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The following is a conversation with Commander David Fraser, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces Squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people. He's also famously one of the people who, with his own eyes, saw and chased a UFO unidentified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic-Tac and the incident more formally 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 and an open minded human being is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm aware of.

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He's a humble, fascinating and fun human being to talk to. I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many of the questions that people posted as I could. And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation. And I'm sure if the world wants us to and if there's more questions to be had, we'll talk on this podcast again. Quick summary of the sponsors. A flood of Greens Express VPN and better help.

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Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UMP's unidentified aerial phenomena and aliens in general is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open minded one, often looking and thinking outside the box. I'm often disheartened by the closed mindedness of the scientific community and in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigour and basic scientific inquiry 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 should walk. I think we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars and the nature of reality and the nature of our very own minds. The path to understanding can only be walked humbly, the very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology, whether human made or alien made that moved in the way he did, should be inspiring to 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 and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of US human beings. Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles and remove the constraints on innovation placed on us by the scientific inventions and assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube. Review the five stars in our podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patron or connect with me on Twitter.

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Allex Friedemann, as usual. I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. More and more. I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less ad the more personal. But I give you a timestamp so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by a lot of greens that all in one daily drink to support health and performance.

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I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need. Now let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting. I fast, often, sometimes intermittent fasting of sixteen hours and then an eight hour eating period of two meals, sometimes twenty four hours. That's one dinner to the next. I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to have done.

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People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits, the chance to meditate on the finiteness of life, not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal, that every day is precious. I certainly experience this with the twenty four hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the 48, 72 and even week long. Fast anyway. I always break my fast with a lot of greens. It's delicious, refreshing. It makes me feel good.

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So good. Athletic greens. That council likes to claim a special offer of free vitamin D for a year. Again, go to the Greens. That councillor likes to get free stuff and to support this podcast. This show is also sponsored by Express VPN, Get It and Express VPN, dot com, like SPAD 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 the British version with Ricky Gervais and then the American version with Steve Carell. Express Open lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100 different countries and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions of the office and other countries. Also, it protects you when you do shady things on the Internet that you shouldn't be doing, like checking the website of this very podcast for some reason was not available in Russia for a long time.

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Not sure if it still is, but if it isn't, you can use Express VPN to access it. I think of express VPN like a pirate ship and regular VPN free life as a boring cruise from one place to another with no excitement in between. Choose wisely my friends again. Get it on any device. I expect to be at the council spot to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. This show, sponsored by Better Help Spelled Help, Help, like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane to notice you check it out, better help that complex.

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They figure out what you need, a match with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. You can communicate by text in time and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Now hard left turn. Let me talk about desert islands, whatever you think of it. I love the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending time on an island alone with potentially no hope. 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 my crazy mind, which is the introduction to Algorithm's book, also called Clarus for the first letters of the last name of the four authors I find algorithm's beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world inside computers when the real world outside is an impossible, chaotic mess. I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months far away from human civilization. Anyway, check out Better Help and Better Health Outcomes neglects to get a discount and to support this podcast.

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And now finally, here's my conversation with David Fraizer.

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You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School. Yeah, I am, but are known as Top Gun. Let me maybe 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 I and a friend of mine who is a Top Gun instructor said there's two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic. One, there is a place called Top Gun.

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And number two is they do fly airplanes are.

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Other than that, you know, I went through in seven class four ninety seven. And there's actually a log of every single person that's went through, kind of like seal training. You know, there's a list. So people because there's a lot of posers out there. I was a Navy SEAL. They weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun. You can actually go to Top Gun, in matter of fact, just to get a top gun patch, the 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. There's the real ones are controlled, the people that make them honor that. And when you go in, they look up your name. If you want to get one, they look up your name. You just tell them like, OK, here and LSP, if you are not on the list, you can get no badge because it is it's a pretty big deal to go through.

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But it's, for me, one of the best experiences of flying because everyone there is extremely competent. It's very, very challenging, but it's what we all signed up to do. So it's it's just the entire group.

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That is when you want to be that, you know, that level, you know where you go, everyone really cares and everyone really wants to be good.

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Is it competitive like it was in the movie or.

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No, it's when you go through it's you know, it's if anything, it's more of the students, you know, and then there's the instructor side and the instructor sides are really, you know, they're guys that, you know, they just chose to stay up. And Phalen and it's extremely difficult job because they have they have a very small tolerance for.

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Not being good, so they're Breece, the guys, when they give a lecture, so let's just say there's a fight or employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones. 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 a murder boards where he scrutinized by his peers and he practices by the time they actually stand in front of a class, they pretty much have their two hundred and fifty PowerPoint slides memorized and they don't even turn around. They just click and they know them in order and they repeat the same thing over and it's standardized. So they are extremely, extremely standardized. When you go through the school. And there's a reason for that because what they're doing is they're training.

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So when you come out of Top Gun, you're called a strike fighter, weapons and tactics instructor.

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So your safety, when you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapon schools on the east or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons. And then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that. So there's a there's a reason that they are extremely particular.

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When you go through the course, it's it is literally one of the best things. And it's not it's not a rank based thing because think, oh, maybe you can come in as a you know, like an 004 lieutenant commander, the lieutenants, the hierarchy will cease to be.

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I don't know how it is exactly today, but I imagine it's the same. The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank. So one of the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in the Phalen Ranges. They set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise 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 from the staff, they all speak the same language. It's and it has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded.

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So it's just a it's an incredible group, individuals.

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So there's a bar of excellence that that the instructors demand. Well, 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. There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard. They have to and I mean every moment of every day. So if they go someplace, if they go from Phalen and they come down and do they're called site visits where they come down and they'll come Tullamore, California, which is where the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy. And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on some of that knowledge.

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That's that same high level of standard. It's they can't just drop your guard because you wear the top gun patch and people know that. And they were light blue shirts. So it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there. And, you know, and then everyone else who's been through the school, including them, have the patch on their sleeve. So there's a standard that's expected when you come out of there.

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So you're a Navy pilot for eight years. Yes. 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 when I was enlisted, I was a Marine and then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy. So it's always better to be lucky than good. But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I had that dream to fly. So when I got selected, I've always dreamed of flying. Yeah. Since nineteen sixty nine. When I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, I was at that point I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was from I was just prior to being five and I said.

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So cool, Mom, and she said, well, you know, they were all pilots, and then at that point it was like, I'm going to be a pilot. And if you knew me growing up because I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just like you. All right. I used to joke I'm going to fly. I'm going to fly jets. I'm going to drop bombs then.

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And if people that knew him as a kid, they would be like, yeah.

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And they'd be like, oh, not a chance. And then when I did, I actually had a funny story and I'll get to it and I'll finish my career. But I was at my cousin's wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood, but we kind of had Italian side of the family. That's how we grew up. So it was my house. Right down the street is my cousin Chad, and 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 me and I was a paper boy in the neighborhood.

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So they all knew me. And I went to my cousin's wedding and he and Mr. Reese looks at me and he says, David Frazier, I go, Mr. Reese, how are you doing? You fly jets, top gun and all that. I go, sir, I figured he'd be in jail by now.

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And it was kind of to me it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on and I kind of overcame that. But what do you attribute that to?

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So you I've heard you before and just now say that. But maybe it's better to be lucky than good. And you talk modestly about just being lucky, but. If you were to describe your trajectory maybe in the way of advice, like retrospectively. How'd you pull it off to be like to be truly a special person, the easiest way is one never, never take no, 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 if you want something and you want to do something, then you can achieve it. Not in all cases.

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Like if I loved basketball and I really want it to be in the NBA, there's a realism that says I'm five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap and I'm really not that good at basketball. Probably not ever going to happen no matter how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is or for me to be in the NFL. I'm not fast, you know, I'm not that big. It just physically 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 strength, but it's mental. And I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a fighter pilot. Matter of fact, you don't it really comes down to the ability to think very quickly. 80 percent solution is typically good enough because if you overthink it, you're you're behind. And then in an air to air fight, 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 don't have you can't get to the nth degree. You know, six decimal places, 80 percent solution is good enough for the really strong good for the 80 percent solution.

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Just yeah, I'm a big believer in 80 percent solution.

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I love that if you go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what like if you're fighting and BFM, the 80 percent solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this and and I know that if I do a maneuver, if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do a if he doesn't do a, he does some degree less like BCD. And then I know how bad his his error is.

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And then I capitalize. So my my I don't have to be perfect, you know, I have to go, I need to go to forty seven degrees nose high. If I just kind of get above 40 then I'm good and I can watch over X and then I can adjust for that.

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And you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage to eventually you know, if you're really, you know, fighting, you know, just guns only recorder where you got to get behind the guy kind of World War to dog fighting type stuff, then it's it's literally it's a it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at, 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 dream and didn't take no for an answer.

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Yeah, well, you know you know, part of it is family.

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You know, my dad was I am a fire ready aim guy. You know, he'd smack me and then asked me what I did wrong.

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Good parenting back then. You know, I joke and people look because, you know, times it was kind of tough, you know, because he can be pretty demanding. But on the other side, you know, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times. But then everyone else, my family, you know, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid, my my grandfather, who is a big, big part of it, my mom's dad, who he taught me a lot.

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And when you have a question there that we'll talk about, about him, but huge, huge influence, very, very positive.

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And a lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught me. And, you know, and I figured, you know, it was the first funeral ever went to and it was is about three miles long and church was overfilling and people were out. He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious.

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And you go, there's someone else who died, the pope.

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So a lot of people loved them. So back to back to my career because I'm getting down a rabbit hole. No, I when I was at the I was going to I was going to stay in the Marines, I really wanted to go. And I love the Corps. I think it's EVOL Services. It's that one. Everything is in a ball. And they're very, very professional. And it was a great, great organization to join. But I went out to the Nimitz on my freshman cruise.

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After your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and you you're an enlisted person. You get to experience that half when I was enlisted.

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So it's fine with me because it comes up a lot. I'm saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is like. Yeah.

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So Nimitz is an aircraft carrier, so it's four and a half acres of sovereign U.S. territory. It floats around the US oceans or the giant thing.

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Does it have weapons on it? The air wing is really the weapons. It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part, it's a giant moving airport is what it is.

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So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off and I'm like, oh, and the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was VF forty one and a fourteen squadron VF 84 and a fourteen squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons. And we actually ended up pairing up and hanging out with some of the pilots. So it was really a neat experience and I said. I want to do that, and the way to do it was to not to to go in the Navy because there are Marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based, you know, to support the Marines, because that that unit, that whole unit, the Marine Corps is at one service has it all.

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And so when I graduated and I got to you know, I worked hard through primary and that's where I knew Missy. We were actually going through together, Missy Cummings. We went through primary together and then I went to Kingsville. We all selected the same time. I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Widmaier, the three of us. So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville and Missy went to Meridian. So the three of us that we had all went through, we got we selected our primary together.

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We all ended up going jets. And that's that's besides from school. I knew her at school to the long story. I got done, got winged. It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings and threw some luck. I ended up getting Essex's on the West Coast, which is a side by side bomber. So it's a pilot on the Left Sea and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat.

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It was built in the 60s. It is all weather and it flies low at night and it's got a terrain mapping radar. How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jet as a broad Category four for the public? Yeah, that's how many fighter jets are side by side like that. That was in the Navy. That was the only one.

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The Air Force, the F1 11 was a side by side, but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the B, which is a derivative of that. And now that those are all gone, the six PS just went away a few years ago and now the Growler is the replacement for the 6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew really became the fourteen, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise by fuel.

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Then the Hornet and the Horn as the fighting is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually like in front and behind in a modern two seater.

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Yes, but most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat. So he's just one person, one person with the exception of outprice someone to yell at me.

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But really, with the exception of the Fifteen Strike Eagle and the Fat F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two seater and the G is also a two seater. But it's more of an electronic attack if I say full up fighter bomber.

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So most of the time that you've flown in, you're like I said, eighteen year career was a two seater. That was about half and half. So I started off an A6 was a two seater. Then I went to a single seat, 15s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000. And let me think, two thousand and one to the end of 2001. And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets. And I flew in both of those the E and the S, but I deployed when I had command of a forty one, I had the two.

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They were F squadron. So you eventually ended up commanding the the strike fighter squadron. Forty one. I love the the name the Black Aces. What is there some parts of that journey that are amazing parts of it that are tough that kind of stand out to me.

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It was one, it was a huge honor and I got to serve with you know, I got pulled up because the guy who the the people that are exos because we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number one guy.

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So the XO becomes the CEO, so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer.

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So I had worked with NOUSE soon to be Vice Admiral. Weitzel was the he was Commander Weitzel at the time was the XO. And he really wanted because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into Lemoore. Limor had been a single seat fighter community since the forever.

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And now all of a sudden you've got the fat F coming in, which has the weapons systems operators in the back that are not pilots, their weapons systems operators. And there's a difference. And Kenny is a weapons systems operator.

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And Kenny knew because of my background that I have a switch that I can go one seat to seat, one seat DC, because when you fly to seat, there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take the advantage of the weapon systems operator.

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And it's not that one plus one equals two in that environment because it really there's a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies.

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But it does it does equal more than one.

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And I would say that one plus one with two people as well is a minimum of one point five, because you've got an extra head, you've got extra eyes, you've got someone that can monitor systems. The airplanes can do two things at once. I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.

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Can we just pause on that just for me from like a human factor? And also a I perspective, what's how difficult so there's like when there's two people, there's also a third person that's the I part the some level of automation, like autopilot, maybe. That's correct. Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of, like you said, making decisions really quick, 80 percent. How do you deal with another brain working with you and then also the automation.

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Is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn? And also as that change throughout your career, I imagine it got you gotten better in terms of the automation or perhaps not?

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Well, I can tell you so let's say there's a bunch of stars. There's no this is this is good. This is good. And this is you know, I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a Tic TAC. So.

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So let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the 60s. All right. And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between the pilot and the Bombardier Navigator. So we would fly low at night in the mountains. So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington. So you've got the Cascades, an incredible amount of time. And we would get in the simulators because unlike normally people think train following and there's the radars, the 111.

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The B1 has a system like this, put it, the radar can see and it'll fly, basically flies a straight line. So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual.

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So you do this low level routes where you're going to you're going to fly in the mountains at night. You're going to be at, you know, 500 to 1000 feet above the ground ripping through like fog layers because you don't need to see outside you're you're literally forcing a little TV screen radar.

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What are you looking at most times? Just as a screen? It's this really primitive.

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If you look at it now, what we did, you think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun. So it's similar to like the flare stuff is that is no, this thing is totally radar based. Now, the airplane had a flare ball's target recognition and multisensory was called a tram.

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You're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects.

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You know, actually what it is, is the Bombardier navigator had a radar and he was getting a raw feed off of a pulse radar in front. OK, so it's just basically mapping the mountains. So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be it's going to give you a really bright return. And on the back side, it's just going to be a giant shadow because you can't see on the other side.

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So the Bombardier navigators would do that and they would have charts and they could shade their charts knowing that, hey, if we turn a little bit left here, we can get in this valley, we can sneak up this valley and go round the back side of the mountain, which is what the airplane would do.

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And inside interrupt. I'm going to just keep asking dumb questions I project.

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But the pilot at a high level say what the pilot does versus the bombardier.

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So you're a you're actually just controller. I'm flying the jet.

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I have the throttles, the stick and I have a it's about a probably a four inch or six inch wide by maybe four inches, five inches high. It looks like it's literally a CRT. That's all it is, a CRT screen.

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And what it would do at the radar would do is the the the Bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking out about twelve and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scope down because a radar can see a lot further. He's looking at about twelve and a half miles when we're in a terrain mode where we're dodging mountains and stuff.

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And what the pilot has is there's they're called range bends and there's eight of them. So the very far range bin is the twelve and a half mile, you know, and the closest range bin, it's a thing. And it'll be like between like a half a mile and a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile. And the next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles. And then it just keeps going out like that. So if there's a mountain, if for let's say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain out in the distance at fifteen miles, and we we're just driving right at it.

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So when we get to the point where it hits twelve and a half miles where the radar is going to see it on his scope, my twelve, my range been for that would pop up and it would show like a big bump, like a mountain. And then as I got closer to it, the next arrangement would pop up and show it and I could see that that bump was moving towards me. And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over to the right hand side and I could do that.

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But it wasn't like a video game. It's literally like if you think of the original Atari's.

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Yeah, but you build up, I imagine that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual 3D environment based on that little Atari.

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It sounds you're exactly right and you have to you have to train. So there's been studies, no matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people argue with me. But it's true. There were studies done watching a cruise in our simulators. We call it the WIST, the weapon systems trainer. Then it was not even emotion. It just kind of sat there and you just you can fly these things and had train that they would inject into the system.

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But the. Through coordination, so you get so my first my First Fleet Bombardier navigator who who I'll name him, his name is Chris Sadow.

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He's a works at Apple, pretty high up at MIT Grad, I think computer engineering. He's scary, smart.

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So Chris could really work. And matter of fact, all the guys I flew. So there's another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP. We did our first night Trappes together. The bond between us. I mean, it's one of those things that you just you're never going to forget. But Chris and I, when we started flying together, we were actually the most junior crew in the squadron. We'd spent a lot of time training.

[00:30:13]

And Chris was amazing at how he could work the system, one, because he was extremely brilliant and he had that inquisitive mind of all. We could do all these different things and there's all these degradation modes.

[00:30:26]

But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get because in it's you almost talk in Parshall's. So as the B.N. is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, I've got rising terrain. That's just what they say, and rising terrain at 12 miles. And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, got it. This is going to go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads. So when you first get together, the interaction, it's it's almost like you have to rehearse that you have to know and you talk in full sentences the more and more we fly together.

[00:31:02]

Chris could go, I'm showing, and he'd get, like, rising out. And before he finished, I'd say, I've got it. So you end up starting to talk in Parshall's because. I have to trust him. Like, I mean, there can be no I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job because I'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain moving. Remember the mountains here?

[00:31:27]

And then it's going to pop up here and then it's going to pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up.

[00:31:32]

Remember, it's an analog system to where he is telling me, like, I can't see all the way to the left. And he he's got a wider scope on the radar. But my screen doesn't show that. So he's told me, start a left turn, how to avoid a hard turn.

[00:31:46]

And we would do that. So, Mike. And this is all happening quick, very quick.

[00:31:50]

Well, you're doing we would typically fly between four hundred and twenty and 480 knots of ground speed miles an hour.

[00:31:57]

Well, twenty seven miles a minute or eight miles between seven and eight miles a minute is what you're flying at night. I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember him and I fly and we were on its ear. It's called an ear out, an instrument route that's low there all around the country. There's either three forty four that we used to fly, which would Kostyan off of. You'd fly from the land. You go out over the ocean, turn around on and you could practice actually coming in on a coastline.

[00:32:22]

And we were flying and we ended up in the clouds. Keep in mind, we're between 500 and a thousand feet in the mountains and we're in the clouds like you can't see anything. And I had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they're called a antipollution light because it was reflecting off the clouds. And it starts to bother you. Just gets annoying. So I turned it off and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying, we break out of that coastal marine layer and we break out and it's a decent night.

[00:32:48]

And this is right by Mount St. Helens. This is kind of we're coming in. So we're coming in from the east and we're just north of Mount St. Helens where the route goes and you look up, you know, because you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's right next to you. But you're flying along here just like, you know, you got to trust and you can see houses, you can see the lights, they're above you.

[00:33:03]

We're literally below people's houses flying down these valleys. And so just incredible experience. So when you take that and then you move into an effort. So now we're into modern technology. It was actually built in this century and you're flying.

[00:33:18]

So now, you know, the WIZO is behind us and we're not doing those night low levels, but that same type of crew coordination that has to happen because what you're doing is you're sharing the load.

[00:33:29]

So most of the communications that go out of the airplane, the wizard does all the talk and he's got and actually he uses it with the that's the weapon systems operator in the back of an. So he's going to run. Well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational awareness display and it's linked to all the other airports that has to do with the situational awareness display because that term comes up a lot and think of it as think of it as a God's eye view.

[00:33:52]

So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has well, the block tube has about an eight by 10 display for the windows that they can look at. The pilots is smaller. It's down between us. It's a six by six between his legs. And they're they're getting ready to redesign that. Boeing is. But when you look at it, you'd be like if you put your airplane in, you're looking down. So all the stuff like if you're radar seeing bad guys out in front of you be like looking down, going, oh, I'm right here.

[00:34:15]

I know there's bad guys out here and my wingman is over here and it shows everything. It's just like it gives you you can look at that display and go, oh, I can see where everything is at. I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy. It shows you all that. So it's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of what's going on, because big just sense it because it's happening so fast.

[00:34:39]

And this is where that autonomy piece, this is the third brain. So we're all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion. It's pulling stuff together, going, oh, this is all this guy. This is this guy. This is this guy. It's sending it out through the link. So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network, you know that we don't even see. It just says that airplane says, hey, I'm over here and it tells us and we go, oh, he's right there.

[00:34:59]

And then we can go. He's his airplane says, oh, I'm looking at this airplane, this bad guy. And it shows us, oh, he's he's over there and he's looking at this guy. I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot. But when you look down at stuff, it's all you know, you can see the pictures so really quick.

[00:35:16]

The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and gives you a big picture view. What about the control? Like is there and apologize is if this is a dumb question. But, you know, people use a high level term of autopilot. How much is there?

[00:35:36]

He's a loose term of A.I. How much automation is there, how much is there in helping you control there?

[00:35:43]

The A.I. piece would be more of a control loop because the digital flight controls so the airplane actually they had to make the airplane easier to fly. And when I say easy, it's relative because people go, I could do it because I did it on flight SIM. Real life is a lot different. In Flight SIM, you have no apparent fear of death. You'll do things in a simulator that you would never do in real life. But the the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage.

[00:36:08]

I mean, because you think about it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data, you've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data. All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got a joint helmond amount of queuing system on that. It basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head's at looking. So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right, the targeting flare, we'll look to the right and oh, by the way, the back seat or has a helmet on, too, so he can look to the left and he can do things so depending on what sensor he's controlling.

[00:36:36]

So if he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left, but if I have something where I want to lock a guy up, then I don't see that maybe the radar didn't see.

[00:36:45]

But I can get over a now point the radar, you know, get the because it's a it's a phased array radar now. It doesn't really scan. There's there's all kinds of cool stuff that that technology brings, because if you if you went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey, we're going to have this helmet now, you're going to do everything to your head.

[00:37:03]

And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean, literally, you're just going to map magnetic resonance and go, oh, look. And then I can I can literally slu my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer, you know, high quality coordinates from a system into a joint. Jaiden, which is the joint direct attack munition. That is the bombs that you see all the time and then let that thing fly. And I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes or hey, I got it.

[00:37:31]

We're going to have to menstruate corniness and you bring back the data and then they do all the targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it instead of all that. Now it's that fast.

[00:37:40]

So there's a I mean, we probably don't have enough time to talk about the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane, but at a high level. This is a really interesting question for people who don't know what they're talking about, like me, which is what is the difference between a human being and and a system like what can what is the ceiling of current AI technology for controlling the plane?

[00:38:10]

Like, how much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated flight, for example, like what is the hardest part about flying that a human does expertly, that an assistant cannot in warfare situations in in flying fighter jet flying.

[00:38:31]

So I would say. A.I. systems are usually black and white when you write the algorithm for an system, it's it's it's really it's basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing. Right? So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are there's there's there's a line. It says, I can't or I can't. And it's it's a very finite line, you know, but you can go up to the line where a human we all have gray areas where we go, yeah, maybe I'll try it so he can operate within that group.

[00:39:06]

So if you took if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a Super Hornet, don't matter any airplane. And you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane. So if, you know, in an M diagram is the energy. So it basically says the airplane can fly as slow as this. It can go as fast as this. It can pull this many GS force of gravity. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

[00:39:28]

And then based on the airfoil design and everything else and how it can pull, here's how it's going to fly, you know, because it's really physics based. Well, if you depending on how you write the A.I., but typically A.I., you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight. Right. You want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope where there are times. And you can go back to World War One where people intentionally departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is that's where the human goes.

[00:39:57]

Can I do this? I know it's outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that so you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes with digital flight controls, they're extremely forgiving. So you can literally I've done things in Super Hornets that literally, even as a pilot inside the airplane, you're just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that. Like, it'll flop ends, which defies most logic.

[00:40:25]

And I guess, you know, in a way you could probably program it. But I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage.

[00:40:34]

There are things that a human can will do that I won't. And I don't think we've got to. The point is, how do you how do you map illogical solutions? You know, most A.I. is logical. It's based on some type of premise. When you write the algorithm to control it, there's bounds.

[00:40:53]

Yeah, there's this giant mess. Like you said, the difference between the simulator and real life also gets that, that somehow that there is somehow the fear of death. All of that beautiful mess comes into play that. Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sully landing that plane famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions? Is there some?

[00:41:21]

Well, it's very it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier where the sexo one is. When you're flying with a crew, there's standardization. So you gotta remember when Sully flew, when his first Oscar, that's the co-pilot showed up, you know, first time they met. And this happens all the time in the commercial world. You know, there's six, seven thousand pilots at United Airlines. You know, your chance of flying with the same guy all the time, Slim and none were in the Navy.

[00:41:44]

We were screwed. So I had a primary and a secondary wizo that flew with me for four months.

[00:41:51]

Oh, yeah. For like the deployment. So because you use you have to trust all of those things, it increases the capability airplane.

[00:42:00]

It's not to say we can't swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex missions like forward air controllers or in the air actually controlling ground assets and supporting ground troops.

[00:42:13]

If you're in a high threat area, which is it crazy busy, you have to you have to be melded. When you do that, you have to have trained to do that job. Otherwise you're going to be ineffective.

[00:42:23]

So when you get to the commercial world and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial, there is a standardization. Like we know that at this point I'm going to put the switch. You're going to do that. And everyone, they know their rules, captain, is going to do this for stops. You're going to do this. And they know that when the emergency breaks out. So in Sully's case, when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem, and if you listen to the cockpit recordings of him, the two of them talking, you know, you got to remember they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes.

[00:42:52]

But they're also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York area. And it's like we got a bird strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silenced the alarm. They silence the alarm. The first officers pulling out the book, he's going through the procedures while Sully is actually flying the airplane knowing that they've lost their motors. And you got to think his decision process, like they're trying to get him to go into an airport, into New Jersey and he realizes not happening.

[00:43:14]

We're going to put this thing. And he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane, that he was going to put this thing in the Hudson River. And he did it flawlessly.

[00:43:23]

I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck. The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, you know, and it got fished out of the Hudson.

[00:43:29]

But what is it about those human decisions he had to make? Is that something you put into words or is that just deep down some instinct to develop as a pilot over time?

[00:43:40]

It's when we when you train, you know, in aviation is a self-cleaning oven. So if you make bad decisions, you're and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions. And so when you look at what he did or the way we train, because the commercial industry and the Navy and the Air Force for all that we have what's called we have emergency procedures that we have to know, like engines on fire. The first three steps, you just have to know what they are, right.

[00:44:09]

So they know the airline. Same type. You know, they go, hey, I know this is they pulled a book out because the airplanes are designed. They're built to have some time. But there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second guess it. So when he decided I'm putting this in the Hudson River, he couldn't all of a sudden, halfway through it go, well, maybe I can get over to that airport.

[00:44:26]

He he looked he made a quick assessment. This is that 80 percent solution where you go.

[00:44:31]

These are not you know, it's it's like a multiple choice test when you go, oh, my God, I don't really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong gone.

[00:44:39]

So the Jersey Airport and going back to LaGuardia gone. Yeah.

[00:44:43]

So what's my next option. Well the Hudson River is there. That's probably looking pretty good. Or what is my other one. Can I get a restart on the the motors. And then if I can get a restart now can I take it someplace else. He had to make really, really fast decisions and then once they as a they go that 80 percent solution you realize. Right, I'm going into the Hudson, there's the 80 percent. Get the book out.

[00:45:03]

Let's see if we can get our store. Because if you listen to tapes are trying to get it started, the closer he gets to the water, the more he's going, I'm ditching the airplane. So the original decision to this is my best option right now. This is where I'm going. And you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events which they tried to do. And then he gets to that last minute, says, we're going in the water.

[00:45:26]

They change the plan, they secure the airplane. They do exactly what they're do. And he does that basically flawless landing on the on the Hudson.

[00:45:31]

But you got to remember, every it's every six months for commercial. They go back and they do research in the airplane, in the simulator where they train to the airplane being broken. You just lost a motor. You just lost another motor.

[00:45:46]

So they go through this extensive training, you know, and all these and it's you know, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave. Where you going to get in? Because you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator that the airplane is going to break, you're going to lose hydrogen. And it's sometimes are a problem, like, oh, I just lost this hydraulic system, but I'm having an issue on the other motor.

[00:46:05]

Well, if I shut down this motor and I've got a hydraulics because there's two hydraulic systems, one on each motor, Wolf, I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system and my right motor is starting to give me indications. Do I want to shut the right motor down? Because that's going to kill my hydraulic system. That's good. And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system. And without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly.

[00:46:24]

So it's a really there challenging problems that you have to think through in real time. And of course, the weather is never good. It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're going to break out it. Just all this stuff gets piled on top of you. And it's intended to increase the level of stress, because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's going to stem power. You know, we're the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are literally on instinct like an animal.

[00:46:52]

Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you're going to have when the main part of your your cognitive abilities start to shut down, you're you're running.

[00:47:02]

That instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly what to do and that's literally how it happens.

[00:47:08]

So there's no how do I put it, fear of death, like in Sally's case. Do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die? You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say there was so much going on in the cockpit in that time, his his mindset was probably I can do this, I'm trained. I'm going to do the procedures.

[00:47:34]

I've practiced this before. I've done these things. And, you know, I'm assuming that in his mindset, because I never thought about when things were really bad. You know, if you're having problems with the airplane that, you know, that I was going to more, you know, and planted into the ground, it was always, you know, maybe it's an ego thing where you think I can do this.

[00:47:49]

And I mean, so you never have you experienced fear during flight like. I mean, one one way, which is all find mentioning Mike Tyson when he talked about like as he's walking up to the ring, he's like he starts out basically in fear and they are worried about how things are going to go. I mean, purely to put into words his fear. But as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over.

[00:48:27]

Do you think there's no way anybody could defeat me? So, like, that's that's his experience of overcoming fear. But do you did you experience any kind of thing like that or is that or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and then you just go to the instinctual 80 percent solution?

[00:48:47]

I wouldn't say I was never afraid. I think that would be I. I couldn't tell you that anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just it's usually especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the weather sucks and the decks move, you know, the ship's going up and down because it will scare lover living shit out of you.

[00:49:10]

Can I say that deficit. So it's about landing and take off that.

[00:49:14]

That is if you even if they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam. You know, guys go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and people were getting shot down a lot. The highest the highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier.

[00:49:30]

How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible like for for a civilian, I guess, like me, just seems crazy that a human can do that.

[00:49:39]

The problem with night is there's different degrees of night, just like day. I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, oh, you know, this is not that bad.

[00:49:50]

But you got to remember at night, I think everyone can associate with your driving in your car. And it's just a it's an overcast, dark night and you're on a country road with no sidelights. Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of my God, because you what you'll do is you'll drive your headlights because it is so dark, you know, and you can get outside you get outside a city and get up into New Hampshire, especially when the roads are khurvin, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good.

[00:50:18]

It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception what you think is fixed. The runway is actually moving up and down and left to right.

[00:50:32]

Yeah. When it's really bad, you can actually see it move. And we have two systems. You know, there was a there's an automatic system that's actually.

[00:50:42]

It stabilizes with the initials on the ship and then there's the illest now civilian pilots will tell you that ISIS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope. You know, you come down, you it's like a plus on the carrier. It's not it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a non precision approach. It's not stabilized at all. That and I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the attack and there's all kinds of stuff moving because the base that it's all sitting on is doing this.

[00:51:10]

And ships don't just go up and down. They they do this. So the bomb goes up and down in the tail like you normally see a ship. And then there's so that's pitch and then it has roll. So it's doing this and then it has heaved. So the whole boat is going up and down while pitching and rolling and Yogurtland on that.

[00:51:27]

So and it's I mean, I remember landing as I was with Chris Sayto and Chris and I, we were off the USS Ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's Sinton getting turned into razorblades. We're flying the old A6 and we come in and it was off to San Diego. And it's just ugly night because San Diego always has a marine layer that is about twelve hundred feet lower than at that time. And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around is just crazy tonight I've ever seen of San Diego.

[00:51:54]

And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop. And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked we call it the six pack. So it's right in front of the island. So if you see an aircraft carrier of the island and the number of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area. So it's like you get front row seats to the concert and and this this becomes in, you know, ugly pass.

[00:52:20]

He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one you never want to catch the first one, which means you're not really high above the back of the ship when you landed. And it comes in and the exhaust on another six or eight, six actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see across. I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white because of the water being blown off the deck.

[00:52:43]

And I'm shaking and I like I'll never forget. I looked over at Chris and I said, oh, my God. I go, Hey, dude, man, 10000 foot runway looks really good right now. And I go, and I'm shaking my hands like this. And I said, I'm not even this is I'm not faking this. I know that's literally I cannot stop shaking. I said that scared the shit out of me.

[00:53:00]

Yeah, but but it scares you afterwards.

[00:53:05]

You don't during it, you're not. You don't have time to think about that, you're doing it. You've got to do is kind of the quote from Tom Hanks. And what's that? The girls baseball movie where he goes, There's no crying in baseball. Well, that's our joke. There's no crying in naval aviation. I said you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but, you know, there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it.

[00:53:26]

So you cry all the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it's time to it's time to, you know, man up and land that land of jet.

[00:53:35]

Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid, that dream to fly. What's it like to fly an airplane, what it looks incredible to me as a human, like a descendent of ape, I sit here on land and look up at you guys.

[00:53:54]

It seems incredible that a human being can do that.

[00:53:57]

You know, people ask, you know, I'll be sit around my friends and are like I as I said, it's the greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's an office with a view because you're sitting in a glass office.

[00:54:10]

You you can do you know, it's like roller coasters.

[00:54:14]

You go, oh, it does all these cool stuff. So we take people flying everyone well. And it's like, oh yeah, I like roller coaster. I go, no, take any roller coaster, coolest roller coaster you've ever been on and multiply it by a thousand.

[00:54:25]

I said it's an experience, you know, to put your body under, you know, you know, the Jets rated at seven and a half, but it'll pull up to eight point one before it overstress. It depends on fuel weight.

[00:54:36]

So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight GS to be able to do that to your boss. I mean, it takes a toll.

[00:54:43]

Like I can't really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that. But would I trade it? I mean, it was a childhood dream. I know how many people get to do that, you know, professional. I want to be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which is a very small percentage. Well, I want to fly jets and and to fly. You know, at the time when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had in our squadron were brand new, like literally right out of the factory.

[00:55:06]

I'd come off our first Super Hornet cruise. We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis where they were building my new jets that I was going to get. And I actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it together. So I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet together that's going to get delivered to me in a couple of months that I'm going to fly.

[00:55:21]

So just I mean, the whole of it is it's yeah, I it's I'll tell you what, when I left when I decided to walk away.

[00:55:31]

Yeah. I told myself I wouldn't, I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your five command you're flying really starts to tag to come down. You know, even if you go and you're an air wing commander, which is we call tag carrier group commander, you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should you be. I mean, there's young people that are coming up and it's training your relief because that's the next generation.

[00:55:56]

So like currently, I have friends of mine that we served together. Their kids are flying Super Hornets. Right.

[00:56:04]

So to me, that's really neat because I watched them when they were little. And now, you know, one of them who is good friends is and we'll get his last name.

[00:56:13]

But Joey, who lived down the street from us is a top was a Top Gun instructor. And I'm like, Hey, Joey, Joe is the top gun, you know? And I'm like, that's cool. Because, you know, I went there and I knew him. He would come down to my house. And now to see these kids that are because typically military breeds military, you know, because the kids grew up in it. I mean, and I the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind.

[00:56:35]

So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL because he had talked about doing that. He's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player. But he's you know, both my kids are well, my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his third year.

[00:56:51]

So but there's a I suppose I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation. So you don't you told yourself you're not going to miss it. You miss it. There are days I do when I hear jets like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memory so I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever. You know, Tom Brady can't play football.

[00:57:20]

There's going to come a time where he has to stop.

[00:57:22]

He seems to have done it for a long time. But, you know, typically when you look at you go, I had the opportunity. And I think as automation moves on, especially with A.I., that, you know, when will when will the last man fight or rebuild? You know, and that's that big question. You know, we just did have 35. It's over budget. It's seven years late. There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it.

[00:57:45]

And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the Air Force is working on with smaller, cheaper a charitable platforms that you can go, oh, we can, because if you don't put a man in the box or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this, too. So I'll just say that as a person.

[00:58:05]

So we say, man, and he we mean both men and women, because offline you told me about a lot of incredible women that thought I had.

[00:58:13]

I had three three female actually for one of them didn't fly any more. She actually lives right around here. She she's she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore. One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly she's one of the most gifted people I've ever met in my life. She is the vice president. Amazon Air. You can see her on TV. Your name, Sarah. Incredible. And then I had a page who ended up taking command.

[00:58:41]

She got out of fighters and went into other platforms and she was a commanding officer. And then the other one is a teaches leadership.

[00:58:49]

And she is all three of them, actually, all four of the women that were direct. I'm home not forgetting.

[00:58:56]

I don't think I'm forgetting someone incredibly, incredibly talented and a great addition to the writing room. So anyone who gets into the, you know, women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. And, you know, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy.

[00:59:12]

So women can fly as good as the guys. Yeah, you can't tell if you passed another airplane.

[00:59:17]

You can't tell if there's a man or woman in it. It really comes down to stick and throttle the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be.

[00:59:29]

If you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast. Anyone has those characteristics can do it. And then I think most important, besides that, there has to be a desire. Yeah, and I'm not saying that everyone if you took because we used to track.

[00:59:41]

So when I ran, we call it the rag. It's the replacement air group. It's where. So the the Super Hornet training squadron, there's two of there's one on the East Coast, one 06 and there's one on the West Coast, which is VFP one twenty two, one twenty two is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer.

[00:59:57]

OK, so we track the last hundred students. All right, so everyone goes, it's funny to hear students talk because, oh, he's awesome. If you took the hundred, there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally gifted aviators. They're well, well, well above average.

[01:00:14]

It's like the person in a math class that sits down and complex math and they just get it, you know, at the bottom. There's the three at the bottom that are going to struggle and there's a good chance they won't get out. And if they do get out, they're going to have to work really hard to just maintain kind of average.

[01:00:30]

Sometimes it's just the way your mind works. Not everyone is good at everything.

[01:00:33]

If you took the ninety four of them in the middle there within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there, they're all, you know, it's a the bell curve doesn't look real good.

[01:00:43]

It's just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone's right there within one main deviation. And then you have the outliers usually not on the high side because they're going to get through, but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through.

[01:00:55]

So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job, as does the Air Force of screening. So now what they do when I went, you just showed up and you started. Now what you do is you actually go fly Piper Warriors' wing to see. Can you are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation that goes through. And then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go and then they put you in a primary.

[01:01:15]

It's kind of like a it's like a PreCheck, you know, like the preset the SAT to go, hey, how am I going to do on the SAT?

[01:01:21]

It's it's it's very similar to that, but it's more of a hand skill. Can you adapt?

[01:01:26]

Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not you know, we this is you know, this is all has depth with all that where it's really relative to aviation.

[01:01:35]

We are two dimensional, very two dimensional space.

[01:01:39]

So so our perception is actually more limited than than that of an aviator.

[01:01:45]

Very much. And here's why. So we look at let's look at a tall building. Let's look at one World Trade Center in New York, because that's way everyone knows what looks like big tall building.

[01:01:56]

That's what maybe eighteen hundred feet tall. Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like, what, twenty one hundred feet tall.

[01:02:01]

It's not that big.

[01:02:02]

So a Super Hornet to do what a split s is, which is I'm flying. I'm just going to roll the airplane upside down and then I'm going to do basically a C the letter C, I'm going to go in the top and I'm at the bottom. So and I'm just basically a vertical displacement of the airplane. So I'm going from high. Low. It's very, very tight and it doesn't it about roughly about 2500 feet, give or take a little.

[01:02:25]

So you go that is that is a really tight vertical turn. Yeah. For example, the A6 in order to do that was about nine thousand feet. And we look at a building that's 20 feet high and think that is Paul.

[01:02:37]

Right. All right. So in an aviation sense, when you're starting to do vertical displacement maneuvers going from 35000 feet down to 20 thousand feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane because the human brain thinks we really are, we like to be flat. I see.

[01:02:51]

We we think to do so if I'm fighting how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane is to work in the vertical because most people will do like one move in the vertical and then they want to start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable.

[01:03:04]

Yes.

[01:03:05]

And if you still think in, like, stacks of two layers or no.

[01:03:09]

Or do do you truly start to think in that third dimension, like the rich 3D world of like of fighting, they could do start to actually be able to really experience the 3-D nature you do, because you have to project you're going to be so you have to know the performance of the airplane, knowing that, hey, if I do this maneuver that I am going to go, it's it's kind of like when I when I talk about when we were chasing the Tic-Tac.

[01:03:36]

So the tektites coming up and I'm at about, you know, and I've been doing this for at the time 16 years. So I'm looking and I'm going, hey, I'm here. He's there on the other side, a circle. I'm going to do a vertical display. So I'm going to go like this. I'm going to cut across the circle.

[01:03:49]

And I'm not going to I'm I'm going out in front of him. I'm going over here because I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that's where he's going to be.

[01:03:54]

And I'm trying to, you know, basically join up on him. But I also had to look at it go, do I have enough altitude to do it? Because what I did was we're here and I do this. I'm going to end up over here and he's going to be above me. And then, you know, I have to get that energy back to get up to him. And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade.

[01:04:11]

So you have. This is this is really important when you're when you're fighting airplanes and you're really max performing. So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he's literally playing with it. He's got a finite amount of energy. He can add some with the motors and stuff. But you're what you're really doing is it's a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other pieces is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance because I know if I do a nice, easy turn, the airplane will make it.

[01:04:40]

And what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight that twenty five hundred foot split s that it's going to cost me energy. So if I enter the split s at two hundred knots and I do it right, I'm going to come out at the bottom at probably two hundred knots. Although I lost 2500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance turn.

[01:05:02]

And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's your overall energy package so you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you. But if this jet is at 400 knots in this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. All right, it's overall energy package, and that's that you've got to be constantly evaluating where you're at and this is that 80 percent solution.

[01:05:26]

Can I afford to do this or not? Yes or no? And you have literally a split second to make.

[01:05:29]

The most incredible dance of human decision making is just incredible. I know a million people want me to talk about Tic-Tac, and I definitely will. But let me ask one last ridiculous, subjective question.

[01:05:46]

What's the greatest plane ever made in history?

[01:05:52]

You don't get through, like from pure speed, I would say. Seventy one, I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, you know, skunkworks for what that was able to do. And when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built the CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia.

[01:06:15]

To me, that is an incredible engineering marvel. I think that like X 15, by the way, this is our I to drop this.

[01:06:22]

Seventy one still holds the the speed record of any plane, as far as I can understand. Yeah.

[01:06:30]

What's funny when you get into it is it's member fast is relative. And when I say that I mean so if you're going 3000 miles an hour, a hundred feet above the ground, you're going three thousand miles an hour through. You know, that's how fast you're going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicator of speed and there's a, you know, your ground speed. So you're indicated air speed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane.

[01:06:55]

Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing you like three hundred knots, but at three hundred knots you're really doing 2500 miles an hour over the ground. So, you know, like, we would take the airplanes up to 50000 feet when we had to do full the maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing two hundred and some odd, not sure it's actually slow for the airplane. It's you know, you're getting you know, it's kind of like it's not you know, there's maneuvering speeds, you know, that if I hit a certain speed and a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability, the airfoil.

[01:07:26]

If I'm below that speed, I'm going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G. OK, so when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast? When you look at it are seventy one that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet. The air so thin, you know, just like the F-16, you can get to much higher speed. But the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low.

[01:07:49]

So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low, but because you're going fast to get enough air over your prostatic system to show that you're going three hundred knots, you're you're screaming.

[01:07:59]

I mean, the fastest I ever got was I was with the wheel soon to be Vice Admiral White. So we had taken a check flight in and I got it up to one point seven eight. I got a Super Hornet to make one point seven, eight. And it was and we were struck by Pebble Beach two. And it what's that feel like when you get that fast start to me, it got a little bit weird because you realize in your brain and I did that there's no out.

[01:08:24]

If something happens I can't eject the ejection would kill me.

[01:08:28]

It's that kind of liberating in a way that maybe not always want to push the limit. You know, it's like how fast I could have got it going faster. It was it was literally still accelerating when I stopped. But I had it was fuel limited and space limited because I you know, I'm off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I'm going and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, you know, the whole Monterey Peninsula just going.

[01:08:50]

And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute. I mean, you're screaming. Yeah, I mean, that's.

[01:08:56]

And then you have to. Well, the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was a slipped off Super Hornet. So it's basically just the airplane. No pylons, no pads, no nothing. And then we had to get it turned around because we got to go to the exit point for the area. And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop out.

[01:09:13]

When you're going that fast, they don't because the Super Hornet really doesn't have speed brakes. It deforms the flight controls.

[01:09:20]

They don't function. So you really you're trying to maneuver. And when you're going that fast, you can't turn because a seven G turn at one point, five mock is a pretty big turn.

[01:09:30]

So it's just it's crazy, incredible that a human can do this and human can engineer that the system, which allows another human to control that system, that it's to me, it's it's I think it's just it's it's one it's a great experience.

[01:09:46]

Was it sad to see this? I saw anyone go. I think it was during your career. I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes?

[01:09:54]

We would see it flying when I was flying Hornets because we the West Coast flies in. It's called our twenty five away, which is covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards. That's a huge area. It's it's actually I think the guy from Switzerland come out because they were they had hornets and he's like, this is bigger than our whole country now because it's a pretty big area in California that you fly. But you would see the seventy ones. They had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington State and Montana and they do a loop.

[01:10:21]

And so you'd see them coming back down. They descend above sixty thousand. You'd either get contrails, you know, the white lines behind airplanes and come down and hit the tanker and then they go back up. So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.

[01:10:34]

But, you know, I think with money age, the advent of satellites, you know, because they're everywhere now. I mean, you got commercial companies putting satellites up. How much of that need was really there? Because you got to remember when those things. Started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around, you know, it was it was the U2 and ESR 71 that were out there doing that work.

[01:10:57]

So at the time it was needed, it was at the if you think about it, really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time. Yeah. I mean, literally, we have yet to pass that. And you also ask, what is our need to pass that? I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space. So do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in.

[01:11:17]

It does all kinds of crazy stuff, you know, to work with automation, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of these, in my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO literally and identified flying object and not only witnessed, but got to.

[01:11:43]

How do you put it? Like chase it? Essentially, it chased it. So let me just lay out I think it's easier than you telling the story. Maybe me and my dumb simpleton waste trying to explain the story as I understand it, and then maybe you can correct me.

[01:11:59]

So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers, that's cruiser, the cruiser cruiser. So you can't land on a helicopter, has a helicopter pad on the back and has weapons on it. OK, got it. Shoots the missiles up, but has a nice radar, just an incredible spy system, phased array for panels. So it looks at squadrons.

[01:12:26]

Perfect. So they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at twenty eight thousand feet with speed of with what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour. Don't know that in knots, but on the coast of California.

[01:12:44]

So and they kept detecting these objects for just about a week, then comes in like you're part of the story, which is on November 14th. From the I guess it's from the USS Nimitz, I you flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white tic tac shaped object with no wings flying in ways you've never thought possible. And in some interviews, some way, he said, I think it was not from this world. So there's a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation.

[01:13:24]

There's videos involved, the video of a flare, forward looking infrared receiver, receiver. There's also the visible light. You can switch TV as a TV mode, so that gives you visible light. And then as I Armont and Chad Underwood recorded that video and those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later, one of the three videos, the two other videos go far and Gimple were recorded in two thousand something, 14 or 15 here on the east coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects.

[01:14:07]

But they're weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences that people have described were similar in in the degree of weirdness. But the difference is, is actually on the East Coast, the 2014 case, very few people have spoken about it. And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it. So there's a mystery to it. But it's in some sense, it's a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery.

[01:14:43]

And it's fascinating. And there is a lot of opinions. There's division of opinions because it's a mysterious I mean, it truly is a UFO in the sense that UAP, what is the unidentified phenomena?

[01:15:01]

So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I've gotten wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general.

[01:15:10]

So here's what I know. So, yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission. And they said there's all kinds of rumors out here, there's all kinds of after this has come out, so originally it was the four of us. There's two jets, two people in each jet. They're FAA.

[01:15:30]

OK, there is no video from our event. It was all four sets, eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly that's it.

[01:15:44]

And so when you see eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing. Yeah. So so we're flying out. We get we get vector, they come up and tell us, hey, we're going to cancel training. This is the USS Princeton. So this is this Aegis cruiser. So we're talking to one controller.

[01:16:00]

Who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance we have on board, and I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and training, typically because bad stuff happens, usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane and it's not good.

[01:16:14]

So we had what's called a of nine, which is really just a blue two with the aim night speaker on the front of it, which is an air missile. So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off with a sledgehammer. You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and unlocks the lugs and pulls the plugs back in. That holding on when it really fires the impulse from the engine actually throws it looks forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail.

[01:16:35]

That's how it works. So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking. So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers airplane to the left hand side of me. So she's kind of stepped up like this. And I'll use your Mike Box to start says we're going out there. Corn ranges are called broccolis bearing range in altitude. And they're telling us, hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles.

[01:17:01]

So they're saying a two seven zero thirty twenty thousand. So they say so we got our radars and we had we had mechanically scanned radars at the time. APJ 73, good piece of gear, maybe.

[01:17:13]

Seventy nine new ones way better.

[01:17:14]

But anyway, and I apologize if I interrupt the story, Wolf, it's useful, but they're telling you the location of a thing that you should look at.

[01:17:22]

If they're telling us they have a contact on their radar, they don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things.

[01:17:29]

And what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving a system. We've been tracking these things for about two weeks. That's we'd been at sea for two weeks because this is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are.

[01:17:40]

They kind of interrupt the mission to say check it out. So we start driving out there. And as we get down to he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, ten miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution, some of the radar, because radars don't see everything there. So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution. Right. So and it's basically think of a little cubes so they can and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes and they're looking.

[01:18:08]

So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube, then the radar can only see one thing that makes sense. So they call merge plot. Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around. Something's around you get your head out. So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore. And the Wizards, the Wizards can look, but everyone else heads out when they say merge plot. You're done looking at your displays inside.

[01:18:30]

You're doing this and you're trying to find it. So as we look out to the right and you look high and low because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up, now, keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away. So it can't see the surface. And you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel can really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the curve.

[01:18:53]

But let's just say that it can't at this time.

[01:18:56]

So, you know, is it worse than that? So as we're looking around, we see know this is a it's a clear day.

[01:19:03]

There's no clouds and there's no whitecaps. It's just a calm. It's actually a perfect day. If you on a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots a win. And you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have Whitewater come out, is it was the perfect day to own a sailboat.

[01:19:19]

How many miles? I'll take like seven. Like, you see, just it's a clear day. It's 50.

[01:19:24]

It's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to horizon. It's just clear it's nothing. And we're basically off the coast.

[01:19:30]

If you look at a map and you go San Diego and inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that. And we're probably about by the time this all hits, we're price and low. Eighty hundred, I don't know.

[01:19:42]

But somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast. Perfect is from twenty thousand feet. You'd be amazed. You can do the calculation, you can see stuff, you'll see land fifty miles away. You can see, you know, and when you're looking at a continent, it's really easy to see. You're not looking at an island. I mean, you're looking at Mexico.

[01:19:58]

And you can see on the whitecaps in the water if you if there is any. Oh yeah. They're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or so if it's a really whitecap windy day, then the ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it. It makes it actually easier if the ship has to move where it's got a big weight because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day you go, OK, and it creates what's called we call the Birbal.

[01:20:20]

But when the air flows across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up. So when you're coming board to land, it's going to make you go up a little bit and then you're going to fall and you got to you got to anticipate that to stand glide slope.

[01:20:32]

So we're pretty we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves in the wind. So we there's no waves. There's no wind. There's no white caps. And we look down and we see white water. So if you put if you put a piece of land, a sea mount below the surface, like, you know, even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough. As the waves come in, waves have height and length when they come in.

[01:20:55]

That's what happens on the shore. When a wave comes in, it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave heights up because it can't go any more and then spin it.

[01:21:04]

And that's where you get the white. So what happens is at sea when you get a storm out, you'll see stuff come in, the wave will crash and you'll get white water. You can go out when it's high tide and any one of the coast, you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks in at high tide. I can't see the rocks are covered, but there will be white water around those rocks.

[01:21:22]

You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface that makes sense. Yeah, so that's what it was. We see we don't see an object because there's all kinds of. Oh, they saw this, they saw it. Another craft below the way. We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw white water. But the white water and I like to shape it. You can say it was a cross. I say it's about the size of a 737.

[01:21:39]

So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water. So the waves breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is that you'd see that this kind of shape.

[01:21:48]

So it looks like a cross. So we're looking down off the right side, the back seat or any other airplane. Jim says this is that talking and partials again. He says, hey, skipper, do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, what the hell is that in? Do you see?

[01:22:04]

That essentially is what we see, the white water, and that's what draws our eyes down. Otherwise we'd never seen it. So we see this.

[01:22:10]

I would love to see the look on your face when you see that. And then we see this little white Tic-Tac because we're about twenty thousand feet above it and it's doing it's going basically north, south and then east, west, north. And it's abrupt. It's very abrupt. So it's not like a helicopter for helicopters going sideways and it goes once it's going sideways.

[01:22:28]

Lt goes what it'll do is it'll go, it's got to speed. It slows down because there's inertia and it stops and then it goes back the other way.

[01:22:35]

This thing's not it's like left, right, left, right with no so moving in ways that doesn't doesn't feel intuitive to you at all of the things you've seen in the past.

[01:22:44]

So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter. Right. So you go, oh, what is? Because we see it's moving. We're like, oh, helicopter. So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that, because usually when they get down there towards that fifty feet, you'll get rotor wash.

[01:23:00]

You see it in the movies when the helicopters by the water water comes up the sides because the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that. It pushes the air down and then it has to come up the side.

[01:23:09]

So you see it and you go, well, there's no there's no rotor wash. What does that thing? So by this time, we're driving around. So as we're if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this thing. And it's just it's still pointed north, south and it's going left, right. And it's kind of moving around the object. And if it had if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.

[01:23:29]

So if you've got the east west and then the north south kind of. Cross, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out, just kind of moving up, down, left, and it's crossing over it, it's going up kind of. So now we're like, what the hell is that? So then I go, hey, I'm going to go check it out. And the other pilot says, I'm going to stay up here. And I said, yes, stay up high, because now we get we get a different perspective.

[01:23:51]

So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending. She can watch because right now all I'm watching is the Tic-Tac. She can watch me and the Tic-Tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important. You can hear people say it's high cover, whatever.

[01:24:06]

She's watching me, which is it's perfect as the story goes on, because it gives a two perspectives of perspective. It's about eight thousand feet above us when that thing disappears and they don't know because of it, just like, oh, I lost it. They go, no, it's over to the right. We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm just descending you.

[01:24:26]

It's an easy descent. I'm doing about three hundred knots, which is a really good air speed for the airplane for maneuvering, because I have I have everything available to me at that speed.

[01:24:36]

So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 o'clock as it takes doing this, it literally it's like it's aware of us and it just goes and it kind of points out towards the west and starts coming up. So now it's obviously knows that we're there, whatever this thing is. And I was over there.

[01:24:50]

So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down. We're just I'm just watching it now. You remember, this whole thing is like this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it. It was gone. Or I saw lights in the sky and they were gone. We watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers. Watch this thing fly around. So we're like, OK, so I get over to the eight o'clock position and I'm a little I'm a couple of thousand feet above it.

[01:25:12]

And it's about so I'm probably about 15 k I think it is. I think as my stories about fighting, it's just estimating. So you can see it's really easy to say because so was fourteen, fifteen thousand feet. I thought it was eight thousand dollar. The other airplanes up about that. OK, so they're still at about twenty thousand feet so they're in the air slowly and I'm descending, they're staying up there. So I'm kind of doing this as I drive around.

[01:25:36]

OK, so I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position. We're about the eight o'clock position. And I'm like, oh, I've got I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat that I'm going to want to do this. He's like, go for it, Skip, because I was the skipper, so I cut across the bottom.

[01:25:53]

So I'm kind of almost coming out co altitude as this thing's coming, I'm going to meet it and I'm driving and I get to probably it's I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, half mile is pretty far half mile in aviation isn't.

[01:26:05]

It's nothing that's I mean you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane. You can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail.

[01:26:12]

So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards me. So I'm cutting across because I'm going to the three o'clock position. It's at two o'clock and I'm going to meet it at three o'clock because I do this. It goes it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around estimate, about 12000 feet. So they're at twenty. So they've got about 8000 foot of altitude above us when this happens.

[01:26:32]

And it just is it crosses our nose. It just it accelerates. And literally in less than less than a half second, it just goes and it's gone. And so we're like and the first thing is, dude, do you guys see it? The other airplanes like it's gone. We don't we have no idea what's that.

[01:26:49]

So we kind of spin around. OK, well, let's see what's down here. And I turn around. We're looking for the white water. We can't the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember telling the guy in my back seat I could do them. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is I mean, you know, at the time, like thirty some hundred hours of flying.

[01:27:09]

I've been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like anything, you know.

[01:27:12]

So as we turn, we go, oh, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I've got to put on my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to overseas.

[01:27:22]

So we got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CEO, because, like, I get I get it training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that. So, hey, let's go back. And the the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine Squadron.

[01:27:35]

And so Cheek's is that, you know, he's listening to all this happen, you know, because he's just like because he when he first went out, they were going to do him. But the little Hornets, the legacy hornets, that cities don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets. So he had launched first and they were going to do him. And then they knew we were off the deck. They just told him, hey, go to your cap point down south and we're going to send we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets with a cap point, because that's where we hold.

[01:28:00]

So it's called a combat air patrol point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end. It's kind of like, hey, you guys are going to think of it. If it's a football field, we're going to sit on one goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at each other and try and do something in the middle of a field, then go back to our reset points.

[01:28:17]

OK, so you're talking to him. He's he's he's listening to the he's just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just he just dials up because they know that we all know the frequency. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like because I cancel training. So what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting for him and his. Winchman, so they're just there listening to all this go on and then at this point you move on?

[01:28:36]

Yeah, we come back up to train, we go back as we're flying back the controller because we're talking to the the kid on the Princeton, the the they're called OSes are operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars.

[01:28:48]

And we're talking to him and he's like, hey, sir, you're not going to believe this. But that thing is that your cap, it showed back up. Just popped up. You know, this is like 60 miles away.

[01:28:56]

It just reappears. We're like, oh, OK. So we got the radars that we're looking for it. We get out there. We never see it.

[01:29:02]

We never see it again. We do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like, oh, this is going to be where I told I told him, I go, do you know we're going to catch we're going to get shit for this. When we get back to the ship, we're going to get out and we're just going to catch maximum. And we did. And it's kind of joking, you know.

[01:29:19]

So the ship plays, movies. We have movies on the boat and they do twelve hours of movies. So they repeat because there's a date check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night place. So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy because I watch stuff on TV. That way too will be like, oh hey, I've seen this and I'll jump into a movie in the middle and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put it all together because that's how we have to do it, because we're so busy.

[01:29:42]

Well, the movies became and is Men and Black Aliens. Independence Day definitely going to catch some shit.

[01:29:52]

Well, we will. But let me just ask some dumb questions just because it's whatever whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened, it's, you know, one of the most fascinating things, events in recent history. So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about a different kinds of angles. There's no good answers, but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here. So, first of all, you mentioned you saw at some point X, Y, and then somebody in the Princeton said you're not going to believe this or it's that cap point that's a different place.

[01:30:32]

How the heck did it know what your point is? That's a good question.

[01:30:36]

That's one of you to know one. You know, you don't you don't tell it.

[01:30:39]

We don't broadcast it. We have a waypoint in the system. But I don't know if maybe it knew where we were going because we used the same one day after day after day.

[01:30:47]

But it it obviously knew. And you never saw it there. Never saw it there.

[01:30:51]

Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, hey, look, we just we just chased this thing.

[01:30:57]

They're I go in there like Wigo duty and I go and I told him, I said, did get videoed. He goes, so and that's how he is. He's like, oh, I'm going to go. Anyway, he was he was determined he was going to find this thing, so. When you look at his video and this is the stuff it is now that they don't see because not all the all you see is the fleer tape, that's the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver.

[01:31:20]

I'll probably overlay the visual when he people when he goes out, it's, you know, what he's looking at on his displays as he has basically two radar displays up. He has azimuth and range on the right one and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one. So this is called the Asil display. And this is called this is basically the PPE, which is the you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square.

[01:31:41]

It's really taken this it's taken a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out. So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us, because they do this, they squared off.

[01:31:51]

So so he goes out and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it, because when he's not trying to lock it, so the radar just throw an energy out and get it. You know, it's a Doppler radar. So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing.

[01:32:02]

It's going, oh, I can see. I can see. And it's looking for a turn. So he gets a return. So he wants to see what it is because all you get is a little green square unless it builds a track file on it. But a little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving because it's it's sitting in one spot in space. He locks it up when he goes to lock it up. Now, he's put in a bunch of energy on it.

[01:32:20]

So he's telling the radar, stare down that line of sight and whatever's there. I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is and the direction that it's going.

[01:32:29]

OK. The radar smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed. So that's all it is, is you send the signal out something, it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back. And the radar was smart enough to go. That is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me. I'm being jammed and it shows you and it puts strobes up.

[01:32:53]

It gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff. So you can I mean it. Well, it does. It goes full into it.

[01:32:58]

It's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see because everything comes up and the the this aspect gets long and all kinds. I want to get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed.

[01:33:07]

So and as you said, a program, by the way, the jamming is an act of war. Active jamming is when you actively jamming on a platform. Yes. It's technically an act of war.

[01:33:14]

Feels like you should be freaking out at this point. I mean, so.

[01:33:18]

Well, he does it and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle. They have their side stick controller so they can control all the sensors and they can just toddle around and do stuff. So he can he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that Azmath elevation on the radar to the targeting pod.

[01:33:34]

Well, as soon as he command of the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes, oh, what's over there? And it'll stay there because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together. You can decouple them, but they're going to automatically couple up.

[01:33:46]

So when he cassells over a switch looks like a castle, which was a castle. So when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says, instead of looking at the radar, I want a look at the targeting pod he sees in on the targeting pockets, targeting pods already looking there. And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out. He's just receiving our energy from the Tic-Tac. And then the system itself will track the pixels.

[01:34:10]

And the contrast of this depends on what Modred. So it says, oh, and that's what those little bars you see in the video where the Barsh left some vision based tracking.

[01:34:18]

That's exactly what it is. So that's the video he goes through, Zoom's changes, the money. He goes through all the modes.

[01:34:26]

So there's a narrow, medium and wide. So wide is far away, medium and then narrow. And then there's the TV mode and he goes from our mode to the TV mode.

[01:34:34]

That cool thing with the TV mode is narrow air mode is only medium TV mode, so you can actually get closer with narrative mode. It's got a better zoom capability when you go on a TV mode. So he goes through all those things and that's when you see it going from a black background to white back, trying to figure out what the heck is this?

[01:34:53]

Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it with that thing.

[01:35:00]

Green the so the video has been out. It actually was on YouTube for years and before the government released, it leaked two thousand.

[01:35:09]

What about.

[01:35:10]

No, I got the guy that was in my back seat, sent me an email and I had retired.

[01:35:16]

So this is about NOCH because I was working I was working down in San Diego. So this is about two thousand eight early.

[01:35:24]

Two thousand nine. So sends methanol to strange land dotcom, which is not suitable for workboats top notch. Yeah. And he says, hey, I can remember the email. Hey, Skip, does this look familiar? And I look at I'm like, how the hell did that get on strange land?

[01:35:46]

So the next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube link to someone. You don't send strange land dotcom to someone because you don't know what you're going to get. It's like Googling kittens. Yeah. So it ends up there somehow.

[01:36:03]

So it gets on YouTube, which is cool because I would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they do.

[01:36:09]

What's the coolest thing you ever saw flying? You know, it's kind of like you were asking what it's like and I go, oh, did I chase the UFO?

[01:36:13]

And I'm like, get out. And I'm like, No, sir.

[01:36:15]

So this is literally how it happened. So I sit with my friend Matt.

[01:36:19]

So Matt and I did our my he was the guy in my right seat of the eight six when I did my very first night trap.

[01:36:24]

Right. And we were friends to this day. Right. Because when you do stuff like people like that, you know, you had to have faith in him. He had faith in me. You know, there they become like your brother. Yeah.

[01:36:37]

And these are guys that literally, you know, I don't talk to them on a regular basis, like Chris, who works at Apple. If if Chris called me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help, I need this, I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out. Let's do it. Because it's they're like family. You do it. And most Navy guys, we don't we're not we don't send letters to each other weekly.

[01:36:55]

You know, I have friends that I haven't talked to in ten years that they showed up on my door, you know, pop bottle of wine, grab a beer, drive through the shit, take about first ten minutes to catch up. And it's it's like old times and it's amazing how fast it's happened.

[01:37:07]

So so I'm out to dinner with Matt and I'm telling him this story and he's like, get out of here. So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco, Paco has a fighter sweep dotcom.

[01:37:20]

It's a blogsite. So Paco's obsessed like he is way into UFOs.

[01:37:25]

Yeah. So Pacho calls me up. He says, Dude, I was talking to Matty. That's what we call him. He goes, I was talking to Matty.

[01:37:31]

He goes, did you got to tell me the story?

[01:37:34]

So I'm like, all right. So I spend a chunk of time. And so he calls me one day and I'm like, You're going to voicemail. Hey, give me a call. So I call him up and he answers the phone. But I could hear people in the background and I go, Hey, dude, what's going on? Hang on, hang on. I got to put you on speakerphone. I go, what do you put me on?

[01:37:49]

Because you got to tell a story. I'm having a dinner party. You got to tell the story. So he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table as I tell a story.

[01:37:57]

Yeah. So he calls me up again. He says, hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fight or stuff like he wrote about that. We call the shit hot break. That's the guy that when you land on a carrier comes and turns and gets ready to land really fast, like breaks it off right at the back of the ship.

[01:38:13]

And one of the guys when we were junior officers on the USS Ranger, one of the apartments in our squadron is a guy nasty and nasty, was notorious for coming in in a tomcat and crankin off to shit. Hot break. Right.

[01:38:25]

So he he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with nasty. And there's another guy or Marv was our one of our landing signal officers for the airwing.

[01:38:35]

It's just it's just it's a good article on how this was and how, you know, it. It kind of forms you in naval aviation. It's kind of become a part of the club. So he said, I got to write about this thing. I like what he does. I got to write about it. Go all right. I go because at first I would say now I'm like, dude, I don't want this out there.

[01:38:49]

Just so you haven't really before then talked about it much because my wife didn't even really know the whole story.

[01:38:55]

What the a comment. Is it just because you caught them?

[01:38:59]

No, it's just I'll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two days. They played the goofy movies. There's a comic on the back of the airwing schedule that they would put. It was like first one was a Pharcyde in the second one was me and the guy in my back seat. And it was men in black. But it had our names, you know, protecting me, protecting the Nemitz Battlegroup type stuff is just funny shit like that.

[01:39:20]

So so that to me it wasn't that big of a deal. I was like, OK, we're never going to know what it was. I want to get out because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors. There's a group of folks are. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.

[01:39:36]

Nobody looking like me, you know, came out on a no no one came out of the helicopter, no one came out on an airplane. You know, you get oh, I was told to turn over this classified. What's funny is all the CEOs and several more are still in the Navy. There's one that is a he. I think he just finished up. He was a captain of an aircraft carrier, you know, so he'll end up making admiral and all that stuff.

[01:40:00]

Those guys are my friends. I talk to them daily.

[01:40:03]

Just just to clarify. So just for people who don't know, there's a story that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed. They showed up, they took the data, quote unquote. So all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably deleted it. There's a kind of story to that. And then from what I've seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about offline, that joke spread faster than or just rumors spread fast and anything.

[01:40:40]

And on the ships that it might have been a joke that started and. Well, they did. So here's the here's the joke.

[01:40:47]

Yeah. So they had come down, right? We had the tapes and they were Chadds tapes. So we use those tapes over and over again. You know, they're they're a consumable remember, I have a budget as a squadron. We have a budget. So I have to buy those tapes.

[01:41:00]

I have to all that stuff that we used, I'm accountable for. And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's on them. OK, so we had the tapes. So the the secured the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what's called Civic Cevik, which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need to tapes. These guys are going to come, they're going to come and get them.

[01:41:22]

This is so we're like I'm like, oh, or whatever, you know?

[01:41:25]

So we hand them the tapes and then someone because I have, you know, people shortly after they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they're they're messing with you. They're playing a joke. So I said, oh, well, let's see how well that goes, because, you know, I'm I'm a CEO and they're not. And so I went down to Civic and it was a private he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant J.G. So he's way junior to me.

[01:41:48]

And I said, hey, I want my tapes back. And he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are pulling my leg. I know you. There's no one came out. And I go and you have about thirty seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this place apart. That's when I told him and I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it's not going to go well, I said because it's bullshit and I need those tapes.

[01:42:11]

And he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up. They weren't to say if he open up a filing cabinet, pulled him out, handed to me. I said and I basically said a few things to him, like, don't ever get me again. And I left. I had the tapes. So this no one came out. There's no flying going on when all this is happening. And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.

[01:42:31]

So I took two brand new A.I.M. tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor to that, oh, the original Fleer video is ten minutes long. And there's some one of these petty officers are saying, I saw it. That's total crap. The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the released video is the entire video.

[01:42:48]

So you have mentioned I apologize if I say stupid things. Please correct me if you have mentioned that, like, I'm not going. I think that you watched it on, you know, on a bigger screen and felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the fleer video that would give us more pixels and more information, presumably because of the.

[01:43:18]

I would doubt it, because I don't know where the stuff that the government released. I don't know where they got. OK, so the stuff that was on Strange Land and YouTube, you know, someone pulled off of a secret. It looks like Iraq. You know, there's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive. And they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube.

[01:43:36]

Now, it's just like, you know, any time even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets it degrades. So you don't know how many times it's been copied. So we were looking at the videos. I've seen her right off the original. They're high eight tapes. That's basically pulled off the back of the display. So it's not film with cameras. It's literally a digital feed. It's pulled off the back and put onto a highway tape.

[01:43:55]

That's how the recorders work. Now, it's actually digital, the digital. It's not even on tapes anymore. It's it's a digital recording system. But we are still in that process of slowly because originally we had little cameras here that shine. So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.

[01:44:08]

So this is it's a pretty good feed when you put it on. So we're instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor, whatever, I'm looking at it on a nineteen inch because it was still normal TVs back there. We just put flat screens in Iridium that I had bought so we could watch movies.

[01:44:24]

So because when this huge 19 inch screen is maybe 20 Jarndyce, wow, that's huge, gigantic, I can get for like 50 bucks like this since 2005.

[01:44:39]

So so you look at it this big thing and you could see. So when you get to the TV, when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those. It was very clear.

[01:44:48]

But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic-Tac, was it did you get much more information from the higher from the clear little things out of the bottom at the bottom?

[01:45:00]

So when you see it, because he's coming almost co altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little. You know, like if you look at a Cessna, there's a little antennas hanging out about them, kind of like that. There was two little things on the bottom. There's nothing on the top. There was no plume, no air, no no visible propulsion, even heat signature. You know, it's all that stuff.

[01:45:18]

And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display, which that really raises a classification level, especially to see what the radar does, what is being in, you know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation and about 2000.

[01:45:33]

And let me think about 2009.

[01:45:37]

I got a call, my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, hey, tell me who he was. He still in the government? I'm friends with him. And he said, hey, we're going to investigate your Tic-Tac thing. This is literally five years later. Yeah, five years later.

[01:45:55]

And I said, OK, whatever.

[01:45:57]

And he did a pretty good job. I call it the unofficial official report because. It was really never official, it wasn't, but I'll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests. So he does the report. He sent me the report and all he said is, hey, I'm going to send this report. Please don't distribute this report.

[01:46:17]

I said, OK, the report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough to redact. There's a few versions of it unredacted. And I'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this. So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid. He doesn't talk to anyone. Now, the pilot of his airplane, she has come out on unidentified, but they don't release her name, although people are starting to do it.

[01:46:39]

And she's had weird shit happen around her house. She's got kids, you know, so I'm very protective of her. And I've told people like Jeremy and George, if I know that it names never came from you, I will never talk to you again about this. And Jeremy's been really good about it. And so is George. And then but George George knew the names were because he had he got the report from Senator Reid. And then the other crew, so the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that individual, they really don't have the recollection they were just out flying that day and it wasn't a big deal.

[01:47:14]

So it's you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door. And, you know, and there's rumors. Are you talk to everyone. I think you're about the twenty third person that I've talked to Total. And that includes, you know, the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selected because there's so much I mean, if I turn down like I turned on Russian TV, I can give you her name when we're done here.

[01:47:37]

She called she not only called me, she called my wife. She called my daughter. She called my son. Did you call my son away?

[01:47:43]

Because they're persistent. So I'm pretty. I'm very particular.

[01:47:47]

I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is because I knew we would have a conversation.

[01:47:50]

It wasn't based just on the Tic-Tac and the Internet, but we can actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into to get more people involved to go, because I think there's you know, and when you talk to, you know, Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon, you know, the group at TSA, you know, that whole thing.

[01:48:09]

That's to the Stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLay group that got started.

[01:48:13]

So you go, well, you know, because I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually when you talk to him, he's he's he's very smart. And I ask him, how'd you get into this? And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink 182, he goes, you read a lot of books when you're laying in a van and you're driving to your next gig before you make it big.

[01:48:33]

And he goes and he read he was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs. I'm trying to get the title. It's one of the big ones that's out there real popular. And so he started just he started asking more. And through his fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more connected. You know, if you talk to Chris Mellen, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and he's part of the Melen, you know, Dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.

[01:48:59]

He knows he he he definitely knows how the government works because he worked there.

[01:49:04]

And so when I went down to D.C. to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to.

[01:49:10]

When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, a month and a half ago, I asked I he text me, I text him Tom Lou to go, hey, because they were like, you got to do it. Because I turned to I'd turn Tucker down a couple of times before and his his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. Because those guys like, you got it. You got to do this for us.

[01:49:32]

So from my perspective, just to give you some context, so to me, there seems to be some stigma. So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today. And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, of faculty, fellow faculty at MIT and major universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to this subject from from the scientific community. A lot of people, especially when they hear your story, are like, wow, this is really interesting.

[01:50:04]

But you you don't even know when you're afraid to talk about it. And two, you don't know what the next steps are like. How can we seriously try to think about what you saw, how to think about how we further look for things like it, how we develop systems and plans for how in the future we can immediately collect a lot more data and try to react properly, you know, to try to communicate, try to interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective.

[01:50:42]

And I, I just would love to remove stigma from this subject.

[01:50:48]

Well, I think that's the first step we have done in this country, an absolutely terrible job with these things. So you go and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell. So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer. That's literally what came out. And then magically the next day, it's a weather balloon and they're showing your pieces of Mylar and you go, wow, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday.

[01:51:11]

Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series about Project Blue Book. But The Bottom Line, a project blue book is it really did two things. It investigated sightings. And I did everything it could to debunk and disprove. To the point where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look so there's always been this this unlove, you call it an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs.

[01:51:33]

If you're talking about them, they're nuts with ours because I'm not a I'm not a you I'm not a UFO guy. I'm not a junkie. If you ask me, do I believe that there's life outside of Earth, I would say you probably have a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than were the only planet that has life on it in the universe.

[01:51:52]

It just the odds are against it.

[01:51:54]

If you're if you do just do the math you have to accept, because if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it and then I win and you lose, and the more and more science has shown that there's habitable planets out there, that, yeah, everything we've learned so far, we know very little.

[01:52:11]

But everything we've learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets, it seems that it's very likely that there's a life out there. Intelligent life is another topic.

[01:52:24]

But life, well, we we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says we are an ego and not so much.

[01:52:35]

Maybe we are not so intelligent because we are. It's just how we learn. So, you know, our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel.

[01:52:49]

What if you're in another planet where you didn't you figured out the ability to create a gravity field or you used, you know, because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, catapults on ships were steam powered. And the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic roller used to use the chain to get you the top of the hill. Niyi They shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going.

[01:53:10]

So there's a whole new realm of propulsion that, you know, sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support theory. You know, we are just now proving, you know, recently theories that Einstein had were people actually joked about him. And now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light. You know, we've proven that. So when you look at that, when you go, well, does that mean that, you know, seven years ago Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong?

[01:53:34]

Or do you go? We just didn't have the ability to look that deep into space, to actually find something that we could to actually measure.

[01:53:41]

And, you know, and I've seen and that's just a hundred years and that kind of things that can happen if you say, look what we've done in the last twenty years, that's crazy.

[01:53:47]

I mean, because it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science perspective, you're I mean, you've spoke you've been brave in, you know, telling your story. Not some dramatic thing, but just telling you the things you've seen. Did it encounter did it impact your career? Is that why more people haven't come out like you've mentioned, Roswell?

[01:54:14]

Like how what advice do you give to people, to the community, to me as a scientist, for ways to go forward about this topic and still have, you know, not being put in the bin in society that he's a loon or she's a loon or that person is to get away from the little green men just divorced the two little green men.

[01:54:39]

And, you know, and I've talked to Lou Elizardo about this, you know, and the group that they're working with, which is incredible. I mean, they've got Steve Justice, who used to run Skunkworks, where they built, you know, projects.

[01:54:50]

Now, Lozado, as you mentioned, was a program director. He ran a program at the Pentagon. And Ative was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs.

[01:55:01]

So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an original member of a tip. And the original stuff that ATIP did was for you exempt. And people were, how do you know that I go? Because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are literally watch the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's why that's why I call it the unofficial official report.

[01:55:26]

It was never there was never releasable because people go I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go, well, just because you put in for requesting it, I go because how much how much time do you think that guy is going to spend to get you the information you requested if he can't find it? I actually got called by the Navy. I had a commander in a Navy call me about right before the article came out in The New York Times.

[01:55:46]

It was this was starting to come back. And she had called me because there's been there was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident. And I said, do you know of anything? She called me because do you know of anything else besides the situation reports that come off the ship? You know, and you got to remember when the situation report comes off the ship, that's like third hand. So we tell someone, they tell someone, that person has to write it up.

[01:56:07]

So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it. But then there's the unofficial official report that's actually pretty well written, there's some errors in it, but it was you know, I didn't help write it, I just did. And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the zoo and the players.

[01:56:23]

So she called me and said, is there anything out there? And I said officially out there, she said, yes. I said, I don't know anything. I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one. But I'm not you know, if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because it's not my job and nor do I care.

[01:56:37]

I mean, I did in that whole situation you mentioned, Lou. And did you think about your impact, your career? Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other things, other people like in the Roosevelt, are thinking about this kind of thing? Why aren't they talking about this? Why people are afraid to talk about this?

[01:56:59]

Well, honestly, the military in the press, there's a distrust.

[01:57:02]

I'll just tell you that right now we typically don't like talking to the press, because if I talk to you, you know, especially when I do even the TV shows, you know, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours. Yeah. And then the screen is five minutes.

[01:57:19]

Well, and the and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from autonomous vehicles is the clipping happens. Yes. But also the incompetence. Let me just call out journalism.

[01:57:34]

They're not thinking. I mean, so here's the thing. I've I have a Ph.D. and I've taken painfully too many classes from like physics and math. And I also have a deep curiosity about the world. I read a lot that seems to be missing with journals. And so you're talking to a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed in history.

[01:58:06]

Like you, it might have been nothing. And who knows what you witnessed might have been from a sort of debunking perspective, might have been some kind of trick of mind if you and others have hallucinated something, that could be some simple explanation, but possibly it was something not of this world. And to not do justice to this story from a scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence. And so, yeah, that's true for a journalist. That's true for the psyche.

[01:58:41]

It's just a it's human nature. Yeah. If we if we can't if we see something that we can't explain. Then sometimes if you just do it, maybe it's just me and you let it go away and you don't think about it.

[01:58:53]

Maybe it'll just, you know, it's it's you ignore it.

[01:58:58]

The other side is the inquisitive mind says, well, what was that? And I want to I want to dig more into it, you know? And if you you you look at it or you going against the norm, you can get ostracized, you know, and if you look at, you know, Einstein is the perfect example. I mean, he started coming up with some of his theories. Some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you're you're a nut job.

[01:59:19]

And he's he's literally proving them. But he didn't have he proved them in theory, but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory.

[01:59:29]

There's a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim Gates that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with with his theories. It's fascinating.

[01:59:49]

Well, yes, at the time, it's kind of crazy when he's saying, yeah, if you look at it back at the time, don't we look at it now and go, well, the guy was a walking genius and he was.

[01:59:58]

But if you go back in time when he was doing it, it was like, what are you talking about?

[02:00:03]

You know?

[02:00:04]

But one of the challenges is your eyewitness. One of the challenges is you're essentially an eyewitness account. Like we don't have good data. We have very limited data of some of the incidents that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's just to paint more and more of the picture. One you kind of mentioned to take tax shape. Let's break apart two situations. One is the video.

[02:00:36]

Let's look at the actual account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes. What's the what can you say about the shape of the thing? Is there interesting aspects outside of the Tic-Tac like is there any appendages? Is there some texture to it that no smooth white?

[02:00:56]

Tic TAC. No, we don't. Yes, there's no no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows. When you probes that we could see, we don't notice. Like I said, we don't see the little things on the bottom of it until we see the video in the TV mode. When it zoomed in right before it's shortly, you kind of see zoom in, you don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there.

[02:01:21]

Remember, we're looking at the original tape. So there's not there's basically no degradation.

[02:01:26]

But when you saw your eyes, there's no kind of appendage, no know what about like somebody has a lot of people ask you questions. So I appreciate you spending your time here. Let me ask some of them. Did you I mean, you chased it, so we flew close to it, relatively speaking. Was there. Did you feel any wake like any did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically? No, nothing.

[02:01:54]

Nothing.

[02:01:55]

So another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing. You've developed a feel for for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival or did it? Let me ask a few questions around it. So did you did it feel like the thing was surprised? Did it feel like it wanted to be seen? Almost to show off its capability, did and did, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a and er fight against sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet.

[02:02:36]

So one, I think I think it knew we were there when we showed up. It's just me. It's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side of field, it'll actually go no threat and it'll start eating. You know, they don't put their tail up as you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there.

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And I'm going to react or I'm going to move. So as we were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing, you know.

[02:03:03]

Which I don't know. Someone asked, what do you think I got maybe was communicating with something I joked on Good Morning America? Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know? And I actually use that clip was kind of funny, but yeah, we're a little human centric.

[02:03:16]

We think like it would it show up to talk to us?

[02:03:19]

But maybe he's talking to the dolphin, maybe whatever, because it was hanging around that white water and I don't know. Was there something? There is a segment. We just didn't find it. Again, I don't know.

[02:03:28]

But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming up, just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12 where I cut across a circle. I think it was very aware that we were there because it interacted. We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane.

[02:03:50]

But, you know, it was it was. Were we afraid?

[02:03:56]

I don't think so. I mean, and to me, I was more curious. You know, curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have.

[02:04:01]

And I always felt, to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long as much time as I'd spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally it was like a safe zone.

[02:04:14]

I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most. You can't if you're in the airplane and you feel scared, it's not the job for you. You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now. Yes. You know, I am inside. I have the stick, I have the throttles. I've got my window in the back seat. He's running all the displays. We are a team. We're in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new.

[02:04:37]

You feel pretty good. And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did. Like it was like no big deal, you know, for an airplane. If you just put me from a standstill, let's say slow flight, just get me at one hundred knots above the water. And for me to you can't just start a climb.

[02:04:54]

I'd have to lower the nose. I'd have to accelerate and then I have to start coming up.

[02:04:57]

And this thing just like just did it like it was like no big deal.

[02:05:01]

Yeah. You mentioned that, like kind of your reaction to it. Was it like something that you would love to fly almost this object? Just the curiosity experience is like like would it almost like what the heck is that piece of technology? And I want to fly it. Like, what made you. Feel like it's something that you could fly. Do you think it's something that a human could fly like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology?

[02:05:34]

Because another perspective on it is it was not that the thing under the water was the key thing. And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like I don't think it was a projection.

[02:05:49]

I think it was a real object is not a physical hard object that could be flying. Oh, yeah.

[02:05:55]

Yeah. I think all for us it is. It was.

[02:05:57]

And it was this was not because you go, OK, let's just go on it. It's a light projection. Well, we were both sitting next to each other. We were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that. And I go, OK, there's the in theory you could have that, but with an eight thousand foot altitude difference flying, you know, and there, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen.

[02:06:19]

You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue. You know, if you've ever been at sea and I don't mean like coast. I mean like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest. It's incredible.

[02:06:31]

You know, you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean.

[02:06:35]

You got pretty high contrast.

[02:06:37]

And for this thing just to disappear, it was I'm telling you, I would I mean, I know we we all have the same recollection of what happened.

[02:06:49]

You know, there's some details because it's so long ago. But for the most part, we know what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like, what the hell was that?

[02:06:56]

What if I mean, do you think about the thing under the water that's not often talked about if there's something under the water, couldn't have been something gigantic. Like it could be what?

[02:07:08]

Like, do you ever see this big ship? I mean, that's why as a person. So I love like swimming out into the ocean. My mom was an Olympic swimmer. So like, I love that feeling. But I'm also terrified when I swim because the if anything could be under there.

[02:07:22]

Like there's not enough focus on that, perhaps because there's no visibility. But it's a I mean, is there anything interesting to say about the possibility there was anything underneath? There could be. I mean, think about if you're going to hide on this planet.

[02:07:38]

Or what's the least explored spot on the planet? Two thirds of it's the ocean. There's there's there's literally I mean, come on the the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was a triple seven that crashed. You know, they turned they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared. And they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it. But you would think there's large objects that, you know, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up, there's big pieces that would be you'd find something.

[02:08:04]

They haven't found anything except what floated, you know, to hide something underwater. I think it would be easy.

[02:08:11]

So, OK, let's go a little bit of speculation land. But it's the best it's the best we can do, which is the basic question of what do you think? Was it so if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomena? You know, like ball lightning, for example? There's a lot of fascinating things we humans don't really understand. Is it, like I said, perception, cognition that leads you to some kind of hallucination that made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?

[02:08:48]

You put those things on the table, or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was?

[02:08:57]

Oh, it's definitely I don't think it's an ice cloud because ice cores don't fly around and react to you. Do I think it was a light? I'd say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do, I'd say no. What do you mean by light? Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception. There's there like plasma. You can do plasma and you go, I can see it, but it's really not you know, it's plasma.

[02:09:21]

I don't think so. So we'll see. Distortion's I think. Is it move? Maybe not. I mean, I'm not a theoretical physicist and some you know you know, I'm not at MIT.

[02:09:32]

I would say no. I mean, it looked for from all my experience and I quite a bit of it when this happened. No, I think it was a it was a hard object. It b it was aware that we were there. It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something, exactly what I would do. You know, it mirrored me. It wasn't aggressive. You know, there's Toco at fault behind us and never it was never offensive on us.

[02:09:57]

It never did that. It just mirrored us. So as we're coming on, it's just like, you know, you're you're kind of you know, you said you do martial arts, you know, or wrestling.

[02:10:06]

You know, you see people out on the when they get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, because my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto became a wrestler because he beat me up every night and we joke. I talk to him literally probably three or four times a week. But, you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of you're kind of feeling as you walk and boxers do the same thing.

[02:10:27]

It was doing that same thing. It's like what's going on as it comes around, as it comes around. And then it was like, hey, we're going to get here. And when I get too close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we've never seen. The other question is, what if I didn't cut across the circle?

[02:10:41]

What if I just kept going around a circle would just keep going. I kind of just watch.

[02:10:44]

I my one regret out of the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet, in the joint helmet. There's a little camera, but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch. Because you've ever put a GoPro on someone's head where they're looking around like this all the time, it'll it'll nauseate you. So we never turn that on and all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down and hit the switch, you know, and then we didn't go back.

[02:11:03]

And because our tapes didn't have anything, because we didn't get it on radar, because I tried to lock it up, because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't it wouldn't lock the radar would lock.

[02:11:13]

And so so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try to get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human created technology that's simply top secret that was just not aware of or is it not something not of this world?

[02:11:34]

So you if you were to ask me in two thousand four, I just said, I don't know if you ask me now. So we're coming up on sixteen years ago.

[02:11:47]

For a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system because I don't think it did.

[02:11:57]

I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do, then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I understand, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government, I never will speak for the United States. But I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and why we classify stuff. You know, is it is it detrimental to national defense?

[02:12:19]

But there's a point where you have to look and go. If we had a technology like this that could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability to do things, you know, you talk about, you know, are we going to go to Mars? Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, because, remember, these things were coming down when the crews were tracked him from above 8000 feet, which is space, and they would come down and they would come straight down.

[02:12:42]

They'd hang out at like 20000 feet. And then three or four hours later, they'd go back up. We don't have anything that can come down, hang out in once. And I'm talking hold out in a spot where we all know there's winds. They're not drifting like a balloon. They're just sitting there.

[02:12:55]

And then they would go back up and they tracked up to the when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to ten of these things. There's other guys. And it was raining and all this other let's just say they tracked a group of these things coming down, hanging out and going up.

[02:13:11]

So it's not just propulsion and the way it moves, it's also fuel. It's everything. So the whole the whole of it indicates of the kind of technology that's highly advanced. But you don't think in your sense that you actually don't know. But you know, more than a lot of people in your sense, the top secret military technology, if you think about skunkworks, you think about like that cannot be more than 15 years ahead.

[02:13:42]

I would say, for a leap like that and a perfect example in modern times is the 117, because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out like it was developed at this time. It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.

[02:13:56]

What's the 117? That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter. Not to be too, but the stealth fighter. So he look at that, you know.

[02:14:03]

Yeah, you can I think you can hide things for a while. But I think a technology elite I mean, this is not this is not a hey, we developed this and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology. This is a giant leap in technology, you know, and the other one is, do we have the basis to do that? You know, because usually when you have a technology like that, universities, especially when you're working at MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top tier universities, you know, so you've got MIT, you've got Caltech, you've got Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon.

[02:14:38]

I'm just naming schools. Naval Postgraduate School is another one.

[02:14:43]

There's usually indicators. There's papers of, hey, this is where we're going. I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity based propulsion system that literally I've got an object because how do you how much power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant orb that we live on?

[02:15:04]

So, by the way, you mentioned gravity based. That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what kind of propulsion would have to. Would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement, to me, all the gravity discussions. It seems insane from a physics perspective, but of course. It would seem insane until it's not, but because remember, we only know what we know. Yeah, and which is very little.

[02:15:35]

And someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all?

[02:15:41]

Yeah. Well, OK, so this so you're saying that if you had to bet money all your money, it would be something that's. Alien technology, so it's not human created technology. Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't I don't think we would have made it right. I don't think we have developed it.

[02:16:00]

I just you know, because the other one, someone asked me, they said, what if there wasn't maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a wave that got sent here from someplace else.

[02:16:10]

I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around.

[02:16:13]

So I don't I don't know, I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the the giant brains that think this stuff up, I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them, but such a topic, which you mean look for drones for just a just space travel technology.

[02:16:30]

Because if you look at where we're going, you know, because everyone talks about Mars. OK, and, you know, we're here, we're gonna be able to colonize, you know, and I know Ellen is big into that, you know. Yeah. What do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA? We put humans back up, back up there. My theory. So it's funny because I know one of the guys that was he was he was one of the original employees at SpaceX.

[02:16:53]

He's a friend of mine. And I won't say his name, but he knows Elon. He knows Elon. And and he actually worked on the entire Falcon one project. He's one of the guys on that. So he's got some great stuff. Matter of fact, he's there's a movie there's a book coming out that comes out in about a year on this, the original the first years of space for six years of SpaceX, you know, and he's named in the book, you know, and they're supposed to make a movie on it.

[02:17:14]

So I'm like, hey, who's going to school? But what he's done to me, it changed the game. And here's why. Because I said, you know, I think it was 62. And Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex, you know, which it has become. Everything he warned us of, you know, it has become and it's really driven by there's the big three in defense, which is really, you know, Northrop, Lockheed and Boeing.

[02:17:40]

Those are the big those are your biggest. And Raytheon's kind of like a subset of that. But they're right to be in US defense. Those are the big guys, right. That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire. They go to stuff like that.

[02:17:51]

So when you look at that and you go in the way government contracting is working and how we charge and you know why things cost so much, and then you go, you got Elon who's got an ego, you know, and he doesn't like to do things a certain way.

[02:18:07]

And I've talked to the guy that worked there on, you know, because the government likes to have oversight of contracts where he was like, no, just tell me what you want. I'll build it. I'll give you a bill when it's done. And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money because he's money driven guy, which I like capitalism at its best. And so now you look at the two things.

[02:18:25]

So you got the space X, which is the Dragon capsule, right. And then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money and oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters because they come back and land and you don't have to like Morton Thiokol. We used him on the space shuttle, but they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff because they landed in saltwater and he had to put them all back together where Elon gets them down because I was joking with this guy.

[02:18:52]

What do they do? Do they like Rip Rehaul know?

[02:18:55]

It's not actually they clean them up and they can use them again, reusable systems, incredible leap in technology that no one thought of. But here's a private company. So being able to put people on and the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it's literally like sci fi when you watch when they want up. So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been able to do because, you know, the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, you know, and oh, by the way, if you didn't know because I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn Russian.

[02:19:25]

Right? They have to.

[02:19:26]

And they have to do it's what level five where the test is a phone call where they call you up and they, you know, because they would go.

[02:19:33]

So I went to the pinning it to two friends of mine. The one actually had a mission date. The one got one later. So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a spacewalk, you know, because I would pull up because if I knew it was going on, I pull up the NASA thing. I was in a meeting one day and I've got NASA on and makers out there floating around, you know, doing stuff. And I saw one.

[02:19:50]

He's in the space station. Why they're doing a spacewalk. So it's kind of cool when you go, oh, I know that dude. He's up there in space floating around.

[02:19:57]

So when you when you look at what those they're capable of doing and then you go what Elon is bringing to the fact that now it's back in America, it's actually. To me, it's it's cost effective for us to be able to do more stuff, I think it opens the door to do we go back to the moon? Is there a reason to go back to the moon? Personally, I think if we're going to if they're really going to go, you know, in years from now go to Mars, I think that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the moon because we did this on a less than a compact computer in the 60s, which is the whole reason that I flew because I'm obsessed.

[02:20:40]

Matter of fact, I have the giant Lego Apollo at home and the lander and I have one that my dad built me in 1969 right after that. And Neil Armstrong is an Ohio boy and so am I. I have a picture of him in a car in Wapakoneta, Ohio, at the parade after he walked on the moon because his parents didn't live far from my uncle in Wapakoneta and they were out at the parade.

[02:21:01]

So I've been obsessed with this since I was a child.

[02:21:04]

Do you hope to do you think do you hope that you'll go out to the space one day?

[02:21:12]

Me, if if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. You know, I am not.

[02:21:16]

I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you know, like people like I mean, it would be to us tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to in terms of, you know, kind of a civilian. Right. I mean, in a sense that you're in just a normal person. You're not a fighter jet pilot currently. But it seems like if we send a civilian up, there would be somebody like you in the next like 20 years.

[02:21:40]

I'd be you know, if Ilan wants to throw me out, want those things, I'd be all over it. And my wife would say, but, you know, sometimes you got to get your kicks while you're alive.

[02:21:47]

I'd love to hear that discussed with your wife. Listen, there's the pros and cons. She's she's I mean, I've known on board high school, so she she knows how I am. You know, most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person. You were in high school. You know, I was the class clown and I still am that way.

[02:22:03]

So let me ask you this question about so I'm talking to you on again soon. I'm curious to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to you about Tic TAC, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously just like you said, if there's something to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to outer space.

[02:22:36]

What what should Elon think about the stuff? What should he do? What should people like him?

[02:22:42]

I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of it, take the next step and go.

[02:22:48]

You know, we are tied to fuels in either solid rocket or liquid or, you know, whatever we do.

[02:22:54]

But it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really in a in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what but that's what it does.

[02:23:05]

If you have something that you can contain, that is as a fuel source, that would last a significant amount of time. You know, those rocket boosters go and when they're done, they're done. There's enough to get them back down. That's it.

[02:23:18]

There's not a huge, you know, not coming back and going, oh, I still got three quarters of a tank. Let's pull them out and do it again. His system's not doing that. But you know, the way the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons of money.

[02:23:32]

But you got to remember that the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars. For the most part, there's times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done. But then when you look at I'm just going to throw a few out there. But if you look at.

[02:23:45]

What Amazon, you know, does with Bezos and you've got Elon, there's some there's some big money out there. I mean, you're talking you know, Bezos alone could buy companies like big companies.

[02:23:59]

Apple is another one of these companies that huge, huge amounts of money. And then just go over to the Gates Foundation and they've got gazillions and gazillions of dollars. We've got universities. There's so much money out there if we really want it to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do live in a free society. I think there's enough to go. How do we do this, and because when you work outside of what the government would want to do, let's go.

[02:24:27]

Let's not we're not working on this necessarily for the United States.

[02:24:30]

Although I am a huge giant, I will be American. I would never I am an American talking to somebody born.

[02:24:36]

And so I can't believe you agreed to this.

[02:24:39]

But but when I, you know, haven't killed me yet, if you're here and you've been here for a while, then I'm joking.

[02:24:49]

I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American when you do that.

[02:24:53]

So you look at let's just look at American universities. Yes. So there's some brilliant minds and we'll just use that MIT because you worked on there. There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that are not American citizens. So if you want to get into government stuff and you are not an American citizen, it gets really, really, really hard.

[02:25:10]

But if I take money like Bezos money, Elon money and they let's just say they want to work together, they can split it up 50/50, the two of them, when the technology gets developed. But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work. I just want to make sure that I try and keep it in the United States because technology is technology.

[02:25:28]

And if it gets developed and gets over to where, you know, a country gets a hold of it and then just basically uses it for their own because you save them all the research time, you don't want to do that. But if we can get to the point where we can we do it on the International Space Station, we realize that space was too expensive for one country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate.

[02:25:50]

It's the one thing that the Russians and the US actually work together on. Think about it. That's it. We work together on space because we realize it's way too expensive for us to do alone and effective. So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around for God. Now, what is it like 20 years? That thing's been up there floating around. So it's getting old. We're going to have to replace parts and do stuff.

[02:26:09]

But if we can pull the money together and come up with something that would literally change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of exploring, because if you develop that technology, I'm not you don't even have to send a manned person if you can develop a technology. That's so with our automation and we're progressing in our computing power to send something out that's not just floating around when, you know, that can react a lot quicker to something that could actually go down to the surface and come back up.

[02:26:37]

So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and it just sends data back in and analyze. But if I got a technology that can go up there really quick, I'm not worried about man.

[02:26:45]

I don't have life support systems and all that. But it can go down. It can go. It can cruise around. It can hover above. It can take samples and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back. Yeah.

[02:26:54]

So we can analyze it here. That's a game changer. Yeah, it's a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets. Exactly.

[02:27:01]

So in a sense the the Tic-Tac is a symbol. So whatever you think you want from a debunking perspective, there's a non-zero probability that it's alien technology. And in that sense it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box like it's almost the I hope.

[02:27:34]

To say we can do better propulsion, we can overcome physics in an order of magnitude, better way, and it's worthwhile to try, I think and I don't think the money if you look at the big picture with the amount of money, some of that's out there floating around these private companies, you know, I think if you said, hey, I've got let's just say one hundred million dollars, which really a hundred million dollars relative to Basils has got one hundred and some billion dollars that we're in.

[02:27:57]

So if he said one 100 million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go and I'm going to put a you know, like the government will send a broader announcement out that says, hey, we're looking for this technology or a DARPA program.

[02:28:09]

But what if I just said, hey, who's to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own, to say, hey, I want to go to university because there are fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars. They don't have the checks and they can do whatever they want. So their money.

[02:28:21]

I'm sorry about that to go, hey, I'm going to put this out and I'm going to get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech, at the school, as I mentioned. And you know, by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts. And I'm going to basically I'm going to fund you guys for ten years so you get ten million dollars a year. And I'm going to give you your salaries and we're going to do that or whatever the amount works.

[02:28:44]

So let's cut it down to five so we can pay you.

[02:28:46]

Well, right. To do the research. But, oh, by the way, the research is it's not classified, but it's controlled. So we're not going to publicly just put this out in journals. But if we make a leap that we think would advance because although those let's say there's ten of them, those 10 scientists come up with something and they put out a paper, there might be another a number 11 at another university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kind of had this idea and now you can get a thought pool that pushes this in and gets us out of the the mindset because we have a tendency to we evolve the stuff that we create.

[02:29:19]

But it's like I was joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls. And I said, but you know how much when a person gets a Ph.D. in like engineering, how much new math is really being done? I said there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing I'm talking I'm talking Steven Hawkins type brilliance that is going I'm really doing something that's. Yeah, that's totally different.

[02:29:42]

That's a big dramatic thing now going on in physics, that this is just everybody's converge towards this local minima or local maximum. We think about it and it's it's again, same as with the Tic-Tac thinking outside the box is not is not accepted. And it probably should be.

[02:30:01]

But it is hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original.

[02:30:06]

He was the he was out of the box. Yeah. He did not think the he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories.

[02:30:15]

Where would we be. OK, we jumping around a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space. But let's let me jump back to a few questions that folks had. I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual idea, not the actual facts of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other.

[02:30:44]

But let me kind of bring it up, make w. I've just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to talk to you about this world, and Nicole is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to debunk sort of his his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic. I think it's it's very useful and powerful, especially for me, coming from a scientific perspective to take the approach he does.

[02:31:13]

It's valuable. And I think no matter what, I think there's a hope that people, quote unquote, true believers, are a little bit more open minded to the work of MidCoast. I think it's quite useful and brilliant work. So let me ask here's a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible other explanations of the things that were out there.

[02:31:37]

He has some explanations of the things that you've seen in it with the Tic-Tac, like with your own eyes, like he says that it's possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and so on when you were flying. I don't fight that as I mean, maybe you can comment on that.

[02:31:57]

But first, let me do it right now. Sure. So because that comes up like how how did you know it was about 40 feet long?

[02:32:02]

I go, OK, so 16 years fine against other airplanes. Know what stuff looks like? You know, I've looked down on things. So if I know, I know. Here's the known things I know.

[02:32:13]

When we saw the Tic-Tac, I was at twenty thousand feet ish right around there. So when I look down, I know what a horn it looks like looking down on him because I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's that's why I said 40 feet, because it's about Kornet size. So and as I go around, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big, you know.

[02:32:39]

So I would argue the fact of, you know, pure experiencers, you know, professional observers, which is what we're actually trained to do. And having done it for so long now, it was and everyone came back with the same thing.

[02:32:54]

They're like is about size Hornet from a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years do you find that is what you see is the incorrect state of things? So like, how often do you make mistakes with vision? You actually you make vision issues a lot because you're and the sad part is, is your brain believes what your eyes see. We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly because your brain and I can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instincts.

[02:33:31]

Let's go back to landing at night so your eyes do that. Yeah. Landed like that. Zoom that the runway and your brain assumes that the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving. So if I try and do stuff visually, I would you die every time, but not every time. But you die close to every time trying to land on a boat. So we actually use instruments which are counter to your brain. So and there's actually all kinds of things that we go through and training.

[02:33:57]

They have this thing and think they still use it. It's called the MSD Multi Spatial Disorientation Device or the spin and puch. It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules and when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing. But you're actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate as fast as a human can talk. But as they spin you around and a little something and slow it down, a speed it up, your body does this and you you know, and then by visuals of showing you, like, they can spin it sideways to the outside wall, but they can show like lines that are they can make the line stand still because they're moving the same velocity they the other way.

[02:34:35]

And you'll think you're screaming. You see it in amusement parks all the time. You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A, but you're really not doing you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff. So if you if you want to look at it and go, well, you're you're disoriented. You're the Sybylla, I'd argue going, no, I'm not. Because, you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking at the Tic TAC, I've got a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing.

[02:34:58]

So I've got I know what I'm doing.

[02:35:01]

I can look outside, I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking inside to crosscheck of what I'm seeing is in reality, what I'm.

[02:35:07]

Do you actually your brain gotten good at combining, almost adding extra sensory information. You have to you have like supervision. So you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting what the sensors, what you call the instruments and giving you. And that that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like that that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're saying.

[02:35:29]

You'd be amazed at how good. So here's here's another example. So if we go out over the water so there's no land in sight and we're going to fight.

[02:35:37]

So when we fight two airplanes, we're going to dogfight as an instructor. And I was for most of my time, you have to come back and you have to recreate it. So we call it drawing arrows. So you have to recreate that stuff so you get pretty good at going.

[02:35:56]

Like, I would take off and say, all right, we're starting heading due east and I know where the sun is at because in the short couple of minutes we're going to fight. The sun's really not going to move much. It's going to be in a row. So I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say one nine five degrees.

[02:36:12]

Right.

[02:36:13]

So I'm starting going east and it's actually be down off my right hand side. So now I know as I'm fighting because in the water you don't have any reference. Like I passed land, I passed like, no, you don't. And you can't use clouds because clouds do move. But you got to come back because you go, here's where I started and then you went.

[02:36:26]

As soon as you end, you go, all right. I ended heading three, four, five.

[02:36:30]

And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relatives. You can create this entire battle that went on with arrows that you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened. And you get really, really good at that. So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six o'clock and you went around and he came up here I go, because I'm trained to do all that and I take all the notes why I'm flying.

[02:36:54]

You can do it, but usually you memorize it all and you get done and you read as soon as you're done, you knock it off. You look at the other airplane, you get set and you start writing all your notes down.

[02:37:02]

Yeah. And you're writing it really fast on your car. And you go out the stack of cards and you stick a new one on your keyboard card. You ready to go? And here's the next set up.

[02:37:10]

It's kind of it's in some way similar to what like at the at the highest level chess players do.

[02:37:18]

I mean, you're I mean, they they they recap the games, but the the richness of the representation that they use and remembering like how the games evolved, it's not like it's much richer than the actual moves. It's like these a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words like like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved. It's more like instinctual from years and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really can't.

[02:37:53]

It's it's just not I understand it.

[02:37:55]

It's because for us, if we don't come back with anything, then there's no learning to be had because the whole thing is the de-brief. When we get back and we talk about that's really where the learning is. And it's the same thing. If you want to go back to chess, you know, and you start off, you try and learn because you're remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place. Play with someone better than you.

[02:38:15]

That's how you learn if you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything, you're just learning that they're not good. And you're better when you when you challenge yourself against someone that is going to is better than you. You learn. So I learned how to fight an airplane with. He's actually one of my best friends. We'll call him Tom. I won't give us call because because he wasn't. So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left OPCON.

[02:38:40]

He was the the training officer Top Gun, which. So that's the guy. The training officer is the main guy at Top Gun.

[02:38:47]

So Tom was a training officer talking to Tom when I learned because I come out a six and we really don't fight because it was a bomber. So I get in fat and I want to learn how to fight because it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the F and F fighter attack, the fattiness fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight. So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world. He's going to teach me how to do it.

[02:39:07]

And he did and I would do something and then he would go, I get to a situation where I had never been, and then I would go, well, going to do this.

[02:39:14]

And then he would destroy me and he would come back and go, Here's why you don't do that. And then I would take that knowledge and I would put it in my little basket of tricks.

[02:39:23]

And over time, because, you know, no one walks out into that world.

[02:39:26]

I don't care how gifted an aviator and go. I am the man or the woman.

[02:39:30]

I am it. No, it's a learning process. And so are all those years you've gotten good.

[02:39:36]

So, I mean, so what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic-Tac? Low zero. Well, I mean, I'm not so naive, I am ninety nine point nine percent, so point one percent, my eyes deceive me. But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. The percentage is even lower.

[02:40:02]

Yeah, well, I don't find that particularly the case that you saw, but I'm glad you put it. You you said those words out loud. So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical. So you're I I think is the most fascinating story and that I think that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there on so many levels, just like I was at an engineering level, that maybe there's propulsion systems we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.

[02:40:41]

So it's at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring.

[02:40:46]

I just want to say that but on the video side, it's like it's. The videos for the flare video that go fast and the Gambo video, they are only interesting to me, to me in the context of your story, like without that, they're kind of low resolution. It's like it it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical. So that's just where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me otherwise. But so to bring up MapQuest one more time.

[02:41:25]

He looks at the flair video and he says that one of the most amazing video parts of the video for people who haven't seen it is at the end of it the the the Tic-Tac. Flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left of the screen, off the screen.

[02:41:47]

And what makes us says is that, you know, MapQuest, probably others, that the way to explain that is the tracking system. Like we said, it's vision based tracking simply loses the like the object, the tracking loses it. And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking it. So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video looking at your face.

[02:42:22]

You do not. So can you maybe comment to that to that debunking aspect?

[02:42:28]

So it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system, know for sure. And that's like me going because I'm a big Formula One fan, you know, that's like me going, oh, my God, Lewis, what were you doing? You could have done this with the car and you to win the race. You know, and Lewis Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two times four time four or five time world champion.

[02:42:49]

But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't tell you how many times of watching you. You remember when we looked at this thing, when it when when Chad came back with the video, we sat and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going on. Right.

[02:43:09]

Right. All right.

[02:43:10]

Let's look at this, you know, because you can look and see where the you can see where the airplane is going. You can see if it's looking left or right. And if you actually watch all that stuff, it doesn't do that. It actually when the vehicle starts to move to the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up. And the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built upon the tracking.

[02:43:27]

It'll start to open up. And but the thing when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can't move fast enough. It has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around, because there's another theory that, oh, the pods looking forward when the pod passes underneath the airplane. So if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me, as does this, the ball will actually flip around to kind of finish off. And it'll it'll it swaptions because it has you know, it's a gimbal.

[02:43:50]

It it can't just it's not free floating, but there's a theory on one of them.

[02:43:55]

Oh, it's here. And it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front, it stays like this. So yet another another debunker who doesn't know this. So, you know, an MC has had several theories on other of some of the other videos, like one of them, the go fast is a bird. And Jeremy Corbyn actually did the balloon of saying, no, it's not because he's on he's on black hot. So the white object is actually colder than the ocean that's flying.

[02:44:19]

Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd be dead.

[02:44:22]

So the Gimbel video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the apparent rotation of the object. That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of. And us suggest that a flare like reflections or whatever can explain.

[02:44:47]

Now, what McMath's doesn't see is so when they take because I've talked to the one of them actually I work with. So I know him. I know I talked to him all the time. So and it's his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends. But they give you a video game of a both of them the go fast in the or shot by the same person.

[02:45:06]

OK, so and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each other.

[02:45:11]

OK, so what you don't see is so the airplanes are flying still Super Hornets, but they have the RPG seventy nine, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon. Things incredible.

[02:45:23]

OK, it doesn't usually if it's if it's out there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff. And then they actually through one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting potboilers, heat signature and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something's there. It's real. It's not you're not picking up some extraneous thing.

[02:45:39]

So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit, look at that thing. It's just sitting there and it's in the wind and it's going against the wind. Why it's doing this, you know, someone goes, oh, it's an airplane. No, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect.

[02:45:54]

It just is just routine. Right. The other thing that you see when you talk to them is so they're on their radar. There's an object that they identify is their number one priority over their launch and steering.

[02:46:08]

So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pod is going to look. That's what you get on the gimbal video. There's five other I think it's five. They're kind of in a V, you know, like a geese would fly that are out in front of it. And they're actually coming. They're out in front of it and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while they're filming the GIMPLE video, which it's I know Ryan has come out and talked about it, but but when you see it, you go, you know, if you take it in context because you go, oh, it's just the video.

[02:46:37]

Well, if you take the video with the radar going, no, there's actually other. Things out there, because there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar, off the vacates, it was it actually became the I called a buddy of mine who is running the wing at the time, the fighter wing. I said, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, Well, we got a NOTAM out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area.

[02:46:58]

So anyone can you can fly a Cessna through the air. It's all the warning area tells you that there's high military traffic and training out here. It's probably best not to be here, but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there.

[02:47:08]

So these things have the right, wherever they're from or whatever they are, you know, because people are like other balloons. Well, balloons float, balloons don't sit in 70 knots. A wind stay in the same location.

[02:47:19]

They say they had an airplane because it was two. There's the gimbal thing. That's a pretty big object. There's also they talk about it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere, a translucence view.

[02:47:29]

What the hell is that? And I've heard you almost hit one. It's almost hit hit them. So that's another that's one of the biggest another biggest account. It's like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a Cuban and translucent sphere. What do you make of that? And you know what I mean, that that's the most dangerous. You're right, the biggest frustration is when you do that and you go, OK, so this thing passed between two airplanes.

[02:47:57]

And it was I think it was like 100 feet or something like that of the airplane. It almost hit it.

[02:48:02]

So what they do is they come back and go, hey, I had a near midair would you have in your midair with this floating beachball with a cube inside of it and you go, huh?

[02:48:10]

You know, so they send out a NOTAM again and they they do a what's called a hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there. We almost hit one area and that gets sent off to the Naval Safety Center.

[02:48:21]

What was done? I mean, what are you going to do? You can, you know, catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one, you know, because they've seen them. They picked them up, like hovering on radar. And then all of a sudden they're traveling at really high rates of speed.

[02:48:32]

So, you know, you do what? Yeah. What are you going to do?

[02:48:35]

Well, let me ask this, because this is what people kind of think about after you witness Tic-Tac and after this these incidents, as far as we know, with the gimble and the go fast. It seems like people in the military did not or did not react like what, like did not freak out, it almost like was like a mundane event.

[02:49:03]

How do you explain that? Why didn't the people on the ship, not the higher ups, why wasn't there a big freak out? Or as some people suggest, the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not letting everyone know that there's some kind of secret military, you know, like like tests almost.

[02:49:23]

So let's talk about so let's say you've got this cool new toy you call the cool new toy. You typically don't take your cool new toy out into an area where the cool new toy could get damaged. Or what if the airplane would have actually hit your cool new toy and you got two people that are ejecting or dead and you got a, you know, 80 million dollar airplane that's now in the bottom of the Atlantic.

[02:49:43]

You know, tests are normally done in controlled environments, just like any test lab test or whatever. When you take things out into the real world, you know, you're still going to test it in an area where if something goes wrong. So when they started and we'll go back to Elon, so my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go off. They were out in Kwajalein. And when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket and it ran out of fuel before it got all the way up and it came falling back down.

[02:50:09]

Well, when you're out on an aitel in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is going to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land? And it actually crashed next to the atoll. And Ellen, was it happy and threw this guy under the bus?

[02:50:24]

So that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So because someone said, well, when we chase the Tic-Tac, well, it could have been some secret government thing. Well, secret government things typically just don't come out and test to where there's no knowing pilots.

[02:50:38]

We can't control a lot of things.

[02:50:40]

You're exactly right. So you go you know, it's you know, it's not the Dr. Evil Scientist that's going to throw shit out there to get there's control. And there's reasons that we do it, because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to there's there's you build something in theory, you model it, you go, hey, this is it looks like it's going to work. You get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it.

[02:51:04]

You know, you like an airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the ground. They've got things over the prostatic system that are changing the what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it. And it's probably up on Banjaxed. So the gear up. So it doesn't it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know it's sitting on Jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the prostatic system so they can actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go.

[02:51:27]

Hey, it looks like it's going to work.

[02:51:29]

And then there's there's a bunch of stuff that they do that's a controlled environment, which you can do the testing. Yeah. Throwing shit out in the middle of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that I've heard. Is it possible? Yes.

[02:51:43]

Is it more really is it is it is it more likely?

[02:51:48]

More likely they're not doing that than the other?

[02:51:51]

The other side of that question is, why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the US government in general not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen, freak out in a positive way, freak out in the negative way, like what are the Russians up to again or or more like what is this like, more turmoil?

[02:52:12]

So the ranks if you were to put a Chinese flag on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side of it, I said, yeah, it had a big Russian flag on the side of it, dude. Then it would have got a lot of attention. It would have sent high order. Yeah, right. If it was you don't have to say Russia or China. Just say if there was another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then it's a big deal.

[02:52:34]

So here's what's going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint work up. Normally they we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving so we could run home up to the Central Valley, have Thanksgiving with our family and and run back down and do this.

[02:52:49]

OK, so.

[02:52:53]

You know, and I had just taken a ride, had the squadron for a month. Right, so I'm a brand new CEO, I'm the most junior guy on the business as far as a commanding officer goes for time in the Navy. And actually at the time, I think it was the most junior CEO for 05 command in the Navy. Right.

[02:53:10]

So you go, OK, so I'm out here. I got my squadron, I'm running it. I see this thing, you know, we get shit for it. I have a squadron to run. I have the the Tic TAC was over here. And although an extraordinary event, I have 17 aircrew and three hundred sailors that I'm responsible for their well-being, making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're burning, you know, and I'm working with my master chief and I'm working with my XO snap and we're going through all this stuff.

[02:53:40]

I don't have a lot of time to worry about the ticktock and if people need to talk to me.

[02:53:46]

So you got to remember you got the captain of the ship, you got the air wing commander and you got the admiral. Those are the top three. And you got the CEO of the the Princeton who is a major command guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are five command and you got the small boys that are out there, which is 005 command. So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what's going on, I'm pretty much in the top 20 with all my peers.

[02:54:11]

And then I've got obviously the captain and the admiral. Right. And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with.

[02:54:19]

I talked to responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh, yeah. The schedule. Yeah. His missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done and there's no time for silly things. That's exactly right.

[02:54:31]

So and we're the we're the integration. You want to win a battle group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing. The air power is the key.

[02:54:40]

It's we take our airport with us. We can park it anywhere we want and we can do what we need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that all these men in suits showed up, so the captain, the ship never said anything to me, to admiral, never saying to the people on his staff that I was friends with, never saying to me, the other CEOs that I talked to on a daily basis never said anything to me.

[02:54:59]

And no one ever came and talked to me. And I'm the guy that chased it. So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories, because I don't know if people think they're going to get rich on this because I made a big doughnut on this. I can tell you what I got paid for. I got paid to go out and spend twenty one hours of my day going to L.A. and do a five minute talk for someone.

[02:55:14]

I'm like, and it wasn't for the talk because I'll talk for free because you're not paying me.

[02:55:18]

I said, I said. And then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because they my, my wife and I got to go because it was just look like fun because the whole town gets involved. Yeah. And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because it was just, you know, it was fun. And I got asked and Jeremy and George, it happened, what, the year before.

[02:55:35]

So I went with Bob Lazaar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife. And, you know, we all hung out, kind of, you know, talking about UFO stuff, but just getting to know each other as people because, you know, Bob's like me. The stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life.

[02:55:51]

If anything, it ruined his life. Yeah. You know, he's just a really, really smart guy. That's just like the rest of us trying to get through life. Yeah, that's nevertheless. I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lucha Lozano's resignation note from his that he was a program director at the Aztek program.

[02:56:14]

Yeah, one of the sad things is that he's mentioned that, you know, people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, like UFOs, as a threat. Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it, it's a sad thing to think about that, that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly. It doesn't is distraction that we don't want to deal with, and it kind of just fades into history, like literally it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up.

[02:56:52]

Like, and it just didn't because they're not like when aliens show up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule and if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up in some very nonchalant, peaceful way.

[02:57:12]

Briefly, people will be like, that's that. That's I don't have time for this. That's so sad. It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back. Let's go back.

[02:57:24]

Way back, way back in the time machine, you know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe. You know, in Europe is a perfect example. Why does France speak French and then right next to them, Spanish? Spain speaks Spanish and they need to kind of jump over and Germans or German and the Polish people, everyone speaks a different language, because if you look at the way the train kind of subdivide the original people that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently.

[02:57:53]

Right.

[02:57:53]

You'd be like the US. But see, the U.S. is different.

[02:57:56]

We all speak English because what happened, we came over and we started on the East Coast and we migrated west. We will get into the what happened.

[02:58:03]

And, you know, because the Native Americans all spoke different languages. Yeah. You know, it's that same type of thing. So but any time we have a tendency to show up, you're you're actually you think about you're an alien. If I go to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years were over a thousand years or travel. We weren't traveling across oceans at the time. We were well, we don't think we were.

[02:58:23]

The Vikings were because we had limited you know, we had to have supplies in the boats weren't as big.

[02:58:29]

We had to build them by hand. We didn't have power tools and all that stuff.

[02:58:31]

So, you know, if you show up someplace like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know, and then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in a human alien world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other. We we take what we want, and that's what happened, I mean, we literally defunct, did civilisation's because that's how we are, you know, humans are we're an interesting group.

[02:59:04]

So you go now what what if something is from someplace else? Just let's just let's just go off the grid and go. Let's say there are little green men and what are their intentions? Who asked me this when we were talking to Louisana? And he said, what do you think they were here for us? I don't know.

[02:59:19]

He goes where I go, Oh, they were observing. They come down and hang out. And he goes, What if they are prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do? And you go, that's interesting. The other theory is maybe there's a more advanced civilization out here and they just check in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization that's inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above, because now these they become the threat and type.

[02:59:45]

So you watch us grow until we start getting too much. You know, it's kind of like you go well, because they always have a tendency to hang out around nuclear. Right. And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced civilization, I'm going to go science fiction kind of comical. They come down and watch it and go look at the the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't destroy themself.

[03:00:04]

Yeah.

[03:00:04]

If I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb. That's why the I mean, there's certainly an uptick of what is it, UFO sightings since. Since the nuclear. Since the nuclear.

[03:00:19]

Yeah, that's you go.

[03:00:21]

Hmmm. Let me ask a little bit out there. Question, maybe speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell. Do you think it's possible that there is? Out of this world, aircraft or beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth, like the US government, is it possible? So the one perspective of that, if it's possible. Is it possible to keep a secret like that? I would say this, I think it's very highly possible because if you go if you just look at all the sightings and nuts, go just look at Project Blue.

[03:01:05]

Look, it was what forget how many thousands of sightings. And there's a percentage it's like 10 or 15 percent. They still can't explain. Like our Tic-Tac is one of them. You know, they basically the government has come out and said, we don't know what that was. OK, so so if you go OK, of that 15 percent that we don't know and all of these thousands are still that 15 percent makes up a pretty big number, what are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?

[03:01:30]

And I don't care if it's of intact system or you got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain or some some biological matter, to say the least.

[03:01:43]

It could be intact or it could, but the odds of that now are starting to go down that, you know, that could never happen. And I'm not talking just the United States.

[03:01:51]

I'm talking the globally. So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone in the in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people? Has something that is not from this world and I'm not talking a meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation, could it be a drone? Could be a foreign drone. You know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff. And we got stuff that just went past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper Belt.

[03:02:18]

You know, there's there's stuff out there floating around. And what about ours? It's going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, because we've had stuff crashing into planets.

[03:02:26]

So if that's the case, you would think something is out there that we have something that we can't explain. And according to LU, there is stuff that we can't explain. You know, and I would assume that Lu, who ran data, has has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about because, you know, because I had a clearance, when you have a clearance, you you sign your name, you're bound to that. And to me, that's an important oath that you hold to, you know, and this is kind of where, you know, people have issues with Bob.

[03:02:55]

So if, you know, when I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob and I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy.

[03:03:04]

Are you? Yes.

[03:03:05]

There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked, you know, to those who will clearance, who, you know, are true to the government, you would say he should have never spoke. He he was under an oath to not say anything, but he did. If you asked Bob, why did you say something? His his answer was, I understand there's an oath, but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind and it shouldn't be locked away.

[03:03:30]

Know I'll leave if you believe, Bob, that's that's kind of what Bob says.

[03:03:33]

And that this is a really interesting point. If there is aircraft technology that's in the possession of the, say, the U.S. government, should they make that publicly known? This this node and this is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature of human civilization, like the the way we the way we think about our place in the world? Also, the if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that information or not?

[03:04:13]

If you were the government so.

[03:04:15]

Well, here's exactly how so for for classified information, the government is the people that classify it. So I can't go I can't look at something and go, oh, my God, this Avión bottle is now top secret. I can't I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that. That's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life. So I understand that. But now you go there's reason stuff is classified, OK?

[03:04:42]

And it has to do with sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained. It's just like the mob. If I have a spy, I'm I'm a mobster and you're the counter mobster. But I have a guy on the inside that's feeding me information I can't do it in a perfect example is if you've ever seen the it's the Tom Cruise movie, what is it, Air America or whatever. But he he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling drugs for Pablo Escobar, and he ended up getting a cargo plane.

[03:05:08]

And the government the CIA was kind of funding him to do stuff. That's how he got hooked up with Pablo. But they put cameras on his airplane. And when Reagan had come out and said, here's pictures, we have proof that they're running these drugs, it didn't take so long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside of the plane of this guy he had been working with. And that guy ends up dead. Does that make sense?

[03:05:27]

So you classify to protect a source you classified to protect the technology, because if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there's levels depending on if it's a secret or top secret, there are levels of damage that can be done to the US government and our well-being as a country. And we owe it to this because we're all Americans. You know, to me, no matter what some people will say, even in this country, this is the greatest country on the planet.

[03:05:51]

This is the only country that you have the ability to do what you want to do. It's just don't be lazy. And I have stories of people that came over here and started with nothing. And they're they're living the American dream. And they'll tell you. And they didn't get it because of, you know, I like you. You came over here from Russia. You get no minority status or anything else. You get you're a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, whatever your religion, you.

[03:06:19]

But you come over here.

[03:06:20]

I kind of knew that from the left. But you come over here, you basically have made yourself you're educated. You're working at literally the top research university in the world.

[03:06:32]

To be honest, I can do whatever the hell I can create with a bit of with a lot of hard work. I can do quite a bit. No one gave it to you.

[03:06:42]

So, I mean and I tell people I'm a believer that like that I mean, we are a community, so like there is a social aspect to it. But the freedom and the American dream is a real thing. And this is this I you know, I joke about being Russian, but I I'm an American and this is, I do believe, the greatest country on Earth. So there's a reason the nationalist pride, the pride in your nation is a powerful thing.

[03:07:09]

And around that, this secrecy holds value. But to me, alien technology is bigger than that. I mean, it's it's not so much a threat as you're holding back something that could inspire the world like a human knowledge. So let's talk in theory. So I'm going to go back to Bob because I've talked about. So Bob is a propulsion guy, right? Right.

[03:07:40]

Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor. He built the rocket car, you know, so he did that.

[03:07:45]

So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say this is I'm just talking this is Dave's theory.

[03:07:52]

Yeah, I am. I own I have I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don't understand. And I know it's a propulsion system. So now I got to figure it out. Right. So who are you going to go to? Right. You go find someone. So you go, wait.

[03:08:10]

Here's a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos, which they have proven who is big into propulsion. He designs all this. He builds a shit in his garage. Hey, he's super smart. Why don't we bring him in? So you hire him on a contract and you go, hey, we're going to brief you on the program. And he goes and works on wherever he says he worked. You know, that's not important. But you get access to the technology to try and figure it out.

[03:08:32]

And then you go, well, you know, Bob comes out and says, you know, we're figuring out these things, but there's a part where our technology isn't advanced enough for us to figure the whole thing out.

[03:08:41]

So then, you know, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out and tell anyone he he works on it until he gets to a point where he stagnated, he he's he's in a wall. You go, I can't do it.

[03:08:52]

So sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So you go find someone else who's in a propulsion. You bring him and they work. They can't figure it out or they get to the point where kind of back to the Einstein theory where, hey, I've got all these theories on how it works, but we don't have the technology. We haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need. Do we still have to advanced technology more?

[03:09:07]

So then what do you do yourself? You go, hey, good projects over and the contract yourself it and you wait another ten years and you wait another ten years until technology and our abilities and our our research advances more. And then you go find new people to bring in that are experts in that view and go, hey, we want you to work on this thing. And here's what we know about it so far.

[03:09:27]

Or you don't tell him anything because because remember, if you if you reveal someone else's research, you can taint their beliefs. They'll start to sway in that direction. So you go, I'm not going to tell you anything. I'm going to give you this thing. And now you tell me what you think. And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem that maybe Bob and someone else solved earlier, you can go, hey, what about this?

[03:09:45]

You don't have to tell where it came from. What about this? And now they can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology.

[03:09:55]

Shove it again. Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because it's heartbreaking. I don't listen. I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on.

[03:10:06]

The the alternative approach is to release this to the world and say there's a mystery here. And then the Ilan's of the world that Jeff Bezos we talked about money, but it's also not just money. It's like this engine that's within. We talked about the American dream to say I'm going to be the one that cracks this mystery open and like that's within a lot of us. And like money aside, people in their garage just will. But you're thinking like a scientist now.

[03:10:36]

Let me know. Let's shift to let me think like a country. So we have country A, B and C, and you can look at the nuclear arms race. So we know that Germany was really close. We know that Russia was getting pretty close. We just won the race and we were the first ones with it. Yeah.

[03:10:51]

And still to this day, Germany could have won the. They could have won. They could have won. But someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they knew they had. The answer is literally what it comes down to. Someone was smart enough to realize if that that got into the hands of the Nazis, that that would be the end. And that's that's a tough call to do that, knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the wrong end.

[03:11:14]

And that's kind of the fear.

[03:11:15]

When you look at this, you go, OK, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it, kind of International Space Station, like we're all going to work on it together in a you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from any weapons or anything.

[03:11:32]

We're supposing we got the international thing down there. We're all going to work together. If you did it in a in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out because what you don't want is the someone stealing information and getting it back to where and countries are interest to do this. Hey, we're doing internationally, but we're secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first. That's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power.

[03:11:57]

It would literally change the game of the way the world operates and from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect. It's got huge, huge.

[03:12:09]

Yeah, yeah. I as a beautifully, beautifully presented and there's I feel like there's a tension between those two place, the scientists view of the world and the national security view of the world.

[03:12:22]

Let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists kind of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally as a hierarchical system that's exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets. And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to almost any conspiracy theory to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do.

[03:12:46]

I agree with you. But the there does seem to be and I tend to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy. It seems that the communication, like the three videos that were released and just the way of Dodie's in general talks about the things we've been talking about is just confused. This contradictory. It's not inspiring. It's it's suspicious. It's just not even the way they released the videos. You know, the Tic-Tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists.

[03:13:26]

It's like at the US going to the moon. And it's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible, you know, and the way was really so suspicious. It was like low resolution video on a crappy web. Say, like with some crappy documents and I mean, why what? I don't know how to ask this question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the public?

[03:13:55]

Because I don't think they know how. Now, especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years, and I don't think because I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that, you know, when it comes in, like I said, you know, the government has the right to classify stuff. They they classify everything because they don't know you have something. You don't know what it is you don't know. So we just go, well, it must be must be top secret and let's put it in a vault.

[03:14:18]

You know, it's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the ark and they put it in the it's in the giant army warehouse, you know, and we don't even know what we have. So but I also believe that, you know, and I'll say this openly, I don't think that the American people need to know everything. I think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection of this country, and I totally believe in that.

[03:14:41]

So, you know, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about a storm, Area 51, something like, yeah, that's probably the worst idea you could possibly have, is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons. There are reasons that we have things that we don't just let out to the public, because if we do, as soon as you do, let someone know that you have something, they immediately try to counter it.

[03:15:04]

And perfect example. The U.S. in the 60s developed a bomber, it was a mock three compressional bomber called the XB 70, OK, there was three of them built, three of them ever built. It was a like sixty thousand foot high mock three. They an incredible airplane. When you see it, there's actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio, at the museum. You know, it would go that wingtips would fold on it looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster.

[03:15:31]

When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG 25, literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber, and they built an entire fleet of MIG. Twenty five. Right. We built three Zib 70s and we scrapped the program. Right. Because now you go, well, it's the technology is cool.

[03:15:55]

We proved it, but now it becomes obsolete. So it's not even worth building a whole fleet of these things. You know, it's constant. It's a chess game. We do something. They do something, we do something. They do something. And it's we do something. And then they counter it. They got to you got to figure out how to defeat it. So you go out, we'll build something. So the more we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better.

[03:16:15]

We actually I personally think we talk too much.

[03:16:17]

And I think the the military and the DOD is starting to see that, you know, we're too open. You know, you know, you announce, hey, we're building this because there's a budget line and we live in a free society. But you don't have to release all the specs and you don't have to put everything in open source.

[03:16:34]

But that's a problem when we go to the universities, if we want to go do work with MIT and you want to partner with MIT and your defense company and you want to partner, you know, you guys have a rule that if you create it, then it can be open source because the university owns it. And we are an institution of learning where the defense side might go.

[03:16:52]

We don't we don't really want that published in a paper in Scientific America or I break I talked to CTO of Lockheed Projects and just just skunkworks the some of the best, if not the best engineering and science. But engineering really ever is done in secrecy. And it sucks because it's so inspiring and they can't talk about it. It is.

[03:17:17]

But still due to funding, the U.S. government has deep pockets.

[03:17:22]

You know, some of this new technology that you developed for an open source, unless and this is goes back to the original conversation, we now there's enough money in the private sector that individuals control.

[03:17:33]

Beezus, I'm not talking Amazon, I'm talking Jeff Bezos single individual worth over one hundred billion dollars, he has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what the Gates Foundation with between Bill Gates and his his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos, his ex-wife, actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the conversation. So, I mean, what's the Gates Foundation worth these days? You know, and these are guys, you know, brilliant, brilliant.

[03:18:03]

I mean, some of the greatest minds we have to go, you know, what are they doing? Because they have the ability to it's a nonprofit thing.

[03:18:08]

Hey, I want to fund this. I want to fund this research.

[03:18:10]

They can look beyond the conflicts between nations. You can look beyond the conflict of having to have a classification. You could do what you want.

[03:18:17]

You know, it's just like, you know, we classify how to do, you know, the whole nuclear you know, how to create critical mass.

[03:18:26]

Right. But they're really smart high school kids that have figured out how to do it. They do their science project. And then the government comes in and says, hey, we got to classify your government because we just don't want this out in the public domain, which I understand.

[03:18:37]

But they never stop them from free thought and developing that. It's just we really don't want this out there. OK, so I understand that. I totally understand it. But if they if Bill and Melinda want to do this and go, hey, we want to do this and they're going to work with Bezos and I'm going to work with Elon and we're going to think about it, there is a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D.

[03:18:57]

And I'm not talking just science like this. I'm talking medical research and all this. But then you go, who gets it? Because now you're competing against the companies that actually do it.

[03:19:06]

You go that well. Are they the greatest, greatest minds?

[03:19:08]

I'd say, you know, we have a tendency to go. These are the best that we have.

[03:19:14]

And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have. But there's probably people out there that don't want to work. There's brilliant minds that don't want to do anything with the fence because they just disagree with what it does. So they go to another path, they go do something else.

[03:19:26]

And in the sense that the ilan's of the world, that Jeff Bezos actually, in a certain sense, much better than Dodie's at finding the brilliant, weird minds out there because they're not tied to the government.

[03:19:40]

So when you work a government contract, the government writes, they tell you what they want and then they work with you on the requirements and they usually have an end in mean.

[03:19:50]

You know, they have an idea that this is what I want it to be, where if you go to like Space X, where. You know, they come up with why don't we just land these things on a pad and reuse them? Yeah, well, if the government scientists, if you're on a government contract says no, that's not the requirements. We're not paying for that. We want you to do this. You're kind of controlled.

[03:20:10]

Or when Elon does it, his company, they can do whatever the hell they want to do because they have no bounds. The only bounds they have is the liability if it doesn't work and it lands on something. So what do you do? You go out to Kwajalein and you test it. And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we clean it up. No big deal. We lost the money, but we'll move on.

[03:20:26]

It's money makes the world go round contrary to what everyone thinks. But, you know, there's a lot of money that's sitting around that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with. And I don't know. I mean, I'll guarantee that. What is it? Blue Origin? Isn't that Amazon?

[03:20:40]

You know, that they're doing some cool stuff because they have funny and I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because they were building the first test thing and they they were limited. And Elon found this like 400 acre thing. I think it's about 40 acres down by Waco, Texas.

[03:20:58]

And he's like, I go, how he goes, he goes, Dude, I worked. He goes, I worked with. He goes because he's done government contract. He goes, there's a government contract. And then we're going to SpaceX with Elon money. And that's what he refers to it as, is Elon Money, where it was like, don't, I'll throw them. And he would throw the money at it and make it happen.

[03:21:13]

And it's I'm talking this fast. Yeah. I mean, he talks about he has a great story about this. I mean, this is Elon and this is how fast you can do in the private sector via the government.

[03:21:21]

Where there's the bureaucracy is they had a company that was a basically a tool and die machine shop that did a lot of their high precision parts for the rockets.

[03:21:32]

They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies. And when the economy was down, the guy was actually looking at going out of business. So the guy I know, he told me the story. He was talking to the guy. He had to go over there and get something. And he's like, holy shit. He goes, hang on. So he calls up on the phone space. He says, Hey, is Elon there?

[03:21:48]

Can you get him in the boardroom? We'll be there in 20 minutes.

[03:21:51]

So he grabs this guy who's literally going to fold his company.

[03:21:55]

They go over to SpaceX and I may be getting some of this wrong if people are going to fact check me. But this is pretty close. They go in the boardroom and he said literally within like a, you know, an hour or two. Ian has bought the guys company, that guy is now a senior VP running the his company, and they're going to pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing so they can actually build the parts and they can still contract out to make the money outside.

[03:22:21]

And it happened like that fast.

[03:22:23]

And it's not just money. It's because I see I witnessed it, too, with Elon. I think it's whatever whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise to the top. But like because I've also worked for DARPA for research in terms of a source of funding, I there's a weight of bureaucracy. When I was working, like being funded by DARPA and with Elon, like I was literally in the presence of like anything is possible, cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, the all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately.

[03:23:04]

How much money and time do you waste dealing with the bureaucracy when you could actually be doing real work? That's the difference. And this is why I honestly, when I went back to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about, when you look at it and go, SpaceX can do something for half the price ahead of schedule that what Boeing were paying Boeing. And you go, oh, well, this just came out. You go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with this side?

[03:23:29]

Because you've got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to fly around in it, work like a champ. It went up. It hung out. It came back. It splashed down. It worked perfectly. You know, we're going to dust it off. And, oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and put to museums, they're going to reuse that dragon capsule came down. They're going to dust it off, put a new coat of paint on it, slapped on top of another rocket.

[03:23:54]

Away it goes. Holy cow. It's amazing. It's a shift. It's a complete shift in mentality. And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost.

[03:24:02]

Yeah, it's exciting, especially given the putting the Tic-Tac in context, like then the sky or it's limitless. The possibilities we could do with this kind of message. I think it's exciting. Yeah, I think we live in an exciting time right now besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is this is a hopeful. Like, there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have a hope for the future to look up to the sky.

[03:24:33]

And we're humans. We can solve so many. We can solve all of this.

[03:24:38]

I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing, and I said is this would be great, you know, because when the government had come out a month ago and said, hey, this does exist, we're doing this and we're going to release more stuff. And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mullin and those guys before I went on because they had called me up to be on Tucker's show. And I'm like, I go, you know, this would be great.

[03:24:58]

You know, just come out with the find the the the relic of a spaceship, like pull out the Roswell wreckage. If you have it, pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it. God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with the the riots in the cities. And I mean it. I know it's an election year and all that, but God, it would be something would be refreshing to not have to turn on my TV and see everything that is just depressing in the world to be here.

[03:25:22]

Holy cow. We actually do have this and we're working on this technology.

[03:25:25]

Imagine if there is a Rosewell aircraft and they pull it out. Imagine the innovation that happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than that. Just the the innovation that happens. The look on the on Musks face, look on Jeff Bezos, his face and all the brilliant engineers would change the game. It would change. It would change the game completely. Let me ask the big question. I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it outside.

[03:25:50]

I mean, one of the things the fact that you've. Lay your eyes on a UFO. Probably open your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings. There could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them, what do you is the outside of your own sighting is the most interesting sighting or UFO related event in history?

[03:26:18]

I think there's several what does it Rammasun Forest in England, the other guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns. One guy was medically disabled, but they weren't going to given and he had help from Jimmy Carter. John McCain, his office helped get the guy's disability re-established. I think that's a big one. I think there's people out there that have seen stuff. And I'm talking credible because there's you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven.

[03:26:47]

They're actually explainable.

[03:26:50]

You know, you sent me the question, the the Phoenix lights.

[03:26:55]

I think there's. What's that? Some say I'm not familiar with some of these. I'm not either. I want a funny story on it. So I was at a I was at a conference and hopefully he doesn't want us to get offended. But we had this this it was I call called speed dating. So there's a table of about eight people at a table. And we would go sit at the table and they could ask us questions. And then after ten minutes, we move to the next table.

[03:27:18]

So speed dating all these people that are really into this.

[03:27:21]

Yeah, I was kind of funny, but I sat down and it's not funny. So some people will try and dominate it. But, you know, you have to kind of push the Dominators away so that, you know, if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question here.

[03:27:32]

So we got into this and the guy starts naming all these. Well, what about this?

[03:27:35]

What about the Phoenix lights on my own about the Phoenix lights? What about this event? Oh, about that.

[03:27:39]

He goes he looks at me and he goes, Well, you're not a UFO guy. Go, No, I'm not. But I chased one. So I'm an expert.

[03:27:46]

Have you? And you could see you get deflated because I'm kind of a smartass like that. Yeah. I mean, the first hand experience from a credible in some sense, these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human.

[03:27:57]

Well, I think part of that is to us that's a credibility piece, because the four of us that actually saw it plus, you know, the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video, none of us are UFO obsessed people. So when we come out and say, because to me it's just in it's five minutes of my life, I did a lot of really cool and it really kind of neat things have been able to do.

[03:28:22]

But when you look at it and go. We don't to me, it wasn't it's not the pinnacle of my life, you know, to other people that they live in the UFO world and it's like they you know, if you talk to people, they'll go that are really into it, who've never seen one.

[03:28:38]

It kills them that they didn't see one when here we are because and what's unique with ours, which kind of adds that level, is it wasn't we just didn't see it. It wasn't like, oh, look, something in the sky. And it was weird.

[03:28:51]

We actually engaged with it, you know. Yeah.

[03:28:53]

Though there's an engaged five minute thing and there's other stories from other countries, like there's a story in the back when the Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these things. And one of them shot at some, you know, it shot it because he said shoot at it and it shot it. And then it got shot down. And then he said, don't ever shoot at him again and don't chase them. Just you can observe them, but don't go after them because obviously they have firepower that we can't control, because if you can make something float around and jam radars at will and do whatever you want, you know, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful.

[03:29:26]

You know, you can go to Independence Day. They had that forcefield around.

[03:29:28]

Oh, we got to. We got it. Now you got it. Cyber warfare. You got to take the bug down. You got to take the warfare. Now, we can actually inhibit some type of damage.

[03:29:35]

So there's a I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights, somebody on. I think Rhetta said ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix lights. So the interesting thing, like you said with the Tic-Tac, is that multiple people laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix? So many people.

[03:29:53]

So here's a deal with massive sightings. So the Phoenix Lights is unexplainable, although I know the Air Force had said something about it was an eight ten drop and flares.

[03:30:01]

No, I don't think so. Instead of flares, don't burn that long. They just come out and say, you know, they detract when they go away.

[03:30:08]

Although on the other hand, there's, you know, because clouds can do things. So.

[03:30:11]

So I lived in central California for 18 years and you would get oh, my God, what was that in the sky? And it was really Vandenberghe shooting a missile off. You know, they were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across and they go land in the atoll. It Kwajalein, you know, and then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff, you know, stuff that we do because we were a superpower.

[03:30:33]

But when you see them go up, you know, especially if you've ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night, it'll have stream the glow and you can tell it's a rocket. But if you don't look up until later, when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, but you can watch us on TV when even the space X ones go. It's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow.

[03:30:51]

And then it hits a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because there's the forces aren't holding that all into one unique thing.

[03:30:58]

And it looks really odd and then it'll go off. Because it burns out and you get state separation, then you see the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand it because they didn't watch it from launch because we sit in our driveway and, you know, if it was a three hour drive, but you could sit and watch it and I'd watch you watch. It's really cool if you don't see anything.

[03:31:19]

What you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume. You know what's left, the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blown.

[03:31:26]

So you get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky, you know, that's part.

[03:31:30]

But when you go to Phoenix lights and you go, hey, you know, when a thousand people see something, are you going to discredit all a thousand people? Are you going to try and explain it away with something else? You know? You know, it's a weather balloon, you know, and it's a weather balloon. Again, just like the Tic-Tac, I think is just inspiring for the limitless nature of the science. I think you're I think more is going to come out, I think some of the stuff that the to the stars folks have done.

[03:31:59]

So there's a 10 year academy. Yeah. What are your thoughts about them? Are they. I talked to them quite a bit. I am not a part of to the Stars Academy. I you know, but, you know, like I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.

[03:32:13]

What's their mission? What's their hope. What's there was there when they started their mission was to try and don't look at this as little green men. But let's look at this as a technology and let's try in almost reverse engineer and figure out how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge, you know, physics based knowledge to go how would something like this operate? That's really their bottom line, was to try and use and then couple that with because they've got the series Unidentified couple that with television to get the word out.

[03:32:48]

So you're actually putting something instead of because everyone has a theory. You know, ancient aliens covers all kinds of theories. You know, it's kind of off of, oh, my God, and I've seen the stuff and I've seen stuff that I've said taken out of context on shows that I did not talk to. So there's all that because you can take a clip and go, oh, it's this. It's that, you know, and if I know about stuff like it, you can't technically use my likeness unless I tell you you can.

[03:33:12]

So if I haven't signed something you can't do, there was a guy who put something out and I was in and I told him, you can take it down. And you talked to lawyers because I'm not I'm not supporting you.

[03:33:20]

So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that it was connected to was let's face it, if you're making TV shows, there's two reasons to do it.

[03:33:27]

One, you want to get word out, or two, you want to make money, or three, both.

[03:33:31]

And so usually it's I would say the the make money is probably the biggest thing to put a TV show out.

[03:33:36]

And the mission of the To the Stars Academy is to not do that is is to try to get some when I when I started and I talk to them because I've talked to Tom and I've talked to Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid of the the stigma that's tied to UFOs. And let's look at it from a science base and then use TV to get the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool things.

[03:34:03]

I mean, you know, they've the the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property.

[03:34:09]

Their government, they got a bunch from it might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of stuff, like, here's all our records. What can you do with it to try and now pull from country based to a more global based research, which is what you were talking about, and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government, I mean, any government, but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some of the metallurgy because you go, oh, I found this.

[03:34:32]

We had this piece of metal. What is it in? Some of the stuff has been explained. They've got some objects, artifacts that have not been explained.

[03:34:38]

And that's slowly coming out, you know, and I think and you hope as the US government, or at least some of the government is the government.

[03:34:44]

The US government came out a month ago and said, we have we have we have material that we cannot explain the origin.

[03:34:51]

They have said that they just haven't released the wreckage from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about it like it's 70 some years old.

[03:34:58]

I mean, they might let it out.

[03:34:59]

I think you put it beautifully that in this time they'll will be a heck of an inspiring, hopeful thing to see. People don't just to distract them.

[03:35:09]

Yeah, the division is I mean, nothing will unite as humans, descendants of chimps like the idea that there's life out there.

[03:35:21]

Oh, it would literally change. I said this a while ago, I think, as the London Sun-Times had called me and I said, you know, personally, I think this is a global issue. It's not if there is stuff coming down, which we're pretty sure there is, there's enough stuff that we can't explain if there is stuff coming down.

[03:35:36]

And this is not a country based thing and it's not about technology and it's not about who's going to win the next war because you don't know what they're doing. So you got really a couple of theories. One, you've got ETTY or Close Encounters, and the other extreme is you've got Independence Day. Are you going to prepare and bet on E.T. and Close Encounters or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is Independence Day? You actually have a game plan.

[03:36:01]

And when you get into Independence Day, that scenario, you know, and I don't like going too much in the sci fi, but let's just say in theory that that becomes a reality. It's not a US, Russia, China, England, France, Spain name any country in any continent. It becomes a global issue. And the only way you can deny it, just like Americans, we all you know, we're divided. It's we it's been that way forever.

[03:36:28]

So if you think we won't get through this, we'll get through it, because we've had times just like this before until Nazi Germany pops up in Nazi Germany, pops up or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center, and then all of a sudden we're all like united.

[03:36:39]

We also have very, very short memories.

[03:36:42]

Yes, we do. Exactly. It's when you look and go, well, we can do this and you go, oh, no, no.

[03:36:48]

If you think that everyone on the planet is good. You need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking, you know, we said that there were people during the rise of Hitler. No, no, it's OK. No, no, no, it's OK. We're not going to do. We're not going to stop. No, no, it's OK. No, no, it's OK. And you got to think the only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia.

[03:37:15]

If he just stuck with the pact with Stalin and not went to the east and had a fight.

[03:37:20]

And it was really the Russian winter that crushed him and he would have put all his high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally different outcome. The man in the iron, the man in the high tower, whatever the Netflix show or Nazi actually wins it.

[03:37:34]

And you look, you know, we didn't know everything that was going on, especially the atrocities with the concentration camps and what he was doing to the Jews.

[03:37:42]

I mean, it's you look at that going if you really want to see evil. And then there's the whole side of what Stalin did because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did. But that never gets the press.

[03:37:52]

And the thing is, we forget to forget this history in our conflicts today. We forget that there is the nature of evil. We forget that there's real evil in the world.

[03:38:03]

And the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both.

[03:38:09]

It's like this interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan of being both like kind to each other, compassionate, empathetic, but also being like strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to to make sure that you that there is a balance between kindness and force.

[03:38:31]

That is, you use force when force is necessary. But you don't have to walk around like Billy Badass all the time. I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with that literally could kick the shit out of whoever came near them. They never got in fights because, one, even people that didn't know them because they were actually nice guys, you know, they were they're just good dudes. But, you know, if you cross them like I had a friend of mine, he was he's a nationally ranked wrestler.

[03:38:56]

It went to went to Naval Academy with me. He's a very, very good friend of mine.

[03:39:01]

And he is when you meet him and he wrestled at 190 ninety pounds. And he did not lose a match his senior year until he went to Nationals. He just had a bad day. He actually lost to a guy. He had pummeled the shit out of me and he would cross.

[03:39:15]

It was funny. We joke about it even with him, because when you meet him, he's like the nicest, like local. Hey, hey, dude, you know. Hey, how are you doing? He's super nice. And he would cross that ring on on a wrestling mat as soon as he crossed that ring. It was like a totally different person and he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on and he would get done.

[03:39:37]

And he's, like, super humble. And they'd raise his hand and he would he'd have this blank expression. They'd raise his hand and he'd walk off.

[03:39:43]

And as soon as he crossed the line, he'd he'd look up. Hey. Hi, guys. How are you doing? Like, he literally just went could read someone's arms off, but as soon as he crossed a line, he was a totally different person. He's like and he's that way today. Yeah. I mean, he won't even tell you he's a wrestler.

[03:39:55]

Yeah. That's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is. Oh, he's the wrestler. He's across the line.

[03:40:03]

You're you're you can be hard, but once you're off the mat, you're just the kind of human being.

[03:40:11]

Yeah, I know you're super humble. Saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. That the entire trajectory of having a dream, of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career. What advice would you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and inspire that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything?

[03:40:50]

Yeah. Yeah. First, let me start with you, and you had a question on inspirational people, so my grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier. Huge funeral beer delivery guy was delivering beer in the 60s. Riots were the guys in the black neighborhoods where, you know, white people didn't go. And my grandfather's Sicilian. He was one of the first ones in his family, born in the United States. So my great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat.

[03:41:22]

Huge, huge guy. And just the nicest, friendliest would give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his funeral. And I'm talking at his funeral. The head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The Mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. I mean, it was literally a mix of of of who's who. And he had told me once, you know, because when you're little, you start looking.

[03:41:45]

And I grew up basically I was probably middle class, lower middle class. My dad was a fireman. You're not rich. He's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up. And I was talking to my grandfather one day and he said something to me, and this is this is literally how I run my life. He said it was about money because you'd see, you know, back in the day if you saw someone in a Mercedes that was rare.

[03:42:03]

You know, they were everywhere, you know, people that you couldn't leave the car. You actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash. So it was a totally different than we are now. And he said he goes, you know, David, he goes there no better than you and you're no better than anyone else. He goes, you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

[03:42:24]

He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes. It doesn't make him a bad person. It just that's that's who they chose to be. And you make choices in your life, but never, ever look down on someone because, you know, there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should never, ever do that. And I kept that close to me. He was a huge influence. Was my mom's dad just a big, big influence in my life and the way I carried myself.

[03:42:48]

And he was one that would say, you know, you can be anything you want to be. You know, he grew up dirt poor, you know, in the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that. You know, to him that was a success. And to me, it was always, you know, trying to better and move on. And he was the one you know, my parents were a big part of this, too, was instilling that that anything is possible.

[03:43:11]

So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969, you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military pilots. And, you know, we had an Air National Guard that at the time was flying F 100. So I'm dating myself.

[03:43:25]

And I was just fascinated with flight. And I just looked that going, that's really what I want to do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always I could do this or do that. And when I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into natural resources at Ohio State. And I'm like, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger because I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires, because that's just I like that stuff.

[03:43:47]

You know, it was that or be an oceanographer because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau and I actually that's my my undergrad degree. Is Jacques Cousteau so influenced our Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau? I have an oceanography degree. I got an MBA from University of Houston. Go Cougars got to mention them. And and so you looking people go, what what are you going to do with that?

[03:44:04]

And I said, you know, I got an oceanography degree because I got well, I'm going to sail on the ocean. So at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at. And that was kind of a running joke.

[03:44:13]

And then and then there's these passions. And underneath it is the is the belief that you can be anything you want to.

[03:44:20]

You can.

[03:44:21]

You know, I told my kids this, you know, when they were young, you know, it was tough, especially for my son. So when it was about five, six year, we knew Nate was colorblind. You know, my my wife's brothers are both color blind. It's really color deprived, color blind. You see, black and white. He can't tell he has issues with greens, reds, browns. It's funny if you're ever around someone like that because.

[03:44:39]

So what are you looking at? Goes right over there by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go, this like, he had a hat on one day ago. Which one are you getting? The hat? A hat in his hand. It was green. He goes, I'm going to get the green one. I go, Oh, this one right. Here he goes, no, the one of my head.

[03:44:50]

I go, Nate, that one's brown. He's like, Leave me alone, Dad.

[03:44:53]

You got the brown hat. Because to him it looked great. Yeah. Yeah. So he couldn't fly. He came. He said, I go. Do you want to do any you know, you're talking to your kids and we want to go see I want to be a pilot now and I got to tell him because he's looking at me because I'm a pilot.

[03:45:06]

Do you can't be a pilot. He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you got issues, you know?

[03:45:11]

So you got to redirect. And the other one was because I had I stopped flying. I was forty two years old and I was like and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I know exactly what it feels like when, you know, Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it.

[03:45:26]

Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time. But whatever.

[03:45:29]

So you do and you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you have to walk away from something you love and you think you can still do it.

[03:45:39]

So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both my kids and I said, you know, find something that you want to do, that you love to do and that you can do your whole life.

[03:45:49]

And you should be able to do good things for other people, you want to be able to help other people. That's what I said.

[03:45:57]

So both of my kids and there's no one in my family, both of my children, one of them is my daughter is a doctor doing a residency in internal medicine right now.

[03:46:06]

And my son is in his third year and are both going to be doctors. And I look at it is, you know, people go, oh, you got to doctor. I don't care. I told my kids, if you want to be a garbage man or you want to dig ditches, I don't care. Just be be the best ditch digger that you can be, I said, and be happy doing it. Because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of money, money, money, money, money, money, money, and that's what makes the world go round.

[03:46:28]

But what you realize and I'll go back to my grandfather who didn't have a lot of money, and he was probably one of the most happy people on life.

[03:46:34]

And unfortunately, he died and he died at sixty five, had a massive heart attack because he didn't tell that he kind of knew what was happening and he just made the choice to to do and it was devastating to the entire family. But he didn't he didn't have a lot of money. But I'll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there's nobody at them. And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, had I it literally it was like three miles along the pope.

[03:46:59]

It was crazy who died. That was because it was like he's a Catholic, he's Italian. He goes, you know who died? The Pope. And I got to ask my grandfather. And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister. And there was like, you know, thirty people. And I looked at my mother and I said, Where's everybody? And she goes, Oh. No, this is normal, this is what a normal funeral looks like, so it's, you know, for young kids, bottom line one, be nice, kindness will get you.

[03:47:25]

I'm a big believer in karma. Kindness will get you a long way in the world. You know, it's easy. It's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, you know, and get rid of the hate. And number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything. And there's a there's a self realism like, you know, if you really have trouble with math, getting a Ph.D. in applied math is probably not something you're going to be able to do.

[03:47:48]

But understand yourself what your own capabilities are and, you know, inside your heart, don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do. You have to determine that yourself and go for it.

[03:47:57]

And and you can do anything. It's just it's it's a great the world's incredible. It really is.

[03:48:04]

Let me ask the last. Yeah. Big ridiculous question. So you've lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.

[03:48:15]

So let me ask kind of several different ways, the same kind of question. One, do you have you pondered your own mortality, the finiteness of it? And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of your Tic-Tac encounter, is what do you think is the meaning of this thing we've got going on here, the meaning of life, human life in this sense? So let me start with have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often, and I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do believe in God.

[03:48:59]

I've just seen too many things in the world that I can't explain and some people will explain it by subconscious.

[03:49:05]

I'll give you a story in this kind of puts in the thing of do I fear death? So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with. We were stationed in Japan together and in Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins. So there's a real high cancer rate for those that served on the base in Atsugi, Japan.

[03:49:23]

Him and his wife had one son and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday of cancer. And I was hanging out with I'll call him John and I was hanging out with John, we were in oil and gas. He had come to the same company and we were doing an event together. And he was opening up to me because we were actually the demo pilots. We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff. And him and I were sitting there talking and.

[03:49:51]

He was giving me the whole story and how he had really changed his look on life, that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die.

[03:49:59]

Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location that fit there, you know, close to the water where they could do stuff. And I won't say where.

[03:50:09]

And he was doing what he loved to do. And he got diagnosed with throat cancer. And I was talking to him is about maybe two months before he died. And I said. Dude, you're sad, you mean this is your friend and I'm kind of really bummed out and this is the guy this is a guy that's dying of cancer. And here's what he tells me. He says, Dave, dude, we're all going to die. He goes, but I have to look at it, I have to make the best of the time that I have and I said, I understand that.

[03:50:46]

And he goes, with the exception of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly. He goes, I'm OK with dying. I've had a really good life. And. About because actually the original announcement when he when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me because I don't do Facebook and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed and about the day before he died, for some reason, I was thinking about him.

[03:51:16]

And I had a dream where I think it was a dream or an altered reality, you can get into whatever, but he was there.

[03:51:25]

It was just him and I. And I was really sad in the dream, I was actually crying and he was there and he was actually in his uniform using his white skin because he's a Navy. And we were just talking and he looked at me and he said, and this is in my dream, he's like, Dave, it's all going to be OK.

[03:51:41]

And this is this is like and this is a vivid conversation.

[03:51:44]

I have this and people don't think I'm weird about this, but, you know, I know what my dream was and, you know, maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream. But in reality, to me, this was real, that it was put there for a reason. He's and he basically explained everything, that's OK. I'm going to be fine. My wife is fine. He goes, this is this is what's meant to be, you know.

[03:52:05]

But, you know, in the bottom line was make use of every day that you have because you don't know.

[03:52:10]

And literally two days later, I find out that he passed.

[03:52:15]

So but ultimately he accepted the finiteness of it.

[03:52:20]

He did what you have to do. And it's like I talk about, you know, money and job position and this and that. And I said, you can get an any you know, you can go to a company. Just remember, when you want to be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company.

[03:52:31]

You have to. I said, if you look, I joke with people at work. And I said I said, you know, when you ever think that you're important or this guy has that. I said, when you're sitting on ninety three or ninety five, one twenty eight and you're sitting in traffic and we're stop, which doesn't happen right now because of it. But normally it starts bumper to bumper and you're sitting here like I was coming down here by the gas tank.

[03:52:51]

When you're sitting there, look left and look right, you know, and there can be a a Lamborghini or an S five Mercedes. And on the other side, there could be some piece of crap car.

[03:53:01]

We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time trying to do the same thing, which is just get home so we can be with our family. Because the most important thing that we have, it ain't money. And in our job, it's not our position. I go because when it's all said and done, you could be you know, you can be with the exception of the presidents of the United States, I mean, name the vice presidents.

[03:53:23]

Most people can, and eventually they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the seventeen hundreds in the Boston area and you're good to go. I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life?

[03:53:34]

He probably did. But eventually people forget. You realize what's important now. And the one thing that you have is your family and your close friends. And that's that's it. You can take all the money or everything else if you're down on your luck, you know who is going to be. We always joke who your true friends.

[03:53:52]

It's the person while there's there's ones that I won't say, but, you know, hey, your broke down on a road in the middle of nowhere and it's three o'clock in the morning. Who are you going to call. Is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you.

[03:54:03]

And that's life. Those that is life that people you love. It's it's it's the people you truly care about.

[03:54:09]

And contrary to I have, you know. Oh, my God, I got six thousand Facebook friends. You get about that many real friends that you can count on and that's it. Everything else doesn't matter.

[03:54:19]

It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you don't be nice. I mean, have there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for and then come to my house and stuff.

[03:54:25]

But then there's the people, you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin Chad and I got two brothers, sisters, fourteen of us. There's only two boys. There's three of us together. And we all grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools play football together.

[03:54:49]

All that.

[03:54:50]

I said if one of those, if rare Chad ever needs me, if something happens like when my uncle died, it wasn't it wasn't an issue. If I'm coming home, it's I'm book in the ticket. I don't give a shit what it costs because I will be there to be here with you. And then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with.

[03:55:10]

You know.

[03:55:11]

You know, if there's there's I have a handful of people that, you know, I will drop literally everything, even if my wife would be pissed at me at times she's like, seriously, I got I got to do it. And now she knows. And it's the same thing with her. I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her and she has to go, she would go and I would let her go.

[03:55:32]

So given all that, I'm honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time, David was one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. It's a pretty long one.

[03:55:45]

That's probably sets the record for the longest one.

[03:55:47]

So I. I mean, I'm a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for talking to me.

[03:55:54]

You're welcome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fraser and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens Express VPN and better help. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube. Reviewer Starting up a podcast. Follow on Spotify support on page one. Connect with me on Twitter, Allex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.

[03:56:24]

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening. Hope to see you next time.