02:25:11.400
is technology.
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02:25:12.400
And if it gets developed and gets over to where a country gets a hold of it and then
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02:25:17.380
just basically uses it for their own, because you save them all the research time, you don't
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02:25:21.640
want to do that.
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02:25:22.720
But if we can get to the point where we can, we do it on the International Space Station.
link |
02:25:25.660
We realize that space was too expensive for one country to do alone.
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02:25:29.900
So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate.
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02:25:34.640
That's the one thing that the Russians and the U.S. actually work together on.
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02:25:38.200
Think about it.
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02:25:39.200
That's it.
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02:25:40.200
We work together on space because we realize it's way too expensive for us to do alone
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02:25:43.760
and effective.
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02:25:45.120
So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around for God, now what is it, like
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02:25:47.960
20 years that thing's been up there floating around?
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02:25:50.080
So it's getting old.
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02:25:51.080
We're going to have to replace parts and do stuff.
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02:25:52.760
But if we can pool the money together and come up with something that would literally
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02:25:56.720
change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of
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02:26:01.240
engineering, because if you develop that technology, you don't even have to send a man person.
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02:26:06.200
If you can develop a technology that's so, and with our automation and where we're progressing
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02:26:10.120
and our competing power to send something out that's not just floating around when,
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02:26:15.800
you know, that can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface
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02:26:20.160
and come back up.
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02:26:21.160
So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends
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02:26:23.680
data back.
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02:26:24.680
Get an analyzer.
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02:26:25.680
But if I've got a technology that can go up there really quick, I'm not worried about
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02:26:28.600
man.
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02:26:29.600
I don't have life support systems and all that.
link |
02:26:30.600
But if it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples
link |
02:26:34.640
and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back.
link |
02:26:38.600
So we can analyze it here.
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02:26:39.600
That's a game changer.
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02:26:40.600
It's a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets.
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02:26:44.520
Exactly.
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02:26:45.520
So in a sense, the Tic Tac is a symbol.
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02:26:50.360
So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there's a nonzero probability
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02:26:56.020
that it's alien technology.
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02:26:58.520
In that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the
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02:27:06.920
aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box.
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02:27:13.880
It's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion.
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02:27:21.240
We can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way and it's worthwhile to try.
link |
02:27:27.200
I think, and I don't think the money, if you look at a big picture with the amount of money,
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02:27:30.400
some that's out there floating around these private companies, I think if you said, hey,
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02:27:34.320
I've got, let's just say a hundred million dollars, which really a hundred million dollars
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02:27:37.720
relative to Bezos has got, what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that work.
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02:27:41.560
So if he said, hey, a hundred million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go
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02:27:45.520
and I'm going to put a, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that
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02:27:50.440
says, hey, we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program.
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02:27:53.520
But what if I just said, hey, who's to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own
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02:27:57.920
to say, hey, I want to go pool universities because they have fewer restrictions because
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02:28:01.720
it's not tax dollars.
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02:28:02.720
They don't have the checks inbound.
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02:28:03.720
They can do whatever they want.
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02:28:04.720
So their money, sorry about that, to go, hey, I'm going to put this out and I'm going
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02:28:09.160
to get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech,
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02:28:14.720
at the schools I mentioned.
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02:28:15.720
And, oh, by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts and I'm going to basically,
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02:28:20.080
I'm going to fund you guys for 10 years.
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02:28:23.440
So you get $10 million a year and I'm going to give you your salaries and we're going
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02:28:26.840
to do that or whatever the amount works.
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02:28:28.160
So let's cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right?
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02:28:30.960
To do the research.
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02:28:31.960
But, oh, by the way, the research is, it's not classified, but it's controlled.
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02:28:36.640
So we're not going to publicly just put this out in journals, but if we make a leap that
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02:28:40.760
we think would advance because although those, let's say there's 10 of them, those 10 scientists
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02:28:45.060
come up with something and they put out a paper, there might be a number 11 at another
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02:28:49.560
university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kind of had this idea and now you can
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02:28:54.240
get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the mindset.
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02:28:59.280
Because we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it's like I was
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02:29:04.560
joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls.
link |
02:29:09.320
And I said, but how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering, how much new math is
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02:29:13.360
really being done?
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02:29:14.360
I said, there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I'm talking Stephen
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02:29:18.720
Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something that's totally different.
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02:29:26.000
That's a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody's converged towards
link |
02:29:30.800
this local minima or local maxima, whatever you think about it.
link |
02:29:34.320
And it's again, same as with the TICTAC, thinking outside the box is not accepted and it probably
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02:29:44.200
should be.
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02:29:45.200
But it's hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original, he was
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02:29:51.720
out of the box.
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02:29:53.080
He did not think the norm.
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02:29:54.080
That's true genius.
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02:29:55.080
Had he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories, where would
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02:29:59.140
we be?
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02:30:00.140
Okay, we're jumping around a little bit.
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02:30:03.080
So we've talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, but let me jump back to a
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02:30:09.720
few questions that folks had.
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02:30:11.840
I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual facts
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02:30:17.800
of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart
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02:30:25.040
a little bit because people are just talking past each other, but let me kind of bring
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02:30:29.120
it up.
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02:30:30.120
Mick West, I've just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to talk to you
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02:30:36.560
about this world.
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02:30:37.560
And Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to
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02:30:44.120
debunk.
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02:30:45.120
Sort of his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic.
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02:30:50.360
I think it's very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective
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02:30:55.120
to take the approach he does.
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02:30:57.200
It's valuable.
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02:30:58.200
And I think no matter what, I think there's, I hope that people, quote unquote, true believers
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02:31:04.760
are a little bit more open minded to the work of Mick West.
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02:31:07.960
I think it's quite useful and brilliant work.
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02:31:11.120
So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible
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02:31:17.320
other explanations of the things that were out there.
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02:31:21.020
He has some explanations of the things that you've seen in with the Tic Tac, like with
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02:31:27.880
your own eyes.
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02:31:28.880
He says that it's possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and
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02:31:36.200
so on when you were flying around.
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02:31:37.720
I don't find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that.
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02:31:41.520
Let me do it right now.
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02:31:42.520
Sure.
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02:31:43.520
So, cause that comes up.
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02:31:44.520
Like how, how did you know it was about 40 feet long?
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02:31:45.840
I go, okay, so 16 years flying against other airplanes, know what stuff looks like.
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02:31:53.120
You know, I've looked down on things.
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02:31:54.860
So if I know, I know, here's the known things.
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02:31:56.560
I know when we saw the Tic Tac, I was at 20,000 feet ish, right around there.
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02:32:02.120
So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like looking down on them cause I've
link |
02:32:05.260
done it for all those years.
link |
02:32:07.200
I mean, I got a good idea.
link |
02:32:08.440
So that's, that's why I said 40 feet cause it's about Hornet size.
link |
02:32:11.880
So and as I go around, you know, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge
link |
02:32:15.760
distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big, you
link |
02:32:21.720
know.
link |
02:32:23.600
So I would argue the fact of, you know, peer experiences, you know, professional observers,
link |
02:32:30.120
which is what we're actually trained to do.
link |
02:32:33.800
And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing.
link |
02:32:38.160
They're like, yeah, it's about size of Hornet.
link |
02:32:40.320
From a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years do you
link |
02:32:46.720
find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things.
link |
02:32:53.000
So like how often do you make mistakes with vision?
link |
02:32:57.840
You actually, you make vision issues a lot because you're, and the sad part is, is your
link |
02:33:02.240
brain believes what your eyes see.
link |
02:33:04.820
We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly
link |
02:33:08.760
because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instruments.
link |
02:33:14.880
Let's go back to landing at night.
link |
02:33:16.260
So your eyes assume that the runway and your brain assumes that
link |
02:33:22.980
the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving.
link |
02:33:26.800
So if I try and do stuff visually, I would, you die every time, not every time, but you
link |
02:33:31.960
die close to every time trying to land on a boat.
link |
02:33:34.600
So we actually use instruments, which are counter to your brain.
link |
02:33:37.800
So, and there's actually all kinds of things that we go through in training.
link |
02:33:41.160
They have this thing, I think they still use it.
link |
02:33:43.780
It's called the MSDD multi spatial disorientation device or the spin and puke.
link |
02:33:51.000
It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules.
link |
02:33:53.720
And when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can, you can make
link |
02:33:57.360
yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but we were actually only going around in
link |
02:34:01.360
circles at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk.
link |
02:34:04.160
But as they spin you around in a little sub thing and slow it down and speed it up, your
link |
02:34:08.360
body does this and you, you know, and then by visuals of showing you like they can spin
link |
02:34:12.520
it sideways to the outside wall, but they can show like lines that are, they can make
link |
02:34:16.640
the line stand still because they're moving the same velocity.
link |
02:34:18.440
They can move the other way and you'll think you're screaming.
link |
02:34:20.680
You see it in amusement parks all the time.
link |
02:34:23.960
You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A, but you're really not doing, you're
link |
02:34:28.440
sitting there.
link |
02:34:29.440
So we get trained on all that stuff.
link |
02:34:30.440
So if you, if you want to look at it and go, well, you're, you're disoriented or this,
link |
02:34:33.480
I'd be like, I'd argue going, no, I'm not.
link |
02:34:35.440
Because you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking at the Tic Tac, I've got
link |
02:34:39.000
a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing.
link |
02:34:42.420
So I've got, I know what I'm doing.
link |
02:34:44.680
I can look outside.
link |
02:34:45.680
I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking inside to cross check of what
link |
02:34:49.040
I'm seeing is in reality, what I'm doing.
link |
02:34:51.240
You actually, your brain gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information.
link |
02:34:56.460
You have to, you have like supervision, so you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting
link |
02:35:01.000
what the sensors, what you call an instruments are giving you.
link |
02:35:04.480
And that, that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that, that
link |
02:35:10.600
adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're saying.
link |
02:35:13.400
You'd be amazed at how good, so here's a, here's another example.
link |
02:35:15.860
So if we go out over the water, so there's no land in sight and we're going to fight.
link |
02:35:20.960
So when we fight, you know, two airplanes, we're going to dog fight.
link |
02:35:25.340
As an instructor and I was for all, most of my time, you have to come back and you have
link |
02:35:30.440
to recreate it.
link |
02:35:31.520
So we call it drawing arrows.
link |
02:35:33.720
So you have to recreate that stuff.
link |
02:35:37.360
So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would take off and say, all right,
link |
02:35:41.040
we're starting heading due east and I know where the sun is at because in the short couple
link |
02:35:47.020
minutes that we're going to fight, the sun's really not going to move much.
link |
02:35:49.160
It's going to be in a relative zone.
link |
02:35:50.160
I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say 195 degrees, right?
link |
02:35:56.740
So I'm starting going east and it's actually be down off my right hand side.
link |
02:36:00.800
So now I know as I'm fighting, cause in the water you don't have any reference.
link |
02:36:03.280
Like I pass land.
link |
02:36:04.280
I pass land.
link |
02:36:05.280
No, you don't.
link |
02:36:06.280
And you can't use clouds cause clouds do move.
link |
02:36:07.280
But you got to come back cause you go, here's where I started.
link |
02:36:09.560
And then you, when, as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355.
link |
02:36:14.280
And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relative.
link |
02:36:18.280
So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows so that you can come back
link |
02:36:22.440
and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened.
link |
02:36:27.000
And you get really, really good at that.
link |
02:36:28.840
So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six oclock?
link |
02:36:31.240
And he went around and he came up here.
link |
02:36:32.800
I go, because I'm trained to do all that.
link |
02:36:36.200
And I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do it.
link |
02:36:39.000
But usually it's, you memorize it all and you get done and then you, as soon as you're
link |
02:36:42.960
done, you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get set and you start writing
link |
02:36:45.480
all your notes down.
link |
02:36:46.480
Yeah.
link |
02:36:47.480
And you're writing it really fast on your card and you go out with a stack of cards
link |
02:36:50.040
and you stick the new one on your knee board card so you're ready to go and here's the
link |
02:36:52.360
next setup.
link |
02:36:53.360
It's kind of, it's in some way similar to what like at the, at the highest level chess
link |
02:37:00.440
players do.
link |
02:37:01.440
I mean, you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games.
link |
02:37:07.960
But the, the richness of the representation that they use in remembering like how the
link |
02:37:13.720
games evolved.
link |
02:37:15.240
It's not like it's much richer than the actual moves.
link |
02:37:19.640
It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all
link |
02:37:24.680
the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved.
link |
02:37:30.200
It's more like instinctual from years and years of experience.
link |
02:37:34.220
So they try to put it into words, but they really can't.
link |
02:37:37.240
It's just.
link |
02:37:38.240
I understand that.
link |
02:37:39.240
It's because for us, if we don't come back with anything, then there's no learning to
link |
02:37:42.560
be had.
link |
02:37:43.560
Right.
link |
02:37:44.560
Because the whole thing is the debrief when we get back and we talk about, that's really
link |
02:37:47.100
where the learning is.
link |
02:37:49.100
And it's the same thing if you want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off,
link |
02:37:52.600
you try and learn because you're remembering what you're doing.
link |
02:37:55.100
If you play against someone, I'm always a big place, play with someone better than you.
link |
02:37:59.100
That's how you learn.
link |
02:38:00.100
If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything.
link |
02:38:01.600
You're just learning that they're not good and you're better.
link |
02:38:04.120
When you challenge yourself against someone that is better than you, you learn.
link |
02:38:10.080
So I learned how to fight an airplane with, he's actually one of my best friends, we'll
link |
02:38:15.760
call him Tom.
link |
02:38:16.760
I won't give his call sign because I don't know what his name is.
link |
02:38:19.280
So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun.
link |
02:38:23.960
He was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that's the guy, the training officer is
link |
02:38:28.720
the main guy at Top Gun.
link |
02:38:30.960
So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun.
link |
02:38:32.440
So Tom, when I learned, because I had come out of A6 and we really don't fight because
link |
02:38:36.480
it was a bomber.
link |
02:38:37.960
So I get in F18s and I want to learn how to fight because it's a whole other side of the
link |
02:38:40.800
mission.
link |
02:38:41.800
It's the F and F fighter attack.
link |
02:38:42.800
The F18 is fighter attack.
link |
02:38:44.500
So I had to learn how to fight.
link |
02:38:46.400
So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach me how to
link |
02:38:49.760
do it.
link |
02:38:51.520
And he did.
link |
02:38:52.520
And I would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never
link |
02:38:56.080
been.
link |
02:38:57.080
And then I would go, well, I'm going to do this.
link |
02:38:58.080
And then he would destroy me and he would come back and go, here's why you don't do
link |
02:39:02.400
that.
link |
02:39:03.400
And then I would take that knowledge and I would put it in my little basket of tricks.
link |
02:39:06.960
And over time, because you don't, no one walks out into that world.
link |
02:39:09.880
I don't care how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman.
link |
02:39:13.960
I am it.
link |
02:39:14.960
No, it's a learning process.
link |
02:39:17.560
And so over all those years, you've gotten good.
link |
02:39:22.560
So what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac?
link |
02:39:29.560
Low.
link |
02:39:30.560
Zero.
link |
02:39:31.560
Well, I mean, I'm not zero.
link |
02:39:34.280
So maybe 90.
link |
02:39:35.280
Yeah, I am ninety nine point nine percent.
link |
02:39:37.920
So point one percent.
link |
02:39:39.200
My eyes deceive me.
link |
02:39:40.320
But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people.
link |
02:39:43.720
So the percentage is even lower.
link |
02:39:45.480
Yeah.
link |
02:39:46.480
Look up.
link |
02:39:47.480
Well, I don't find that particular debunking case that you said, but I'm glad you put it.
link |
02:39:51.200
You you said those words out loud.
link |
02:39:55.000
So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little
link |
02:40:00.320
bit more skeptical.
link |
02:40:03.040
So your eye account, I think, is the most fascinating story.
link |
02:40:06.120
And that I think that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists
link |
02:40:12.920
out there on so many levels, just like we said, an engineering level that maybe there's
link |
02:40:19.020
propulsion systems we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.
link |
02:40:24.860
So it's at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring.
link |
02:40:30.000
I just want to say that.
link |
02:40:31.000
But on the video side, it's like it's the videos for the Flir video, the go fast and
link |
02:40:43.800
the gimbal video.
link |
02:40:45.720
They are only interesting to me to me in the context of your story.
link |
02:40:53.080
Like without that, they're kind of low resolution.
link |
02:40:56.800
It's like it it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical.
link |
02:41:02.760
So this is where I'm coming from.
link |
02:41:04.320
Maybe you can convince me otherwise.
link |
02:41:06.040
But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that
link |
02:41:12.740
one of the most amazing video parts of the Flir video for people haven't seen it is at
link |
02:41:17.940
the end of it, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen.
link |
02:41:31.360
And what Mick West says is that, you know, Mick West, probably others, that the way to
link |
02:41:39.280
explain that is the tracking system.
link |
02:41:42.880
Like we said, this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object.
link |
02:41:48.680
The tracking loses it.
link |
02:41:50.760
And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking
link |
02:41:57.160
it.
link |
02:41:58.160
So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video.
link |
02:42:04.640
Looking at your face, you do not.
link |
02:42:07.440
So can you maybe comment to that to that debunking aspect?
link |
02:42:12.500
So it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system.
link |
02:42:18.240
No, for sure.
link |
02:42:19.240
And that's like me going because I'm a big Formula One fan.
link |
02:42:22.680
You know, that's like me going, oh, my God, Lewis, what were you doing?
link |
02:42:25.680
You could have done this with the car and you'd have won the race.
link |
02:42:27.720
You know, and Lewis Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two time
link |
02:42:30.880
ways, four time, four or five time world champion.
link |
02:42:33.600
But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.
link |
02:42:39.600
Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car.
link |
02:42:43.22