How are these interacting with our fighters, if they are?

How are they interacting with the weather

and their environment?

How are they interacting with each other?

So can we look at these

and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm?

Especially off the East Coast

where this is happening all the time with multiple objects.

The following is a conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves,

former Navy fighter pilot,

including Rose as a combat lead,

landing signals officer and rescue mission commander.

He and people in the squadron

detected UFOs on multiple occasions.

And he has been one of the few people

willing to speak publicly about these experiences

and about the importance of investigating these sightings,

especially for national security reasons.

Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering

from WPI and an interest in career roles

in advanced technology development,

including multi agent collaborative autonomy,

machine learning assisted air to air combat,

manned and unmanned teaming technologies,

and most recently,

development of materials through quantum simulation.

This is a Lex Freeman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors

in the description.

And now dear friends, here's Ryan Graves.

What did you think of the new Top Gun movie?

How accurate was it?

Let's start there.

I thought the flying was really accurate.

I thought the type of flying they did

and how they approach the actual mission,

of course had a lot of liberties,

but one thing that seems to be hard to capture

on these types of things are the chess game that's going on

while that type of flying is happening.

The chess game between like in a dog fight

between the pilots and the enemy

or between the different pilots?

I'll even speak to just that particular mission.

They flew there and for that particular mission,

it's kind of a chess game with your shelf

to get everything in place.

So what kind of flight they flew

was called a high threat scenario,

which means they have to ingress low

due to the surface to air threats,

the integrated air defense systems that are nearby.

And they have to ingress low and pop up

like we see in the movie.

And in that particular movie, that was a preplanned strike.

They knew exactly where they're going.

But there's a scenario where we have to operate

in that type of environment

and we don't know exactly where we're gonna strike

or we're gonna be adapting to real time targets.

And so in that scenario, you would have one

of those fighters down low like that

operating as a mission commander, as a forward air controller.

And he's out there calling shots,

joining on those other players

in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target.

So that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing.

Can you actually describe for people

who haven't seen the movie what the mission actually is?

Yeah.

What's involved in the mission?

So in this particular mission,

it's kind of what we would call a preplanned strike.

So there's a known location.

That's in a heavily defended area in the air crew.

In this case, I believe it was four F18s

on the initial package.

Their job was to ingress very low down a canyon

to stay out of the radar window

of the surf to air threats.

What does ingress mean?

Ingress means that they're going to be pushing

from a start location towards the target or the objective.

So there's an ingress portion of the mission

and an egress portion of the mission.

Oh, okay.

Like the entrance and the exit type of thing.

Got it.

But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit, right?

Because when we're entering someplace,

we have the option to enter.

But when we go drop a bomb on a location and we're exiting,

we don't have that luxury.

We don't have that option.

So it actually changes our tactics

and our aggression level.

Got it.

And so they were flying low to the ground

and then there's a surface to air missiles

that forced them to have to fly low.

Is that a realistic thing?

It is realistic.

So driving those aircraft in the clutter,

all radar systems or most I should say

are essentially line of sight.

And so they're going to be limited by the horizon

or any clutter out there.

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

and looking down towards that aircraft,

the clutter or all the objects such as trees and canyons

can have effect on radar systems.

And so it can be a type of camouflage.

So that's a camouflage for the radar.

But what about the surface to air missile?

Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles

as flies so low, like fly I guess below their level?

As far as I know, you can fly under any radar right now.

We don't have necessarily radars

that can look through anything.

So there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself.

But with a larger number of assets

and distributed communication networks,

where those radars are looking,

makes all the difference.

And I said they're ingressing pass and I ads

and that's an integrated air defense system.

And that linking of air defense systems

is what makes it so hard, so complicated

is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated

from each other so that if you took out the target

that was shooting at you, it still has ability

to intercept you from another radar location.

So it's distributed and it's stronger that way.

You mean the surface to air missiles?

Like it's a distributed system

and that if you take out one,

they're still able to sort of integrate information

about your location and strike at you.

Correct.

And there's a lot of complication that can go,

once we start thinking about distributed systems like that

and the ability to self heal and repair

and adapt to losses, it's an interesting area.

Are you responsible for thinking about that

when you're flying an airplane?

To some degree, when we ingress to an area like that,

we're presented with information about targets,

air to air or air to surface or surface to air, I should say.

And we can essentially see where essentially

the danger zone, if you will, is located.

And so essentially we would stay out of that.

And so having a full picture of the environment

is extremely important because at the end of the day,

if we go in that circle, we can die pretty quickly.

So it's absolutely crucial.

So there's regions that have higher and lower danger

based on your understanding of the actual,

whatever the surface to air missiles systems are.

So you can kind of know.

That's interesting.

I wonder how automated that could be too,

especially when you don't know.

It seems like in the movie,

they knew the location of everything.

I imagine that's less known in most cases.

And also a lot of those systems might be

a little bit more ghetto if I can use that technical term.

Like I've gotten ad hoc maybe is the,

I don't know.

But having just recently visited Ukraine

and seen a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought,

there's a lot of improvised type of systems.

So you take high tech, like advanced technology,

but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it

is very improvised and ad hoc

and is responding to the uncertainty in the dynamic

environment.

And so from an enemy perspective or whoever's trying to deal

with that kind of system, it's hard to figure it out

because it's like me, I played tennis for a long time

and it's always easier to play.

This is true for all sports.

Play tennis against a good tennis player

versus a crappy tennis player.

Because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty.

And that's really difficult to deal with.

It seemed like in the movie,

the systems were really well organized.

And so you could plan.

And there was a very nice ravine

that went right down the middle of them.

That's how movies work, isn't it?

Yeah.

But no, I absolutely agree.

So what you say is a very good point.

And if we were to take a chunk of airspace

and break it up into little bits,

there'd be places that are better to fly

or less good to fly.

And we are seeing that now

with what they call manned on man teaming,

we see tactical aircraft

or some type of aircraft or platform

that's being automated.

And it's not being automated in traditional sense

where people think aircrew are flying them around

to conduct missions,

but it's very high level objective orientated

mission planning that allows the aircrew

to act more as a mission commander

versus having to just pick the right assets

or fly them around or manipulate them somewhat physically.

So actually going back to the chess thing,

can you elaborate on what you mean

as playing a game of chess with yourself?

What's, when you're flying that mission,

what exactly do you mean by that?

Well, there's a few people

you're usually fighting against in the air.

You know, there's the bad guys

and then there's physics and mother nature, right?

So when we're down at about a hundred feet,

it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot

and it's a chess game for the WISO

to process the information he needs

and then communicate it to all those other aircraft

that were flying around to ensure

that they're putting their weapons on the right target.

What's the WISO?

WISO is a weapon systems officer.

He's a backseater who is not a pilot,

but they're responsible for radar manipulation

and communications and weapons appointments

of certain natures.

So the chess game is against physics,

against the enemy.

Time.

Time.

What about your own psychology, fear, uncertainty?

No.

No, there's no time for that type of self reflection

while we're flying.

I wanna get to that,

but I don't wanna forget the point that you made

about increased randomness being a tactical advantage.

You know, as you mentioned,

you can introduce autonomy in there

and when you bring autonomy in there

and my expectation would be

as we bring different abilities and machine learning

as we gather more data,

we're gonna be able to bring the tactical environment

around that jet.

The war space that it goes into

will almost be at a stochastic level

from the enemy's perspective

where it'll almost seem like

every tactical environment they go in

will be random and yet very deadly

because the system is providing

a new tactical solution essentially

for that particular scenario

instead of just training two particular tactics

that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal, right?

But not necessarily the most lethal

because they have to be trainable.

But if we can introduce AI into that

and to have a level of randomness

or at least the appearance of randomness

due to the complexity,

I would consider it like a stochastic tactical advantage

because even our own blue fighters

wouldn't be able to engage in that fight

because it would be unsafe essentially for anything else.

And I think that's where we have to drive to

because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse cat game

about who's tactics and who knows what.

But if knowledge is no longer a factor,

it's gonna make things a lot different.

That's really interesting, so out of the many things

that are part of your expertise, your journey,

you're also working on autonomous and semi autonomous systems,

the use of AI, machine learning,

and man to man teaming, all that kind of stuff.

We'll talk about it, but you're saying

sort of when people think about the use of AI in war,

in military systems, they think about like

computer vision for perception

or processing of sensor information

in order to extract from it actionable knowledge

kind of thing, but you're saying you could also use it

to generate randomness that's difficult to work with

in like a game theoretic way.

Like it's difficult for human operators to respond to.

Exactly.

That's really interesting.

Okay, so back to Tom Cruise and Top Gun.

What about the dog fighting?

What aspects of that were accurate?

So dog fighting is kind of an interesting conversation

because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set

nowadays by traditional standards

because the ranges with which we engage

and deploy weapons are very significant.

And so if we're in a scenario, we're in a dog fight like that,

a lot of things have probably gone wrong, right?

And that's kind of how this mission was set up, right?

It was a no win type scenario, most likely.

And so for a dog fight, the aircraft size

and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it

so it's not very theatrical, right?

The aircraft looks small and while it's intense

with the systems I have and the sensors

and what I'm feeling and all that,

we've done it and we've done it, right?

We take video of that and it's just like a blue sky

and you see a little dot out there.

So not very interesting.

And so anytime it really looks interesting

in dog fight arena, that's most likely a fiction

because we really only get close for a millisecond

as we're dipping past each other at the merge.

You're breaking my heart, right?

I know, I'm sorry.

You're breaking my heart.

No, I understand.

You can go out and have fun, but in a dog fight specifically.

Maybe that was more common in the earlier wars of World War II

and before that, where the, is it due to the range

and the effectiveness of the weapons systems involved?

Correct, and the accuracy of the targeting systems at range.

But there's also a train of thought

that hasn't necessarily been tested out yet,

which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare,

EW and or unmanned assets, the battle space may get so complex

and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky

or wasted such that you're going to be in close

with either IR missiles or guns.

If it's a no kidding, you know, must defend type scenario.

First of all, what's electronic warfare?

You know, it's basically trying to get control

of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest

of whatever operation is going on.

So in the tactical environment,

a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar

or can we deceive the missile or just, you know, stop their guide

and things of that nature.

Man, it's a battle in the space of information,

of digital information.

Yeah, well, F 22 and F 35, right?

F 22 is a big expensive aircraft

and it was made to be a great fighter.

But the F 35 is not as great of a fighter,

but it's an electronic warfare

and mission commander platform of the future

where information is what's going to win the war

instead of the best dogfighter.

And so it's interesting dichotomy there.

What's the best airplane ever made, fighter jet ever made?

I know the aviators in the audience

are going to hate my answer

because they're going to want that sexy, you know,

muscly F 14 Tomcat type fighter

or maybe P 51 type aircraft.

The F 35 is maybe not the best dogfighter,

but it doesn't have to get in a dogfight, right?

It's like how you'd be the best knife fighters

not getting a knife fight sometimes.

Locky Martin F 35 Lightning II.

It looks pretty sexy.

There's two real strengths you can have as a fighter.

You can have the ability to kind of outmuscle your fighter,

your opponent and beat them on Gs and power

and rate around on them.

And then there's the other side of that,

which is you can be overly maneuverable.

You can bleed energy quickly.

And that's what the F 18 was good at

because it had to be heavier to land on aircraft carrier.

We had to give it extra bulk,

but it also needs special mechanisms

to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier.

And so it made it very maneuverable.

And what that leads to a lot of times,

the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight,

which is very good, but if you do make that sharp turn,

you're going to bleed a lot of your energy away

and be more susceptible for follow on shots

if that one's less susceptible.

And so there's just kind of aggression,

game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting.

Where does the F 35 land on that spectrum?

The F 35 land somewhere behind the F 22s.

So there'll probably be a row of F 22s or F 18s

and F 35 will be out back,

but it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare

that's happening in front of you.

Is it one of the more expensive planes

because of all the stuff on it?

It certainly is, yeah.

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

So maybe can you say what are the different speeds?

Accelerations feel like Mach 1, 2, 3, or hypersonic?

Have you ever flown hypersonic?

No.

How tough does it get?

I'm just going to call out the BS of ejecting at Mach 10,

just for the record, because in the movie,

there's been, I think, at least one ejection that was supersonic.

And I'll just say, it was not pretty, but he survived.

So there's going to have to be some interesting mechanisms

to eject successfully at Mach 10,

but I'll digress on that for the moment.

Yeah, that seemed very strange.

And he just walked away from it.

But anyway, so, you know...

He seemed disheveled.

Okay, but it's Tom Cruise.

You know, it's like Chuck Norris or something.

Indestructible, yeah.

Indestructible.

That's what I was in age.

Yeah.

But anyway, so what's interesting to say about the experience

of it as you go up?

Does it get more and more difficult?

In the end of the day, crossing the soundbearer is much like

crossing the speed limit on the highway.

You don't really notice anything.

To cross that, at least in F18,

because we have a lot more weight than most fighters,

is typically we'll do that in a descent.

And we'll do that full afterburner,

just dumping gas into the engine.

And so that'll get us over as fast as I think I've gone

with about 1.28.

But what's interesting, people realize,

is that if I take that throttle and I'm an afterburner

and I just bring it back to mill,

which is full power, just not afterburner,

the deceleration is so strong due to the air friction

that it throw you forward in your straps.

Almost, you know, I would say, you know,

maybe like 70% as strong almost as trapping on the boat.

It's pretty strong.

So it's almost like reverse car crashes

for the deceleration.

So the acceleration, you know, is usually kind of slow

and you don't feel anything, of course,

when you're crossing through it,

but the deceleration is pretty violent.

The deceleration is violent, huh?

Okay.

But is there a fundamental difference between like Mach 1

and Hypersonic, Mach 5, and so on?

Does it require like super special training?

And is that something that's used often in warfare

or is it not really that necessary?

No.

So Hypersonic human flight, if it exists,

it's not something that's employed tactically

in any sense right now that I'm aware of.

So, you know, I think of Hypersonic technology,

I think of missiles and weapons systems

and delivery platform.

I don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily.

I can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft, perhaps,

but those would be more efficient, very long, long range.

I imagine the acceleration would be kind of gentle, honestly.

The thing you experience is the acceleration

on the actual speed.

There's been just a small tangent,

a lot of discussion about Hypersonic nuclear weapons,

like missiles from, you know, Russia bragging about that.

Is this something that's a significant concern

or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapons systems?

Hypersonics, I do think, pose a challenge for our detection systems

because there are, you know,

there are design considerations in these sensor systems,

as always, right?

And when you build them and the technology progresses

to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology,

you know, there's a problem.

But with the, you know, the all domain

data linking capabilities we have,

it's less of, you know, it's a more of an integrated picture, I'll say.

And so the Hypersonics are really what it is,

is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem?

You're just shortening the time available to do that.

We call it something like that the kill chain, right?

It's from locating a target and identifying it

and, you know, essentially authorizing its destruction

by whatever means employing and then actually following up

to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense, right?

Does it need another reattack, something of that nature?

And so there's an old dogfighting framework you could call it.

It's called the Udalloop.

It kind of made its way in the engineering of business now,

but the old Observe Orientate Decide Act was initially a fighter mechanism

in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent

and break it up so that he can't process his kill chain on you.

And so Hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows

of opportunity to react to that.

I wanted to, like, how much do you have to shorten it

in order for the defense systems not to work anymore?

It seems like, you know, I'm both often horrified

by the thought of nuclear war,

but at the same time wonder what that looks like.

When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems,

I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon

can reach the United States by missile with the defense systems.

But then again, I also understand that these are extremely complicated systems,

the amount of integration required,

and because you're not using them,

there could be, you know, there's like an intern somewhere

that, like, forgot to update the code,

the Fortran code that, like, is going to make the difference.

Because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test,

which is really scary.

Of course, the systems are probably incredible

if they could be tested,

but because they can't be really thoroughly tested

in an actual attack, I wonder.

I guess one assumption there would be that

these Hypersonic missiles would only be launched

in the case of an attack.

It'd be interesting if there were other Hypersonic objects

that we could use to flex those systems.

Another thing that actually happened,

I just have a million questions I want to ask you.

It's fascinating to me.

Is there's a bird strike on the plane?

Does that happen often?

Yeah, it's a serious issue.

It damaged the engine,

and they made it seem like it's a serious, exactly a serious issue.

I've hit birds.

I know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face

through the cockpit, right?

Shattered the cockpit, knocked them out.

Actually, I don't know personally about this story.

I know from the command I was at,

and I believe the backseater had to punch out

and punch them both out because he was unconscious

in the front seat from the bird.

It can kill you from hitting you.

It's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour.

It can take out an engine very easily.

Every airport I've flown at in the Navy,

I've had to check the bird condition, if you will,

to see how many birds.

We've had to cancel flights because there's too many of them

around the airport.

Some airports even have bird radars, military airports.

Is there systems that monitor the bird condition?

There is, yeah.

There's actual radar systems,

and you can go in the certain bases,

you have to call up and they'll tell you what it is for the day

or for that hour,

and other ones have it in their weather report

that goes out with the radio.

What are some technological solutions to this?

Or is this just because it's a low probability event,

there's no real solution for it?

I would say it's not a low probability event.

This is happening a lot.

Although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common,

or I'll say a catastrophic hit,

either a near miss or a hit,

or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it,

it's pretty common.

It seems stressful.

It is.

It's so common in fact that we know that you never want to go under a bird

if you see it in front of you.

You always want to try to go over it

because what they'll do immediately if they see you

and you startle them is they'll bring their wings in

and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path.

It's interesting.

I didn't know they did that,

but if you try to go under them,

they're going to be dropping into you.

So you typically want to try to go above them.

Is this something you can train for or no?

Is this one of those things you have to really experience?

It's a skill set that you somewhat train for

in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense, right?

Being able to react to your environment very quickly

and make decisions quickly.

Is that one of the more absurd things,

challenges you have to deal with in flying?

Is there other things sort of maybe weather conditions,

like harsh weather conditions?

Is there something that we maybe don't often think about

in terms of the challenges of flying?

Birds in a way aren't a ridiculous threat for us.

It's a safety threat that anything physical in the air

is something that we really have to be careful about,

whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us

or whether it's a turkey vulture at 2,000 feet

or a flock of 5,000 birds like at the runway,

we have to wave off, you know?

And although there are low probability,

a lot of bases will have like actual environmental

protecting agency employees that are responsible

for safely removing migratory birds or different animals

that may be in the runways or flying about.

Wow, I didn't know what a turkey vulture is

and it really does look like a mix between a vulture and a turkey.

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

In that movie, who was the enemy nation?

Was it, I mean, I guess they were implying it's Iran or was it Russia?

I didn't think they were implying any particular nation state, frankly.

I think they did a somewhat decent job of having some ambiguous

5th generation fighters, the location and the stockpile.

I get like how the story kind of insinuates certain things,

but they seem to do a good job of not having anything

directly pointing to another nation, which I thought was, you know, the good move.

I enjoy these type of movies as an aviator and, you know, as an American, right?

Because it's a feel good movie, but, you know, we shouldn't be celebrating

going to war with any particular country, you know, China, Russia,

wherever may have these weapons. It's fun to watch, but it would be

an incredibly serious event to be employing these weapons.

Yeah, and we'll talk about war in general.

Because yeah, it's the movies kind of celebrating the human side of things

and also the incredible technology involved, but there's also the cost of war

and the seriousness of war and the suffering involved with war,

not just in the fighting, but in the death of civilians and all those kinds of things.

Well, you were a Navy pilot. Let's talk a little bit more seriously about this.

And you were twice deployed in the Middle East, flying the FAA 18F Super Hornet.

Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a Navy pilot?

Sure. So I joined the Navy in 2009, right after college.

I went to, essentially, the officer boot camp, officer candidate school.

I applied as a pilot and I got in as a pilot.

That was advantage of going that way is that I essentially choose what I wanted

and if I got in great, if not, I didn't get stuck doing something else.

So you knew you wanted to be a pilot?

I did. I joined. I went through my initial training.

I went through primary flight training that all aviators go through.

And I did well enough that, you know, one of the first lessons I teach you in the Navy is that,

you know, you can have a great career in the Navy and you can, you know,

see the world and do what you want.

But at the end of the day, it's all about the needs of the Navy and what they need.

So, you know, they may not have the platform you like or, you know,

you may not necessarily get to choose your own adventure here.

But I was lucky enough that there was one jet slot in my class

and I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to get it.

So it was a jet slot.

So yeah, what that means is that I was assigned actually a tail hook at that point,

which meant I would go trained to fly aircraft that land on aircraft carriers.

And there's essentially three aircraft that do that at the time.

There's the F18 and the E2 and the C2.

C2 is kind of like the mail truck for the boat.

E2 is one of the big radar dish on top.

And then there's all the F18s.

So E2's comms the C2 mail truck?

Yeah.

C2 basically goes to the mail.

They back on the shore and they're the ones that bring supplies to the ship via air and people.

Sorry if I missed it.

Is it a plane or is it a helicopter?

It's a plane.

Okay.

All right.

And the F18 is a fighter jet?

Correct.

Okay.

So I select a tail hook, which meant I could get one of those other ones,

but 80% of them are so are jets.

So I was in a good spot at that point.

And that's when I went to Merde, Mississippi to fly my first jet,

which was the T45 Gauzhawk.

Cool.

So what kind of plane is that?

Is that what you were doing your training on?

That's the jet aircraft you get in before you actually go to the F18.

It is carrier capable.

So go to the boat for the first time in it during the day,

drop fake bombs, do dog fighting, low levels, formation, flying day and night.

Oh, it's a pretty plane.

Yeah.

And it looks like a cone so that no one hits it.

Okay.

So that's usually not used for fighting.

It's used for training.

It's used for training how to fight.

Got it.

So what was that like?

Was that the first time you were sort of really getting into it?

Yeah.

So before that, it was a 600 horsepower prop plane.

Going from that to the T45 is one of like the biggest jumps in power

and like Navy, you know, machine operation.

How much horsepower does the T45 have approximately?

Like 15,000 or so.

So it's a huge jump from 600 you said horsepower about.

Cool.

So it's a big, big leap.

But it's a jet, you know, so it performs differently.

It's faster, right?

And what that means is not just because it's faster,

your whole mind needs to be faster.

Everything happens faster in the air now, right?

Yeah.

Those comms happen faster.

Your landing gear has to come up faster.

Everything just happens faster in a jet.

And so it's a big jump.

And I'll never forget going on my first flight in that aircraft,

it was a formation flight for someone else.

And I was just in the back watching and there was an instructor in the flight.

And so what that means is instructors in a single aircraft

and then there's three or four other aircraft

and they're learning how to do joins.

They're learning how to fly in formation.

And as a new student in the back, it's amazing, right?

Because, you know, photo op time and all this,

like I'm seeing aircraft up close for the first time.

It's awesome.

And on the way back, we couldn't get our landing gear down.

Ironically.

So it, you know, to make a long story short,

because it's overall not that exciting.

We couldn't get the gear down.

We actually went to go do a control ejection to the target area

where that is about 15, 20 miles to the north of the base.

Wait, did you just say that's not that exciting?

Well, because that to me is pretty exciting.

I mean, how, first of all, I mean, that must be terrifying.

Like early on in your careers, I haven't seen those things.

That, yeah, like how often does that kind of thing happen?

More than you would think.

More than you would think.

There was no significant panic.

This is like this understood.

This is what has to be done in this case.

I think I was probably just too dumb to realize the significance of it,

because as a new student, you know, not really appreciating,

you know, just what is ahead of me if we are rejecting.

But at the time it was more, it was just like rote, right?

Because I was back there and then I went from an observer mode to a,

I'm going to provide you the help that I can provide you as member of this crew,

you know, mode.

And so it was less about, you know, on this 20 mile trip and thinking about my,

how vulnerable I am, you know, we're going through checklists,

we're talking to people, we're getting ready.

So no, it wasn't, it wasn't fearful.

And the whole time we were doing one of these to try to get the gear down.

So we're unloading the jet and then loading it back to try to get the gear out with a stick.

And it came down.

It came down halfway there, just on its own.

So it came back around and we did like a safety trap in case there was a problem with the gear.

That was my first flight, you know, a little bit of serendipity,

but I'm going to fast forward a bit and I went back to the squadron as an instructor about five or six years later.

And I was an aviation safety officer at this point, which meant I was responsible for investigating mishaps.

And a, a student went in and he, he went in the back seat of a form flight,

just like the one I went on, and he went out and he ended up ejecting on that flight.

Zack's same type of flight. They went out and they had a runaway trim scenario and it caused the aircraft to just invert itself almost 180 degrees

at about 600 feet over the ground and they punched out just slightly outside the ejection window at about 300 or 400 feet or so,

but they were completely fine.

So, you know, and then about two months later, we had another ejection about three months after that, we had another ejection.

So, unfortunately, you know, it can, it can be more common than people think.

What does it feel like to get ejected?

Thankfully, I don't know. I can describe it to you.

I can tell you what it's like from what I've heard, but I truly think it's one of those things that you just don't understand until it happens.

It's like instantaneous about 250 Gs, which is only possible because of inertia in our blood.

So, you can actually get like 250, 300 Gs for like a few milliseconds and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 Gs to get you away from the vehicle itself.

And so, you know, you may lose consciousness if you do, you know, who knows where you wake up.

You know, you could be in a tree, you could still be falling, you can be in the water.

The physics of that is fascinating how to eject safely.

Do you know the story about how that was tested at all?

I don't know the full story, but there was an airport.

I'm guessing nobody knows the full story. It's probably a lot of shady stuff going on.

But you mean like in early, early days or?

They took a flight dock up to a rocket sled and just see how much their body could take it.

And he turned a lot of his body into mush in the process of getting that science done, but he saved a lot of lives.

People used to be tougher back in the day.

That's how science used to be done.

So how did your training continue?

So take me farther through your career as you work towards graduating towards the F18s.

So in VT9, where I was a student, there's two phases.

There's an intermediate and advanced.

Intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft.

And at that point, you truly hear, all right, you're going jets now,

or you're going to go one of the other aircraft that landed on the aircraft carrier.

I was told I was going jets at that point.

And then we go into same squadron, same aircraft, same instructors, but it's called advanced now.

And now we're learning how to dogfight for the first time.

We're doing what we call tactical formation, which is just like aggressive position keeping.

We are doing dogfighting in low levels and all sorts of great stuff.

So it's really that first introduction to that tactical environment and putting,

really putting Gs on the jet and on your body and maneuvering.

Is that like tactical formation is collaborating with other fighter jets a part of that?

It is.

So flying in, that's what you mean by formation.

So literally having an awareness.

Is this done for you or are you as a human supposed to understand like where you are in the formation,

how to maintain formation, all that kind of stuff?

Yeah.

Is it done autonomously or manually?

There's a great autonomy point on the end of this I've thought about.

But what we do, it's all manual, so I'm looking at his wing and I'm looking at different visual checkpoints

that form like a triangle, like an equal out triangle essentially.

And then as that triangle is no longer equal, I can tell my relative position against that aircraft.

That's really cool.

And so that's what I'm staring at first, sometimes hours on end, several feet away,

doing one of these from in the weather.

That's all it is.

So you get, it's almost like, is it peripheral vision or is it?

No, we're staring directly at it.

The peripheral is going on my stuff, right?

My sensors and all my instruments.

And so he is my gyroscope at that point, right?

Wow.

You're flying not looking straight.

Correct.

I'm flying like this for hours.

It can hurt your neck.

We don't like doing this as much and I don't think it's just me, right?

It's a weird thing where when you're like this,

it's actually harder to fly formation slightly than here because being in line of your hand movements

and of the aircraft somehow has an effect on our ability to be more precise and comfortable

and strange.

Sure.

But so there's a symmetry to the formation usually.

So one of the people on the other side really don't like being on that side.

Who gets like the short straw?

How do you decide which side of the formation you are?

The good question too, because there's kind of rank in some sense.

So if it's a four person formation, right?

You have the division lead who's qualified to lead a whole division,

but maybe the other ones aren't.

And he has a dash two and that's his wingman essentially.

And then in a division, there's two other aircraft.

And then you have another senior flight leader.

That's the dash three position.

And then you have dash four, the last one.

And if you are all lined up on one side like fingertip, one, two, three, four,

that dash four guy is going to be at the end of that whip.

So if you're flying formation, each one's making movements relative to the lead.

Dash four is kind of, you know, at the end of that error, you know,

and so his movements are kind of like a whip.

It's very difficult to fly in that position and close.

Can you elaborate?

Is it because of the air?

The air dynamics?

So what's a whip?

If this is a flight lead and this is dash two,

flight lead is rock steady and just doing this thing.

Flight two is going to be working that triangle moving a little bit, right?

And he has a small error bubble that he's doing his best to stay.

And then, but dash three is flying off dash two.

And so his error bubble is dash twos plus his own.

So it gets more and more stressful as you get farther out.

It's difficult, yeah.

Okay.

What's the experience of that staring for long periods of time

and trying to maintain formation?

How stressful is that?

Because like, you know, we're doing that when we drive staying in lane

and that becomes, after you get pretty good at it, it becomes somewhat,

it's still stressful, which actually surprisingly stressful.

When you look at like lane keeping systems,

they actually relieve that stress somehow and it's actually creates

a much more pleasant experience while you're still able to maintain

situational awareness and like stay awake, which is really interesting.

Like, I don't think people realize how stressful it is to lane keep when they drive.

So this is even more stressful.

So are you, do you think about that?

Or is this, yeah, I guess how stressful is it from a psychology perspective?

It's very stressful.

So I taught students how to do this as well.

And so at our feet, we have two rudders.

And if I'm flying off of a flight lead over here,

what you'll find a lot of times is you'll be flying,

or like if I'm the instructor and the student's flying,

I'll start to notice that he's having a harder and harder time keeping position.

What I'll notice typically is he's locked out his leg.

The lock out the leg that's closest to the aircraft they're flying against

and push on the rudder subconsciously,

because their whole body's trying to get away from the aircraft because they're so uncomfortable being close to it.

And so I'll tell them, I can fix their form with just a couple words.

I'll say, wiggle your toes.

And they'll wiggle their toes and they'll loosen all the muscles in their legs

because they realize they've been locked up and their formation flying will get a lot better.

And so, you know, there's a lot of stress associated with that.

There's some interesting psychological or visual issues such as vertigo as you're flying.

So if you're flying with him and then you fly right into a cloud, right?

That's when it's very stressful because you have to be very close in order to maintain visual.

You might be on thunderstorm, right?

And so you have to be very tight.

You might start raining and then he's turning, but you might not even know that.

You might not even be able to see that turn.

And so all of a sudden you might look while you're in a turn thinking you were straight and level

and you look just maybe back at your instruments very quick

and you realize you're like in a 30 degree turn.

And your whole concept of where you are in the world starts getting very confused.

And you immediately get this sense of, it's weird.

Like I look at the HUD and it feels, all my senses are telling me it's spinning, but it's not, you know?

And so I have to trust my instruments even though it feels like it's spinning.

And the same thing can happen when you're flying formation off of someone

and it can be very dangerous and disorientating.

The point is to try to regain awareness by trusting the instruments.

Like distrust all your human senses and just use the instruments to rebuild situational awareness.

Not in this particular case because our situational awareness is predicated off of our flight lead.

So in a sense, I'm just trusting his movements.

And so he's my gyroscope, but you're absolutely right.

And if I was by myself, I would trust my instruments,

but I can't just stop flying form and trust my instruments because now I'm going to hit him.

So he's my reference.

So the instruments are not helping you significantly with his positioning?

Not. It's all complete manual.

So is there a future where some of that is autonomous?

Yeah. And I've thought about automating that flight regime.

But when I started thinking about it, I realized that all the formation keeping that we do

is designed to enhance the aviators ability to maintain sight, right?

So we fly very tight formations so that we can go in weather and to reduce groups of traffic coming into the boat.

We fly in one particular position so that all of the flight crew can look down the line and see the flight lead.

So everything has to do with the two aircrew visually maintaining sight of each other and defending each other, right?

In a combat spread, I might be looking three miles away from him flying formation, directly beam,

and looking around to make sure nothing's there.

So as I was looking into automating this process, I thought, well, you know,

sure, it's easy to get a bunch of aircraft to fly in formation off each other, right?

It's trivial, but why? You know, what is the best formation? Why are they doing that?

And that opened up a much more interesting regime of operations and flight mechanics.

And that's when we get back to that kind of stochastic mindset where we can bring in aircraft close

to do some type of normal flying or reduce congestion around airports.

But when we consider flying in a formation and tactical environment,

we can be much more effective with non traditional formation keeping or perhaps no formation keeping perhaps.

So autonomy used for formation keeping, not for convenience, but for the introduction of randomness that's hard to...

Like to a real time mission planner, yeah.

And then that's where you also have some human modifications.

So it's like unmanned teaming enters that picture.

So you use some of the human intuition and adjustment of this formation.

The formation itself has some uncertainty.

I mean, it's such an interesting dance. I think that is the most fascinating application

of artificial intelligence is when it's human AI collaboration that that semi autonomous dance

that you see in the semi autonomous vehicle systems in terms of cars being driving,

but also in the safety critical situation of an airplane of a fighter jet,

especially when you're flying fast. I mean, in a split second you have to make all these kinds of decisions

and it feels like an AI system can do as much harm as it can help.

And so to get that right is a really fascinating challenge.

One of the challenges too isn't just the algorithms of the autonomy itself,

how it senses the environment.

That of course is going to be what all these decisions are based off of.

And that's a challenge in this type of environment.

I ask, so F 18, what's it like to fly a fighter jet as best?

I mean, what to you is beautiful, powerful?

What do you love about the experience of flying?

For me, you know, and I think I'm an outlier bit.

It wasn't necessarily the flying itself, right?

It wasn't necessarily the soaring over the clouds and, you know,

looking down at the earth from upside down, you know, I came to love that.

But it wasn't necessarily the passion that drove me there.

I just had no exposure to that.

The only exposure I had was reading and going in the woods and science fiction and all that.

And so, you know, what seemed to kind of drive me towards that was just a desire

to really be operating as close to what I thought was the edge of technology or science.

And that's the path that I chose to try to get close to that.

I thought that being in a fighter jet and, you know,

all the tools and the technology and the knowledge and the challenges

and the, you know, failures and victories that would come with that

just seemed like something that I wanted to be a part of.

And it wasn't necessarily about the flying, but it was about the challenge.

And like I said, as a person from a small town, you know,

small high school being able to get my hands, you know,

or even just near something of such technological significance

was kind of empowering for me.

And that's kind of what bore the love of flight from there, you know,

becoming, you know, having some level of mastery in that aircraft.

It really feels like an extension of your body.

And once I got there, then the kind of the love of flying kind of followed.

So you sort of, one is the man mastery over the machine.

And second is the machine is like the greatest thing that humans have ever created, arguably.

The things that Lockheed Martin and others have built.

I mean, the engineering in that, it's, however you feel about war,

which is one of the sad things about human civilization is war inspires

the engineering of tools that are incredible.

And it's like, maybe without war, if we look at human history,

we would not build some of the incredible things we built.

So in order to win wars, to stop wars, we build these incredible systems

that perhaps propagate war.

And that's another discussion I'll ask you about.

But this, do you, this is like, this is a chance to experience

the greatest engineering humans have ever been able to do.

Like similar, I suppose, that astronauts feel like when they're flying.

And I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to take that route.

I was going to apply to test pilot school.

It just didn't work out for me.

I ended up having a broken foot during my window.

But long story short, I ended up after my time in my fleet squadron

and we can get back to the rest of the timeline if you want.

But I went to be an instructor pilot instead, right?

And then, you know, I was talking about this with a squadron mate earlier today

about how, you know, I certainly wouldn't be talking with Lex today

if I ended up going to test pilot school.

I never would have had the, maybe recklessness, I don't know,

but the willingness to have a conversation about UAP while I was, you know,

that led me to the decision to get out once I went there.

And it kind of enabled me to talk about UAP more publicly.

And if I stayed in the Navy, then I don't think that would have happened.

I wouldn't have been able to if I went that route.

Well, as a small tangent, do you hope to travel to Mars one day?

Do you think you'll step foot on Mars one day?

If you asked me that five years ago, I would have said yes, I want to.

In fact, I would like to die on Mars.

Now, now I have some hesitations and I have some hesitations

because I'm hopeful and optimistic.

And I think that, you know, I think that we are truly like on the brink of a very

wide technological revolution that's going to kind of move us,

how we used to move information and data in this last century.

We're going to be manipulating and managing matter in that next century.

And so I think that, I think our reach as humans, as humans,

they're going to get a lot wider, a lot faster than people may realize,

or at least.

Wait, are you getting like super ambitious beyond Mars?

Is that what you're saying?

Well, I mean.

Like Mars seems kind of boring.

I want to go beyond that.

Do you mean the reach of humanity across all kinds of technologies,

or do you mean literally across space?

Across space, you know.

So, you know, we're going to be, I think that as artificial intelligence

and machine learning start broaching further into the topic of science,

the area of science, and we start working through new physics,

we start working through, or I should say, past the Einsteinian frameworks

as we kind of get a better idea of what space time is or isn't.

We may have, we may find, you know, answers that we didn't know

that we were looking for, and we may have more opportunity.

And I'm not saying this is something I'm, you know,

betting the farm on, of course, but maybe, maybe that's a road

I want to explore on Earth instead of on Mars.

Maybe there's technology that can be brought to bear with new science

and harder engineering that is a road that doesn't go past Mars

to get outside the solar system.

So there are different ways to explore the universe

than the traditional rocket systems.

If we can continue sort of your journey,

you said that you were attracted to the incredibly advanced technologies

of the F20, of the F18s, and just the fighter jets in general.

Let me ask another question, which seems incredibly difficult to do,

which is landing on a carrier or taking off from a carrier

and landing on a carrier.

So what's that like?

What are the challenges of that?

Taking off is pretty easy.

It's procedurally somewhat complex,

where there's a lot of moving parts, almost like a clock, you know.

You're almost on a pocket watch, so it's a fence,

and you're a part of the machinery.

And so long as you press the right buttons

and do the right things, then you go shooting off the front.

So there's like a checklist to follow,

and there's several people involved in that checklist,

and you just got to follow the checklist correctly.

Essentially, yep.

There's lots of ways to screw it up,

but you'll know how to screw it up.

But landing on the back of the boat is a whole different animal.

There's a lot more variables.

There's essentially one or two people responsible for the success of that.

The landing signal officer, who actually represents a team

of specially trained aviators who are responsible

for helping that aviator land on the boat.

And the pilot himself.

And it is a hard task to actually fly precisely enough to be good at it.

So to fly, quote, unquote, the perfect pass,

you essentially have to fly your head through a one foot by one foot box.

That's essentially the target you're shooting for.

Plus or minus, probably about five knots on airspeed,

although we don't really judge it by airspeed.

It's something called angle of attack,

but generally, you know, pretty tight parameters there.

And you can do everything perfect and still fail, right?

So when we go to touchdown, we immediately bring the power up

and we rotate as if we were bouncing off the deck.

And if we catch it, then we slow down.

And then someone tells us to bring the power back, which we do.

We don't do it on our own because it's such a violent experience.

You can think you're trapped or not or something breaks

and you bring your throttle back.

That's a very serious thing.

It happened best of us.

You know, I've done it once.

When I first got to the squadron, it's called ease guns land.

And so, you know, I came in the boat and I brought the power.

I cracked the power back a little bit before I've been told to

or that my aircraft had finished settling in.

And that was a big faux pas, right?

So especially as a new guy.

So it's a very serious business.

There's a lot of eyes on you and there's a lot of ways to screw it up.

But the physical, you know, rush of like having a great pass

and then like there's just a like the crash of into the boat

and all that, the physical sensation from it.

You know, when everything's going great, you know,

at the top of the world, it's a great feeling.

How much of it is feel?

How much of it is instruments?

How much is other people just doing the work for you,

catching you as long as you do everything right?

There's a few systems we use.

One is called the ball.

And the ball is external to our aircraft.

And it's BALL.

Ball, like ball.

It's an eye floss landing system,

which stands for something very long convoluted.

But essentially it's a mirror with lights on it.

And you see the light at a different cell

based on your position relative to an ideal glide slope.

So if you're right on it, you're right in the middle.

And if you're below, you're low.

And as I add power and maneuver the aircraft, that ball,

you know, I see that ball rise, I see that ball low.

It's a lagging indicator though, right?

And your jet is a lagging engine too, right?

It takes time to spool up the engine.

So that adds to the complexity, you have to think ahead a bit.

You know, so you don't want to,

you can't just bring the power up and leave it there.

You have to bring the power up, touch it and bring it back.

And oh, by the way, your landing area is moving,

not just away from you, but also on an angle, right?

Because we have an angled deck.

And so you're constantly doing one of these

to correct yourself as you go.

That seems stressful.

And even every time you do one of those,

maybe it's a 30 degree angle bank, right?

I'm losing lift, right?

Yeah.

And so I have to compensate with power each time I do that.

So I'm doing another one.

Because you have to maintain the same level

you're always lowering.

It's a constant rate of descent that's increasing

from about 200 feet per minute to about 650.

And every time you do this, that's messing with that.

Okay.

So you have to compensate.

And you're doing that manually.

Do that manually.

All right.

And then of course, as you come down that glide slope,

it becomes more and more narrow.

And you have to, of course,

modulate your inputs such that they're smaller and smaller

because they have a bigger and bigger effect

as you get closer in.

And what happens to when you get in close

is that right before you cross over,

if this is the boat right here, your table,

right before you kind of get your wings over the boat itself,

this big wind from the main tower of the boat

is where it dips down.

So the wind actually goes down.

It's called the Burble.

And it'll actually pull the aircraft down,

increase your rate of descent.

So at that particular point, you need to, you know,

increase your power and try to compensate against that.

And so that's kind of a third variable that's trying to

screw you up on your way down.

What's the most difficult conditions in which you have to land

or you've seen somebody have to land?

Because I think you were also a signal officer as well.

I was, yeah.

I was the head landing signal officer for my squadron.

So you've probably seen some tough landings.

I have.

I've seen a ramp strike,

which is when a part of the aircraft hits before the landing area,

which is basically the round out of the boat that is before

the landing area.

So they basically struck the back of the boat coming in.

Yeah.

It was just their hook.

So it wasn't the aircraft.

And they were fine.

That one was kind of ugly.

But it like rips that part of the aircraft.

Absolutely.

And then you land on your bellies, that kind of thing.

In this particular case, it hit and then it gave

and essentially dragged the hook on the surface after that.

And so he was able to grab a wire at that point.

When does that kind of thing happen?

The miscalculation by the pilot or is it weather conditions?

I wouldn't even call it a miscalculation.

I mean, I'm going to put the blame on the pilot because he's

the only one in the cockpit.

But then the day he's reacting to the situations he's dealing with.

And so it may be errors or he may be doing the best with, you know,

the conditions that he's been given on that particular one.

You just got too high a rate of sense.

Very common.

And that's what you see it with new pilots.

You see it with older pilots, right?

New ones and complacent ones.

What you see is they'll try to make the ball go right where they want it

in close.

They think they can beat the game a little bit.

And so we have sayings.

We teach pilots, you know, as a landing signal officer,

we tell them, like, don't recenter a high ball in close.

It's one of the rules to live by.

And so when the ball is up high, don't try to bring it back in close

to, like, the center point when you're in close.

Because what you're going to do is you bring the power off

and you're going to crash right down.

And that's what happens, right?

Because you've got the verbal pulling you down.

You might be correcting, which is decreasing your lift.

And then you have that type of maneuver.

How are you supposed to do all of this in harsh weather conditions?

And so that's the one I wanted to tell you about.

That's the hardest one.

And what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi lights on,

that's really shitty.

99 taxi lights on.

What's that mean?

So everyone put your taxi lights on.

Because you're about to land on the boat.

And you don't see the boat?

Weather is so bad that the landing signal officer on the boat

can't see you either.

And you can't see the boat.

And you won't be able to see it when you touch down.

So we call that a zero, zero landing.

And you turn on the taxi lights so that the LSO,

who has a radio in his hand that looks like a phone from 1980,

is talking directly to the pilot.

And he's looking at that little light in the rain.

And he's telling him, you're high, you're low, power, things like that.

Come right, back to the left.

And literally talking him down to land on the boat right there.

And the pilot, usually it comes as a surprise to the pilot to land it.

Because he's just listening to the voice.

Can't see the ball.

Can't see the boat.

And all of a sudden you just hit the boat.

You crash.

I mean, you crash.

We're going about 1,600 feet per minute descent at that point.

So you're still, you're going super fast.

So all of this is happening fast.

You don't know, you don't know at the moment it's going to hit.

So you're just going into the darkness.

And just waiting for it to hit.

It's not dark though.

A lot of times it's white.

Into the light.

You're going into the light.

And then there's a voice from an 80s phone.

I got it.

This is terrible.

But so that you still, you still have to, so this kind of thing happens.

You still have to land.

Sometimes you just don't have a place to divert.

But you know, in a sense, we're trained for that because we do the night landings as well.

And I think you'll find this interesting.

But I always found that the night landings where in these particular cases,

you're usually lined up behind the boat, maybe 10, 15 miles.

Whereas the other ones, it's like a tight circle, the landing pattern.

And so we can potentially see the boat way out there if the lights were on, which they're not.

But we can maybe see like the string of aircraft in front of us.

But what's, what's interesting is that it can take a while.

It can take, you might be 15 miles out and your lights are turned down as dim as possible.

You have a cloud deck, maybe at six or 7,000 feet.

So that the starlight, there's no moon, but let's say the starlight's blocked out, right?

Because just a starlight alone, no moon, you can see the boat, you can see the water.

But when that goes away, it's like closing your eyes, right?

You can't tell anything.

It could be upside down.

It could be in any position.

And for me, it was almost a meditative process that I had to snap myself back out of when I was on like a long straightaway.

And then I would see the light pop up in the sea of darkness, right?

No lights anywhere.

Can't even see the horizon.

And I just see a light out there.

My instruments are telling me, and they're turned down as far as I can go, right?

So I can barely see them.

So my eyes can adjust.

And I'm just staring at this light in the distance.

And it's just very meditative and it's the hum behind you.

And then like four miles, you know, almost like, oh, the light is a little bit bigger.

And you almost kind of have to snap back to it and be like, oh, I need to like kind of like look around a little bit and engage my brain.

Like back to my body and like do this thing.

Because you're going to have to actually land.

Well, is there just, you said you don't necessarily feel the romantic notion of the whole thing.

But is there some aspects of flying where you look up and maybe you see the stars, the stars?

Or yeah, that kind of thing that you just like, holy crap, how did humans accomplish all of this?

Like, am I actually flying right now?

I used to have those moments on the boat when I was catching planes land.

I would, they would trap and it'd be nighttime.

And it's just all this chaos in the middle of the ocean and nothing.

And I would have these moments where I'd be like, how the hell did I end up here?

You know, there's one moment in time next to an aircraft landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you know.

Where did my life, you know, how did my life go to end up here?

How interesting.

But what I did start to enjoy was the night vision goggles and putting those on and looking up at the stars flying around.

Especially over the ocean.

What do they look like?

There's just so many.

There's just so many stars that, you know, you normally can't see.

They're shooting stars all the time.

Almost every flight you'd see them with the goggles on.

And so it was a great pleasure to take advantage of the lack of light pollution in some cases,

especially on deployment, to go grab some goggles at night and go out some quiet spot in the ship that no one can see me.

And just kind of look around, you know.

Yeah, it's humbling.

Quick break? Bath and break?

That wouldn't mind a quick stretch of luck.

You got a few cool patches.

I do.

So this is a VFA 11 Red Rippers patch, typically going actually on our arm.

So this is actually what we call the boar's head or Arnold.

So this is actually the boar's head from the Gordon's Gin bottle.

Yeah.

So in 1918, we were in London or the UK somewhere and we apparently partied with the owner and founder of Gordon's Gin.

We had a great time and there's a signed letter in our ready room that says we can use the logo in perpetuity.

Oh, nice.

Yeah.

So I'd like to give you that patch.

I drank quite a bit of Gordon's, so this is good.

And I'd like to give you that coin from our squadron.

The Red Rippers, that's a badass name.

Thank you, brother.

You're welcome.

So let's jump around a little bit, but let me ask you about this one set of experiences that you had and people in your squadron had.

So you and a few people in the squadron either detected UFOs on your instruments or saw them directly.

Tell me the full story of these UFO sightings and the smallest technical details because I love those.

I'll do my best.

So we returned from, and when I say we, I mean, not my squadron, but VFA 11, the Red Rippers, I was a somewhat junior pilot at the time.

I joined them on deployment in 2012 where they had been already out there for about six months or so operating in the vicinity of Afghanistan.

I joined them and then we flew back and still as a relatively new guy, we came back and we entered what's considered a maintenance phase where we slow down the tactical flying a bit, kind of recuperate, do some maintenance on the aircraft.

And our particular model of the F 18, the lot, the lot number was plumbed for the particular things that were needed to upgrade the radar from what's known as the APG 73 to the APG 79.

And the APG 73 is a mechanically scanned array radar.

It's a, you know, perfectly fine radar, but the ASA radar is kind of a, you know, magnitude jump in capability, kind of an analog digital kind of mindset.

So it's a leap to digital APG 73.

So I mean, are these things on a carrier?

Like, what are we talking about here?

This is our biggest radar.

Yeah.

So this is actually the radars in the F 18 itself.

Okay.

So when you say they were chosen, this is to test the upgrade to the new, the 79 APG 79 less of a test and more of just, Hey, it's your turn to get the upgrade.

Like we're all going to these better radars.

They were building ones off the off the line with the new radar.

But we were this weird transitionary squadron in the middle that transitioned from the older ones to the new ones.

But it's not particularly rare to fly with different types of radar because in the, in we call the fleet replacement squadron, essentially the training ground for the F 18, you have all sorts of F 18s with different radars.

So you are used to having multiple ones, but in the actual deployable combat squadron, we upgraded.

And when we upgraded, we saw that there were objects on the radar that we were seeing the next day in this with this new radar that weren't there with the old radar.

And these were sometimes, you know, the same day you might go on two flights.

The one in the morning might be with the older radar, the one in the evening with the new radar.

And you, and you'd see the objects with the, with the new radar.

And that's not overly surprising in some sense.

They are more sensitive.

Perhaps they're not filtering out everything they should be yet, or perhaps there's some other type of error.

Maybe it needs to be calibrated, whatever.

It was relatively new and we were somewhat used to there being software problems with these types of things occasionally, just like anything else.

And so, okay, maybe this is a radar software malfunction.

We're getting some false tracks, as we call them.

What were you seeing?

And so what we would see are representations of the object.

So this is off of our radar.

We're not seeing a visual image here.

This is kind of like a, what's being displayed to us almost like in a gaming fashion, right?

Like our, the icon, right?

So the icon is showing us, hey, something is there.

And here's the parameters I can understand about it.

So this is in the cockpit.

There's a display that's showing some visualization with the radars detecting.

Correct.

And there's two different ways to do that.

The first one is like the actual data, like the radar where I am, it's showing me the data kind of as if it's in front of me and I'm selecting those contexts.

And there's another screen called the situational awareness page, and that's kind of a God's eye view that brings all that data into one spot.

And so I'm going to talk about this from the essay page, from the situational awareness page versus the individual radar ones, because it's easier.

But can you, sorry, sorry to linger on that.

So the individual displays are like first person.

And then the essay is when you say God's eye view is like from the top integration of all that information as if it's looking down onto the earth.

Yes.

Is that a good way to summarize it?

It is.

But for the aviator, it's slightly different because those two radar displays I talked about are at the bottom of that display is kind of representative of where I am.

And so I see what's in front of me.

Got it.

Whereas the situational awareness page, the aircraft is located in the center of that.

And then all around me, you know, based off of the data link and wherever I'm getting information from, I can see that whole awareness page.

I can see how it's situation.

So I'm going to kind of talk about this from the situational awareness page, which is a top down view, just to kind of frame our minds instead of jumping around.

And so what we would see out there is we'd see these indications that something would be there and they would have a track file.

That track file, that thing that represents the object has a line coming out of it and that represents, it's called the target aspect indicator.

There's some tracking from the radar.

Correct.

So it's showing you where the object's going.

This is all pretty cool that the radar can do all this.

So radar locks in on different objects and the tracks them over time.

Correct.

That's coming from the radar.

That's like built in feature.

Okay.

Cool.

Out there, we're seeing it.

We don't have to necessarily like pull things into our tracker in some sense, right?

Like it's all out there and then we can kind of choose to highlight on stuff or to kind of focus in on it more so.

But the information shall be out there.

And so we'd see that target aspect indicator, that line on a typical aircraft, you know, it would kind of look like this.

It would be coming out and it would go steady.

And if they turn, you know, it would be like, and you see them turn, right?

Like it's not magic, but this object, they would, the target aspect would kind of be like all over the place, like kind of randomly in a 360 degrees, you know, from that top down view.

That line would be in a place.

So kind of, you know, is it unable to determine the target aspect?

Is it stationary?

You know, and that's just how it puts it out and it's not used to seeing it.

So I'm not saying that's necessarily super weird, but it was different than what we were used to seeing because we weren't used to seeing stationary objects out there very much.

And what was also interesting is that these weren't just stationary on a zero wind day, right?

These are stationary at 20,000 feet, 15,000 feet, 500 feet, you know, with the wind blowing, you know.

And so much like the sea, you know, when we're up there fighting, it affects everything.

We consider the wind when we're, you know, shooting missiles, when we're flying or fuel considerations.

It's like operating, you know, in that volume of air, like the ocean, everything's going with the current.

And so anything that doesn't go with the current, you know, is immediately kind of identifiable and strange.

And that's why these were initially strangers because they would be stationary against the wind.

So if you had something like a good drone in a windy conditions, what would that look like?

Would it, it would have not come off a stationary? Would it sort of float about kind of thing?

No, I think with the drone technology we have today, they could stay within a pretty tight location.

Well, I meant like DJI drone, not like I'm saying like generically speaking, not a military drone.

No, I have a DJI drone myself even and, you know, maybe not a hundred knots, but if that thing's in 30 or 40 or not wins, you know,

the amount of distance it's going to be kind of doing one of these, like that change is not something I'm going to detect from maybe many miles away.

Interesting.

So it could look very stationary.

But that wasn't necessarily, what's interesting about this story is that there's not like the one smoking gun, right?

You have to kind of look at everything.

And that's what, you know, I don't like about the Department of Defense and just generally people's take on this is that everything is kind of based around a single image,

you know, or that one case.

But a lot of the interestingness comes from the duration or the time it's been out there, how they're interacting relative to other objects out there.

And you don't get that information when you just look at a frame for a second, you know, everyone kind of bites off on the shiny object.

So you yourself, from your particular slice of things you've experienced and seen directly or indirectly, you've kind of built up an intuition about what are the things that were being seen?

I want to go that far.

I've just been able to, you know, eliminate some variables because of how long I've observed it.

So like you said, yes, kind of drones stay in a particular position against the wind like that, certainly.

But I don't think it can do that and then go.8 Mach for four hours after that, you know.

And so when you look at it outside of that one, that moment in time, then it eliminates a lot of the potential things that could be at least from my perspective.

So what kind of stuff did you see in the instruments?

We'd see them flying in patterns, kind of racetrack patterns or circular patterns or just going kind of straight east.

Occasionally see them supersonic 1.1, 1.2 Mach, but typically.6 to.8 Mach just for extremely extended periods of time, you know, essentially all the time.

And this is airspace where there's not supposed to be anything else at all.

And it's pretty far out there.

It starts 10 miles off the coast, goes like 300 miles.

Can you say the location that we're talking about?

Off the coast of Virginia Beach.

Got it.

And so nobody is supposed to be out there.

It's possible for people to be there.

It's not necessarily restricted, but it's well monitored and we're out there every day all day.

And so, you know, people know to stay clear.

If a session goes bumbling in there, everyone's going to know about it.

FAA is going to, you know, call them out, going to tell us about it.

So, incursions happen, not a big deal, but they're pretty rare, honestly, because everyone knows the area and we've been operating there first.

And what are the trajectories at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach that these objects were taking?

Typically, they would be in some type of circular pattern or kind of a racetrack pattern when they were at those speeds.

Or I just see them kind of, and it wasn't always like a mechanical flight description.

And when I say that, I mean like an autopilot is going to be just very precise, right?

It's going to be locked on straight.

And whereas I could see an airplane, I could tell if the pilot's flying it, right? Because it's not going to be perfect.

The computer's not controlling it.

And these seemed more like that.

Not that they were imprecise, but that they were even much more erratic than that.

So, like, it wasn't like a straight line in a turn.

It was just kind of like a, you know, a weird drift like that in that direction, you know.

So, it wasn't controlled by a down computer, not the suspected computers.

So, it wasn't controlled by autopilot kind of technology.

That's not the sense that I got.

So, how many people have seen them in a squadron?

So, how many times were they seen?

How many were there times when there's multiple objects?

Once we started seeing them on the radar enough, and we would get close enough, we'd actually see them on our FLIR as well.

So, our advanced targeting pod.

It's essentially a infrared camera that we use for targeting mostly in the air to surface environment.

We don't use it in the air to air arena.

It's just not that good of a tool, frankly.

But we would see our energy emitting from that location where the radar was dropping us off.

So, you know, the radar, we'd lock onto the object and our sensors would all look there.

And so, then we could see that it's looking at that right piece of sky, but there's energy actually coming from there.

So, now we started thinking that, okay, maybe not radar malfunctions.

Maybe more, maybe something is physically here, of course.

And then people started to try to fly by and see it.

And at this point, you know, I would say maybe 80 to 90% of our squadron have probably seen one of these on the radar at this point.

Everyone was aware of it.

There was small communication, I think, between squadrons of the same area that had the same radar.

So, I knew it wasn't just our squadron for whatever strange reason, because they would be other squadrons to be out there.

And we would talk to them, like, hey, careful, there's an object.

Are you aware of that?

So, like, they would be aware of it.

And then, of course, people would want to go see what they look like, right?

So, people would try to fly by.

I try to fly by them.

I like how that's an of course.

Of course.

Of course you don't want to fly by it.

You know, there's an argument against that kind of perspective that maybe the thing is dangerous, so maybe we don't.

But perhaps that's part of the reason you want to fly by it is to understand better what it is if it's a threat.

We have a lot of context now that we did it back then, you know.

And so, it was still a, hey, is this a balloon? Is this a drone? You know, at a certain point.

And we're also aware of, you know, potential intelligence gathering operations that could be going on.

We're up there flying our tactics.

We're emitting.

We're practicing our EW, you know.

We're turning at particular times.

Like, there's stuff that can be learned.

It's not a secret.

And, you know, countries keep different fishing vessels and whatnot in international waters off there.

So, it's not exactly a secret that we're being observed out there.

So, to think that a foreign hospital or a foreign nation would want to, you know, somehow intercept information,

that's our radar signals or our jamming capabilities to try to break that down or understand it better,

be ready for that next fight.

I mean, that's what scares me about this scenario.

Because we didn't jump right to aliens or UFOs.

We thought, you know, this is a radar malfunction we need to be aware of.

It's a safety issue.

And then, you know, this could be a tactical problem right here because everything we do is based off a crypto and locations.

Everything is classified we do out there, right?

And so, over time, if you gather enough data about those fights and just monitor them forever,

just like some nations do with other pieces of technology or software, they could probably learn a lot.

And so, we have to be cognizant of the fact and defend against it.

So, what can you say about the other characteristics of these objects, like shape, size, texture, luminosity?

How else do you describe object?

Is there something that could be said?

So, you said, like, this is the Tech Town radar, step one.

Now, you have clear images that can give you a sense that it's actually a physical object.

What else can be said about those physical objects?

So, eventually, someone did see one with their own eyeballs, multiple people.

And they saw it in a somewhat interesting way.

The object presented itself at the exact altitude and geographic location of the entry points into our working areas.

So, we enter at a very specific point at a certain altitude and people leave the areas at the same point at a lower altitude.

Probably one of the busiest pieces of the sky on the eastern sea board.

So, two jets from my squad went out and they went flying and they entered the area where these objects went right between the aircraft.

So, they're flying in formation and the object went between the aircraft?

They went between the object, I think.

I don't think the object was moving.

I don't think it aggressively went at them.

I think it was located still there and then they flew through it.

But they didn't have it on their radar.

And that would, I think the radar might have been malfunctioning.

I don't know that for sure.

I would like to look into it.

But my supposition is that if their radar was malfunctioning, it would make sense that they wouldn't avoid the object that was there because they knew these were physical at that point.

And we would go up to these objects all the time and try to see them.

We couldn't see them.

And we didn't know what it was.

Were they just not there or being fooled?

Was something happening?

Were they moving, dropping altitude to last minute?

We're going by pretty quick, so it's difficult to tell.

But perhaps if his radar wasn't working, he wasn't receiving energy from the jet.

And the jet, of course, didn't know that it was there.

And so whatever the case was, they flew right by and they described it just as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere.

And the kind of the apex of the cube or touching the inside of that sphere.

That's an image that's haunting.

So what do they think it is?

Did they think at that moment that they is it just this kind of cloud of uncertainty that they just described me a geometric object?

It's not on radar, so it's unclear what it is.

What was the any kind of other description they've had of it in terms of the intuition from a pilot's perspective?

You have to kind of identify what a thing is.

To answer the first part, they actually canceled the flight and came back because they were like, if there's one of these out here and we're almost hitting them and it's right there, then perhaps we need to get a different jet with better radar.

So they came back and they're in their gear and they're talking to the front desk and talking to Skipper and like, hey, we almost hit one of those damn things out there.

And this kind of was one of those kind of slight watershed moments where we all were kind of like, all right, this is a serious deal now.

Maybe we thought they were balloons or drones or malfunctions or maybe we thought it was fine.

But at the end of the day, if we're going to hit one of these things, then we need to take care of the situation.

And that's actually when we started submitting hazard reports or hazard reps to the Naval Aviation Safety kind of communication network.

And it's not like a big proactive thing where people are going to investigate. It's more of a data collection mechanism so that you can kind of share that aggregate data and make sure that things are progressing.

So it wasn't a mechanism that would result in action being taken, but we were hoping to at least get the message out to whomever was maybe running a classified program that we were not aware of or something like that, that, hey, like you could kill somebody here.

Like you've grown too big for your bridges here. Take a step back.

So that was our concern at that point. That's kind of where we were thinking this was going.

What's the protocol for shooting at a thing? Was there a concern that it's a direct threat, not just surveillance, but a thing that could be a threat?

At least from my perspective, like that never really crossed into my mind. I thought it was potentially an intelligence failure that could be being watched and information gathered.

But I didn't think that it was something that would proactively engage me in a hostile manner.

It wouldn't really make sense either too. It would be shocking to have one of these objects take out an F18, but there's no real tactical advantage other than fear perhaps.

Psychological. I've learned a lot about the psychological warfare in Ukraine.

There's a big part of the war in terms of when you talk about siege warfare, about wars that last for many years, for many months, and then perhaps could extend to years.

But yes, it didn't seem, it didn't fit your conception of a threatening entity.

Correct.

So looking back now, from all the pieces of data you've integrated, you've personally added, what do you think it could be?

I don't know. I don't know what it could be. I think we've been able to categorize it successfully into a few buckets.

We've been able to say that this could be U.S. technology, that someone put in the wrong piece of sky or perhaps was developed and tested in an inappropriate spot by someone that wasn't being best practices.

Is there, sorry to interrupt, is there a sort of modularity to the way the military operates to where it's possible for one branch not to know about the test of another?

Yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that that could occur, right? And so if we just make that assumption, we can integrate that into our analysis here and just say, okay, but at the point we're at now, we have to assume that that's not the case, right?

With everything that's been going on and the statements that have been made and the hearings, I think that if it was a noncommunication issue, we're in big trouble at this point.

What about it being an object from another nation, from China, from Russia?

Or even one of our allies, perhaps, right? Maybe that's, you know, I don't think it's controversial to say that our allies could be gathering information about us or anything of that nature.

But that would be an extreme case, but I think it's just important to say, right, to not just say Russia or China and just call them the bad guys and assume that if they don't have it, no one can do it.

And so from my perspective, you know, anyone else, anyone else, and it doesn't necessarily need to be a foreign power, it could be a nongovernment entity, perhaps, although I think that's very unlikely.

But again, these are things you must consider if you kind of throw everything other than the U.S. under scrutiny.