David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor,

00:00:03.360 | who was a Navy pilot for 18 years

00:00:05.760 | and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41,

00:00:08.860 | also known as the Black Aces,

00:00:11.400 | a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.

00:00:15.240 | He's also famously one of the people who, with his own eyes,

00:00:19.640 | saw and chased a UFO,

00:00:23.520 | an identified flying object in 2004

00:00:26.860 | that is referred to as the Tic Tac,

00:00:28.940 | and the incident more formally referred to as

00:00:32.000 | the USS Nimitz UFO incident.

00:00:35.040 | His story, corroborated by several other pilots,

00:00:38.540 | from my perspective as a curious scientist and an open-minded human being,

00:00:43.220 | is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history,

00:00:47.140 | at least that I'm aware of.

00:00:49.260 | He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to.

00:00:53.520 | I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places,

00:00:56.800 | and tried to ask as many of the questions that people posted as I could.

00:01:00.980 | And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation,

00:01:03.820 | and I'm sure if the world wants us to,

00:01:06.280 | and if there's more questions to be had,

00:01:08.400 | we'll talk on this podcast again.

00:01:10.660 | Quick summary of the sponsors.

00:01:12.120 | Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.

00:01:15.960 | Please check out the sponsors in the description

00:01:17.920 | to get a discount and to support this podcast.

00:01:21.540 | As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs,

00:01:25.680 | unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general,

00:01:29.140 | is foreign to me because of the high ratio

00:01:31.820 | of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence.

00:01:36.720 | I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open-minded one,

00:01:40.460 | often looking and thinking outside the box.

00:01:43.020 | I'm often disheartened by the closed-mindedness

00:01:45.460 | of the scientific community.

00:01:47.300 | And in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor

00:01:51.380 | and basic scientific inquiry and study

00:01:53.900 | on the part of the conspiracy theorists.

00:01:56.780 | I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes

00:01:59.540 | that more inquisitive minds should walk.

00:02:02.900 | I think we humans know very little about our world,

00:02:06.940 | what's up there among the stars, and the nature of reality,

00:02:10.580 | and the nature of our very own minds.

00:02:14.180 | The path to understanding can only be walked humbly.

00:02:17.560 | The very idea that there's a possibility

00:02:19.980 | that David witnessed a piece of technology,

00:02:22.780 | whether human-made or alien-made,

00:02:25.180 | that moved in the way it did,

00:02:26.920 | should be inspiring to every scientist

00:02:29.140 | and engineer on this Earth.

00:02:31.100 | There may be propulsion and energy systems

00:02:33.260 | yet to be discovered that, once understood and mastered,

00:02:36.980 | will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings.

00:02:41.220 | Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding

00:02:44.500 | can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes

00:02:47.580 | and allow ourselves to dream,

00:02:49.860 | to think from first principles,

00:02:51.740 | and remove the constraints and innovation placed on us

00:02:54.740 | by the scientific conventions and assumptions

00:02:56.900 | of prior generations.

00:02:59.420 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

00:03:01.740 | review the Five Stars on Apple Podcast,

00:03:03.980 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

00:03:06.660 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

00:03:09.940 | As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now,

00:03:12.300 | and no ads in the middle.

00:03:14.020 | More and more, I'm trying to make these ad reads

00:03:16.380 | unique and interesting, and less adsy, more personal,

00:03:21.340 | but I give you timestamps so you can skip.

00:03:23.660 | But still, please do check out the sponsors

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00:03:27.980 | It is honestly the best way to support this podcast.

00:03:31.100 | This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens,

00:03:33.900 | the all-in-one daily drink

00:03:35.340 | to support health and performance.

00:03:37.340 | I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing

00:03:39.740 | any of the nutrition I need.

00:03:41.680 | Now, let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting.

00:03:45.640 | I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours

00:03:49.540 | and then an eight-hour eating period of two meals,

00:03:52.940 | sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next.

00:03:57.100 | I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72-hour fast

00:04:00.500 | that some people I look up to have done.

00:04:02.820 | People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss

00:04:05.620 | and the different health benefits,

00:04:07.660 | it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life.

00:04:11.300 | Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal,

00:04:14.860 | that every day is precious.

00:04:16.900 | I certainly experienced this with a 24-hour fast

00:04:20.140 | and I think it goes even deeper for the 48, 72

00:04:23.460 | and even week-long fast.

00:04:26.220 | Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens.

00:04:29.380 | It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good.

00:04:31.980 | So go to athleticgreens.com/lex to claim a special offer

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00:04:42.620 | and to support this podcast.

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00:04:53.300 | You probably know there's a show called "The Office"

00:04:55.380 | that I fell in love with,

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00:06:22.220 | and the idea of spending time on an island alone

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00:06:27.100 | The natural question is, if I could,

00:06:29.320 | what would I bring to this island?

00:06:31.620 | The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing.

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00:07:00.020 | Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com/flex

00:07:03.860 | to get a discount and to support this podcast.

00:07:07.780 | And now, finally, here's my conversation with David Fravor.

00:07:12.560 | - You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School.

00:07:18.020 | - Yeah, I am.

00:07:18.860 | - Better known as Top Gun.

00:07:20.580 | - Yeah.

00:07:21.420 | - Let me ask the most ridiculous question.

00:07:23.620 | How realistic is the movie "Top Gun"?

00:07:26.100 | - So it's funny, we used to joke,

00:07:28.220 | and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said this.

00:07:31.620 | There's two things in the original "Top Gun" that are true,

00:07:34.980 | that are very realistic.

00:07:36.100 | One, there is a place called Top Gun.

00:07:39.380 | And number two is they do fly airplanes there.

00:07:41.680 | (Dave laughs)

00:07:43.020 | Other than that, I went through in '97, class 497,

00:07:47.400 | and there's actually a log of every single person

00:07:51.140 | that's went through, kind of like SEAL training.

00:07:53.900 | There's a list.

00:07:54.740 | So people, 'cause there's a lot of posers out there,

00:07:56.540 | oh, I was a Navy SEAL.

00:07:58.060 | No, you weren't.

00:07:58.900 | Well, I went to Top Gun.

00:07:59.720 | You can actually go to Top Gun.

00:08:00.860 | And matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch,

00:08:03.020 | the real patch, you have to have gone there.

00:08:06.000 | So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real.

00:08:11.500 | The real ones are controlled,

00:08:13.140 | the people that make 'em honor that.

00:08:16.020 | And when you go in, they look up your name.

00:08:17.820 | If you wanna get one, they look up your name.

00:08:19.340 | You just tell 'em, they go, "Okay, here."

00:08:20.500 | And they'll sell 'em to you.

00:08:21.340 | If you are not on the list, you ain't getting no patch.

00:08:24.500 | Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go through.

00:08:27.780 | But it's, for me, probably one of the best experiences

00:08:32.100 | of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent.

00:08:36.060 | It's very, very challenging.

00:08:38.140 | But it's what we all signed up to do.

00:08:41.460 | So it's just the entire group that is,

00:08:45.940 | when you wanna be that level,

00:08:48.200 | where you go, everyone really cares,

00:08:51.180 | and everyone really wants to be good.

00:08:53.220 | - Is it competitive, like in the movie?

00:08:55.860 | - No, it's, when you go through, it's,

00:08:58.300 | if anything, it's more of the students,

00:09:01.660 | and then there's the instructor side.

00:09:03.180 | And the instructor sides are really,

00:09:04.700 | they're guys that you know.

00:09:06.460 | They just chose to stay up in Fallon.

00:09:09.060 | And it's extremely difficult job,

00:09:12.100 | because they have a very small tolerance for not being good.

00:09:17.100 | So they're briefs, the guys, when they give a lecture.

00:09:22.380 | So let's just say there's a fighter employment lecture,

00:09:25.200 | which is one of the hardest ones.

00:09:26.200 | It takes about two days

00:09:27.060 | to give the fighter employment lecture.

00:09:30.020 | The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple,

00:09:32.580 | they call them murder boards,

00:09:33.500 | where he's scrutinized by his peers, and he practices.

00:09:36.140 | By the time they actually stand in front of a class,

00:09:39.220 | they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized,

00:09:43.420 | and they don't even turn around.

00:09:44.580 | They just click, and they know them in order.

00:09:46.660 | And they repeat the same thing over.

00:09:48.940 | And it's standardized.

00:09:50.640 | So they are extremely, extremely standardized

00:09:52.860 | when you go through the school,

00:09:53.700 | and there's a reason for that.

00:09:54.940 | Because what they're doing is they're training.

00:09:57.460 | So when you come out of Top Gun,

00:09:58.580 | you're called a Strike Fighter Weapons

00:09:59.980 | and Tactics Instructor, okay?

00:10:01.460 | So you're SFTI.

00:10:02.800 | When you come out of that,

00:10:04.780 | your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools

00:10:07.440 | on the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons,

00:10:09.980 | and then you visit the squadrons and train

00:10:12.100 | and do upgrade rides and all that.

00:10:13.400 | So there's a reason that they're extremely particular

00:10:18.400 | when you go through the course.

00:10:20.380 | It is literally one of the best things,

00:10:21.980 | and it's not a rank-based thing,

00:10:23.700 | 'cause think, oh, Navy.

00:10:25.400 | You can come in as an '04 Lieutenant Commander.

00:10:29.440 | The lieutenants, the hierarchy,

00:10:32.200 | or at least to be, I don't know how it is exactly today,

00:10:34.360 | but I imagine it's the same.

00:10:36.240 | The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school,

00:10:39.220 | not necessarily rank.

00:10:40.380 | So when the tactical decisions are made,

00:10:42.520 | which are based on fact and trying things out

00:10:45.780 | in the Fallon ranges,

00:10:47.040 | they set the top X number of folks

00:10:50.480 | that have been there seniority-wise,

00:10:52.400 | and I mean time-wise,

00:10:54.280 | are the ones that actually make the decision.

00:10:56.400 | And when the door, you may not agree,

00:10:58.160 | but when the door opens and everyone comes out

00:11:01.400 | from the staff, they all speak the same language.

00:11:04.600 | And it has to be that way,

00:11:07.000 | which is why the school has been so effective

00:11:09.440 | since it was founded.

00:11:11.040 | So it's just a, it's an incredible group of individuals.

00:11:14.080 | - So there's a bar of excellence

00:11:16.160 | that the instructors demand.

00:11:20.760 | - Oh, very much so, and they're held to it.

00:11:22.680 | So it's not a, "Hey, I'm now an instructor,

00:11:24.480 | "so I can do what I want."

00:11:26.200 | There is a standard,

00:11:27.220 | and they have to live up to that standard.

00:11:29.880 | They have to, and I mean every moment of every day.

00:11:32.700 | So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon

00:11:36.200 | and they come down and do,

00:11:37.020 | they're called site visits where they come down

00:11:38.560 | and they'll come to Lemoore, California,

00:11:39.880 | which is where the West Coast Fighter Wing

00:11:41.160 | is at for the Navy,

00:11:42.680 | and they go around and start flying sorties

00:11:44.560 | with the fleet squadrons

00:11:46.000 | to kind of pass on some of that knowledge,

00:11:48.840 | that's that same high level of standard.

00:11:51.160 | They can't just drop your guard

00:11:53.400 | because you wear the Top Gun patch,

00:11:55.160 | and people know that.

00:11:56.000 | And they wear light blue shirts,

00:11:57.120 | so it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there.

00:12:00.080 | And then everyone else who's been through the school,

00:12:02.160 | including them, have the patch on their sleeve.

00:12:03.980 | So there's a standard that's expected

00:12:05.520 | when you come out of there.

00:12:07.000 | - So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years.

00:12:09.940 | - Yes.

00:12:11.000 | - Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?

00:12:15.020 | - Yeah.

00:12:16.600 | So first I was enlisted, I was a Marine.

00:12:21.080 | And then the Marines actually sent me,

00:12:25.160 | recommended me to go to the Naval Academy.

00:12:27.440 | So it's always better to be lucky than good,

00:12:29.080 | but I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished.

00:12:31.840 | And I had that dream to fly, so when I got selected--

00:12:34.440 | - They've always dreamed of flying.

00:12:35.880 | - Yeah, since 1969 when I watched Neil Armstrong

00:12:39.600 | walk on the moon.

00:12:41.240 | I was, at that point I asked my mom,

00:12:43.360 | I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five.

00:12:47.120 | And I said, "Wow, yeah, it's so cool, Mom."

00:12:50.640 | And she said, "Well, you know, they were all pilots."

00:12:53.160 | And then at that point it was like, "I'm gonna be a pilot."

00:12:56.400 | And if you knew me growing up,

00:12:57.920 | 'cause I was a little bit of a delinquent,

00:13:00.440 | people are just like, "Yeah, right."

00:13:02.720 | I used to joke, "I'm gonna fly jets

00:13:04.720 | "and I'm gonna drop bombs."

00:13:06.080 | Then, and if people that knew me when I was a kid,

00:13:08.560 | they'd be like, "Yeah."

00:13:09.400 | And they'd be like, "Not a chance."

00:13:10.580 | And then when I did, I actually had a,

00:13:13.800 | it's a funny story and I'll get to it,

00:13:15.560 | I'll finish my career, but I was at my cousin's wedding

00:13:17.960 | and we all grew up in the same neighborhood.

00:13:20.160 | We kind of, they had Italian side of the family,

00:13:24.560 | that's how we grew up.

00:13:25.400 | So it was my house right down the street,

00:13:26.520 | it was my cousin Chad,

00:13:27.680 | and then right around the corner is my cousin Ray

00:13:29.240 | and my aunts and uncles and stuff.

00:13:31.280 | The guy two doors down from my,

00:13:32.120 | and I was a paper boy in the neighborhood,

00:13:33.400 | so they all knew me.

00:13:34.520 | And I went to my cousin's wedding

00:13:36.440 | and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, "David Fravor."

00:13:40.640 | I go, "Mr. Race, how you doing?"

00:13:42.080 | He goes, "You fly jets, top gun and all that."

00:13:44.820 | I go, "Yes, sir."

00:13:46.520 | He goes, "Man, I figured you'd be in jail by now."

00:13:48.480 | (laughing)

00:13:50.960 | And it was kind of a,

00:13:51.800 | to me it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on.

00:13:53.720 | I kind of overcame that, but--

00:13:55.640 | - What do you attribute that to?

00:13:57.080 | So you, I've heard you before and just now say

00:13:59.740 | that it's better to be lucky than good.

00:14:02.840 | And you talk modestly about just being lucky,

00:14:07.840 | but if you were to describe your trajectory,

00:14:13.040 | maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively,

00:14:16.940 | how'd you pull it off to be truly a special person?

00:14:21.940 | - The easiest way is one, never take no.

00:14:26.540 | Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it.

00:14:29.220 | I mean, I knew what I was capable of inside,

00:14:33.700 | and if I really believe if you want something

00:14:35.800 | and you want to do something, then you can achieve it.

00:14:39.340 | Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball

00:14:42.780 | and I really wanted to be in the NBA,

00:14:44.940 | there's a realism that says I'm five foot eight

00:14:47.540 | and I got like a really short vertical leap,

00:14:49.180 | and I'm really not that good at basketball,

00:14:50.380 | it's probably not ever gonna happen

00:14:51.500 | no matter how hard I try and practice.

00:14:53.300 | It's just the way it is.

00:14:54.260 | Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast,

00:14:57.940 | I'm not that big, it's just physically,

00:15:02.060 | I'm incapable of doing that.

00:15:04.340 | But there's things that don't really tie

00:15:06.380 | to a true physical ability as far as size and strength,

00:15:09.860 | but it's mental, and I'm not saying you have to be a genius

00:15:14.420 | and super smart to be a fighter pilot.

00:15:16.060 | Matter of fact, you don't.

00:15:17.340 | It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly.

00:15:21.000 | 80% solution is typically good enough,

00:15:23.960 | 'cause if you overthink it, you're behind.

00:15:26.380 | And in an air-to-air fight, that's what happens.

00:15:28.900 | People try and overthink it, and before you know it,

00:15:31.260 | because it's happening so fast,

00:15:32.620 | you can't get to the nth degree, six decimal places.

00:15:36.820 | 80% solution's good enough.

00:15:38.100 | - You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution.

00:15:40.860 | - Yeah, I'm a big believer in the 80% solution.

00:15:42.740 | - I love that.

00:15:43.580 | - If you get 80%, you can go,

00:15:45.660 | and then you can always adjust,

00:15:47.060 | which is exactly what, if you're fighting in BFM,

00:15:50.020 | the 80% solution is.

00:15:51.120 | It's like a chess game,

00:15:51.960 | but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go,

00:15:54.660 | I'm doing this, and then I know that if I do a maneuver,

00:15:57.980 | if he's gonna counter it correctly, he should do A.

00:16:01.240 | If he doesn't do A, he does some degree less, like B, C, D,

00:16:05.140 | and then I know how bad his error is, and then I capitalize.

00:16:09.780 | So I don't have to be perfect.

00:16:11.700 | I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees nose high.

00:16:14.500 | If I just kinda get above 40, then I'm good,

00:16:16.700 | and I can watch how he reacts,

00:16:17.780 | and then I can adjust for that.

00:16:19.100 | And you continually work that problem, and you chip away,

00:16:22.860 | 'cause if you start neutral,

00:16:24.340 | you're just basically chipping away

00:16:25.700 | and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage,

00:16:27.300 | 'til eventually, and if you're really fighting

00:16:31.700 | just guns only rear quarter,

00:16:33.100 | where you gotta get behind the guy,

00:16:34.580 | kinda World War II dogfighting type stuff,

00:16:37.740 | then it's literally, it's a very, very fast chess game

00:16:42.380 | that happens at 400 knots, 300 knots, depends.

00:16:46.300 | - So to get to be one of the rear individuals

00:16:48.940 | that are able to do that, he just had the dream

00:16:53.940 | and didn't take no for an answer.

00:16:55.980 | - Well, part of it is family.

00:16:59.400 | My dad was, I used to call him a fire-ready aim guy.

00:17:03.920 | He'd smack me and then ask me what I did wrong.

00:17:07.740 | (laughs)

00:17:08.700 | - Good parenting.

00:17:10.140 | - Back then, I joke, and people look,

00:17:12.500 | 'cause at times it was kinda tough,

00:17:14.220 | 'cause he can be pretty demanding,

00:17:15.660 | but on the other side, I probably needed

00:17:18.200 | to be reined in a little bit at times.

00:17:20.900 | But then everyone else in my family,

00:17:22.660 | my mom was really awesome when I was a kid.

00:17:24.960 | My grandfather, who is a big, big part of it,

00:17:29.640 | my mom's dad, who, he taught me a lot,

00:17:34.020 | and you have a question there that we'll talk about him,

00:17:37.220 | but huge, huge influence, very, very positive.

00:17:40.900 | And a lot of the stuff that I do today

00:17:43.020 | and decisions are based on things that he taught me.

00:17:46.540 | And I figured, it was the first funeral I ever went to,

00:17:52.020 | and it was about three miles long,

00:17:55.020 | and church was overfilling, and people were out.

00:17:57.420 | He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious.

00:18:00.140 | And you go, someone asked who died, the Pope?

00:18:02.380 | - So a lot of people loved him.

00:18:05.340 | So back to my career, to your first question,

00:18:07.820 | 'cause I'm getting down a rabbit hole.

00:18:10.340 | No, when I was at the, I was gonna stay in the Marines.

00:18:13.100 | I really wanted to go, man, I love the Corps.

00:18:15.380 | I think it's, of all services, it's that one.

00:18:18.980 | Everything is in a ball, and they're very, very professional,

00:18:21.240 | and it was a great, great organization to join.

00:18:23.860 | But I went out to the Nimitz on my freshman cruise.

00:18:29.100 | After your freshman year at the Naval Academy,

00:18:30.780 | you go out on a ship, and you're an enlisted person.

00:18:33.060 | You get to experience that half an hour.

00:18:34.980 | He was enlisted, so it was fine with me.

00:18:36.500 | - Because it comes up a lot.

00:18:37.620 | Do you mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is?

00:18:41.020 | - Yeah, so Nimitz is an aircraft carrier.

00:18:43.500 | So it's four and a half acres of sovereign US territory

00:18:46.820 | that floats around the US oceans.

00:18:48.260 | - Is it a giant thing?

00:18:49.380 | Does it have weapons on it?

00:18:51.380 | - The air wing is really the weapons.

00:18:52.740 | It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part,

00:18:55.180 | it's a giant moving airport, is what it is.

00:18:58.720 | So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off,

00:19:02.180 | and I'm like, "Oh."

00:19:04.020 | And the squadrons that were out there,

00:19:05.180 | one of the squadrons was a VF-41 and a 14 squadron,

00:19:08.020 | VF-84 and a 14 squadron, and then a couple of A6 squadrons.

00:19:12.580 | And we actually ended up pairing up

00:19:14.300 | and hanging out with some of the A6 pilots and BNs,

00:19:16.340 | so it was really a neat experience.

00:19:17.660 | And I said, "I wanna do that."

00:19:20.660 | And the way to do it was to not to go in the Navy,

00:19:23.460 | because there are Marine squadrons

00:19:25.220 | that go out to the aircraft carriers,

00:19:26.580 | but most of them are land-based to support the Marines,

00:19:29.660 | 'cause they're that unit, that whole unit.

00:19:32.820 | The Marine Corps is that one service that has it all.

00:19:35.260 | And so when I graduated and I got to,

00:19:39.380 | I worked hard through primary, and that's where I knew Missy.

00:19:44.140 | We were in, actually went through together.

00:19:45.660 | - Missy Cummings. - Missy Cummings.

00:19:46.940 | We went through primary together,

00:19:48.180 | and then I went to Kingsville.

00:19:50.100 | We all selected the same time.

00:19:51.260 | I went to Kingsville.

00:19:52.180 | There was another guy, Scott Wiedemeier, the three of us.

00:19:55.540 | So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville,

00:19:58.100 | and Missy went to Meridian.

00:20:00.060 | So the three of us that we had all went through,

00:20:02.100 | we got, we selected out of primary together.

00:20:04.100 | We all ended up going jets.

00:20:05.860 | And that's how, besides from school,

00:20:07.660 | I knew her at school too.

00:20:08.980 | Long story, I got done, got winged.

00:20:11.380 | It took me two years to the day

00:20:12.540 | from the time I graduated the Naval Academy

00:20:14.300 | until I got my wings.

00:20:15.900 | And through some luck, I ended up getting A6s

00:20:20.660 | on the West Coast, which is a side-by-side bomber.

00:20:23.300 | So it's a pilot on the left seat

00:20:24.700 | and the bombardier navigators on the right seat.

00:20:26.340 | It was built in the '60s.

00:20:28.220 | It is all weather and it flies low at night.

00:20:31.380 | It's got a terrain mapping radar.

00:20:33.180 | - How many, I guess, is that a good term to use,

00:20:36.580 | fighter jet, as a broad category for the public?

00:20:39.740 | - Yeah, that's fine.

00:20:40.580 | - How many fighter jets are side-by-side like that?

00:20:43.300 | - That was, in the Navy, that was the only one.

00:20:45.860 | The Air Force, the F-111 was a side-by-side,

00:20:48.780 | but the Navy, it was the A6.

00:20:50.260 | And then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of that.

00:20:53.460 | Now those are all gone.

00:20:54.660 | The EA6Bs just went away a few years ago.

00:20:56.540 | And now the E18G Growler is the replacement for the EA6B.

00:21:01.540 | There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew.

00:21:04.820 | It really became the F-18,

00:21:06.740 | which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance-wise

00:21:10.540 | by fuel than the Hornet.

00:21:12.780 | - The Hornet is the F-18. - The F-18, yeah.

00:21:16.020 | - Is there usually two people in the plane,

00:21:18.580 | but they're usually in front and behind?

00:21:21.460 | - The modern two-seaters, yes.

00:21:23.180 | But most of the tactical airplanes

00:21:25.100 | in the world today are single-seat.

00:21:26.740 | - Single-seat, just one person?

00:21:27.940 | - One person, with the exception of,

00:21:30.420 | I'll probably, someone will yell at me,

00:21:31.540 | but really with the exception of the F-15E Strike Eagle

00:21:34.900 | and the F-18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two-seater,

00:21:38.580 | and the G is also a two-seater,

00:21:40.060 | but it's more of an electronic attack

00:21:41.620 | by say, full-up fighter, bomber.

00:21:44.300 | - So most of the time that you've flown in your,

00:21:48.900 | like I said, 18-year career, was it two-seater?

00:21:51.980 | - No, it was about half and half.

00:21:53.420 | So I started off in A6, was a two-seater,

00:21:55.820 | then I went to single-seat F-18s,

00:21:57.900 | and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and,

00:22:02.900 | let me think, 2001, to the end of 2001.

00:22:07.660 | And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets

00:22:10.020 | and I've flown both of those, the Es and the S.

00:22:11.980 | But I deployed when I had command of VFA-41,

00:22:15.500 | I had the two-seat, they were F squadron.

00:22:17.940 | - So you eventually ended up commanding

00:22:22.220 | the strike fighter Squadron 41.

00:22:24.960 | I love the name, the Black Aces.

00:22:28.300 | Is there some parts of that journey that are amazing,

00:22:34.500 | parts of it that are tough, that kind of stand out?

00:22:36.900 | - To me, one, it was a huge honor,

00:22:39.440 | and I got to serve with, you know,

00:22:42.420 | I got pulled up because the guy,

00:22:44.820 | the people that are XOs, 'cause we fleet up,

00:22:46.500 | we go from the number two guy to the number one guy.

00:22:48.900 | So the XO becomes the CO,

00:22:50.300 | so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer.

00:22:53.060 | So I had worked with, now soon to be Vice Admiral Weitzel,

00:22:58.060 | was the, he was Commander Weitzel at the time,

00:23:01.240 | was the XO, and he really wanted,

00:23:03.460 | because he knew there was a little bit of a problem

00:23:06.020 | when the Super Hornets came into L'Amour.

00:23:08.420 | L'Amour had been a single-seat fighter community

00:23:12.060 | since the forever.

00:23:15.980 | And now all of a sudden you've got the F-18F coming in,

00:23:18.220 | which has the weapons systems operators in the back

00:23:21.100 | that are not pilots, they're weapons systems operators,

00:23:23.380 | and there's a difference.

00:23:24.900 | And Kenny is a weapons systems operator.

00:23:27.300 | And Kenny knew because of my A6 background

00:23:31.380 | that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat,

00:23:34.100 | one seat, two seat, because when you fly two seat,

00:23:36.460 | there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload

00:23:39.380 | and take the advantage of the weapons systems operator.

00:23:42.580 | And it's not that one plus one equals two

00:23:44.700 | in that environment, 'cause it really,

00:23:46.940 | there's a huge amount of capabilities

00:23:48.500 | that the single seat has and the autonomy

00:23:50.380 | that comes for the ability to make decisions quickly

00:23:53.340 | and how well the airplane flies.

00:23:55.040 | But it does equal more than one.

00:23:58.500 | And I would say that one plus one with two people

00:24:01.380 | is a minimum of 1.5, because you've got an extra head,

00:24:05.900 | you've got extra eyes,

00:24:07.300 | you've got someone that can monitor systems,

00:24:09.380 | the airplanes can do two things at once.

00:24:11.160 | I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability

00:24:12.980 | that we add when we do that.

00:24:14.820 | - Can we just pause on that just for me,

00:24:16.780 | from a human factors perspective

00:24:18.660 | and also an AI perspective,

00:24:20.380 | how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people,

00:24:26.380 | there's also a third person that's the AI part,

00:24:31.000 | there's some level of automation,

00:24:32.340 | like autopilot maybe even.

00:24:33.980 | Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like,

00:24:37.740 | you said making decisions really quick, 80%.

00:24:41.940 | How do you deal with another brain working with you?

00:24:46.220 | And then also the automation.

00:24:48.460 | Is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn?

00:24:51.860 | And also as that changed throughout your career,

00:24:54.620 | I imagine it gotten better in terms of the automation

00:24:58.140 | or perhaps not?

00:24:59.620 | - Well, I can tell you, so let's--

00:25:01.060 | - Sorry, there's a bunch of questions in there.

00:25:01.900 | - No, this is good, this is good.

00:25:03.740 | And I'm enjoying this because now we actually get

00:25:06.460 | to talk about something other than a tic-tac.

00:25:09.460 | So let's start with the A6.

00:25:10.700 | The A6 was really an analog airplane

00:25:12.900 | that was built in the '60s, all right?

00:25:16.340 | And there's been studies done on the crew coordination,

00:25:20.140 | which is the interaction between the pilot

00:25:21.940 | and the bombardier navigator.

00:25:23.580 | So we would fly low at night in the mountains.

00:25:26.540 | So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington.

00:25:28.860 | So you've got the Cascades and incredible amount of time.

00:25:33.080 | And we would get in the simulators because unlike,

00:25:35.840 | normally people think terrain following

00:25:37.460 | and there's the radars, the 111, the B1

00:25:39.340 | has a system like this, but it'll,

00:25:41.140 | the radar can see and it'll fly,

00:25:42.420 | it basically flies a straight line.

00:25:43.620 | So it goes up and over mountains and back down

00:25:45.340 | and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual.

00:25:48.640 | So you do this low level routes where you're gonna fly

00:25:52.020 | in the mountains at night, you're gonna be at,

00:25:53.420 | you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground,

00:25:56.260 | ripping through like fog layers

00:25:58.700 | 'cause you don't need to see outside.

00:26:00.060 | You're literally flying a little TV screen and a radar.

00:26:02.940 | - What are you looking at most of the time?

00:26:04.300 | So you just as a screen?

00:26:05.540 | - It's this really primitive,

00:26:08.100 | if you look at it now what we did,

00:26:09.400 | you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun.

00:26:11.780 | - Is it similar to like the FLIR stuff?

00:26:14.100 | Is that, is-- - No.

00:26:16.140 | This thing is totally radar based.

00:26:17.740 | Now the airplane had a FLIR ball,

00:26:19.180 | it's a target recognition and multi-sensor,

00:26:21.380 | it was called a tram.

00:26:22.380 | - So you're looking at like basically

00:26:25.100 | like dots of hard objects.

00:26:27.260 | - No, actually what it is is the bombardier navigator

00:26:30.140 | had a radar and he was getting raw feed

00:26:32.000 | off of a pulse radar in front.

00:26:33.740 | Okay, so it's just basically mapping the mountains.

00:26:35.860 | So if you look at a mountain on a radar

00:26:37.940 | and you're coming up on it,

00:26:39.180 | the front side is gonna be,

00:26:40.140 | it's gonna give you a really bright return.

00:26:41.780 | And then the backside, it's just gonna be a giant shadow

00:26:44.480 | because you can't see on the other side.

00:26:46.480 | So the bombardier navigators would do that

00:26:49.300 | and they would have charts

00:26:50.300 | and they could shade their charts knowing that,

00:26:52.180 | hey, if we turn a little bit left here,

00:26:53.540 | we can get in this valley, we can sneak up this valley

00:26:55.660 | and then go around the backside of the mountain,

00:26:57.460 | which is what the airplane would do.

00:26:59.100 | - And sorry to interrupt,

00:27:00.580 | I'm gonna just keep asking dumb questions, I apologize.

00:27:03.420 | But the pilot, can you at a high level say

00:27:06.880 | what the pilot does versus the bombardier?

00:27:10.120 | - Yes, so--

00:27:11.440 | - You're actually just controlling.

00:27:13.320 | - I'm flying the jet.

00:27:14.160 | I have the throttles, the stick,

00:27:15.360 | and I have a, it's about a, probably a four inch

00:27:20.040 | or six inch wide by maybe four inches, five inches high.

00:27:24.640 | It looks like, it's literally a CRT.

00:27:26.680 | That's how old it is.

00:27:28.120 | A CRT screen and what it would do,

00:27:29.880 | what the radar would do is the bombardier navigator

00:27:33.180 | is looking at his radar.

00:27:34.160 | He's looking out about 12 and a half miles

00:27:35.920 | in front of the airplane.

00:27:37.160 | So he has the range really scoped down

00:27:39.000 | 'cause the radar can see a lot further.

00:27:40.360 | He's looking at about 12 and a half miles

00:27:41.880 | when we're in the terrain mode

00:27:43.200 | where we're dodging mountains and stuff.

00:27:45.240 | And what the pilot has is there's,

00:27:46.720 | they're called range bins and there's eight of them.

00:27:49.280 | So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile,

00:27:52.520 | you know, and the closest range bin, it's a thing,

00:27:55.920 | it'll be like between like a half a mile

00:27:58.320 | and or a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile.

00:28:01.560 | The next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles.

00:28:04.600 | And then it just keeps going out like that.

00:28:06.240 | So if there's a mountain in front,

00:28:07.880 | let's say we're on a flat plane

00:28:09.760 | and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles

00:28:12.700 | and we're just driving right at it.

00:28:14.800 | So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles

00:28:17.600 | where the radar is going to see it on his scope,

00:28:20.120 | my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up

00:28:22.840 | and it would show like a big bump, like a mountain.

00:28:25.520 | And then as I got closer to it,

00:28:27.160 | the next range bin would pop up and show it.

00:28:29.360 | And I could see that that bump was moving towards me.

00:28:32.200 | And then if I turned a little bit, you know,

00:28:34.760 | to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over

00:28:36.320 | to the right-hand side and I could do that.

00:28:38.720 | But it wasn't like a video game.

00:28:41.320 | It's literally like, if you think of the original Atari's.

00:28:44.320 | - Yeah.

00:28:45.200 | But you build up, I imagine,

00:28:47.160 | that you start to get a really deep sense

00:28:50.440 | of like the actual 3D environment

00:28:54.080 | based on that little Atari's.

00:28:55.960 | - It's, you're exactly right.

00:28:57.240 | And you have to train.

00:28:59.040 | So there's been studies.

00:29:00.440 | As a matter of fact, a lot of the bases,

00:29:02.280 | and people probably argue with me, but it's true.

00:29:04.600 | There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators.

00:29:07.840 | We call it the WIST, the Weapon Systems Trainer.

00:29:10.600 | And it was not even a motion.

00:29:11.720 | It just kind of sat there and you just,

00:29:13.560 | you could fly these things and they had terrain

00:29:15.280 | that they would inject into the system.

00:29:17.560 | But the crew coordination, so you get,

00:29:19.240 | so my first fleet bombardier navigator,

00:29:23.520 | who I'll name him, his name's Chris Sato.

00:29:27.360 | He's a, works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad.

00:29:32.360 | I think computer engineering, he's scary smart.

00:29:36.600 | So Chris could really work.

00:29:39.240 | A matter of fact, all the guys that flew us,

00:29:40.520 | so there's another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple,

00:29:42.320 | who's now at SAP.

00:29:43.240 | We did our first night traps together.

00:29:44.960 | The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things

00:29:47.080 | that you just, you're never gonna forget.

00:29:48.680 | But Chris and I, when we started flying together,

00:29:50.400 | and we were actually the most junior crew in the squadron,

00:29:55.320 | we'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing

00:29:59.080 | at how he could work the system.

00:30:01.200 | One, because he was extremely brilliant

00:30:03.480 | and he was, had that inquisitive mind of,

00:30:05.240 | oh, we can do all these different things

00:30:06.760 | and there's all these degradation modes.

00:30:08.840 | But we spent a lot of time to see

00:30:12.200 | how good we could actually get.

00:30:14.000 | Because, and it's, you almost talk in partials.

00:30:16.680 | So as the BN is looking at his radar scope,

00:30:19.720 | Chris would say, "I've got rising terrain."

00:30:22.680 | That's just what they'd say,

00:30:23.800 | "Showing rising terrain at 12 miles."

00:30:25.560 | And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, "Got it."

00:30:28.560 | This is gonna go to your question on the autonomy

00:30:30.560 | and how you work with two heads.

00:30:32.160 | So when you first get together, the interaction,

00:30:34.840 | it's almost like you have to rehearse it.

00:30:38.320 | You have to know, and you talk in full sentences.

00:30:40.960 | The more and more we fly together,

00:30:44.680 | Chris could go, "I'm showing,"

00:30:49.360 | and he'd get like rising out.

00:30:50.880 | And before he finished, I'd say, "I've got it."

00:30:53.200 | So you end up starting to talk in partials

00:30:54.920 | because I have to trust him.

00:30:57.880 | Like, I mean, I can have no doubt

00:31:02.440 | that he knows how to do his job.

00:31:04.480 | Because I'm literally looking at this little scope

00:31:06.640 | that's not giving me this continuous picture

00:31:08.640 | of that mountain moving.

00:31:09.480 | Remember the mountains here,

00:31:10.720 | and then it's gonna pop up here,

00:31:12.120 | and then it's gonna pop up here

00:31:13.640 | because there's gaps in the coverage

00:31:15.080 | on how the system was set up.

00:31:16.280 | Remember, it's an analog system.

00:31:18.160 | To where he is telling me,

00:31:19.600 | like, "I can't see all the way to the left."

00:31:21.360 | And he's got a wider scope on the radar,

00:31:23.320 | but my screen doesn't show that.

00:31:25.620 | So he's telling me, "Start a left turn."

00:31:27.640 | - How to avoid the mountain. - Or start a hard turn.

00:31:29.840 | And we would do that.

00:31:30.720 | So my truck-- - And this is all

00:31:31.840 | happening quick? - Very quick.

00:31:33.560 | What you're doing, we would typically fly

00:31:35.620 | between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed.

00:31:38.840 | - Which is how many miles an hour?

00:31:40.760 | - Well, four, 27 miles a minute.

00:31:43.520 | - Okay, seven miles. - Between seven

00:31:45.040 | and eight miles a minute is what you're flying.

00:31:46.640 | - That's fast.

00:31:47.480 | - At night, I mean, I broke out of clouds.

00:31:49.360 | I mean, I remember him and I flying.

00:31:51.160 | We were on it's IR, it's called an IR route,

00:31:54.200 | an instrument route that's low.

00:31:55.800 | They're all around the country.

00:31:57.200 | There's IR-344 that we used to fly,

00:31:59.040 | which would coast in off of Oregon,

00:32:00.640 | you'd fly from the land,

00:32:01.520 | you'd go out over the ocean, turn around,

00:32:02.840 | and then you could practice actually coming in

00:32:04.380 | on a coastline.

00:32:05.840 | And we were flying, and we ended up in the clouds.

00:32:10.160 | Keep in mind, we're between 500 and 1,000 feet

00:32:12.360 | in the mountains, and we're in the clouds.

00:32:13.680 | You can't see anything.

00:32:14.800 | And I had to turn off our red lights that flash.

00:32:16.760 | You know, they're called anti-collision lights.

00:32:18.840 | Because it was reflecting off the clouds,

00:32:20.480 | and it starts to bother you.

00:32:21.600 | Just gets annoying.

00:32:22.600 | So I turned it off, and we were flying,

00:32:25.800 | we're flying, we're flying.

00:32:26.640 | We break out of that coastal marine layer,

00:32:28.920 | and poof, we break out.

00:32:31.120 | And it's a decent night.

00:32:32.160 | And this is right by Mount St. Helens.

00:32:33.560 | This is kind of where we're coming in.

00:32:34.480 | So we're coming in from the east,

00:32:35.640 | and we're just north of Mount St. Helens,

00:32:37.040 | is where the route goes.

00:32:38.300 | And you look up, you know,

00:32:39.280 | 'cause you can kind of see the silhouette

00:32:40.600 | of this mountain that's right next to you.

00:32:41.920 | But you're flying along, you're just like,

00:32:43.380 | you know, you gotta trust.

00:32:44.840 | And you can see houses.

00:32:45.960 | You can see the lights, they're above you.

00:32:47.120 | We're literally below people's houses,

00:32:48.760 | flying down these valleys and stuff.

00:32:50.040 | So just incredible experience.

00:32:51.760 | So when you take that, and then you move into an F-18F.

00:32:55.360 | So now we're into modern technology

00:32:57.680 | that was actually built in this century.

00:32:59.680 | And you're flying, so now, you know,

00:33:03.120 | the Wizzo is behind us.

00:33:04.120 | And we're not doing those night low levels,

00:33:05.440 | but that same type of crew coordination

00:33:07.960 | that has to happen,

00:33:09.280 | because what you're doing is, you're sharing the load.

00:33:12.920 | So most of the communications that go out of the airplane,

00:33:15.440 | the Wizzo does all the talking.

00:33:16.560 | He's got actually, he uses his feet.

00:33:18.460 | That's the weapon systems operator in the back of an F-18F.

00:33:21.800 | So he's gonna run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now,

00:33:25.560 | but we have a situational awareness display,

00:33:27.880 | and it's linked to all the other airplanes.

00:33:29.560 | - Just out of curiosity,

00:33:30.400 | what's the situational awareness display?

00:33:32.160 | 'Cause that term comes up a lot in-

00:33:33.320 | - Think of it as a God's eye view.

00:33:35.800 | So if you have a, the back of the Super Hornet has,

00:33:38.240 | well, the Block IIs has about an eight by 10 display

00:33:40.780 | for the Wizzos, that they can look at.

00:33:43.340 | The pilot's is smaller, it's down between his,

00:33:44.880 | it's a six by six between his legs,

00:33:46.560 | and they're getting ready to redesign that Boeing is.

00:33:49.440 | But when you looked, it'd be like if you put your airplane

00:33:52.600 | and you're looking down.

00:33:53.540 | So all the stuff, like if your radar's seeing bad guys

00:33:56.180 | out in front of you, it'd be like looking down and going,

00:33:57.640 | "Oh, I'm right here.

00:33:58.480 | "I know there's bad guys out here.

00:34:00.260 | "And my wingman is over here."

00:34:01.520 | And it shows everything.

00:34:02.360 | It's just like, it gives you,

00:34:04.040 | you can look at that display and go,

00:34:05.360 | "Oh, I can see where everything's at.

00:34:07.160 | "I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy."

00:34:09.880 | It shows you all this.

00:34:10.720 | It's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up

00:34:13.480 | for the crews to maintain the overall picture

00:34:18.480 | of what's going on.

00:34:19.960 | - Big picture sense of what's going on.

00:34:20.800 | - Because it's happening so fast.

00:34:23.520 | And this is where that autonomy piece,

00:34:24.800 | this is the third brain.

00:34:26.340 | So we're all looking at it,

00:34:27.180 | and the third brain is doing fusion.

00:34:29.380 | It's pulling stuff together going,

00:34:30.520 | "Oh, this is all this guy, this is this guy,

00:34:32.040 | "this is this guy."

00:34:32.880 | It's sending it out through the link.

00:34:34.000 | So all the airplanes are talking to each other

00:34:35.560 | through this digital network that we don't even see.

00:34:38.400 | It just says, that airplane says, "Hey, I'm over here."

00:34:41.000 | And it tells us, and we go, "Oh, he's right there."

00:34:43.360 | And then we can go, his airplane says,

00:34:45.640 | "Oh, I'm looking at this airplane, this bad guy."

00:34:47.880 | And it shows us, "Oh, he's over there,

00:34:49.520 | "and he's looking at this guy."

00:34:50.440 | I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake

00:34:55.320 | because your eye, you can hear a lot,

00:34:57.080 | but when you look down at stuff,

00:34:58.240 | it's all, you can sell the picture really quick.

00:35:00.360 | - The third brain is doing the sensor fusion,

00:35:05.360 | the integration of the different sensors,

00:35:07.080 | and gives you a big picture view.

00:35:08.580 | What about the control?

00:35:09.880 | Like, is there, and I apologize,

00:35:12.040 | as if this is a dumb question,

00:35:13.440 | but people use the high-level term of autopilot.

00:35:17.360 | How much is there, let's use a loose term of AI,

00:35:22.360 | how much automation is there?

00:35:24.100 | How much AI is there in helping you control the airplane?

00:35:27.360 | - The AI piece would be more of a control loop

00:35:29.680 | because of the digital flight controls.

00:35:31.480 | So the airplane actually,

00:35:33.680 | they had to make the airplane easier to fly.

00:35:36.000 | And when I say easy, it's relative

00:35:37.360 | 'cause people go, "I can do it,"

00:35:38.360 | 'cause I did it on Flight Sim.

00:35:40.440 | Real life is a lot different.

00:35:42.240 | In Flight Sim, you have no apparent fear of death.

00:35:44.160 | You'll do things in a simulator

00:35:45.560 | that you would never do in real life.

00:35:46.680 | But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage,

00:35:51.680 | I mean, 'cause you think about it,

00:35:52.760 | you've got a radar that's feeding you data,

00:35:55.660 | you've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data.

00:35:58.000 | All that stuff is hooked to your head

00:35:59.720 | because you've got a joint helmet-mounted cueing system on

00:36:02.040 | that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit

00:36:04.820 | so it can tell where your head's at looking.

00:36:06.860 | So if I turn my head to the right,

00:36:08.400 | the radar will actually look to the right,

00:36:09.800 | the targeting FLIR will look to the right.

00:36:11.760 | And oh, by the way, the back seater has a helmet on too,

00:36:14.760 | so he can look to the left and he can do things.

00:36:16.560 | So depending on what sensor he's controlling,

00:36:18.800 | so if he's got control of the targeting pod

00:36:21.720 | and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left.

00:36:24.960 | But if I have something where I wanna lock a guy up

00:36:27.120 | that I don't see, that maybe the radar didn't see,

00:36:28.920 | but I can get over and now point the radar,

00:36:31.080 | 'cause it's a phased array radar now,

00:36:32.680 | it doesn't really scan.

00:36:33.980 | There's all kinds of cool stuff.

00:36:37.760 | That technology brings, 'cause if you just,

00:36:41.040 | if you'd went back 30 years and said,

00:36:42.600 | "Hey," or 40 years ago and said,

00:36:44.160 | "Hey, we're gonna have this helmet."

00:36:45.320 | Now you're gonna be able to slew everything to your head.

00:36:47.480 | And I don't mean a mechanical setup,

00:36:49.200 | but I mean literally you're just gonna map

00:36:50.880 | magnetic resonance and go, "Oh, look."

00:36:52.560 | And I can literally slew my sensors this fast

00:36:56.960 | and then mash a button and transfer high quality coordinates

00:37:01.240 | from a system into a joint, a JDAM,

00:37:03.920 | which is a joint direct attack munition

00:37:06.000 | that is the GPS bombs that you see all the time.

00:37:08.280 | And then let that thing fly.

00:37:09.960 | And I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes,

00:37:13.680 | or, "Hey, I got it.

00:37:15.160 | "We're gonna have to mensurate coordinates."

00:37:16.720 | And you bring back the data

00:37:18.360 | and then they do all the targeting for it

00:37:19.680 | and then they send another group out to get it.

00:37:21.600 | Instead of all that, now it's that fast.

00:37:24.220 | - So there's a, okay, I mean,

00:37:25.960 | we probably don't have enough time to talk about

00:37:28.160 | the beautiful fusion of minds that happens

00:37:30.200 | when two people are flying, controlling the plane.

00:37:33.240 | But at a high level, this is a really interesting question

00:37:37.320 | for people who don't know what they're talking about,

00:37:39.600 | like me, which is what is the difference

00:37:42.800 | between a human being and an AI system?

00:37:47.240 | Like what is the ceiling of a current AI technology

00:37:52.240 | for controlling the plane?

00:37:53.960 | Like how much does the human contribute?

00:37:57.280 | Is it possible to have automated flight, for example?

00:38:00.480 | Like what is the hardest part about flying

00:38:05.080 | that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot?

00:38:09.280 | In warfare situations, in flying a fighter jet plane.

00:38:14.280 | - So I would say AI systems are usually black and white.

00:38:20.200 | When you write the algorithm for an AI system,

00:38:22.800 | basically you're taking thought

00:38:27.000 | and turning it into a giant math problem

00:38:28.800 | is really what you're doing, right?

00:38:30.360 | So you've got this logical math problem.

00:38:32.720 | Math problems are, there's a line that says,

00:38:35.680 | I can or I can't.

00:38:36.680 | And it's a very finite line, you know,

00:38:39.280 | but you can go up to the line where a human,

00:38:42.480 | we all have gray areas where we go, eh, maybe,

00:38:46.480 | yeah, I'll try it.

00:38:47.400 | - So humans can operate within that gray.

00:38:50.080 | - So if you take an airplane and say,

00:38:52.440 | and I'll just take a Hornet for a while,

00:38:53.680 | a Super Hornet, it doesn't matter, any airplane,

00:38:55.880 | and you go, here is the flight performance model

00:38:58.240 | of the airplane.

00:38:59.080 | So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy.

00:39:02.360 | So it basically says the airplane can fly as slow as this,

00:39:05.600 | it can go as fast as this,

00:39:06.840 | it can pull this many Gs, force of gravity,

00:39:09.320 | you know, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

00:39:11.920 | And then based on the airfoil design and everything else

00:39:14.200 | and how it can pull, here's how it's gonna fly,

00:39:17.200 | you know, 'cause it's really physics-based.

00:39:19.520 | Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI,

00:39:22.360 | but typically AI, you don't want the airplane

00:39:24.120 | to leave controlled flight, right?

00:39:25.920 | You wanna maintain it so that it is flying

00:39:28.120 | in a controlled envelope.

00:39:29.640 | Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I,

00:39:33.240 | where people intentionally departed the airplane

00:39:36.000 | from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage,

00:39:39.340 | which is, that's where the human goes, can I do this?

00:39:42.680 | I know it's outside of where I would normally go,

00:39:45.620 | but I can do that.

00:39:46.460 | So you can do some crazy things now,

00:39:48.360 | especially since the flight control logic

00:39:50.520 | in modern airplanes with digital flight controls,

00:39:53.940 | they're extremely forgiving.

00:39:56.240 | So you can literally, I've done things in Super Hornets

00:40:00.640 | that literally, even as a pilot inside the airplane,

00:40:03.320 | you're just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that.

00:40:05.720 | Like, it'll flop ends, which defies most logic.

00:40:09.160 | And I guess, in a way, you could probably program it,

00:40:12.000 | but I still think when you get to the edges

00:40:14.680 | that may or may not give you an advantage,

00:40:17.160 | there are things that a human will do that AI won't.

00:40:23.120 | And I don't think we've got to the point,

00:40:24.420 | which is how do you map illogical solutions?

00:40:29.100 | Most AI is logical.

00:40:30.380 | It's based on some type of premise.

00:40:32.300 | When you write the algorithm to control it, there's bounds.

00:40:37.300 | - Yeah, there's this giant mess.

00:40:38.940 | Like you said, the difference between the simulator

00:40:41.760 | and real life also gets at that somehow,

00:40:44.000 | that there is somehow the fear of death,

00:40:47.620 | all of that beautiful mess comes into play.

00:40:51.620 | Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight?

00:40:55.280 | Like with Sully landing that plane famously

00:41:00.280 | versus the simulator, all of those discussions,

00:41:03.020 | is there some?

00:41:04.740 | - Well, it's very similar to what I was talking about

00:41:07.180 | earlier with the A6.

00:41:08.000 | So one is when you're flying with a crew,

00:41:11.540 | there's standardization.

00:41:13.140 | So you gotta remember when Sully flew,

00:41:14.860 | when his first officer, that's the co-pilot,

00:41:16.880 | showed up, it's the first time they met.

00:41:19.420 | And this happens all the time in the commercial world.

00:41:21.220 | You know, there's six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines.

00:41:24.340 | You know, your chance of flying with the same guy

00:41:25.820 | all the time is slim and none.

00:41:26.940 | Where in the Navy, we recruit.

00:41:29.140 | So I had a primary and a secondary Wizzow that flew with me.

00:41:33.060 | - For months?

00:41:34.860 | - Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment.

00:41:37.220 | So because you want it to know.

00:41:38.060 | - So these brains fuse.

00:41:39.540 | - You have to.

00:41:40.380 | - Trust and all of those things.

00:41:41.940 | - It increases the capability of the airplane.

00:41:43.740 | It's not to say we can't swap out,

00:41:45.780 | but for true effectiveness,

00:41:47.020 | especially in very complex missions

00:41:48.820 | like a forward air controller,

00:41:51.300 | we're in the air actually controlling ground assets

00:41:53.540 | and supporting ground troops.

00:41:54.980 | If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy,

00:42:00.580 | you have to be melded when you do that.

00:42:02.820 | You have to have trained to do that job,

00:42:04.780 | otherwise you're gonna be ineffective.

00:42:06.860 | So when you get to the commercial world,

00:42:09.820 | and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial,

00:42:12.260 | there is a standardization.

00:42:14.940 | Like we know that at this point,

00:42:16.940 | I'm gonna put this switch, you're gonna do that.

00:42:18.380 | And everyone, they know their roles.

00:42:20.260 | Captain's gonna do this,

00:42:21.500 | first officer's gonna do this.

00:42:22.820 | And they know that when the emergency breaks out,

00:42:24.620 | so in Sully's case, when they take the birds

00:42:27.280 | and they know they've got a problem,

00:42:28.580 | and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings

00:42:30.740 | of the two of them talking, you gotta remember,

00:42:34.240 | they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes,

00:42:36.340 | but they're also talking to the air traffic controllers

00:42:38.740 | in the New York area.

00:42:40.460 | And it's like, we got a bird strike

00:42:42.520 | and the first officer already knows,

00:42:43.780 | hey, silence the alarm, they silence the alarm.

00:42:45.700 | The first officer's pulling out the book,

00:42:47.140 | he's going through the procedures,

00:42:48.860 | while Sully's actually flying the airplane,

00:42:50.580 | knowing that they've lost their motors.

00:42:51.940 | And you gotta think his decision process,

00:42:53.720 | like they're trying to get him to go into an airport

00:42:55.480 | in New Jersey, and he realizes, not happening,

00:42:58.300 | we're gonna put this thing,

00:42:59.300 | and he made a decision soon enough

00:43:01.140 | so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane

00:43:03.220 | that he was gonna put this thing in the Hudson River,

00:43:05.480 | and he did it flawlessly.

00:43:07.160 | I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck.

00:43:10.300 | The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane,

00:43:12.060 | you know, and it got fished out of the Hudson, but.

00:43:14.820 | - What is it about those human decisions he had to make?

00:43:17.300 | Is that something you put into words,

00:43:19.180 | or is that just deep down some instinct

00:43:22.340 | that you develop as a pilot over time?

00:43:23.900 | - It's when we, when you train,

00:43:26.060 | and aviation is a self-cleaning oven,

00:43:28.540 | so if you make bad decisions,

00:43:30.300 | and the list is long and distinguished

00:43:33.260 | of those who have died by making bad decisions.

00:43:35.220 | - Oh, man.

00:43:36.580 | - So when you look at what he did, or the way we train,

00:43:39.900 | 'cause the commercial industry and the Navy

00:43:43.500 | and the Air Force, for all that,

00:43:45.100 | we have what's called, we have emergency procedures

00:43:47.640 | that we have to know.

00:43:48.580 | Like, the engine's on fire, the first three steps,

00:43:50.460 | you just have to know what they are, right?

00:43:52.540 | So they know.

00:43:53.380 | The airline, same type, you know, they go,

00:43:55.660 | "Hey, I know this is," they pull the book out,

00:43:57.380 | 'cause the airplanes are designed,

00:43:58.540 | they're built to have some time,

00:44:00.780 | but there's a point where you have to make a decision,

00:44:02.460 | and you can't second guess it.

00:44:03.680 | So when he decided, "I'm putting this in the Hudson River,"

00:44:06.580 | he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go,

00:44:08.380 | "Well, maybe I can get over to that airport."

00:44:10.340 | He looked, he made a quick assessment,

00:44:12.780 | this is that 80% solution where you go,

00:44:14.980 | "These are not, you know,

00:44:16.820 | "it's like a multiple choice test,"

00:44:18.340 | when you go, "Oh my God, I don't really know the answer,

00:44:19.980 | "but I know A and D are wrong."

00:44:22.260 | Gone.

00:44:23.100 | So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone.

00:44:26.620 | So what's my next option?

00:44:28.100 | Well, the Hudson River's there,

00:44:30.020 | and that's probably looking pretty good,

00:44:31.300 | or what is my other one?

00:44:32.940 | Can I get a restart on the motors?

00:44:34.740 | And then if I can get a restart,

00:44:36.380 | now can I take it someplace else?

00:44:38.140 | He had to make really, really fast decisions,

00:44:40.820 | and then once they go, that 80% solution,

00:44:43.660 | you realize, "All right, I'm going into the Hudson,

00:44:45.620 | "there's the 80%, get the book out,

00:44:46.900 | "let's see if we can get an air start,"

00:44:48.020 | 'cause if you listen to the tapes,

00:44:48.840 | they're trying to get it air started.

00:44:50.260 | The closer he gets to the water,

00:44:52.260 | the more he's going, "I'm ditching the airplane."

00:44:55.020 | So the original decision to,

00:44:56.940 | "This is my best option right now,

00:44:59.380 | "this is where I'm going,"

00:45:01.100 | and you start eliminating anything

00:45:02.820 | that could possibly change the events,

00:45:05.060 | which they tried to do,

00:45:06.780 | and then he gets to that last minute,

00:45:08.100 | he says, "We're going in the water,"

00:45:09.460 | they change the plan, they secure the airplane,

00:45:11.500 | they do exactly what they're doing,

00:45:12.540 | and he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson.

00:45:15.120 | But you gotta remember,

00:45:16.860 | every, it's every six months for commercial,

00:45:20.520 | they go back and they do research

00:45:22.260 | in the airplane in the simulator,

00:45:23.860 | where they train to the airplane being broken.

00:45:27.100 | You just lost a motor, you just lost another motor.

00:45:30.000 | So they go through this extensive training,

00:45:33.100 | and all these, and it's,

00:45:35.100 | we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave,

00:45:37.040 | where you're gonna get in,

00:45:37.880 | and you know that when you get in for your check ride

00:45:40.420 | in a simulator, that the airplane is going to break.

00:45:43.160 | You're gonna lose hydraulics,

00:45:44.160 | and it's sometimes they're a problem,

00:45:45.460 | like, "Oh, I just lost this hydraulic system,

00:45:47.240 | "but I'm having an issue on the other motor.

00:45:48.840 | "Well, if I shut down this motor,

00:45:50.460 | "and I've got a hydraulics,

00:45:51.660 | "'cause there's two hydraulic systems,

00:45:52.960 | "one on each motor,

00:45:54.620 | "well, if I've got an issue

00:45:55.460 | "with the left motor hydraulic system,

00:45:57.100 | "and my right motor is starting to give me indications,

00:46:00.060 | "do I wanna shut the right motor down,

00:46:01.500 | "'cause that's gonna kill my hydraulic system that's good,

00:46:04.140 | "and now I'm flying on a good motor

00:46:05.780 | "with a bad hydraulic system,

00:46:06.840 | "and without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly."

00:46:08.260 | So they're challenging problems

00:46:10.640 | that you have to think through in real time,

00:46:12.600 | and of course, the weather's never good.

00:46:14.420 | It's always dark.

00:46:15.680 | It's always crappy.

00:46:16.660 | You're gonna break out at midnight.

00:46:17.620 | I mean, it's just all this stuff gets compiled

00:46:19.520 | on top of you,

00:46:20.580 | and it's intended to increase the level of stress,

00:46:24.460 | because when things happen, like in Sully's case,

00:46:27.940 | we like to joke it's going to stem power,

00:46:30.540 | where the functional part of your brain shuts down,

00:46:32.660 | and you are literally on instinct, like an animal.

00:46:35.660 | Well, if you've trained so much

00:46:37.220 | that that is the instinctive reaction

00:46:38.780 | that you're going to have,

00:46:40.020 | when the main part of your cognitive abilities

00:46:42.740 | start to shut down,

00:46:44.100 | that instinct is ingrained so much into you

00:46:47.580 | that you know exactly what to do,

00:46:49.440 | and that's literally how it happens.

00:46:52.020 | - So there's no, how do I put it, fear of death?

00:46:55.980 | Like in Sully's case,

00:46:58.380 | do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact

00:47:01.780 | if his decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die?

00:47:05.380 | - You know, I can't speak for him,

00:47:06.460 | but I would say there was so much going on

00:47:08.860 | at the cockpit in that time,

00:47:10.620 | his mindset was probably,

00:47:14.460 | I can do this, I'm trained,

00:47:16.100 | I'm going to do the procedures,

00:47:17.480 | I've practiced this before, I've done these things,

00:47:19.840 | and I'm assuming that in his mindset,

00:47:22.500 | 'cause I never thought about when things were really bad,

00:47:24.900 | if you're having problems with the airplane,

00:47:26.180 | that I was going to mort and plant it into the ground.

00:47:29.540 | It was always, maybe it's an ego thing

00:47:31.860 | where you think, I can do this.

00:47:33.420 | You know what I mean?

00:47:34.260 | - So you never, have you experienced fear during flight?

00:47:39.140 | I mean, one way, we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson,

00:47:45.940 | I mean, he talked about as he's walking up to the ring,

00:47:50.940 | he's like, he starts out basically in fear

00:47:56.100 | and worried about how things are going to go.

00:48:00.200 | I mean, it's purely to put in towards his fear,

00:48:02.900 | but as he gets closer and closer to the ring,

00:48:05.260 | the confidence grows and grows

00:48:06.620 | until the ego basically takes over

00:48:10.580 | to where you think there's no way anybody could defeat me.

00:48:15.580 | So that's his experience of overcoming fear,

00:48:18.620 | but did you experience any kind of thing like that,

00:48:22.980 | or do you just go to the part of the brain

00:48:25.500 | that goes to the training,

00:48:27.300 | and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?

00:48:30.900 | - I wouldn't say I was never afraid.

00:48:32.860 | I think that would be, I couldn't tell you

00:48:35.540 | that anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one time.

00:48:37.480 | And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots,

00:48:40.800 | it's just, it's usually, especially when you're new

00:48:44.160 | and you gotta go out and it's nighttime

00:48:46.040 | and there's no moon and the weather sucks

00:48:47.880 | and the deck's moving, you know, the ship's going up

00:48:50.420 | and down 'cause it will scare the living shit out of you.

00:48:53.780 | Can I say that?

00:48:54.620 | - You can definitely say that.

00:48:56.420 | So it's about landing and takeoff that-

00:48:58.380 | - That is, if you, even they used to wire people up,

00:49:01.140 | they did it during Vietnam, you know,

00:49:02.740 | guys would go fly missions, you know,

00:49:04.220 | when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on

00:49:06.300 | and people were getting shot down a lot.

00:49:08.560 | The highest anxiety and heart rates

00:49:11.700 | were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier.

00:49:13.700 | - How hard is it to land on that?

00:49:15.260 | It seems impossible, like for a civilian, I guess, like me,

00:49:20.260 | just seems crazy that a human can do that.

00:49:23.060 | - The problem with night is,

00:49:25.700 | and there's different degrees of night, just like day.

00:49:28.540 | I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know,

00:49:30.940 | where it's like, "Woo!"

00:49:32.620 | You know, this is not that bad.

00:49:34.500 | But you gotta remember at night,

00:49:36.220 | I think everyone can associate with,

00:49:38.420 | you're driving in your car and it's just a,

00:49:41.020 | it's an overcast, dark night

00:49:42.840 | and you're on a country road with no side lights.

00:49:45.800 | Most people have a tendency to slow down

00:49:48.340 | just by nature of, "Oh my God,"

00:49:50.140 | 'cause what you'll do is you'll outdrive your headlights

00:49:52.100 | 'cause it is so dark, you know,

00:49:53.980 | and you can get outside of the city

00:49:55.700 | and get up into New Hampshire,

00:49:57.740 | especially when the roads are curving, you know,

00:49:59.940 | and the lines probably aren't that good.

00:50:02.300 | It's, you know, now take that

00:50:03.900 | and multiply it by like a million

00:50:06.260 | because you have no depth perception.

00:50:08.320 | What you think is fixed, the runway, is actually moving.

00:50:14.740 | - Up and down and left to right.

00:50:16.260 | - Yeah, oh, and when it's really bad,

00:50:17.900 | you can actually see it move.

00:50:19.820 | And we have two systems, you know,

00:50:22.180 | there's an automatic system that's actually,

00:50:25.040 | it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship.

00:50:29.620 | And then there's the ILS.

00:50:30.800 | Now, civilian pilots will tell you

00:50:32.740 | that ILS is a precision approach,

00:50:34.260 | which gives you azimuth and glide slope.

00:50:36.260 | You know, you come down, it's like a plus.

00:50:38.980 | On the carrier, it's not.

00:50:40.020 | It's really just a beam that goes out

00:50:41.380 | and it's considered a non-precision approach.

00:50:43.500 | It's not stabilized at all that.

00:50:45.740 | And I've been where you can actually watch the needle

00:50:47.780 | and the tack hand needle will move.

00:50:49.740 | There's all kinds of stuff moving

00:50:50.740 | 'cause the base that it's all sitting on is doing this.

00:50:53.860 | And ships don't just go up and down.

00:50:55.660 | They do this, so the bow goes up and down

00:50:57.820 | and the tail like you normally see a ship.

00:50:59.860 | And then there's, so that's pitch.

00:51:01.580 | And then it has roll, so it's doing this.

00:51:03.760 | And then it has heave, so the whole boat

00:51:05.620 | is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling.

00:51:08.120 | And you're gonna land on that.

00:51:09.620 | So, and it's, I mean, I remember landing,

00:51:13.820 | so I was with Chris Sato,

00:51:15.940 | and Chris and I, we were off the USS Ranger,

00:51:18.500 | which is now decommissioned.

00:51:19.620 | It's sitting, getting turned into razor blades.

00:51:22.780 | We're flying the old A6 and we come in

00:51:24.660 | and it was off of San Diego and it was just an ugly night

00:51:26.820 | 'cause San Diego always has a marine layer

00:51:28.620 | that is about 1200 feet.

00:51:29.940 | It was lower than that that night.

00:51:31.420 | And it was pouring down rain.

00:51:32.500 | It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around.

00:51:34.820 | It was just the craziest night I've ever seen

00:51:36.340 | out of San Diego.

00:51:37.780 | And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high

00:51:41.520 | that you're shaking.

00:51:42.460 | I mean, you literally can't stop.

00:51:44.300 | And we had spun around out of the landing area

00:51:46.300 | and we parked, we call it the six pack.

00:51:47.980 | So it's right in front of the island.

00:51:49.260 | So if you see an aircraft carrier with the island

00:51:50.860 | and the number of the ship on it,

00:51:52.460 | we're sitting right in front of that

00:51:53.380 | and we're looking at the landing area.

00:51:54.800 | So it's like, you get front row seats to the concert.

00:51:57.900 | And this EA6B comes in, you know, ugly pass.

00:52:02.900 | He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one.

00:52:05.700 | You never wanna catch the first one,

00:52:06.900 | which means you were not really high

00:52:08.500 | above the back of the ship when you landed.

00:52:11.380 | And it comes in and the exhaust on an EA6 or an A6

00:52:14.540 | actually points kind of down and it blows

00:52:16.900 | and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft.

00:52:19.140 | That's how hard it's raining.

00:52:20.060 | And you literally could not see across.

00:52:21.740 | I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane,

00:52:24.220 | and then it was just white

00:52:25.260 | 'cause of the water being blown off the deck.

00:52:27.500 | And I'm shaking and I'll never forget,

00:52:29.900 | I looked over at Chris and I said, "Oh my God."

00:52:31.780 | I go, "Hey dude, man,

00:52:32.620 | "10,000 foot runway looks really good right now."

00:52:35.260 | And I go, and I'm shaking my hands like this.

00:52:37.320 | And I said, "I'm not even, I'm not faking this, dude."

00:52:40.100 | I go, "That's literally, I cannot stop shaking."

00:52:42.540 | I said, "That scared the everyone out of me."

00:52:44.740 | But it scares you afterwards.

00:52:49.100 | During it, you don't have time to think about that.

00:52:52.220 | You're doing it, you gotta do.

00:52:53.980 | There's kind of the quote from Tom Hanks

00:52:56.060 | in what's that, the girl's baseball movie,

00:53:00.100 | where he goes, "There's no crying in baseball."

00:53:01.660 | Well, that's our joke.

00:53:03.060 | There's no crying in naval aviation.

00:53:04.540 | I said, "You can fly around and cry all you want at night,

00:53:06.700 | "but there's only one pilot in those airplanes

00:53:09.360 | "and you gotta land it."

00:53:10.220 | So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away,

00:53:13.260 | put on your big kid pants and it's time to man up

00:53:17.060 | and land the jet.

00:53:18.620 | - Sorry for the romantic question,

00:53:19.980 | but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly,

00:53:22.980 | what's it like to fly an airplane?

00:53:27.820 | It looks incredible.

00:53:31.660 | - To me-- - As a human,

00:53:33.020 | like a descendant of ape, I sit here on land

00:53:35.660 | and look up at you guys.

00:53:38.060 | It seems incredible that a human being can do that.

00:53:41.100 | - You know, people ask, I'll be sitting around

00:53:42.980 | with my friends and they're like, "How was it?"

00:53:44.140 | I said, "The greatest job on the planet."

00:53:47.060 | (Lyle laughs)

00:53:47.940 | I said, "It's an office with a view

00:53:50.820 | "'cause you're sitting in a glass bubble."

00:53:52.260 | - Office with a view.

00:53:54.180 | - You can do, it's like roller coasters.

00:53:58.180 | You go, "Oh, it does all these cool stuff."

00:53:59.300 | So we take people flying every once in a while.

00:54:01.620 | And it's like, "Oh yeah, I like roller coasters."

00:54:03.220 | They go, "No, take any roller coaster,

00:54:04.620 | "the coolest roller coaster you've ever been on

00:54:06.700 | "and multiply it by 1,000."

00:54:08.940 | I said, "It's an experience to put your body under

00:54:13.460 | "the jets rated at seven and a half,

00:54:15.620 | "but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses,

00:54:18.100 | "depends on fuel weight."

00:54:19.740 | So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight Gs.

00:54:22.540 | To be able to do that to your body, I mean, it takes a toll.

00:54:26.780 | Like I can't really turn my head real good anymore

00:54:28.860 | and stuff like that, but would I trade it?

00:54:32.180 | I mean, it was a childhood dream.

00:54:33.340 | And how many people get to do that?

00:54:34.940 | You know, professional, I wanna be an NFL, you know,

00:54:37.780 | and you end up to the NFL,

00:54:38.860 | which is a very small percentage.

00:54:40.700 | Well, I wanna fly jets and to fly,

00:54:43.700 | you know, at the time when I was flying,

00:54:46.220 | the Super Hornets that we had on our squadron

00:54:47.700 | were brand new, like literally right out of the factory.

00:54:49.940 | I'd come off our first Super Hornet cruise.

00:54:52.180 | We had went to the Boeing factory in St. Louis

00:54:54.260 | where they were building my new jets that I was going to get

00:54:56.300 | and I actually signed the inside of one of the wings

00:54:58.900 | while they were putting it together.

00:54:59.940 | So, I'm meeting the people

00:55:01.020 | that are putting the jet together

00:55:02.140 | that's gonna get delivered to me in a couple of months

00:55:03.940 | that I'm gonna fly.

00:55:05.340 | So, just, I mean-

00:55:08.380 | - The whole of it is incredible.

00:55:10.460 | - I'll tell you what, when I left,

00:55:13.220 | when I decided to walk away-

00:55:15.780 | - Yeah, did you miss it?

00:55:17.340 | - I told myself I wouldn't.

00:55:18.940 | I promised myself that, you know,

00:55:21.580 | once you get through your O5 command,

00:55:23.380 | your flying really starts to tag, to come down.

00:55:26.740 | You know, even if you go and you're an air wing commander,

00:55:28.580 | which is, we call them CAG, carrier group commander,

00:55:31.620 | you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots,

00:55:35.220 | nor should you be.

00:55:36.060 | I mean, there's young people that are coming up

00:55:38.100 | and it's training your relief

00:55:39.100 | 'cause that's the next generation.

00:55:40.220 | So, like currently I have friends of mine

00:55:43.220 | that we serve together,

00:55:45.060 | their kids are flying Super Hornets, right?

00:55:48.100 | So, to me, that's really neat

00:55:50.300 | 'cause I watched them when they were little.

00:55:52.180 | And now, you know, one of them who is good friends,

00:55:55.620 | I won't get his last name,

00:55:56.460 | but Joey, who lived down the street from us,

00:56:00.460 | is a top, was a Top Gun instructor.

00:56:02.020 | And I'm like, "Hey, Joey's a Top Gun."

00:56:04.340 | You know, and I'm like, "That's cool."

00:56:06.100 | Because, you know, I'd went there

00:56:07.420 | and I knew him, he would come down to my house.

00:56:08.940 | And now to see these kids that are,

00:56:10.780 | because typically military breeds military, you know,

00:56:13.100 | because the kids grew up in it.

00:56:14.340 | I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it

00:56:17.460 | is he's colorblind.

00:56:18.860 | So, it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL,

00:56:22.420 | 'cause he had talked about doing that

00:56:23.980 | 'cause he's an incredible swimmer

00:56:25.740 | and he likes doing that stuff and the water polo player.

00:56:29.100 | But he's, you know, both of my kids are,

00:56:31.820 | well, my daughter is a doctor

00:56:32.980 | and my son's in his third year, so.

00:56:35.860 | - But there's a, I suppose,

00:56:38.260 | I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover

00:56:42.140 | of this incredible experience of flying

00:56:44.260 | to the younger generation.

00:56:46.060 | So, you don't, you told yourself you're not gonna miss it.

00:56:49.700 | You miss it?

00:56:51.140 | - There are days I do.

00:56:51.980 | When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base

00:56:54.660 | or a jet flies over, but I have all the memories.

00:56:57.740 | So, I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever.

00:57:01.540 | You know, Tom Brady can't play football.

00:57:04.340 | There's gonna come a time where he has to stop.

00:57:06.180 | - He seems to have done it for a long time.

00:57:08.220 | - But, you know, typically when you look at it,

00:57:10.180 | you go, I had the opportunity.

00:57:12.340 | And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI,

00:57:16.580 | that, you know, when will the last manned fighter be built?

00:57:20.780 | You know, and that's that big question.

00:57:22.060 | You know, we just did F-35.

00:57:23.460 | It's over budget, it's seven years late.

00:57:26.660 | There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it.

00:57:29.020 | And then you look at some of the new stuff

00:57:30.500 | that's coming out that the Air Force is working on

00:57:32.780 | with smaller, cheaper, attritable platforms

00:57:37.220 | that you can go, oh, we can,

00:57:39.580 | 'cause if you don't put a man in the box, or a person,

00:57:42.540 | because there's a lot of incredibly talented women

00:57:45.180 | that do this too, so I'll just say that as person.

00:57:48.580 | - Yeah, so we say man and he, we mean both men and women,

00:57:52.160 | 'cause offline you've told me about a lot of incredible

00:57:54.860 | women that flown, so it's--

00:57:56.180 | - I had three female, actually four,

00:58:00.220 | one of them didn't fly anymore.

00:58:01.540 | She actually lives right around here.

00:58:03.380 | She ended up going into aircraft maintenance

00:58:06.320 | when she couldn't fly anymore.

00:58:07.820 | One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly,

00:58:13.180 | she's one of the most gifted people I've ever met

00:58:15.300 | in my life, she is the vice president of Amazon Air.

00:58:17.460 | You can see her on TV, her name's Sarah.

00:58:20.020 | Incredible, and then I had Paige,

00:58:22.460 | who ended up taking command.

00:58:24.700 | She got out of fighters and went into other platforms,

00:58:27.500 | and she was a commanding officer.

00:58:29.240 | And then the other one is a, teaches leadership,

00:58:33.180 | and she is, all three of them,

00:58:35.720 | actually all four of the women that were direct,

00:58:38.900 | I'm not forgetting, I don't think I'm forgetting someone,

00:58:41.880 | incredibly, incredibly talented,

00:58:44.500 | and a great addition to the ready room.

00:58:45.740 | So anyone that gets into the, oh, women can't do it,

00:58:48.180 | that's all total horse crap.

00:58:49.860 | Hey, we can talk about the original integration and stuff,

00:58:52.700 | which was not done well by the military nor the Navy.

00:58:55.940 | - So women can fly as good as the guys?

00:58:58.300 | - Yeah, you can't tell if you pass another airplane,

00:59:01.180 | you can't tell if there's a man or a woman in it.

00:59:03.020 | It really comes down to stick and throttle,

00:59:06.640 | the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle's going to be,

00:59:11.640 | where the airplane would be if you're fighting another one.

00:59:14.200 | You have to be able to think fast.

00:59:15.320 | Anyone who has those characteristics can do it.

00:59:17.820 | And then I think most important besides that,

00:59:19.860 | there has to be a desire.

00:59:21.660 | - Yeah.

00:59:22.500 | - And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took,

00:59:23.920 | 'cause we used to track, so when I ran,

00:59:25.920 | we call it the RAG, it's the Replacement Air Group,

00:59:27.960 | it's where, so the Super Hornet Training Squadron,

00:59:31.120 | there's two of them, there's one on the East Coast,

00:59:32.760 | at 106, and there's one on the West Coast,

00:59:34.440 | which is VFA 122.

00:59:36.480 | 122 is the first one.

00:59:37.640 | So I ended up going there and I ended up being

00:59:39.400 | the Operations Officer and Training Officer, okay?

00:59:42.180 | So we tracked the last 100 students, right?

00:59:45.960 | So everyone goes, "Ah, it's funny to hear students talk,

00:59:47.920 | "'cause oh, he's awesome, he's super."

00:59:50.040 | If you took the 100, there's three at the top of the list

00:59:54.040 | that are just naturally gifted aviators.

00:59:56.160 | They're well, well, well above average.

00:59:58.000 | It's like the person in a math class

00:59:59.360 | that sits down in complex math and they just get it.

01:00:02.360 | You know?

01:00:03.360 | At the bottom, there's the three at the bottom

01:00:05.640 | that are gonna struggle and there's a good chance

01:00:07.560 | they won't get out.

01:00:08.520 | And if they do get out, they're gonna have to work

01:00:10.740 | really hard to just maintain kinda average.

01:00:13.840 | Sometimes it's just the way your mind works.

01:00:15.260 | Not everyone is good at everything.

01:00:17.120 | If you took the 94 of 'em in the middle,

01:00:19.600 | they're within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there.

01:00:23.400 | They're all, you know, it's a,

01:00:25.760 | the bell curve doesn't look real good.

01:00:27.000 | It's just a big hump and it comes back down

01:00:28.800 | and everyone's right there within one mean deviation.

01:00:32.040 | And then you have the outliers,

01:00:33.480 | usually not on the high side 'cause they're gonna get through

01:00:35.600 | but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through.

01:00:38.960 | So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job,

01:00:41.240 | as does the Air Force, of screening.

01:00:42.920 | So now what they do, when I went,

01:00:44.540 | you just showed up and you started.

01:00:46.400 | Now what you do is you actually go fly a Piper Warriors,

01:00:49.480 | low wing, to see, are you adaptable to this?

01:00:52.640 | And there's an evaluation that goes through

01:00:55.280 | and then if you hit a certain mark,

01:00:56.960 | then you're good to go and then they put you into primary.

01:00:59.120 | It's kinda like a, it's like a pre-check, you know,

01:01:01.400 | like the pre-sat, the pre-SAT to go,

01:01:03.640 | hey, how am I gonna do on the SAT?

01:01:05.000 | It's very similar to that but it's more of a hand skill,

01:01:09.000 | can you adapt?

01:01:09.840 | Because although we live in three dimensions,

01:01:11.880 | like this table is not, you know, we, this is,

01:01:14.160 | you know, this is all, has depth with all that.

01:01:17.320 | Where it's really, relative to aviation,

01:01:18.980 | we are two-dimensional, very two-dimensional.

01:01:22.240 | - Can you explain that?

01:01:23.320 | So our perception is actually more limited

01:01:26.200 | than that of an aviator?

01:01:28.840 | - Very much and here's why.

01:01:30.640 | So we look at, let's look at a tall building.

01:01:33.200 | Let's look at one World Trade Center in New York

01:01:35.320 | 'cause that's, everyone knows what it looks like,

01:01:36.960 | big, tall building.

01:01:38.040 | It's what, maybe 1800 feet tall?

01:01:42.360 | Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like, what,

01:01:44.160 | 20-some hundred feet tall, it's not that big.

01:01:46.440 | So a Super Hornet, to do what a Split S is,

01:01:49.480 | which is I'm flying, I'm just gonna roll the airplane

01:01:52.080 | upside down and then I'm gonna do basically a C,

01:01:55.400 | the letter C.

01:01:56.240 | I'm gonna go in the top and out the bottom.

01:01:58.080 | So, and I'm just gonna, it's basically

01:01:59.680 | a vertical displacement of the airplane.

01:02:01.200 | So I'm going from high to low.

01:02:02.680 | It's very, very tight and it does it in about,

01:02:05.640 | roughly about 2,500 feet, give or take a little.

01:02:08.680 | So you go, that is a really tight vertical turn.

01:02:13.040 | For example, the A6, in order to do that,

01:02:14.880 | was about 9,000 feet.

01:02:17.080 | And we look at a building that's 2,000 feet high

01:02:19.280 | and think that is tall.

01:02:21.120 | - Right.

01:02:21.960 | - All right, so in aviation sense,

01:02:23.220 | when you're starting to do vertical displacement maneuvers,

01:02:25.760 | going from 35,000 feet down to 20,000 feet

01:02:28.240 | in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane,

01:02:30.600 | because the human brain thinks, we really are,

01:02:33.640 | we like to be flat. - 2D, I see what you mean.

01:02:35.240 | - We think 2D.

01:02:36.080 | So if I'm fighting, how you really get an advantage

01:02:38.600 | when you're fighting another airplane

01:02:40.840 | is to work in the vertical.

01:02:42.780 | Because most people will do like one move in the vertical

01:02:45.320 | and then they wanna start to flatten out

01:02:46.720 | because that's where we're comfortable.

01:02:48.200 | - Yeah, it's really profound.

01:02:49.160 | Do you still think in like stacks of 2D layers or no?

01:02:53.360 | Or do you truly start to think in that third dimension,

01:02:56.920 | like the rich 3D world of fighting?

01:03:01.920 | Do you start to actually be able

01:03:04.960 | to really experience the 3D nature?

01:03:09.140 | - You do, because you have to project

01:03:10.560 | where you're gonna be.

01:03:11.400 | So you have to know the performance of the airplane,

01:03:13.040 | knowing that, hey, if I do this maneuver

01:03:14.920 | that I am gonna go, it's kinda like when I talk about

01:03:18.440 | when we were chasing the Tic Tac.

01:03:20.040 | So the Tic Tac's coming up and I'm at about,

01:03:22.160 | you know, and I've been doing this for at the time, 16 years.

01:03:25.600 | So I'm looking and I'm going, hey, I'm here,

01:03:27.720 | he's there on the other side of the circle.

01:03:29.400 | I'm gonna do a vertical displacement.

01:03:30.840 | I'm gonna go like this.

01:03:31.680 | I'm gonna cut across the circle and I'm not going to him.

01:03:33.840 | I'm going out in front of him.

01:03:34.760 | I'm going over here.

01:03:35.800 | 'Cause I know that by the time I get through this maneuver,

01:03:37.760 | that's where he's gonna be.

01:03:38.600 | And I'm trying to basically join up on him.

01:03:40.920 | But I also had to look at it to go,

01:03:43.420 | do I have enough altitude to do this?

01:03:44.800 | 'Cause what I didn't, if we're here and I do this,

01:03:46.360 | I'm gonna end up over here and he's gonna be above me.

01:03:48.240 | And then I have to get that energy back to get up to him.

01:03:51.800 | And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade.

01:03:54.480 | So you have, this is really important

01:03:57.840 | when you're fighting airplanes

01:03:59.200 | and you're really max performing.

01:04:01.120 | So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo,

01:04:03.920 | he's literally playing with it.

01:04:05.280 | He's got a finite amount of energy, right?

01:04:07.320 | He can add some with the motors and stuff,

01:04:08.960 | but what you're really doing is it's a trade off

01:04:10.920 | and you can trade off kinetic energy, speed for altitude,

01:04:14.800 | which gives you potential energy.

01:04:16.560 | The other piece is, is I can trade some

01:04:18.480 | of that kinetic energy for performance.

01:04:20.800 | Because I know if I do a nice easy turn,

01:04:22.960 | the airplane will make it at what doesn't bleed energy.

01:04:25.520 | But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S,

01:04:28.880 | that it's gonna cost me energy.

01:04:30.000 | So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right,

01:04:33.200 | I'm gonna come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots.

01:04:35.480 | Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy,

01:04:38.840 | I converted that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned

01:04:42.640 | and bled off the wings in order for me

01:04:44.600 | to get that high performance turn.

01:04:46.360 | And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at

01:04:49.760 | and it's your overall energy package.

01:04:51.960 | So you can have a guy that's behind you

01:04:53.560 | that looks like he's going to kill you,

01:04:55.280 | but if this jet is at 400 knots

01:04:57.040 | and this jet is at 110 knots,

01:04:58.960 | this jet's just gonna pull away, drive around

01:05:00.800 | and kill him in about 30 seconds, right?

01:05:03.480 | It's overall energy package and that's that,

01:05:06.560 | you gotta be constantly evaluating where you're at.

01:05:08.680 | And this is that 80% solution.

01:05:10.000 | Can I afford to do this or not?

01:05:11.160 | Yes, no, and you have literally a split second

01:05:12.840 | to make the decision.

01:05:13.680 | - The most incredible dance of human decision-making.

01:05:17.120 | It's just incredible.

01:05:19.080 | I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac

01:05:21.400 | and I definitely will,

01:05:23.000 | but let me ask the one last ridiculous subjective question.

01:05:27.520 | What's the greatest plane ever made in history?

01:05:32.840 | You don't get to like-

01:05:36.520 | - From pure speed, I would say SR-71.

01:05:39.040 | I think it's an engineering marvel

01:05:40.080 | that was actually developed in the '50s by Kelly Johnson,

01:05:42.320 | you know, Skunk Works, for what that was able to do.

01:05:45.360 | And then when you get into history of it,

01:05:46.560 | you know how they actually built,

01:05:48.320 | the CIA actually made like six companies

01:05:52.120 | in order to buy the titanium from Russia

01:05:54.240 | to bring it back and build an airplane out of titanium

01:05:56.760 | that we would fly over Russia.

01:05:58.680 | To me, that's an incredible-

01:06:00.400 | - Engineering marvel.

01:06:01.320 | - I think that like the X-15, you know-

01:06:03.680 | - By the way, this SR, sorry to interrupt,

01:06:05.600 | the SR-71 still holds the speed record

01:06:10.200 | for any plane as far as I can understand.

01:06:13.280 | - Yeah, what's funny when you get into it is it's,

01:06:15.800 | remember, fast is relative.

01:06:18.160 | And when I say that, I mean,

01:06:20.000 | so if you're going 3,000 miles an hour,

01:06:23.080 | 100 feet above the ground,

01:06:25.360 | you're going 3,000 miles an hour through,

01:06:28.440 | you know, that's how fast you're going.

01:06:30.120 | When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed

01:06:32.800 | and there's a, you know, your ground speed.

01:06:34.960 | So your indicated airspeed is really

01:06:36.960 | how fast the air is going past your airplane.

01:06:39.040 | Well, the air is so thin up there,

01:06:41.040 | you may only be showing like 300 knots.

01:06:44.680 | But at 300 knots, you're really doing

01:06:46.680 | 2,500 miles an hour over the ground.

01:06:48.760 | So, you know, like we would take the airplanes

01:06:51.160 | up to 50,000 feet when we had to do

01:06:53.240 | full the maintenance check flights on them.

01:06:55.400 | So when you're doing 200, you know, and some odd knots,

01:06:59.000 | it's actually slow for the airplane.

01:07:00.400 | It's, you know, you're getting, you know,

01:07:02.480 | it's kind of like, it's not, you know,

01:07:03.960 | there's maneuvering speeds.

01:07:05.000 | You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet,

01:07:07.600 | that I have the full capability of the airfoil.

01:07:09.680 | If I'm below that speed, I'm gonna stall the airfoil

01:07:12.160 | before I get to the maximum G.

01:07:14.640 | Okay?

01:07:15.480 | So when you look at something like that, you go,

01:07:17.600 | well, is it really going fast?

01:07:19.360 | And when you look at an SR-71 that's flying upwards of,

01:07:22.280 | you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air is so thin,

01:07:25.760 | you know, just like the X-15,

01:07:26.840 | you can get to a much higher speed,

01:07:28.920 | but the relative speed of the air going over you

01:07:30.920 | is actually relatively low.

01:07:32.600 | So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be

01:07:34.560 | if you were down low, but because you're going fast

01:07:37.840 | to get enough air over your pitot-static system

01:07:39.680 | to show that you're going 300 knots, you're screaming.

01:07:43.400 | I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the,

01:07:46.200 | well, soon to be Vice Admiral White.

01:07:48.940 | So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78.

01:07:53.940 | I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78.

01:07:55.960 | And it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach too.

01:07:57.920 | And then it-

01:07:59.240 | - What's that feel like?

01:08:00.080 | Or is it just like-

01:08:01.200 | - When you get that fast, it started,

01:08:02.520 | to me, it got a little bit weird.

01:08:03.800 | 'Cause you realize in your brain, and I did,

01:08:07.160 | that there's no out.

01:08:08.160 | If something happens, I can't eject.

01:08:10.440 | The ejection would kill me.

01:08:11.800 | - Isn't that kind of liberating in a way?

01:08:13.320 | (laughing)

01:08:14.880 | - Or no, that, okay, maybe not.

01:08:16.320 | - You always wanna push the limit.

01:08:17.640 | You know, it's like how fast,

01:08:18.600 | I could have got it going faster.

01:08:19.720 | It was literally still accelerating when I stopped,

01:08:21.920 | but I had, it was fuel limited and space limited.

01:08:25.680 | 'Cause I, you know, I'm off the coast of California,

01:08:28.320 | Big Sur, and I'm going, and I can see Pebble Beach

01:08:30.480 | out in the distance, you know,

01:08:31.800 | the whole Monterey Peninsula.

01:08:33.120 | - You're just going fast.

01:08:34.040 | - And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute.

01:08:37.000 | I mean, you're screaming.

01:08:38.480 | - Yeah.

01:08:39.320 | - I mean, that's, and then you have to turn,

01:08:40.920 | well, the airplane didn't have anything on it.

01:08:42.440 | It was a slicked off Super Hornet.

01:08:43.720 | So it was basically just the airplane,

01:08:45.040 | no pylons, no pods, no nothing.

01:08:47.400 | And then we had to get it turned around

01:08:48.800 | 'cause we got to go to the exit point for the area.

01:08:50.400 | And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic.

01:08:53.440 | And there's a bunch of things that are disabled,

01:08:55.400 | like the speed brakes that normally we pop out

01:08:57.320 | when you're going that fast, they don't,

01:08:58.640 | because the Super Hornet really doesn't have speed brakes.

01:09:00.440 | It deforms the flight controls.

01:09:02.320 | They don't function.

01:09:04.520 | So you really, you're trying to maneuver.

01:09:06.440 | And when you're going that fast,

01:09:07.840 | you can't turn because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach

01:09:12.040 | is a pretty big turn.

01:09:13.400 | So it's just, it's crazy.

01:09:16.440 | - It's incredible that a human can do this.

01:09:18.720 | And a human can engineer that,

01:09:20.960 | the system which allows another human

01:09:22.800 | to control that system.

01:09:24.200 | - It's, to me, it's, I think it's just,

01:09:27.960 | it's a great experience.

01:09:29.440 | - Was it sad to see the SR-71 go?

01:09:31.720 | I think it was during your career.

01:09:33.320 | I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes?

01:09:37.680 | - We would see it flying when I was flying Hornets,

01:09:39.520 | 'cause we, West Coast flies in, it's called R-2508,

01:09:43.400 | which is, covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards.

01:09:47.160 | It's a huge area.

01:09:48.320 | It's actually, I think the,

01:09:49.280 | we had a guy from Switzerland come out

01:09:50.720 | 'cause they had Hornets and he's like,

01:09:52.080 | "This is bigger than our whole country."

01:09:54.080 | 'Cause it's a pretty big area in California that you fly.

01:09:57.280 | But you would see the SR-71s, they had a loop

01:09:59.040 | 'cause NASA was flying them out of Palmdale.

01:10:01.680 | And they would take off and they'd go up

01:10:02.840 | towards Washington State and Montana and they do a loop.

01:10:05.280 | And so you'd see them coming back down.

01:10:06.760 | They descend out of, you know, above 60,000.

01:10:08.760 | You'd see them, they get contrails, you know,

01:10:10.440 | the white lines behind airplanes.

01:10:12.120 | And it'd come down and hit the tanker

01:10:13.320 | and then they'd go back up.

01:10:14.200 | So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.

01:10:18.080 | But, you know, I think with money, age,

01:10:22.840 | the advent of satellites, you know,

01:10:27.040 | 'cause they're everywhere now.

01:10:28.040 | I mean, you've got commercial companies

01:10:29.160 | putting satellites up.

01:10:30.240 | How much of that need was really there?

01:10:33.040 | 'Cause you gotta remember when those things started

01:10:34.440 | in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around.

01:10:36.680 | You know, it was the U-2 and the SR-71

01:10:38.840 | that were out there doing that work.

01:10:41.240 | So at the time it was needed, it was at the,

01:10:43.960 | if you think about it, really,

01:10:44.920 | it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time.

01:10:47.280 | - Yeah. - I mean, literally,

01:10:48.760 | we have yet to pass that.

01:10:50.120 | And then you also asked, well, is there a need to pass that?

01:10:51.920 | I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space.

01:10:53.640 | So do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast?

01:10:56.960 | I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics

01:10:59.400 | where you don't have to put a person in

01:11:00.640 | and it does all kinds of crazy stuff.

01:11:01.880 | - You know, the work with automation,

01:11:03.160 | all that kind of stuff, yeah.

01:11:05.280 | - So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you

01:11:08.520 | is you happen to be one of, at least in my view,

01:11:11.720 | one of the most credible witnesses in history

01:11:15.160 | of somebody who's witnessed a UFO,

01:11:19.480 | literally an identified flying object.

01:11:21.960 | And not only witnessed, but got to,

01:11:27.200 | how do you put it, like chase it, essentially?

01:11:29.200 | - Chased it. - Chased it.

01:11:31.320 | So let me just lay out, I think it's easier

01:11:33.880 | than you telling the story, maybe me and my

01:11:37.760 | dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories,

01:11:40.360 | I understand it, and then maybe you can correct me.

01:11:43.400 | So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton,

01:11:48.400 | which is one of the carriers.

01:11:52.880 | - That's a cruiser.

01:11:54.360 | - It's a cruiser. - It's a cruiser.

01:11:55.560 | - So you can't land on a--

01:11:57.120 | - No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back.

01:11:59.280 | - Gotcha, and it has weapons on it, okay, gotcha.

01:12:01.600 | - It shoots the missiles up.

01:12:02.940 | But it has a nice radar, just like--

01:12:04.440 | - It's got an incredible SPY-1 system, phased array,

01:12:07.160 | four panels, so it looks in quadrants.

01:12:10.060 | - Perfect, so they started noticing on November 10th

01:12:14.240 | that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet

01:12:18.000 | with speed of, what I guess is considered

01:12:21.160 | a low speed of 120 miles an hour,

01:12:23.080 | don't know what that's in knots,

01:12:24.360 | but on the coast of California.

01:12:27.520 | So, and they kept detecting these objects

01:12:29.520 | for just about a week.

01:12:31.840 | Then comes in like your part of the story,

01:12:36.840 | which is on November 14th,

01:12:39.100 | from the, I guess it's from the USS Nimitz,

01:12:44.120 | you flew and witnessed a 40-foot long

01:12:49.820 | white tic-tac-shaped object with no wings,

01:12:53.700 | flying in ways you've never thought possible,

01:12:56.500 | and in some interview somewhere you said,

01:12:59.220 | "I think it was not from this world."

01:13:01.820 | So there's a mysterious aspect to this object,

01:13:05.180 | to this entire situation.

01:13:07.500 | There's videos involved,

01:13:09.320 | the video of a flare forward looking infrared--

01:13:14.320 | - Receiver.

01:13:17.540 | - Receiver, there's also visible light,

01:13:19.980 | so you can switch--

01:13:20.900 | - Yeah, it's TV mode.

01:13:21.820 | - It's a TV mode, so that gives you visible light,

01:13:24.420 | and then it has IR mode.

01:13:26.580 | And Chad Underwood recorded that video.

01:13:29.900 | So, and those are the videos that were released

01:13:31.740 | by the Pentagon later, one of the three videos.

01:13:34.780 | The two other videos, Go Fast and Gimbal,

01:13:39.780 | were recorded in 2000 and something, '14 or '15,

01:13:43.620 | on the East Coast of the United States.

01:13:48.340 | They had different kinds of objects,

01:13:50.760 | but they were weird in the same kind of way,

01:13:53.500 | in terms of at least the videos and the experiences

01:13:57.940 | that people have described were similar

01:14:01.220 | in the degree of weirdness.

01:14:03.780 | But the difference is, actually,

01:14:07.380 | on the East Coast, the 2014 case,

01:14:10.280 | very few people have spoken about it.

01:14:13.140 | And even in your situation,

01:14:14.820 | very few people have spoken about it.

01:14:16.660 | So there's a mystery to it,

01:14:18.900 | but in some sense, this is a quite simple story

01:14:23.240 | without much resolution to the mystery.

01:14:26.540 | And it's fascinating.

01:14:28.740 | And there's a lot of opinions.

01:14:31.380 | There's division of opinions,

01:14:33.500 | because it's a mysterious, I mean,

01:14:35.900 | it truly is a UFO, in the sense that UAP.

01:14:40.240 | What is it?

01:14:42.560 | Unidentified aerial phenomena.

01:14:45.260 | So can you maybe correct me

01:14:48.340 | on any of the things I've gotten wrong,

01:14:50.140 | elaborate on some key things,

01:14:52.020 | and describe that experience in general?

01:14:54.020 | - So here's what I know.

01:14:55.060 | So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train,

01:15:00.060 | and they canceled the mission.

01:15:03.380 | And they sent us down.

01:15:04.220 | There's all kinds of rumors out here.

01:15:05.320 | There's all kinds of, after this has come out.

01:15:07.580 | So originally it was the four of us.

01:15:09.580 | There's two jets, two people in each jet.

01:15:11.740 | They're F-18Fs.

01:15:12.580 | Okay?

01:15:15.180 | There is no video from our event.

01:15:17.540 | It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing.

01:15:19.780 | And then when we came back and told it,

01:15:21.540 | when Chad and his pilot took off,

01:15:23.700 | that's when Chad got the video of it.

01:15:25.220 | And we're like, that's it.

01:15:26.420 | That's exactly, that's it.

01:15:27.720 | - So when you say eyeballs,

01:15:30.460 | you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing?

01:15:32.860 | - Yeah.

01:15:33.700 | So as we're flying out, we get vectored.

01:15:35.740 | They come up and tell us,

01:15:36.580 | hey, we're gonna cancel training.

01:15:37.400 | This is a USS Princeton.

01:15:38.460 | So this is a Seagis cruiser.

01:15:40.240 | So we're talking to one controller,

01:15:42.160 | who is like, hey, sir,

01:15:46.460 | first you ask what ordinance we have on board.

01:15:48.220 | And I laugh, 'cause we don't carry live ordinance

01:15:49.780 | in training typically, because bad stuff happens.

01:15:52.120 | Usually someone forgets to put a switch on

01:15:53.820 | and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane

01:15:55.940 | and it's not good.

01:15:57.100 | So we had what's called a CATM-9,

01:15:59.300 | which is really just a blue tube

01:16:00.740 | with the AIM-9 seeker on the front of it,

01:16:02.700 | which is an IR missile.

01:16:04.080 | So there's only two ways to get it off.

01:16:06.660 | You can beat it off with a sledgehammer.

01:16:07.860 | You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it

01:16:10.100 | and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back in

01:16:11.980 | that hold it on.

01:16:13.060 | When it really fires the impulse from the engine,

01:16:15.260 | actually throws the lugs forward and breaks that release

01:16:17.740 | and it comes off down the rail.

01:16:19.220 | That's how it works.

01:16:21.180 | So they said, "Hey, well, we have real world tasking."

01:16:23.880 | So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot,

01:16:28.200 | she maneuvers the airplane to the left-hand side of me.

01:16:31.620 | So she's kind of stepped up like this.

01:16:33.800 | And I'll use your mic box to start.

01:16:36.460 | So as we're going out,

01:16:37.300 | they're calling ranges are called BRA calls,

01:16:39.080 | bearing range and altitude.

01:16:40.160 | And they're telling us, "Hey, it's at 40 miles

01:16:43.080 | or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles."

01:16:44.920 | So they're saying, "Hey, 270, 30, 20,000."

01:16:48.600 | That's all they say.

01:16:49.760 | So we got our radars and we had mechanically scanned radars

01:16:52.900 | at the time, APG-73.

01:16:55.200 | Good piece of gear, APG-79, new one's way better.

01:16:58.220 | But anyway.

01:16:59.080 | - And I apologize if I interrupt the story,

01:17:01.580 | hopefully it's useful.

01:17:02.780 | But they're telling you a location of a thing

01:17:05.180 | that you should look at?

01:17:06.180 | - Yep, they're telling us.

01:17:07.140 | They have a contact on their radar.

01:17:08.500 | They don't know what it is.

01:17:09.340 | They just have a blip.

01:17:10.180 | They have a little blip.

01:17:11.580 | Well, they've been watching these things.

01:17:12.780 | And what he told me is they had been looking at these things

01:17:14.900 | as we're driving.

01:17:15.740 | He says, "Sir, we've been tracking these things

01:17:16.580 | for about two weeks."

01:17:17.420 | We had been at sea for two weeks.

01:17:18.620 | He goes, "This is the first time we've had planes airborne.

01:17:21.300 | We want you to go see what these are."

01:17:23.220 | - Gotcha.

01:17:24.060 | So they kind of interrupt the mission to say,

01:17:26.240 | "Check it out."

01:17:27.080 | - That's exactly it.

01:17:27.900 | So we start driving out there.

01:17:29.620 | And as we get down to, he's going, you know,

01:17:32.740 | 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles.

01:17:35.220 | And then you get to a point where they call merge plot,

01:17:36.980 | which means we are inside of the resolution cell

01:17:39.580 | of the radar.

01:17:40.420 | 'Cause radars don't see everything.

01:17:41.820 | So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution.

01:17:45.820 | Right?

01:17:46.660 | So, and it's basically, think of a little cube.

01:17:48.260 | So they can, and the whole sky is made

01:17:50.100 | of all these little cubes and they're looking.

01:17:52.300 | So if you're inside a cube with something

01:17:54.220 | and you're both inside the same little cube,

01:17:56.180 | then the radar can only see one thing.

01:17:57.980 | Does that make sense?

01:17:58.820 | - Yep.

01:17:59.640 | - So they call merge plot.

01:18:01.140 | Well, when we say merge plot to us,

01:18:03.060 | it means he's right around,

01:18:04.340 | something's around you, get your head out.

01:18:05.860 | So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore.

01:18:07.900 | And the Wizzos, the Wizzos can look,

01:18:09.140 | but everyone, it's heads out.

01:18:10.660 | When they say merge plot,

01:18:12.040 | you're done looking at your displays inside,

01:18:13.640 | you're doing this and you're trying to find it.

01:18:16.920 | So as we look out to the right and you look high and low,

01:18:19.240 | 'cause he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up.

01:18:21.680 | Now keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away.

01:18:24.240 | So it can't see the surface and you can do

01:18:27.280 | your standard radar horizon calculation and go,

01:18:29.440 | hey, it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel.

01:18:33.120 | Can he really see, you know,

01:18:34.760 | there are radars that can see around the curve,

01:18:36.720 | but let's just say that it can't at this time.

01:18:40.160 | So you go, is it, you know, where is it at?

01:18:42.640 | So as we're looking around, we see,

01:18:45.320 | you know, this is a, it's a clear day.

01:18:47.400 | There's no clouds and there's no white caps.

01:18:51.200 | It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day.

01:18:54.400 | If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind.

01:18:57.320 | And you just want to kind of go out there

01:18:58.600 | and you're not going to get beat up

01:18:59.800 | and have white water come out.

01:19:01.080 | It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.

01:19:02.880 | - How many miles out do you see like seven,

01:19:05.000 | like you see just, it's a clear day.

01:19:07.240 | - That's 50, it's unrestricted visibility.

01:19:08.840 | You can see literally all the way to the horizon.

01:19:10.440 | It's just clear, it's nothing.

01:19:12.600 | And we're basically off the coast.

01:19:13.800 | If you look at a map and you go San Diego

01:19:15.720 | and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that.

01:19:18.800 | And we're probably about, by the time this all hits,

01:19:22.120 | we're probably, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know,

01:19:26.320 | but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast.

01:19:28.280 | - Perfect visibility.

01:19:29.320 | - From 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed.

01:19:31.000 | You can do the calculation.

01:19:32.040 | You can see stuff, you know, you'll see land 50 miles away.

01:19:35.080 | You can see, you know, and when you're looking at a continent

01:19:38.160 | it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island.

01:19:40.040 | I mean, you're looking at Mexico.

01:19:41.600 | - And you can see on the white caps in the water.

01:19:43.480 | If there is any.

01:19:44.480 | - Oh yeah, they're easy.

01:19:45.680 | Yeah, for us, we look at it because we know

01:19:48.280 | if it's natural wind or, so if it's a really white cap

01:19:50.960 | windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving

01:19:52.960 | when we land on it.

01:19:53.800 | It makes it actually easier.

01:19:55.440 | If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight

01:19:57.360 | 'cause it has to make its own wind when we land,

01:19:59.160 | which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay.

01:20:01.960 | And it creates what's called, we call it the burble,

01:20:04.080 | but when the air flows across the flight deck,

01:20:06.000 | it drops behind the ship, you know?

01:20:08.240 | And then it kicks back up.

01:20:09.640 | So when you're coming aboard to land,

01:20:10.920 | it's gonna make you go up a little bit

01:20:12.200 | and then you're gonna fall

01:20:13.080 | and you gotta anticipate that to stay on glide slope.

01:20:15.680 | So we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there

01:20:20.600 | with the waves and the wind.

01:20:21.720 | So we look, there's no waves, there's no wind,

01:20:24.120 | there's no white caps, and we look down

01:20:26.280 | and we see white water.

01:20:28.320 | So if you put a piece of land, a seamount,

01:20:31.200 | below the surface, like, you know,

01:20:32.840 | even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough,

01:20:35.160 | as the waves come in, you know,

01:20:36.680 | waves have height and length.

01:20:38.840 | When they come in, that's what happens on the shore.

01:20:40.760 | When a wave comes in, it hits

01:20:42.080 | and then it starts to collapse

01:20:43.360 | and it pushes the wave height up

01:20:44.680 | because it can't go anymore.

01:20:46.120 | And then it breaks off the top and you get-

01:20:46.960 | - And it crashes, yeah.

01:20:47.800 | And that's where you get the white.

01:20:49.440 | - So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount,

01:20:51.880 | you'll see stuff come in, the wave will crash

01:20:53.760 | and you'll get white water.

01:20:54.760 | You can go out when it's high tide

01:20:57.120 | and any one of the coasts,

01:20:59.040 | you can go out here off of Boston and go,

01:21:00.960 | "Hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks

01:21:02.640 | and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered,"

01:21:04.320 | but there'll be white water around those rocks.

01:21:05.800 | You'll be able to tell there's something

01:21:06.760 | underneath the surface.

01:21:07.760 | Does that make sense?

01:21:08.600 | - Yep.

01:21:09.440 | - So that's what it was.

01:21:10.280 | We don't see an object 'cause there's all kinds of,

01:21:12.040 | "Oh, they saw another craft below the wave."

01:21:14.840 | We didn't see anything below the water.

01:21:16.680 | We just saw white water.

01:21:18.040 | But the white water, and I like to shape it,

01:21:20.040 | you can say it was across.

01:21:21.120 | I say it's about the size of a 737.

01:21:22.960 | So it looks like if you took a 737,

01:21:25.360 | put it about 15, 20 feet below the water

01:21:27.520 | so the wave's breaking over the top

01:21:28.920 | and you're gonna get white water where the plane is at,

01:21:30.720 | you'd see this kind of shape.

01:21:32.480 | So it looks like a cross.

01:21:33.720 | So as we're looking down off the right side,

01:21:36.720 | the back seat or any other airplane, Jim,

01:21:39.320 | says, this is that talking in partials again,

01:21:41.480 | he says, "Hey, Skipper, do you?"

01:21:43.120 | And that's about what he gets out of his mouth.

01:21:44.680 | And I go, "What the hell is that?"

01:21:46.960 | In a nice way.

01:21:47.800 | - Do you see that essentially is what he's saying?

01:21:48.640 | - So we see the white water,

01:21:50.240 | and that's what draws our eyes down there.

01:21:51.640 | Otherwise, we'd have never seen it.

01:21:53.080 | So we see this white water.

01:21:53.920 | - I would have loved to see the look on your face

01:21:55.720 | when you see that.

01:21:56.560 | Like, "What?" - And then we see

01:21:57.380 | this little white tic-tac

01:21:59.120 | 'cause we're about 20,000 feet above it.

01:22:00.960 | And it's doing, it's going basically north, south,

01:22:03.640 | and then east, west, north, south.

01:22:04.920 | It's abrupt.

01:22:05.760 | It's very abrupt.

01:22:06.580 | It's not like a helicopter.

01:22:08.860 | If a helicopter's going sideways,

01:22:10.700 | and it goes once, it's going sideways, left,

01:22:12.420 | and it goes right, what it'll do is it'll go,

01:22:13.900 | it's got a speed, it slows down 'cause there's inertia,

01:22:16.900 | and it stops, and then it goes back the other way.

01:22:18.660 | This thing's not.

01:22:19.500 | It's like left, right, left, right, with no-

01:22:21.980 | - So moving in ways that doesn't feel intuitive to you

01:22:26.260 | of the things you've seen in the past.

01:22:27.980 | - So as a pilot, the first thing you think is,

01:22:30.300 | it's a helicopter, right?

01:22:32.400 | So you go, "Oh."

01:22:33.580 | What is, 'cause when we see it's moving,

01:22:34.860 | we're like, "Oh, helicopter."

01:22:36.700 | So the first thing you look for to see

01:22:37.860 | if it's a helicopter when they're doing that,

01:22:39.380 | because usually when they get down there

01:22:41.100 | towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash.

01:22:43.700 | You see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water,

01:22:45.740 | it kicks, water comes up the sides 'cause the downdraft,

01:22:48.980 | you know, like a thunderstorm will do that.

01:22:50.340 | It pushes the air down,

01:22:51.320 | and then it has to come up the sides.

01:22:53.200 | So you see it, and you go, "Well, there's no rotor wash.

01:22:56.540 | "What is that thing?"

01:22:58.280 | So by this time we're driving around,

01:22:59.740 | so as we're, if we were at the six o'clock,

01:23:01.160 | we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position,

01:23:03.220 | and we're just watching this thing.

01:23:04.300 | And it's just, it's still pointing north, south,

01:23:05.900 | and it's going left, right,

01:23:07.280 | and it's kind of moving around the object.

01:23:09.460 | And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself,

01:23:11.700 | it was biased towards the bottom half.

01:23:13.300 | So if you've got the east, west,

01:23:14.700 | and then the north, south kind of across,

01:23:16.800 | it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out.

01:23:18.820 | It's just kind of moving around up, down, left,

01:23:20.220 | and it's crossing over it, and it's going up.

01:23:21.580 | It's just kind of, so now we're like,

01:23:23.380 | "Oh, what the hell is that?"

01:23:25.300 | So then I go, "Hey, I'm gonna go check it out."

01:23:28.380 | And the other pilot says, "I'm gonna stay up here."

01:23:31.180 | And I said, "Yeah, stay up high."

01:23:32.740 | 'Cause now we get a different perspective.

01:23:35.220 | So she's up here, and I'm down here.

01:23:37.660 | As I'm descending, she can watch,

01:23:39.820 | 'cause right now all I'm watching is the Tic Tac.

01:23:42.780 | She can watch me and the Tic Tac.

01:23:44.580 | So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on,

01:23:46.820 | which is really important.

01:23:47.940 | You know, you can hear people say it's high cover,

01:23:49.780 | whatever, she's watching me.

01:23:52.100 | Which is, it's perfect as the story goes on,

01:23:54.380 | 'cause it gives us two perspectives,

01:23:56.900 | you know, of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us

01:24:00.060 | when that thing disappears.

01:24:01.180 | And they don't, you know, 'cause if it just like,

01:24:02.540 | "Oh, I lost it."

01:24:03.860 | And they go, "No, it's over to the right.

01:24:04.900 | "We can still see it."

01:24:05.740 | We all lost it at the same time.

01:24:07.700 | So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock

01:24:09.660 | and I'm descending, and it's an easy descent.

01:24:11.020 | I'm doing about 300 knots,

01:24:12.380 | which is a really good airspeed for the airplane

01:24:14.820 | for maneuvering, 'cause I have everything available to me

01:24:18.060 | at that speed.

01:24:19.540 | So I'm coming down, and as I get to 12 o'clock,

01:24:22.180 | as the Tic Tac's doing this,

01:24:23.020 | it literally, it's like it's aware of us,

01:24:24.820 | and it just goes, "Bloop."

01:24:25.700 | And it kind of points out towards the west

01:24:28.220 | and starts coming up.

01:24:29.540 | So now it's obviously knows that we're there,

01:24:31.420 | whatever this thing is, it knows that we're there.

01:24:33.780 | So as we drive around, it's coming up

01:24:35.460 | and I'm just coming down, I'm just watching it.

01:24:37.060 | Now you gotta remember, this whole thing is like,

01:24:38.460 | this is like five minutes.

01:24:39.620 | This is not like we saw it and it was gone.

01:24:41.740 | Or, "Ooh, I saw lights in the sky and they were gone."

01:24:44.340 | We watch this thing on a crystal clear day

01:24:47.660 | with four trained observers to watch this thing fly around.

01:24:50.580 | So we're like, "Okay."

01:24:52.020 | So I get over to the eight o'clock position,

01:24:54.060 | and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet above it,

01:24:56.060 | and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15K,

01:24:58.540 | I think it is, I think that's my story, is about 15.

01:25:00.340 | That's just estimating.

01:25:01.780 | So you can see it's just a really easy descent because--

01:25:05.060 | - So what's 15K?

01:25:06.260 | - 15,000 feet.

01:25:07.300 | - I thought it was 8,000.

01:25:08.700 | - No, the other airplane ends up about,

01:25:10.980 | so you can go back to that.

01:25:11.820 | - Okay, gotcha.

01:25:12.660 | - So they're still at about 20,000 feet.

01:25:14.420 | So they're driving around above us.

01:25:15.260 | - Okay, and then you're slowly--

01:25:16.100 | - And I'm descending, they're staying up there.

01:25:17.420 | So I'm kind of doing this as a driver, okay?

01:25:20.820 | So I'm looking at this thing

01:25:22.020 | and it's about the two o'clock position,

01:25:23.620 | we're about the eight o'clock position,

01:25:24.740 | and I'm like, "Oh, I've got enough altitudes.

01:25:27.100 | "I'm gonna cut across the circle."

01:25:28.700 | I tell the guy in my back seat, "Dude, I'm gonna do this."

01:25:31.620 | He's like, "Go for it, skip," 'cause I was a skipper.

01:25:34.620 | So I cut across the bottom.

01:25:36.220 | So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude

01:25:39.740 | as this thing's coming out, I'm gonna meet it.

01:25:41.620 | And I'm driving and I get to probably,

01:25:44.860 | I'm probably about a half mile away,

01:25:46.140 | which you think, "Well, a half mile's pretty far."

01:25:47.540 | Half mile in aviation, it's nothing.

01:25:50.300 | I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane,

01:25:52.500 | you can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile.

01:25:54.380 | You can see pretty good detail.

01:25:56.140 | So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose.

01:25:58.500 | So now I'm basically pointing back towards east.

01:26:00.220 | So I'm cutting across 'cause I'm going

01:26:01.780 | to the three o'clock position, it's at two o'clock,

01:26:03.500 | and I'm gonna meet it at three o'clock.

01:26:05.620 | So as I do this, it just accelerates and disappears.

01:26:08.780 | So this happens at around, estimate in about 12,000 feet.

01:26:11.780 | So they're at 20, so they've got about 8,000 foot

01:26:13.580 | of altitude above us when this happens.

01:26:16.060 | And it just, as it crosses our nose,

01:26:17.860 | it just accelerates and literally in less than,

01:26:21.140 | probably less than a half second, it just goes,

01:26:22.700 | and it's gone.

01:26:24.260 | And so we're like, and the first thing is,

01:26:27.020 | "Dude, did you guys see it?"

01:26:29.140 | The other airplane's like, "It's gone.

01:26:30.860 | "We have no idea where it's at."

01:26:32.580 | So we kind of spin around real quick.

01:26:33.980 | I go, "Well, let's see what's down here."

01:26:35.380 | And I turn around, we're looking for the whitewater.

01:26:37.740 | And we can't, the whitewater's gone.

01:26:38.900 | There's nothing.

01:26:39.740 | It's literally all blue.

01:26:41.100 | So now you go, and I remember telling the guy

01:26:43.660 | in my back seat, I go, "Dude, I don't know about you,

01:26:46.700 | "but I'm pretty weirded out 'cause this is,

01:26:48.580 | "I mean, I had at the time, like 30 some hundred hours

01:26:52.140 | "of flying, I'd been doing it for 18 years."

01:26:53.740 | - It's nothing like anything you've seen.

01:26:55.500 | - No, no.

01:26:56.340 | So as we turn, we go, "Oh, well, let's just go back."

01:26:59.820 | 'Cause now I got to put on my real hat,

01:27:02.340 | which we have to train 'cause we're getting ready

01:27:03.700 | to deploy to overseas.

01:27:06.280 | So we got to get our training done.

01:27:07.380 | So that's my mindset, especially as a CO,

01:27:09.460 | 'cause I got to get training out of the flight time

01:27:11.820 | because I'm responsible to do that.

01:27:13.100 | So, "Hey, let's go back."

01:27:14.420 | And the guy who's going to be the bad guys

01:27:16.880 | is the CO of the Marine Squadron.

01:27:18.940 | And so Cheeks is at the,

01:27:20.300 | he's listening to all this happen.

01:27:22.180 | 'Cause he's just like, I don't know.

01:27:23.340 | 'Cause when he first went out, they were going to do him,

01:27:25.340 | but the little Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F-18Cs,

01:27:28.460 | don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets.

01:27:30.820 | So he had launched first and they were going to do him.

01:27:33.260 | And then when they knew we were off the deck,

01:27:34.620 | they just told him, "Hey, go to your cap point down South.

01:27:37.300 | And we're going to send,

01:27:39.260 | we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets."

01:27:42.020 | - What's the cap point, by the way?

01:27:43.300 | - That's where we hold.

01:27:44.380 | So it's called a combat air patrol point.

01:27:46.580 | So we're just going to hold at one end.

01:27:48.100 | He's going to hold at the other end.

01:27:49.840 | It's kind of like, "Hey, you guys are going to get each."

01:27:51.420 | It's thinking about, if it's a football field,

01:27:53.420 | we're going to sit on one goal line.

01:27:54.640 | He's going to sit on the other goal line.

01:27:55.860 | And when they say, "Go," we're going to run at each other

01:27:57.580 | and try and do something in the middle of the field

01:27:59.260 | and then go back to our reset points.

01:28:01.700 | - So you're talking to him.

01:28:03.340 | He's listening to all the stuff.

01:28:04.940 | - He's just listening.

01:28:05.780 | We don't talk to him at all.

01:28:06.600 | He's just listening.

01:28:07.440 | He just dials up 'cause they know that,

01:28:08.260 | we all know the frequencies.

01:28:09.260 | So he's listening to what's going on.

01:28:11.420 | 'Cause he's like, 'cause they canceled training.

01:28:12.780 | So what else is he going to do?

01:28:13.620 | He's just going to hang out there and do circles

01:28:15.100 | while he's waiting for him and his wingman.

01:28:16.580 | So they're listening to all this go on.

01:28:18.700 | - And then at this point you move on.

01:28:20.420 | - Yeah, we come back up to train.

01:28:21.840 | We go back as we're flying back, the controller,

01:28:24.160 | 'cause we're talking to the kid on the Princeton,

01:28:26.560 | they're called OSs, they're operation specialists.

01:28:30.000 | They're the ones that run the radars.

01:28:32.000 | And we're talking to him and he's like,

01:28:33.760 | "Hey sir, you're not going to believe this,

01:28:35.080 | but that thing is at your cap."

01:28:36.960 | It showed back up, it just popped up.

01:28:38.920 | This is like 60 miles away.

01:28:40.040 | It just reappears.

01:28:40.880 | We're like, "Oh, okay."

01:28:42.440 | So we got the radars out, we're looking for it.

01:28:44.920 | We get out there, we never see it.

01:28:46.320 | We never see it again.

01:28:48.280 | We do what we need to do.

01:28:49.200 | We come back to the ship.

01:28:50.480 | Of course, now we're like, "Oh, this is going to be."

01:28:52.520 | I told him, I go, "Dude, you know,

01:28:54.160 | we're going to catch shit for this.

01:28:56.600 | When we get back to the ship, word's going to get out

01:28:58.400 | and we're just going to catch maximum shit."

01:28:59.800 | And we did.

01:29:00.640 | And it's kind of that joking.

01:29:02.680 | So the ship plays movies.

01:29:04.280 | We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies.

01:29:06.620 | So they repeat, 'cause there's a day check

01:29:07.960 | and a night check.

01:29:08.800 | So the same movies in the morning and night plays.

01:29:10.520 | So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie

01:29:12.420 | on the boat, which drives my wife crazy

01:29:14.980 | 'cause I'll watch stuff on TV that way too.

01:29:16.600 | I'll be like, "Oh, here, I've seen this."

01:29:17.840 | And then I'll jump into a movie in the middle

01:29:19.520 | and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning

01:29:21.520 | and I'll put it all together

01:29:23.520 | because that's how we have to do it 'cause we're so busy.

01:29:26.000 | Well, the movies became, it was Men in Black, Aliens,

01:29:30.540 | Independence Day.

01:29:33.680 | - Definitely going to catch some shit.

01:29:35.800 | - Oh, we did.

01:29:36.640 | (laughs)

01:29:37.880 | - But let me just ask some dumb questions.

01:29:40.440 | So just take it, 'cause it's,

01:29:41.840 | whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened,

01:29:45.720 | it's one of the most fascinating things,

01:29:50.720 | events in recent history.

01:29:55.120 | So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about

01:29:59.160 | at different kinds of angles.

01:30:00.160 | There's no good answers, but it's interesting

01:30:01.680 | to ask some dumb questions here.

01:30:03.460 | So first of all, you mentioned,

01:30:05.600 | so you saw at some point X, Y,

01:30:09.000 | and then somebody in the Princeton said,

01:30:11.920 | "You're not gonna believe this, sir.

01:30:13.600 | "It's at your cap point."

01:30:14.840 | Now, that's a different place.

01:30:16.240 | How the heck did it know what your cap point is?

01:30:18.240 | - That's a good question.

01:30:19.520 | And that's the one, no one, we don't tell it,

01:30:23.000 | we don't broadcast it, we have a waypoint in the system.

01:30:26.200 | But I don't know, maybe it knew where we were going,

01:30:28.120 | 'cause we use the same one day after day after day.

01:30:30.000 | - Right, it's just using.

01:30:31.400 | - But it obviously knew where we were going.

01:30:32.840 | - But you never saw it there.

01:30:34.240 | - Never saw it there.

01:30:35.060 | Chad, when he took off, when he got the video,

01:30:36.840 | we landed, we told them, "Hey, look,

01:30:38.280 | "we just chased this thing."

01:30:40.640 | They're like, "What'd I go?"

01:30:41.720 | "Chased it."

01:30:42.560 | And they're like, "What'd I go?"

01:30:43.800 | "Dude, I told him, I said, 'Dude, get video.'"

01:30:46.840 | And he goes, and that's how he is.

01:30:48.480 | He's like, "I'm gonna go."

01:30:49.880 | And he was, he was determined

01:30:51.560 | that he was gonna find this thing.

01:30:52.400 | So when you look at his video,

01:30:55.080 | and this is the stuff that isn't out,

01:30:56.580 | that they don't see because not all the,

01:30:58.400 | all you see is the FLIR tape.

01:30:59.600 | That's the targeting pod,

01:31:01.040 | the forward-looking infrared receiver.

01:31:02.940 | - I'll probably overlay the video

01:31:05.200 | for people who've seen it.

01:31:06.040 | - When he goes out, it's, you know,

01:31:08.120 | what he's looking at on his displays is,

01:31:09.960 | he has basically two radar displays up.

01:31:12.360 | He has azimuth and range on the right one,

01:31:14.640 | and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one.

01:31:16.680 | So this is called the az-L display,

01:31:18.500 | and this is called, this is basically the PPI,

01:31:20.780 | which is the, you're at the bottom of it.

01:31:22.960 | You're at the bottom of the square.

01:31:24.480 | It's really taking this, it's taking a cone,

01:31:26.880 | 'cause a radar really looks left and right from a point,

01:31:29.460 | and it squares it out.

01:31:30.460 | So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us,

01:31:33.800 | 'cause they do this, they square it off.

01:31:35.400 | So he goes out, and when he first sees it,

01:31:38.040 | he gets a radar return on it,

01:31:39.200 | because when he's not trying to lock it,

01:31:40.640 | so the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it,

01:31:42.560 | you know, it's a Doppler radar.

01:31:44.440 | So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing.

01:31:46.040 | It's going, "Oh, I can see you, I can see you."

01:31:47.920 | And it's looking for return.

01:31:48.760 | So he gets a return, so he wants to see what it is,

01:31:50.960 | because all you get is a little green square,

01:31:52.520 | unless it builds a track file on it.

01:31:54.240 | But a little green square is just sitting there.

01:31:55.800 | It's not moving, 'cause it's sitting in one spot in space.

01:32:00.000 | He locks it up.

01:32:00.920 | When he goes to lock it up,

01:32:01.880 | now he's putting a bunch of energy on it.

01:32:03.880 | He's telling the radar, "Stare down that line of sight,

01:32:05.920 | and whatever's there, I want you to grab it

01:32:07.760 | and build a track file on it,

01:32:08.840 | which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is,

01:32:11.640 | and the direction that it's going, okay?"

01:32:13.720 | The radar's smart enough that when the signal comes back,

01:32:17.120 | if it's been messed with, it will tell you,

01:32:19.200 | it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.

01:32:21.720 | So that's all it is, is you send a signal out,

01:32:23.800 | something, it manipulates the signal,

01:32:25.640 | either in range and velocity or whatever,

01:32:27.400 | and it sends it back.

01:32:28.400 | And the radar was smart enough to go,

01:32:30.360 | "That is not a return that I'm expecting.

01:32:32.680 | Something's messing with me, I'm being jammed."

01:32:34.720 | And it shows you, and it puts strobes up,

01:32:36.440 | it gives these lines on the radar,

01:32:38.040 | and it does some stuff.

01:32:40.000 | So you can, well, it does, it goes full into,

01:32:41.880 | it's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see,

01:32:44.360 | 'cause everything comes up,

01:32:45.320 | and this aspect gets along, it's all kinds of,

01:32:47.720 | I don't wanna get into details,

01:32:48.640 | but you can tell it's being jammed.

01:32:50.680 | So, and it's what does-

01:32:51.520 | - As you said on Rogan, by the way,

01:32:52.480 | that jamming is an act of war, right?

01:32:54.280 | - Act of jamming is, when you actively jam

01:32:56.120 | another platform, yes, it's technically an act of war.

01:32:58.120 | - Feels like you should be freaking out at this point.

01:33:00.480 | I mean-

01:33:01.320 | - So, well, he does it, and then in the back seat,

01:33:04.280 | so they don't have a stick and throttle,

01:33:05.720 | they have their side stick controllers,

01:33:07.200 | so they can control all the sensors,

01:33:09.160 | and they can just toggle around and do stuff.

01:33:10.840 | So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick,

01:33:14.680 | and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar

01:33:16.720 | to the targeting pod.

01:33:18.280 | Well, as soon as he commanded the radar

01:33:19.840 | to look at that target, the targeting pod goes,

01:33:22.320 | "Oh, what's over there?"

01:33:23.200 | And it'll stare, 'cause it goes down the line of sight,

01:33:24.960 | 'cause all the systems are hooked together.

01:33:27.000 | You can decouple them,

01:33:28.040 | but they're gonna automatically couple up.

01:33:30.080 | So when he castles over, it's a switch,

01:33:32.680 | it looks like a castle switch, what's a castle switch?

01:33:34.640 | When he moves that thing to the left,

01:33:36.000 | and he swaps the displays out, and he says,

01:33:37.920 | "Instead of looking at the radar,

01:33:38.800 | "I wanna look at the targeting pod,"

01:33:40.600 | he sees it on the targeting pod,

01:33:41.800 | 'cause the targeting pod's already looking there.

01:33:43.920 | And now he's on a passive track,

01:33:45.360 | 'cause he's not literally sending any energy out,

01:33:47.480 | he's just receiving IR energy from the TIC-TAC,

01:33:50.640 | and then the system itself will track the pixels

01:33:53.760 | and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in.

01:33:56.120 | So it says, "Oh," and that's where those little bars

01:33:57.760 | you see in the video where the bars come up left and right.

01:33:59.440 | - He's doing some vision-based tracking.

01:34:02.040 | - That's exactly what it is.

01:34:03.800 | So, and then- - And that's the video.

01:34:05.240 | - He goes through- - Changes zooms,

01:34:07.560 | changes the mode. - He goes through all the modes,

01:34:09.600 | so there's a narrow, medium, and wide.

01:34:11.440 | So wide is far away, medium, and then narrow,

01:34:14.320 | and then there's the TV mode,

01:34:15.800 | and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode.

01:34:18.400 | The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode

01:34:23.400 | is only medium TV mode.

01:34:25.960 | So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode,

01:34:28.280 | it's got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode.

01:34:31.080 | So he goes through all those things,

01:34:33.240 | and that's when you see it going

01:34:34.080 | from a black background to a white background.

01:34:35.640 | - He's trying to figure out what the heck is this.

01:34:37.440 | - Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data

01:34:39.000 | as he can on it based on the different modes

01:34:40.840 | instead of just staring at it going, "What is that thing?"

01:34:43.960 | Granted, so the video has been out,

01:34:46.800 | it actually was on YouTube for years

01:34:49.400 | before the government released it.

01:34:50.600 | - It was leaked in 2000, what, seven?

01:34:54.160 | - About, no, I got a, the guy that was in my backseat

01:34:57.560 | sent me an email, and I had retired.

01:35:00.440 | So this is about, nope, 'cause I was working,

01:35:03.800 | I was working down in San Diego.

01:35:05.000 | So this is about 2008, early 2009.

01:35:08.400 | He sends me a link to strangeland.com,

01:35:14.840 | which is not suitable for work.

01:35:16.320 | Oh yeah, it's top notch.

01:35:18.160 | And he says, "Hey," I can remember the email,

01:35:20.880 | "Hey, Skip, does this look familiar?"

01:35:22.720 | And I look at it, I'm like,

01:35:25.560 | "How the hell did that get on strangeland.com?"

01:35:29.840 | So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube,

01:35:33.160 | which was cool because you can send

01:35:34.880 | a YouTube link to someone.

01:35:36.520 | You don't send strangeland.com to someone

01:35:39.560 | 'cause you don't know what you're gonna get.

01:35:41.280 | It's like Googling kittens.

01:35:42.600 | So-- - So it ends up there somehow.

01:35:46.960 | - So it gets on YouTube, which was cool

01:35:48.760 | because I would go out with my friends

01:35:50.680 | and we'd be drinking and they'd go,

01:35:52.280 | "Dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying?"

01:35:54.000 | You know, it's kinda like you were asking what it's like.

01:35:55.400 | And I go, "Oh dude, I chased a UFO."

01:35:57.400 | And they're like, "Get out."

01:35:58.280 | And I'm like, "No, serious."

01:35:59.120 | So this is literally how it happened.

01:36:00.960 | So I was sitting with my friend Matt.

01:36:02.920 | So Matt and I did our, he was the guy

01:36:05.120 | in my right seat of the A6 when I did

01:36:06.720 | my very first night trap, right?

01:36:08.720 | And we were friends to this day, right?

01:36:10.780 | Because when you do stuff like people like that,

01:36:13.520 | you know, I had to have faith in him,

01:36:15.440 | he had to have faith in me.

01:36:16.940 | You know, they become like your brother.

01:36:19.200 | And these are guys that literally, you know,

01:36:22.440 | I don't talk to them on a regular basis.

01:36:23.960 | Like Chris, who works at Apple,

01:36:25.920 | if Chris called me up tomorrow and said,

01:36:28.580 | "Dude, I need help, I need this."

01:36:30.640 | I'd be like, "All right, let's figure this out

01:36:31.960 | and let's do it."

01:36:32.800 | 'Cause it's, they're like family.

01:36:33.620 | You do it, and most Navy guys, we don't,

01:36:36.320 | we're not, we don't send letters to each other weekly.

01:36:38.720 | You know, I have friends that could,

01:36:39.960 | I haven't talked to in 10 years

01:36:41.000 | that they showed up on my door.

01:36:43.000 | You know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer,

01:36:45.520 | shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes to catch up.

01:36:47.880 | And then it's like old times.

01:36:49.280 | And it's amazing how fast this happens.

01:36:50.880 | So I'm out to dinner with Matt,

01:36:53.360 | and I'm telling him this story,

01:36:55.840 | and he's like, "Get out of here."

01:36:57.700 | So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco.

01:37:00.980 | Paco has a fightersweep.com, it's a blog site.

01:37:04.360 | So Paco's obsessed, like he is way into UFOs.

01:37:09.600 | So Paco calls me up, he says,

01:37:11.120 | "Dude, I was talking to Matty."

01:37:12.600 | That's what we call him.

01:37:13.440 | He goes, "I was talking to Matty."

01:37:15.160 | He goes, "Dude, you got to tell me this story."

01:37:18.320 | So I'm like, all right.

01:37:19.160 | So I spend a chunk of time.

01:37:20.640 | And so he calls me one day and I'm like,

01:37:23.800 | "I gotta get a voicemail.

01:37:24.960 | Hey, give me a call."

01:37:25.800 | So I call him up and he answers the phone,

01:37:28.220 | but I can hear people in the background.

01:37:29.600 | And I go, "Hey dude, what's going on?"

01:37:30.440 | And he goes, "Hey, hang on,

01:37:31.280 | I gotta put you on speakerphone."

01:37:32.480 | I go, "What are you putting me on speakerphone?"

01:37:33.320 | He goes, "You got to tell the story.

01:37:34.280 | I'm having a dinner party."

01:37:36.360 | You got to tell the story.

01:37:37.280 | So he's literally having a dinner party

01:37:38.780 | with his cell phone in the middle of the table

01:37:40.160 | as I tell a Tic Tac story.

01:37:42.320 | So he calls me up again, he says,

01:37:43.460 | "Hey, I got this blog."

01:37:46.400 | And he just writes about fighter stuff.

01:37:48.160 | Like he wrote about, we call him the shit hot break.

01:37:50.360 | That's a guy that when you're landing on a carrier,

01:37:51.840 | comes and turns and gets ready to land really fast,

01:37:54.540 | like breaks it off right at the back of the ship.

01:37:57.000 | And one of the guys,

01:37:58.920 | when we were junior officers on the USS Ranger,

01:38:01.400 | one of the partners in our squadron was a guy, Nasty.

01:38:04.080 | And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat

01:38:06.440 | and cranking off the shit hot break.

01:38:08.680 | So he literally wrote a thing

01:38:10.880 | about the shit hot break with Nasty.

01:38:12.800 | And there's another guy, Mav,

01:38:14.120 | was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing.

01:38:19.120 | It's just a good article on how this was

01:38:21.980 | and how it kind of forms you in naval aviation,

01:38:24.680 | it's kind of become part of the club.

01:38:26.340 | So he's like, "I got to write about this thing."

01:38:28.200 | I'm like, "What do you guys, I got to write about it."

01:38:29.280 | I go, "All right."

01:38:30.440 | I go, 'cause at first I would say no.

01:38:31.840 | I'm like, "Dude, I don't want this out there."

01:38:33.480 | - You haven't really before then talked about it much.

01:38:36.280 | - No, my wife didn't even really know the whole story.

01:38:38.640 | - What, just as a comment,

01:38:40.280 | is it just because you caught some--

01:38:42.640 | - No, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days,

01:38:45.440 | we had the incident.

01:38:46.800 | For about two days, they played the goofy movies.

01:38:49.240 | There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule

01:38:51.680 | that they would put.

01:38:52.520 | It was like, first one was a far side

01:38:53.920 | and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat.

01:38:56.480 | And it was men in black, but it had our names,

01:38:57.960 | you know, protecting the Nimitz battle group type stuff.

01:39:00.720 | It was just funny shit like that.

01:39:02.360 | So, no, it's just, to me it wasn't that big of a deal.

01:39:06.200 | It was like, okay, that's weird.

01:39:07.160 | We're never gonna know what it was.

01:39:08.800 | I want to get out there, 'cause this is important,

01:39:10.680 | 'cause there's all kinds of rumors.

01:39:12.240 | There's a group of folks there.

01:39:13.800 | No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.

01:39:19.920 | - Nobody looking like me came out on a--

01:39:24.360 | - No, no one came out on a helicopter.

01:39:26.080 | No one came out on an airplane.

01:39:28.160 | You know, you get, oh, I was told

01:39:29.840 | to turn over this classified.

01:39:30.960 | What's funny is all the COs,

01:39:33.000 | and several of them are still in the Navy.

01:39:35.840 | There's one that is a, I think he just finished up.

01:39:38.620 | He was a captain of an aircraft carrier.

01:39:40.880 | You know, so he'll end up making Admiral and all that stuff.

01:39:44.080 | Those guys are all my friends.

01:39:44.920 | I talk to them daily.

01:39:46.800 | - Just to clarify, so just for people who don't know,

01:39:50.160 | there's a story that both on the Nimitz

01:39:53.320 | and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed.

01:39:58.320 | They showed up.

01:40:00.000 | They took the data, quote-unquote,

01:40:02.360 | so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident,

01:40:07.160 | and they took it and presumably deleted it.

01:40:10.760 | There's a kind of story to that.

01:40:13.140 | And then from what I've seen,

01:40:15.960 | you said that you believe,

01:40:17.760 | just like we were talking about offline,

01:40:19.460 | that jokes spread faster than,

01:40:21.640 | or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships,

01:40:25.040 | that it might've been a joke that started and--

01:40:29.600 | - Well, they did.

01:40:30.440 | So here's the joke.

01:40:31.640 | So they had come down, right?

01:40:33.080 | We had the tapes, and they were Chad's tapes.

01:40:36.940 | So we use those tapes over and over again.

01:40:39.240 | You know, they're consumable,

01:40:40.800 | but remember, I have a budget as a squadron,

01:40:42.280 | so I have a budget, so I have to buy those tapes.

01:40:43.960 | I have to, all that stuff that we used,

01:40:45.640 | I'm accountable for.

01:40:46.960 | And the tapes are actually classified secret

01:40:48.680 | because of the data that's on them, okay?

01:40:50.780 | So we had the tapes.

01:40:52.280 | So the security intelligence guys,

01:40:55.180 | the intel officers, came down from what's called CIVIC,

01:40:58.120 | it's C-V-I-C, which is Carrier Intel Center,

01:41:01.340 | came down and said, "Hey, we need the tapes.

01:41:03.680 | "These guys are gonna come,

01:41:04.900 | "they're gonna come and get 'em."

01:41:06.960 | So we're like, "Oh," I'm like, "Oh, whatever," you know?

01:41:09.320 | So we hand 'em the tapes.

01:41:11.160 | And then someone, 'cause I have, you know, you know people,

01:41:14.640 | shortly after they came and got the tapes,

01:41:16.720 | someone came to me and said,

01:41:17.720 | "You know, they're messing with you.

01:41:19.080 | "They're playing a joke."

01:41:20.720 | So I said, "Oh, well, let's see how well that goes

01:41:22.480 | "'cause, you know, I'm a CO and they're not."

01:41:25.600 | And so I went down to CIVIC and it was a,

01:41:29.080 | I think he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant JG,

01:41:30.880 | so he's way junior to me.

01:41:32.280 | And I said, "Hey, I want my tapes back."

01:41:35.640 | And he looks at me and I go,

01:41:36.780 | "I know you guys are pulling my leg.

01:41:38.060 | "I know there's no one came out."

01:41:40.000 | And I go, "And you have about 30 seconds

01:41:41.680 | "to get me my tapes before I start

01:41:43.020 | "tearing this place apart."

01:41:45.120 | That's literally what I told him.

01:41:46.960 | And I said, "And if your boss has an issue,

01:41:48.800 | "he can come and see me

01:41:50.160 | "'cause it's not gonna go well."

01:41:52.000 | I said, "'Cause this is bullshit

01:41:53.360 | "and I need those tapes."

01:41:54.760 | Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet,

01:41:56.840 | opened it up, they weren't in a safe.

01:41:57.880 | He opened up a filing cabinet

01:41:58.960 | and pulled them out and handed them to me.

01:42:00.720 | I said, and I basically said a few things to him,

01:42:02.840 | like, "Don't ever fuck with me again."

01:42:05.080 | And I left, I had the tapes.

01:42:06.920 | So this, no one came out.

01:42:08.400 | There's no flying going on when all this is happening.

01:42:11.200 | And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.

01:42:15.080 | So I took two brand new eight mil tapes

01:42:17.200 | and I copied the sections that I want.

01:42:19.520 | So there's a rumor too that,

01:42:21.040 | "Oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long

01:42:23.080 | "and there's some, one of these petty officers

01:42:24.560 | "is saying I saw it."

01:42:25.400 | That's total crap.

01:42:26.240 | The original video is about a minute 30 seconds long.

01:42:28.320 | What you see on the release video is the entire video.

01:42:31.880 | - So you have mentioned,

01:42:33.420 | I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me.

01:42:37.120 | But you have mentioned that, like on "Roguen" I think,

01:42:41.440 | that you watched it on a bigger screen.

01:42:45.520 | It felt like it was higher definition.

01:42:47.520 | So let me ask the question,

01:42:51.160 | is there a higher definition version,

01:42:53.520 | do you think, of the FLIR video

01:42:56.160 | that would give us more pixels and more information,

01:42:59.320 | presumably because of the high number of--

01:43:01.520 | - I would doubt it 'cause I don't know where,

01:43:04.320 | the stuff that the government released,

01:43:05.600 | I don't know where they got.

01:43:06.440 | Okay, so the stuff that was on "Strangeland" and YouTube,

01:43:08.920 | someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like a rack.

01:43:12.640 | There's tape machines in there

01:43:13.560 | and it gets converted to digital

01:43:14.680 | and stored on a hard drive.

01:43:15.640 | And they pulled it off that hard drive

01:43:16.760 | and they put it on YouTube.

01:43:18.120 | No, it's just like, anytime, even a digital media,

01:43:23.320 | the more you copy digital media,

01:43:24.600 | there's some quality that gets, it degrades.

01:43:27.000 | So this, you don't know how many times

01:43:28.240 | this has been copied.

01:43:29.080 | So we were looking,

01:43:29.920 | the videos I've seen are right off the original,

01:43:31.640 | they're Hi8 tapes,

01:43:32.480 | that's basically pulled off the back of the display.

01:43:34.640 | So it's not filmed with cameras,

01:43:35.800 | it's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back

01:43:37.960 | and put onto a Hi8 tape.

01:43:39.440 | That's how the recorders work.

01:43:40.680 | Now it's actually digital to digital,

01:43:42.560 | it's not even on tapes anymore.

01:43:43.680 | It's a digital recording system.

01:43:45.240 | But we were still in that process of slowing up

01:43:46.920 | 'cause original we had little cameras here that shine.

01:43:49.640 | So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.

01:43:52.040 | So this is, it's a pretty good feed.

01:43:53.840 | When you put it on, so we're,

01:43:56.000 | instead of looking at it on your tiny little

01:43:57.880 | computer monitor or whatever,

01:43:59.120 | I'm looking at it on a, like a 19 inch,

01:44:01.800 | 'cause it was still normal TVs back there.

01:44:03.320 | We had just put flat screens in the red room

01:44:04.960 | that I had bought so we could watch movies.

01:44:07.240 | So, 'cause we-

01:44:09.120 | - A nice, huge 19 inch screen.

01:44:11.600 | - It's maybe 20, it was nice.

01:44:13.760 | - Wow, that's huge.

01:44:14.880 | - It was gigantic.

01:44:16.040 | - I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches.

01:44:20.920 | - This is 2005.

01:44:22.120 | So-

01:44:24.040 | - So you look at it as big thing and-

01:44:25.680 | - But you could see, so when you get to the TV mode,

01:44:27.760 | when I say there's little things

01:44:28.720 | coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those.

01:44:30.520 | It was very clear.

01:44:32.120 | - But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac,

01:44:35.760 | was it, did you get much more information

01:44:38.440 | from the higher, from the clear-

01:44:40.560 | - The little things out of the bottom.

01:44:42.440 | We didn't see those visuals.

01:44:43.280 | - So the bottom information, got it.

01:44:44.120 | - When you see it, 'cause he's coming

01:44:45.160 | almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it.

01:44:47.280 | It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna,

01:44:49.600 | there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom,

01:44:51.400 | kind of like that.

01:44:52.240 | There was two little things out of the bottom.

01:44:53.680 | There was nothing on the top, there was no plume, no IR,

01:44:56.320 | no visible propulsions, even heat signature.

01:45:00.240 | You know, it's all that stuff.

01:45:01.520 | And then the other thing that people didn't see

01:45:02.980 | is they didn't see the radar display,

01:45:05.220 | which that really raises a classification level,

01:45:08.960 | especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed.

01:45:12.480 | You know, matter of fact, when they did

01:45:13.720 | the unofficial official investigation in about 2000,

01:45:16.480 | and let me think, about 2009,

01:45:19.440 | I had gotten a call on my cell phone from a guy

01:45:23.080 | who, government employee, and said,

01:45:26.200 | "Hey," he told me who he was, he's still in the government,

01:45:29.960 | I'm friends with him, and he said,

01:45:31.340 | "Hey, we're gonna investigate your Tic Tac thing."

01:45:35.480 | This is literally five years later.

01:45:37.640 | Yeah, five years later.

01:45:39.280 | And I said, "Okay, whatever."

01:45:41.120 | And he did a pretty good job.

01:45:42.240 | I call it the unofficial official report

01:45:43.880 | because it was really never official.

01:45:48.320 | It wasn't.

01:45:49.480 | But I'll give you the history of why I say that

01:45:51.520 | and why it never came out in FOIA requests.

01:45:54.360 | So he does the report, he sent me the report,

01:45:56.600 | and all he said is, "Hey, I'm gonna send you this report.

01:45:58.320 | "Please don't distribute this report."

01:46:01.200 | I said, "Okay."

01:46:02.500 | The report is now out because Harry Reid

01:46:04.540 | got it to George Knapp, and they were good enough to redact it

01:46:07.400 | but there's a few versions of it unredacted,

01:46:09.080 | and I'm very protective of the other people

01:46:11.080 | that were involved in this.

01:46:13.080 | So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid.

01:46:15.440 | He doesn't talk to anyone now.

01:46:17.320 | The pilot of his airplane, she has come out unidentified,

01:46:20.780 | but they don't release her name,

01:46:22.080 | although people are starting to do it.

01:46:23.220 | And she's had weird shit happen around her house.

01:46:25.060 | She's got kids, so I'm very protective of her.

01:46:28.800 | And I've told people like Jeremy and George,

01:46:30.960 | "If I know that a name's ever came from you,

01:46:32.500 | "I will never talk to you again about this."

01:46:34.460 | And Jeremy's been really good about it, and so has George.

01:46:37.840 | But George knew who the names were

01:46:39.500 | 'cause he got the report from Senator Reid.

01:46:41.740 | And then the other crew.

01:46:44.740 | So the pilot of the airplane that took the video

01:46:47.700 | that Chad was in, if you talk to that individual,

01:46:52.700 | they really don't have the recollection.

01:46:54.060 | They were just out flying that day,

01:46:55.340 | and it wasn't a big deal.

01:46:56.600 | So you need to protect, 'cause not everyone

01:47:00.820 | wants people knocking.

01:47:01.780 | I don't want people knocking on my door.

01:47:03.820 | And there's rumors, "Oh, you talk to everyone."

01:47:06.220 | I think you're about the 23rd person

01:47:07.900 | that I've talked to total.

01:47:09.940 | And that includes the newspapers and stuff.

01:47:13.300 | And I've been selective because there's so much.

01:47:14.940 | I mean, if I turned down like, I turned down Russian TV.

01:47:19.460 | I can give you her name when we're done here.

01:47:21.180 | But she called, she not only called me,

01:47:23.020 | she called my wife, she called my daughter,

01:47:24.660 | she called my son, and she called my son-in-law.

01:47:27.180 | Because they're persistent.

01:47:28.260 | So I'm pretty, I'm very particular.

01:47:31.380 | I mean, the reason I'm talking to you

01:47:32.380 | is 'cause I knew we would have a conversation

01:47:33.820 | that wasn't based just on the tic-tac and the incident,

01:47:35.620 | but we could actually talk about

01:47:37.420 | some of the science and some of the theoretical

01:47:39.300 | to get into, to get more people involved to go.

01:47:42.660 | 'Cause I think there's, you know,

01:47:44.100 | and when you talk to Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon,

01:47:49.100 | you know, the group at TTSA,

01:47:50.940 | you know, that whole thing was--

01:47:52.380 | - What's TTSA?

01:47:53.220 | - That's To The Stars Academy.

01:47:55.420 | That's the Tom DeLonge group that got started.

01:47:57.140 | So, and you go, well, you know,

01:47:59.900 | 'cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this,

01:48:02.660 | but he's actually, when you talk to him, he's very smart.

01:48:06.820 | And I ask him, how'd you get into this?

01:48:08.100 | And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink-182,

01:48:11.460 | he goes, you read a lot of books

01:48:12.540 | when you're laying in a van

01:48:13.460 | as you're driving to your next gig

01:48:15.860 | before you make it big.

01:48:16.860 | And he goes, and he read, he was reading books

01:48:19.220 | and he read one of them on UFOs.

01:48:20.340 | I'm trying to think the title.

01:48:21.180 | It's one of the big ones that's out there, real popular.

01:48:23.460 | And so he started just, he started asking more

01:48:26.820 | and through his fame with Blink-182 in the band,

01:48:30.340 | he got more and more connected.

01:48:32.260 | You know, if you talk to Chris Mellon,

01:48:33.620 | who is an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence,

01:48:36.540 | and he's part of the Mellon dynasty,

01:48:39.740 | from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.

01:48:42.940 | He knows, he definitely knows how the government works

01:48:46.260 | 'cause he worked there.

01:48:47.460 | And so when I went down to DC to talk to people,

01:48:51.940 | he's one of the first people I'll go to.

01:48:53.580 | When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago,

01:48:57.100 | a month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me.

01:49:01.460 | I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, hey,

01:49:04.460 | 'cause they were like, you gotta do it.

01:49:05.740 | 'Cause I turned Tucker down a couple of times before

01:49:08.700 | and his producer had called me and I'm like,

01:49:12.300 | all right, I'll do it.

01:49:13.940 | 'Cause those guys are like, you gotta do this for us.

01:49:16.140 | - So from my perspective, just to give you some context.

01:49:19.140 | So to me, there seems to be some stigma.

01:49:23.220 | So I come from the scientific community

01:49:24.740 | and I really appreciate you talking to me today.

01:49:27.060 | And I think that people who listen to this include,

01:49:30.980 | you know, fellow faculty at MIT and major universities.

01:49:35.980 | And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject

01:49:39.860 | from the scientific community.

01:49:42.360 | A lot of people, especially when they hear your story

01:49:45.620 | are like, wow, this is really interesting.

01:49:47.940 | But you don't even know, one, you're afraid to talk about it

01:49:52.940 | and two, you don't know what the next steps are.

01:49:55.500 | Like how can we seriously try to think about what you saw?

01:50:00.940 | How to think about how we further look for things like it?

01:50:05.300 | How we develop systems and plans for how in the future

01:50:10.300 | we can immediately collect a lot more data

01:50:14.540 | and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate,

01:50:19.540 | try to interpret this in the best way possible

01:50:24.180 | from the scientific perspective.

01:50:25.540 | And I just would love to remove stigma from this subject.

01:50:31.540 | - Well, I think that's the first step.

01:50:33.700 | We have done in this country

01:50:36.540 | an absolutely terrible job with these things.

01:50:38.460 | So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell.

01:50:41.900 | So the first reports that came out of Roswell

01:50:43.980 | was we have this crash flying saucer.

01:50:46.260 | That's literally what came up.

01:50:47.940 | And then magically the next day, it's a weather balloon

01:50:50.500 | and they're showing your pieces of Mylar.

01:50:52.100 | And you go, well, that doesn't look like

01:50:53.600 | what they showed us yesterday.

01:50:55.300 | Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know,

01:50:56.900 | so there's that whole series about Project Blue Book.

01:50:58.600 | But the bottom line of Project Blue Book

01:51:00.080 | is it really did two things.

01:51:01.100 | It investigated sightings and it did everything it could

01:51:03.940 | to debunk and disprove,

01:51:05.180 | to the point where it actually went to discredit,

01:51:08.500 | you know, to make you look.

01:51:10.260 | So there's always been this, I don't know if you'd call it

01:51:14.060 | an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs

01:51:16.460 | that if you're talking about them, they're nuts.

01:51:18.860 | With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy, I'm not a junkie.

01:51:23.140 | If you asked me, do I believe

01:51:25.460 | that there's life outside of earth,

01:51:27.620 | I would say you probably have a better chance

01:51:30.440 | of winning the Mega Ball lottery

01:51:32.680 | than we're the only planet that has life on it

01:51:35.480 | in the universe.

01:51:36.320 | It's just, the odds are against it.

01:51:38.480 | If you do, just do the math.

01:51:40.400 | You have to accept, 'cause if there only has to be

01:51:43.320 | one other planet that has life on it,

01:51:45.480 | and then I win and you lose.

01:51:48.180 | - And then more and more science is showing

01:51:49.760 | that there's habitable planets out there.

01:51:52.180 | That yeah, everything we've learned so far,

01:51:54.640 | and we know very little, but everything we've learned so far

01:51:56.960 | about the planets out there, exoplanets,

01:52:01.180 | earth-like planets, it seems that it's very likely

01:52:04.920 | that there's life out there.

01:52:06.160 | Intelligent life is another topic, but life--

01:52:08.920 | - Well, we as humans, and even more as Americans,

01:52:12.760 | we have this hubris about us that says,

01:52:14.360 | ha ha, we're it, and you go, not so much.

01:52:18.800 | - Maybe we're not so intelligent.

01:52:20.680 | - Because we are, it's just how we learn.

01:52:22.740 | So our main mode of transportation

01:52:25.860 | and what people figured out years ago

01:52:28.080 | was the internal combustion engine,

01:52:29.600 | which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel.

01:52:32.880 | What if you're in another planet where you figured out

01:52:36.840 | the ability to create a gravity field,

01:52:39.760 | or you used, 'cause electromagnetics are becoming

01:52:42.380 | bigger and bigger and bigger.

01:52:43.480 | Catapults on ships were steam-powered,

01:52:45.640 | and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic.

01:52:48.380 | Roller coasters used to use a chain

01:52:49.760 | to get you to the top of the hill.

01:52:50.760 | Now they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going.

01:52:53.820 | So there's a whole new realm of propulsion

01:52:56.100 | that sometimes it's our ability to develop

01:52:58.280 | the technology to support theory.

01:53:00.600 | We are just now proving recently theories

01:53:04.600 | that Einstein had where people actually joked about 'em,

01:53:07.040 | and now we actually have the technology

01:53:08.400 | to prove that gravity can bend light.

01:53:10.680 | We have proven that.

01:53:11.880 | So you look at that when you go,

01:53:13.520 | well, does that mean that 70 years ago Einstein was wrong,

01:53:16.540 | or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong,

01:53:17.880 | or do you go, we just didn't have the ability

01:53:20.200 | to look that deep into space to actually find something

01:53:22.620 | that we could to actually measure,

01:53:24.520 | and I've seen this stuff--

01:53:25.360 | - And that's just 100 years,

01:53:26.640 | and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries.

01:53:28.960 | - Look what we've done in the last 20 years.

01:53:30.280 | - Yeah, it's crazy.

01:53:31.520 | Let me direct, 'cause it's such an interesting topic

01:53:34.040 | from a career perspective, from a science perspective.

01:53:36.740 | I mean, you've spoke, you've been brave

01:53:41.180 | in telling your story, not some dramatic thing,

01:53:44.920 | but just telling the things you've seen.

01:53:47.840 | Did it encounter, did it impact your career?

01:53:52.840 | Is that why more people haven't come out?

01:53:55.120 | Like you've mentioned Roswell,

01:53:57.860 | like how, what advice do you give to people,

01:54:02.380 | to the community, to me as a scientist,

01:54:05.240 | for ways to go forward about this topic,

01:54:08.140 | and still have a, you know,

01:54:11.220 | not being put in a bin in society,

01:54:14.140 | that he's a loon, or she's a loon, or that person--

01:54:16.700 | - Mine is to get away from the little green men.

01:54:19.300 | Divorce the two little green men,

01:54:23.500 | and I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this,

01:54:26.540 | and the group that they're working with,

01:54:27.860 | which is incredible.

01:54:28.700 | I mean, they've got Steve Justice,

01:54:29.800 | who used to run Skunk Works, where they built projects.

01:54:33.900 | - Now, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned,

01:54:35.100 | was a program director.

01:54:36.540 | - He ran the AATIP program at the Pentagon.

01:54:38.420 | - And AATIP was a program that was tasked

01:54:40.620 | with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs.

01:54:45.100 | So what's funny is the unofficial official report

01:54:47.540 | that I joke about,

01:54:48.900 | the guy who wrote the unofficial official report

01:54:51.100 | was actually an original member of AATIP,

01:54:53.500 | and the original stuff that AATIP did was FOIA exempt.

01:54:57.020 | And people go, "How do you know that?"

01:54:58.260 | I go, "'Cause I stood there with the memo in my hand

01:55:00.380 | "that said these are, it literally,

01:55:02.540 | "I watched the DOD memo that said it, and it was signed."

01:55:05.460 | So he was one.

01:55:07.060 | So that's why I call it the unofficial official report.

01:55:09.620 | It was never releasable, 'cause people go,

01:55:12.200 | "Oh, I put in a FOIA request, and I didn't get that."

01:55:14.100 | I go, "Well, just 'cause you put in a FOIA request

01:55:15.500 | "didn't get it."

01:55:16.340 | I go, "Because how much time do you think

01:55:18.140 | "that guy's gonna spend to get you the information

01:55:19.780 | "that you requested if he can't find it?"

01:55:21.660 | I actually got called by the Navy.

01:55:23.260 | I had a commander in the Navy call me about,

01:55:26.520 | right before the article came out in the New York Times.

01:55:29.940 | This was starting to come back,

01:55:31.540 | and she had called me 'cause there was a FOIA request

01:55:33.920 | for stuff about the Nimitz incident.

01:55:35.380 | And I said, "Do you know of anything?"

01:55:37.900 | She called me, she goes, "Do you know of anything else

01:55:39.520 | "besides the situation reports that come off the ship?"

01:55:43.180 | And you gotta remember, when the situation report

01:55:44.980 | comes off the ship, that's like third hand.

01:55:46.660 | So we tell someone, they tell someone,

01:55:48.740 | that person has to write it up.

01:55:50.700 | So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it.

01:55:52.860 | But then there's the unofficial official report

01:55:55.500 | that's actually pretty well written.

01:55:56.660 | There's some errors in it, but it was,

01:55:58.500 | I didn't help write it, I just did it.

01:56:00.300 | And he did a really good job of researching it

01:56:02.180 | and figuring out who's who in the zoo and the players.

01:56:04.880 | So she called me and said, "Is there anything out there?"

01:56:09.060 | And I said, "Officially out there?"

01:56:10.620 | She said, "Yes."

01:56:11.440 | I said, "I don't know of anything."

01:56:12.700 | I knew of the unofficial official report,

01:56:14.460 | which is that one, but I'm not,

01:56:16.660 | if you don't know about it, I'm not gonna tell you,

01:56:18.060 | 'cause that's not my job, and nor did I care.

01:56:20.660 | - I mean, in that whole situation, you mentioned Lou,

01:56:25.220 | did you think about your impact to your career?

01:56:29.140 | Just to get back to the question,

01:56:30.660 | do you think others, other pilots, other people

01:56:35.660 | like in Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing?

01:56:39.100 | Why aren't they talking about this?

01:56:40.340 | Why are people afraid to talk about this?

01:56:42.860 | - Well, honestly, the military and the press,

01:56:45.260 | there's a distrust, I'll just tell you that right now.

01:56:47.740 | We typically don't like talking to the press,

01:56:49.740 | because if I talk to you, especially when I do,

01:56:54.340 | even the TV shows, 'cause I've been on a couple of shows,

01:56:57.000 | when you look at it, they come to my house

01:56:58.700 | and they film me for two hours.

01:57:00.740 | And then what you see on the screen is five minutes.

01:57:03.340 | - Well, and the other thing with the press,

01:57:05.260 | let me give you my perspective from autonomous vehicles,

01:57:07.900 | is the clipping happens, yes, but also the incompetence.

01:57:12.900 | Let me just call out journalism.

01:57:15.660 | They're not thinking, I mean, so here's the thing.

01:57:21.940 | I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes

01:57:26.940 | from like physics and math,

01:57:29.440 | and I also have a deep curiosity about the world.

01:57:33.040 | I read a lot.

01:57:34.500 | That seems to be missing with journalism.

01:57:36.100 | So you're talking to a person who is not gonna

01:57:38.140 | push the story forward in an interesting way,

01:57:41.060 | not the story, but the actual investigation

01:57:43.660 | of perhaps one of the most amazing things

01:57:47.700 | that humans have witnessed in history.

01:57:49.700 | Like it might've been nothing, who knows?

01:57:52.780 | What you witnessed might've been,

01:57:54.820 | from a sort of debunking perspective,

01:57:56.700 | might've been some kind of trick of mind.

01:57:59.220 | You and others have hallucinated something.

01:58:01.900 | It could be some simple explanation,

01:58:04.940 | but possibly it was something not of this world.

01:58:09.940 | And to not do justice to this story

01:58:15.180 | from a scientific perspective,

01:58:17.520 | it seems at best negligence.

01:58:20.780 | And so, yeah, that's true for journalists,

01:58:23.220 | that's true for other scientists.

01:58:25.140 | - It's just, it's human nature.

01:58:27.180 | If we see something that we can't explain,

01:58:30.740 | then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's just me,

01:58:34.620 | and you let it go away and you don't think about it,

01:58:36.980 | and maybe it'll just, you ignore it.

01:58:40.500 | The other side is the inquisitive mind that says,

01:58:43.900 | well, what was that, and I wanna dig more into it.

01:58:46.460 | And if you look at it or you're going against the norm,

01:58:51.060 | you can get ostracized.

01:58:53.940 | And if you look at, and Einstein's the perfect example.

01:58:56.460 | I mean, when he started coming up with some of his theories,

01:58:59.020 | some of the top physicists in the world were like,

01:59:01.900 | dude, you're a nut job.

01:59:03.380 | And he's literally proving them,

01:59:05.900 | but he didn't have, he proved them in theory,

01:59:09.060 | but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment

01:59:11.500 | to prove his theory.

01:59:13.460 | - There's a great book that I recommend people read

01:59:15.900 | called "Proving Einstein Right" by Jim Gates

01:59:19.460 | that talks about the hard work

01:59:22.580 | that people try to do years after

01:59:24.900 | to try to experimentally validate the predictions

01:59:29.060 | that Einstein made with his theories.

01:59:32.140 | It's fascinating.

01:59:33.340 | But yes, at the time, it's kind of crazy.

01:59:35.660 | What are you saying?

01:59:36.660 | - Yeah, if you look at it back at the time,

01:59:38.740 | don't we look at it now and go,

01:59:39.980 | well, the guy was a walking genius, and he was.

01:59:42.380 | But if you go back in time when he was doing it,

01:59:44.700 | it was like, what are you talking about?

01:59:46.700 | - But one of the challenges is your eyewitness,

01:59:52.340 | one of the challenges is your,

01:59:54.300 | essentially an eyewitness account.

01:59:56.260 | Like we don't have good data.

01:59:58.700 | We have very limited data of the incident

02:00:02.420 | that you've experienced.

02:00:03.820 | So let me kind of dig in.

02:00:05.100 | Let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's,

02:00:09.560 | just to paint more and more of the picture.

02:00:12.900 | One, you kind of mentioned, so tic-tac shape.

02:00:15.540 | Let's break apart two situations.

02:00:18.460 | One is the video.

02:00:19.700 | Let's look at the actual eye account,

02:00:21.660 | the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes.

02:00:25.060 | What can you say about the shape of the thing?

02:00:28.220 | Is there interesting aspects outside of the tic-tac?

02:00:30.980 | Like, is there any appendages?

02:00:33.180 | Is there some texture to it that--

02:00:37.020 | - No, smooth, white, tic-tac.

02:00:41.380 | You know, you don't see, there's no wings,

02:00:44.780 | no visible propulsion, no windows,

02:00:48.300 | no probes that we could see.

02:00:50.580 | We don't notice, like I said,

02:00:51.780 | we don't see the little things on the bottom of it

02:00:53.580 | until we see the video in the TV mode

02:00:56.900 | when it's zoomed in, right before.

02:00:58.940 | It's shortly, you kind of see them zoom in.

02:01:00.620 | You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff

02:01:02.780 | that's out there.

02:01:03.620 | But remember, we're looking at the original tape,

02:01:06.980 | so there's basically no degradation.

02:01:10.220 | - But when you saw with your eyes,

02:01:11.380 | there's no kind of appendages.

02:01:12.500 | - No, none.

02:01:13.460 | - What about, like somebody asked,

02:01:15.300 | a lot of people asked you questions,

02:01:17.180 | so I appreciate you spending your time here.

02:01:19.460 | Let me ask some of them.

02:01:21.420 | Did you, I mean, you chased it,

02:01:23.860 | so you flew close to it, relatively speaking.

02:01:26.100 | Was there, did you feel any wake?

02:01:30.020 | Like any, did you feel it in any way

02:01:33.380 | in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?

02:01:36.300 | - No.

02:01:37.140 | - Nothing.

02:01:37.980 | - Nothing.

02:01:39.100 | - So another aspect of it,

02:01:42.340 | there's an interesting thing you've developed,

02:01:44.060 | a feel for objects in the air.

02:01:47.920 | Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival?

02:01:52.920 | Or did it, let me ask a few questions around it.

02:01:56.040 | So did it feel like the thing was surprised?

02:01:59.920 | Did it feel like it wanted to be seen

02:02:03.000 | almost to show off its capability?

02:02:06.540 | And did it, what did it feel like

02:02:10.440 | relative to if you were doing an air fight

02:02:15.040 | against sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet?

02:02:20.040 | - So one, I think it knew we were there when we showed up.

02:02:24.920 | It's just, it's me.

02:02:26.880 | It's kind of like an animal.

02:02:27.800 | If you've ever been around deer in a field,

02:02:29.560 | you know, the deer will look up,

02:02:30.700 | and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the field,

02:02:33.040 | it'll actually go, no threat, and it'll start eating.

02:02:34.920 | You know, they don't put their tail up.

02:02:36.000 | As you move closer to the deer, then it goes,

02:02:37.880 | oh, it's there, and I'm gonna react, or I'm gonna move.

02:02:40.640 | So as we were up high,

02:02:41.960 | and it's down doing whatever it was doing,

02:02:45.180 | you know, which I don't know,

02:02:47.620 | someone asked, what do you think?

02:02:48.460 | I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something.

02:02:50.140 | I joked on "Good Morning America."

02:02:51.860 | Maybe it's like talking to the whales,

02:02:53.260 | kind of like "Star Trek," you know?

02:02:55.420 | And I actually used that clip.

02:02:56.660 | It was kind of funny, but.

02:02:57.900 | - Yeah, we're a little human-centric.

02:03:00.060 | We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us,

02:03:03.020 | but maybe it's talking to the dolphins.

02:03:04.300 | - Maybe it was, yeah, it was to whatever, you know,

02:03:05.860 | 'cause it was hanging around that whitewater,

02:03:07.340 | and I don't know, was there something there?

02:03:08.660 | Was there seamount?

02:03:09.500 | We just didn't find it again?

02:03:10.320 | I don't know.

02:03:11.540 | But once we started to descend,

02:03:13.460 | and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis,

02:03:16.220 | and it started mirroring us coming up,

02:03:17.740 | then it was obviously where we were there,

02:03:19.060 | and it was really coming up,

02:03:20.140 | just, you know, you figure I'm at 20,

02:03:21.540 | and it's coming up, and it ends up getting up to 12,

02:03:24.580 | where I cut across a circle.

02:03:27.420 | I think it was very aware that we were there,

02:03:29.220 | because it interacted.

02:03:30.140 | We call it a two-circle fight

02:03:31.460 | when you're fighting another airplane.

02:03:34.100 | But, you know, was it,

02:03:37.500 | were we afraid?

02:03:39.860 | I don't think so.

02:03:40.680 | I mean, and to me, it was more curious.

02:03:42.860 | You know, the curiosity overcomes any fear

02:03:44.580 | that you would have, and I always felt, to be honest,

02:03:47.100 | if I was inside the airplane,

02:03:48.880 | especially as long, as much time as I'd spent

02:03:51.860 | inside the airplane flying and doing stuff,

02:03:54.460 | I felt totally, it was like a safe zone.

02:03:57.700 | I mean, I felt totally comfortable

02:03:59.500 | inside the airplane as most, you can't,

02:04:01.720 | if you're in the airplane and you feel scared,

02:04:03.320 | it's not the job for you.

02:04:04.580 | You have to feel that,

02:04:05.740 | because the airplane is part of you now.

02:04:08.060 | You know, I am inside.

02:04:09.160 | I have the stick, I have the throttles,

02:04:10.780 | I've got my wizard in the back seat,

02:04:12.200 | he's running all the displays.

02:04:14.220 | We are a team, we are in the state of the art airplane,

02:04:18.980 | you know, brand new.

02:04:20.660 | You feel pretty good.

02:04:21.780 | And then you get something that, you know,

02:04:23.960 | can climb from the surface up

02:04:25.700 | and then accelerate like it did,

02:04:26.880 | like it was like no big deal.

02:04:28.720 | You know, for an airplane,

02:04:29.540 | if you just put me from a stance,

02:04:31.140 | so let's just say slow flight,

02:04:32.240 | just get me at a hundred knots above the water,

02:04:35.460 | and for me to, you can't just start a climb.

02:04:37.620 | I'd have to lower the nose, I'd have to accelerate,

02:04:39.580 | and then I'd have to start coming up,

02:04:40.820 | and this thing just did it like it was like no big deal.

02:04:45.380 | - Yeah, you mentioned that,

02:04:46.740 | like kind of your reaction to it was,

02:04:48.820 | like it's something that you would love to fly almost.

02:04:54.480 | So this object, just the curiosity you experience is like,

02:04:58.100 | like what it almost like,

02:05:01.640 | what the heck is that piece of technology

02:05:03.660 | and I want to fly it?

02:05:04.940 | Like what made you feel like it's something

02:05:09.820 | that you could fly?

02:05:10.820 | Do you think it's something that a human could fly?

02:05:13.460 | Like in terms of interpreting what you saw

02:05:16.020 | as a piece of technology,

02:05:17.700 | 'cause another perspective on it is it was not,

02:05:22.700 | that the thing under the water was the key thing.

02:05:26.420 | And what you were seeing is some kind of projection

02:05:30.540 | or something that like-

02:05:31.940 | - I don't think it was a projection.

02:05:32.860 | I think it was a real object.

02:05:33.700 | - It was a physical hard object that could be flied.

02:05:37.700 | - Oh yeah.

02:05:39.100 | Yeah, I think all four of us will tell you the same thing.

02:05:40.860 | It wasn't, this was not, 'cause you go,

02:05:43.260 | okay, let's just go on, it's a light projection.

02:05:46.780 | Well, if we were both sitting next to each other,

02:05:48.780 | we were looking at it from the exact same angle

02:05:50.900 | and all that and I go,

02:05:51.740 | "Oh, okay, there's a, in theory you could have that."

02:05:54.440 | But with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying,

02:05:57.180 | and she's probably not directly above me,

02:05:59.660 | she's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen.

02:06:02.580 | You're getting two different perspectives

02:06:04.540 | from two different altitudes over a clear blue,

02:06:07.420 | if you've ever been at sea,

02:06:08.580 | and I don't mean like coastal,

02:06:10.060 | I mean like when you get out at sea,

02:06:11.260 | the ocean is the bluest, it's incredible.

02:06:13.720 | You got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean.

02:06:18.780 | You got pretty high contrast.

02:06:20.700 | And for this thing just to disappear,

02:06:22.920 | it's wasn't, I'm telling you, I would,

02:06:26.060 | I mean, I know we all have the same recollection

02:06:31.980 | of what happened.

02:06:33.300 | There's some details because it's so long ago,

02:06:35.140 | but for the most part, we know what we saw

02:06:37.300 | and we all came back and looked at each other like,

02:06:39.100 | "What the hell was that?"

02:06:40.380 | - What if, I mean, do you think about

02:06:42.540 | the thing under the water that's not often talked about

02:06:45.140 | if there's something under the water?

02:06:47.260 | Couldn't have been something gigantic?

02:06:49.360 | - It could be.

02:06:51.300 | - Like what, like do you ever think of--

02:06:52.120 | - It's the abyss.

02:06:53.780 | Big ship comes up. - I mean, that's why,

02:06:54.620 | as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean,

02:06:57.460 | my mom's an Olympic swimmer, so like,

02:06:59.940 | I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim

02:07:02.500 | 'cause the abyss, anything could be under there.

02:07:05.900 | Like there's not enough focus on that,

02:07:09.580 | perhaps because there's no visibility,

02:07:11.300 | but is there anything interesting to say

02:07:14.140 | about the possibility that was anything underneath there?

02:07:16.740 | - Could be, I mean, think about it.

02:07:17.820 | If you're gonna hide on this planet,

02:07:20.160 | what's the least explored spot on the planet?

02:07:25.340 | Two thirds of it's the ocean.

02:07:26.840 | There's literally, I mean, come on,

02:07:31.100 | the Malaysia airplane, the 777,

02:07:34.420 | I think it was a 777 that crashed,

02:07:35.940 | they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to

02:07:37.780 | and they just disappeared and they've been searching for it

02:07:39.980 | and they found pieces of it,

02:07:41.740 | but you would think there's large objects that,

02:07:44.100 | when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up,

02:07:46.540 | there's big pieces that would be, you'd find something,

02:07:48.420 | they haven't found anything except what floated.

02:07:51.220 | So to hide something underwater, I think would be easy.

02:07:54.660 | - So, okay, let's go a little bit in speculation land,

02:07:57.540 | but it's the best we can do,

02:07:59.940 | which is the basic question of what do you think

02:08:04.300 | was it?

02:08:05.700 | So if you had to put money on it,

02:08:07.860 | is it like advanced human created technology?

02:08:11.820 | Is it alien technology?

02:08:13.580 | Is it an unknown physical phenomena?

02:08:16.820 | You know, like a ball lightning, for example,

02:08:18.540 | there's a lot of fascinating things

02:08:20.100 | we probably humans don't really understand.

02:08:22.340 | Is it, like I said, some perception, cognition

02:08:26.140 | that led you, some kind of hallucination

02:08:29.020 | that made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?

02:08:31.700 | Let me put those things on the table.

02:08:33.540 | Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena

02:08:37.380 | like an ice cloud or something like that?

02:08:40.300 | What do you think it was?

02:08:41.220 | - Oh, it's definitely, I don't think it's an ice cloud

02:08:43.100 | 'cause ice clouds don't fly around and react to you.

02:08:46.380 | Do I think it was a light?

02:08:48.980 | I'd say no, because of the aspects

02:08:50.700 | and what we looked and watched it do, I'd say no.

02:08:53.300 | - What do you mean by light?

02:08:54.660 | - Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception,

02:08:57.340 | you know, there's, like plasma, you can do plasma

02:09:02.100 | and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it's really not,

02:09:03.940 | you know, it's plasma.

02:09:05.300 | I don't think so.

02:09:07.140 | So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved.

02:09:09.580 | Maybe not, I mean, I'm not a theoretical physicist

02:09:12.180 | in some, you know, I'm not an MIT.

02:09:15.020 | I would say no, I mean, it looked, from all my experience

02:09:20.220 | and I had quite a bit of it when this happened,

02:09:22.940 | no, I think it was a hard object.

02:09:26.660 | It was aware that we were there.

02:09:28.540 | It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane

02:09:31.580 | and I had to come up and do something,

02:09:33.060 | exactly what I would do, you know, it mirrored me.

02:09:35.980 | It wasn't aggressive, you know, there was taco,

02:09:38.540 | it flopped behind us and never,

02:09:39.860 | it was never offensive on us, it never did that.

02:09:42.700 | It just mirrored us.

02:09:43.540 | So as we're coming down, it's just like, you know,

02:09:45.620 | you're kind of, you know, you said you do martial arts,

02:09:48.780 | you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out

02:09:50.940 | on the, when they get into the ring,

02:09:53.660 | especially with collegiate wrestling,

02:09:54.780 | 'cause my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler.

02:09:56.780 | So I de facto became a wrestler

02:09:58.780 | 'cause he beat me up every night.

02:10:01.260 | We joke, I talked to him literally probably three,

02:10:03.500 | four times a week.

02:10:04.420 | But, you know, you see wrestlers when they get out,

02:10:07.340 | they kind of, you're kind of feeling each other

02:10:08.900 | as you're walking.

02:10:09.740 | Boxers do the same thing.

02:10:10.780 | It was doing that same thing.

02:10:11.700 | It's like, what's going on as it comes around,

02:10:13.380 | as it comes around.

02:10:14.220 | And then it was like, hey, we're gonna get here.

02:10:16.220 | And when I got too close to it, you know,

02:10:18.780 | it decided I'm out of here.

02:10:19.900 | And then it did something that we've never seen.

02:10:22.180 | The other question is,

02:10:23.020 | what if I didn't cut across the circle?

02:10:24.540 | What if I just kept going around a circle?

02:10:26.220 | - We just keep going like that?

02:10:27.060 | - I could have just watched it.

02:10:28.060 | I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is,

02:10:30.980 | we have a camera in our helmet, in the joint helmet.

02:10:33.020 | There's a little camera,

02:10:33.860 | but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch

02:10:35.900 | 'cause you've ever put a GoPro on someone's head

02:10:37.620 | where they're looking around like this all the time,

02:10:39.020 | it'll nauseate you.

02:10:40.780 | So we never turn that on.

02:10:42.180 | And all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do

02:10:43.700 | is reach down and hit the switch, you know?

02:10:45.900 | And then we didn't go back and,

02:10:47.140 | 'cause our tapes didn't have anything

02:10:48.500 | 'cause we didn't get it on radar

02:10:50.140 | because I tried to lock it up

02:10:53.300 | 'cause I can move the radar with my head,

02:10:54.820 | but I couldn't, it wouldn't lock.

02:10:56.380 | The radar wouldn't lock.

02:10:57.220 | And so-

02:10:58.940 | - So then the question is,

02:11:00.500 | and this is unanswerable,

02:11:02.060 | but let's try to get some hints at it.

02:11:05.660 | Do you think it's human,

02:11:06.980 | like advanced human-created technology

02:11:09.780 | that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of?

02:11:14.780 | Or is it not something not of this world?

02:11:18.500 | - So if you'd asked me in 2004,

02:11:21.660 | I'd have said, "I don't know."

02:11:23.180 | If you ask me now, so we're coming up on 16 years ago,

02:11:28.500 | - Yeah.

02:11:29.340 | - for a technology like that,

02:11:32.820 | and let's assume that it didn't have

02:11:35.420 | a conventional propulsion system in it,

02:11:37.180 | 'cause I don't think it did.

02:11:38.580 | I would like to think that if we had a technology

02:11:42.860 | that would advance mankind leaps and bounds

02:11:44.820 | from what we normally do,

02:11:46.380 | then it would start coming out.

02:11:47.940 | But to hide something like that for 16 years,

02:11:50.420 | and I understand,

02:11:52.380 | and I don't speak for the United States government,

02:11:54.780 | and I never will speak for the United States government,

02:11:56.500 | but I understand how some of that stuff works

02:11:57.980 | for classification levels and why we classify stuff.

02:12:00.940 | Is it detrimental to national defense?

02:12:03.300 | But there's a point where you have to look and go,

02:12:05.180 | if we had a technology like this

02:12:06.580 | that could literally change the way mankind travels,

02:12:11.340 | how we get things into space,

02:12:13.460 | our ability to do things.

02:12:14.980 | You talk about, are we gonna go to Mars?

02:12:17.220 | Well, if you have something that has the ability to go,

02:12:19.460 | 'cause remember, these things were coming down

02:12:20.740 | when the cruiser tracked them from above 80,000 feet,

02:12:22.740 | which is space,

02:12:24.220 | and they would come down and they would come straight down,

02:12:26.020 | they'd hang out at like 20,000 feet,

02:12:27.660 | and then three or four hours later, they'd go back up.

02:12:29.900 | We don't have anything that can come down, hang out,

02:12:31.780 | and once, you know,

02:12:33.060 | and I'm talking hold out in a spot.

02:12:35.660 | Well, we all know there's winds.

02:12:36.660 | They're not drifting like a balloon.

02:12:37.940 | They're just sitting there.

02:12:39.140 | And then they would go back up.

02:12:40.660 | And they tracked up to the,

02:12:42.140 | when I talked to the controller,

02:12:43.780 | he's like, "We've seen up to 10 of these things."

02:12:46.060 | There's other guys, and it was raining and all this other,

02:12:49.020 | let's just say they tracked a groups of these things

02:12:52.660 | coming down, hanging out, and going up.

02:12:55.220 | - So it's not just propulsion and the way it moves.

02:12:57.860 | It's also fuel.

02:12:59.180 | - It's everything.

02:13:00.100 | - The whole of it indicates a kind of technology

02:13:05.100 | that's highly advanced.

02:13:07.460 | But you don't think, in your sense,

02:13:09.820 | that you actually don't know,

02:13:11.340 | but you know more than a lot of people,

02:13:14.380 | in your sense, the top secret military technology,

02:13:18.860 | if you think about skunkworks,

02:13:19.980 | if you think about like that,

02:13:21.420 | it cannot be more than 15 years ahead.

02:13:25.340 | - I would say, for a leap like that,

02:13:27.860 | and a perfect example in modern times is the 117.

02:13:32.420 | Because now a lot of the data on the 117

02:13:34.060 | is out like it was developed at this time.

02:13:36.460 | It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged

02:13:38.900 | by the United States government.

02:13:39.980 | - What's the 117?

02:13:40.820 | - That's the stealth fighter.

02:13:42.260 | The original stealth fighter,

02:13:43.260 | not the B-2, but the stealth fighter.

02:13:44.540 | So you look at that, yeah, you can,

02:13:48.140 | I think you can hide things for a while.

02:13:51.180 | But I think a technology, a leap,

02:13:52.740 | I mean, this is not a,

02:13:54.940 | hey, we developed this

02:13:55.900 | and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology.

02:13:59.460 | This is a giant leap in technology.

02:14:02.340 | And the other one is, do we have the basis to do that?

02:14:06.340 | Because usually when you have a technology like that,

02:14:08.900 | universities, especially the one you're working at, MIT,

02:14:12.460 | a lot of the leading edge stuff

02:14:13.940 | is coming out of the top tier universities.

02:14:16.140 | So you've got MIT, you've got Caltech,

02:14:17.980 | you've got Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech,

02:14:21.420 | Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools.

02:14:23.620 | Naval Postgraduate School is another one.

02:14:25.660 | There's usually indicators, there's papers of,

02:14:29.100 | hey, this is where we're going.

02:14:31.420 | I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers

02:14:32.980 | on developing a gravity-based propulsion system

02:14:36.460 | that literally, I've got an object,

02:14:38.500 | 'cause how much power would it cost

02:14:41.060 | to create a gravity field of your own

02:14:44.100 | that could actually be strong enough

02:14:45.460 | to counter the giant orb that we live on?

02:14:48.340 | - So by the way, you mentioned gravity-based.

02:14:50.420 | That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do

02:14:53.540 | in terms of propulsion,

02:14:55.780 | like what kind of propulsion would have to be involved

02:15:00.780 | in order to result in that kind of movement.

02:15:03.200 | To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane

02:15:06.140 | from a physics perspective, but of course,

02:15:08.240 | it would seem insane until it's not.

02:15:13.700 | Because remember, we only know what we know.

02:15:16.620 | - Yeah, and which is very little, relatively.

02:15:18.780 | - And as someone has to think out of the box to go,

02:15:21.980 | is this possible at all?

02:15:25.500 | - Yeah, well, okay, so you're saying

02:15:28.380 | that if you had to bet money, all your money,

02:15:30.980 | it would be something that's alien technology,

02:15:35.380 | so it's not human-created technology.

02:15:37.700 | - Well, I don't like to get into little green men,

02:15:39.420 | but I would say that I don't think we've developed it.

02:15:42.740 | I don't think we've developed it.

02:15:44.940 | You know, 'cause the other one, someone had asked me,

02:15:46.420 | they said, "What if there wasn't,

02:15:47.460 | "maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV

02:15:50.780 | "that got sent here from someplace else."

02:15:53.980 | I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around,

02:15:56.340 | so I don't know.

02:15:59.820 | I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some

02:16:01.580 | of the giant brains that think this stuff up.

02:16:03.900 | I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of 'em.

02:16:06.340 | But-- - Which topic?

02:16:08.780 | Which, you mean for drones?

02:16:11.060 | - Just space travel, technology,

02:16:13.980 | because if you look at where we're going,

02:16:15.660 | 'cause everyone talks about Mars.

02:16:17.940 | - Yeah, okay, and we're, hey,

02:16:19.460 | are we gonna be able to colonize,

02:16:20.740 | and I know Elon is big into that.

02:16:22.060 | - Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA?

02:16:26.020 | We put humans back up there.

02:16:29.700 | - My theory, so it's funny, 'cause I know one of the guys

02:16:33.740 | that was, he was one of the original employees at SpaceX.

02:16:37.020 | He's a friend of mine, and I won't say his name,

02:16:39.740 | but he knows Elon, he knows Elon,

02:16:41.860 | and he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project.

02:16:45.180 | He's one of the lead guys on that.

02:16:46.260 | So he's got some great, as a matter of fact,

02:16:48.140 | there's a movie, there's a book coming out

02:16:49.740 | that comes out in about a year on this,

02:16:51.300 | the original, the first years of space,

02:16:53.020 | first six years of SpaceX, and he's named in the book,

02:16:56.260 | and they're supposed to make a movie on it,

02:16:57.460 | so I'm like, hey, who's gonna play it?

02:16:59.860 | But what he's done, to me, it changed the game,

02:17:03.500 | and here's why, because I said,

02:17:06.220 | I think it was '62 when Eisenhower warned

02:17:07.900 | of the industrial defense complex,

02:17:10.300 | which it has become, everything he warned us of,

02:17:13.940 | it has become, and it's really driven by,

02:17:18.260 | there's the big three in defense,

02:17:20.180 | which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing.

02:17:23.700 | Those are the big, those are your biggest,

02:17:25.580 | and Raytheon's kind of like a subset of that,

02:17:28.340 | but they're, Raytheon's pretty big too,

02:17:29.780 | but in US defense, those are the big guys, right?

02:17:32.340 | That's actually where a lot of military guys go

02:17:33.940 | when they retire, they go do stuff like that.

02:17:35.140 | So when you look at that, and you go,

02:17:39.500 | and the way government contracting is working,

02:17:41.620 | and how we charge, and why things cost so much,

02:17:44.180 | and then you go, you got Elon,

02:17:47.460 | who's got an ego, and he doesn't like

02:17:49.940 | to do things a certain way,

02:17:51.020 | and I've talked to the guy that worked there on,

02:17:53.260 | 'cause the government likes to have oversight of contracts,

02:17:55.380 | where he was like, no, just tell me what you want,

02:17:57.540 | I'll build it, and I'll give you a bill when it's done,

02:17:59.420 | and then if I do it for half the price,

02:18:01.180 | I make a ton of money, 'cause he's a money-driven guy,

02:18:04.180 | which I like, capitalism at its best.

02:18:07.420 | So now you look at the two things,

02:18:08.860 | so you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule,

02:18:13.100 | and then you've got Boeing.

02:18:14.540 | So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do

02:18:19.140 | in less time for half the money.

02:18:21.340 | And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters,

02:18:24.780 | 'cause they come back and land,

02:18:25.940 | and you don't have to, like, Morton Thaikol,

02:18:27.540 | we reused 'em on the space shuttle,

02:18:29.220 | but they had to take 'em all apart and do a bunch of stuff,

02:18:31.100 | 'cause they landed in salt water,

02:18:32.260 | and then you had to put 'em all back together,

02:18:33.900 | where Elon gets 'em down,

02:18:35.020 | 'cause I was joking with this guy,

02:18:36.020 | I go, "What do they do?

02:18:36.860 | "Do they, like, rehaul, you know, overhaul?"

02:18:38.980 | He goes, "No, actually, they clean 'em up,

02:18:40.100 | "and they can use 'em again.

02:18:40.980 | "They're reusable systems."

02:18:43.140 | Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of,

02:18:45.540 | but here's a private company.

02:18:46.940 | So being able to put people on,

02:18:48.340 | and the capsule and the spacesuits,

02:18:49.980 | I mean, it's literally like sci-fi,

02:18:51.180 | when you watch when they went up.

02:18:52.780 | So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company

02:18:56.820 | have been able to do, because, you know,

02:18:58.980 | the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money

02:19:01.180 | to the Russian government, you know,

02:19:02.740 | and oh, by the way, if you didn't know,

02:19:04.180 | 'cause I have some friends that are astronauts,

02:19:06.620 | they all have to learn Russian, right?

02:19:09.660 | And they have to do, it's what, level five,

02:19:11.540 | where the test is a phone call,

02:19:13.940 | where they call you up, and they, you know,

02:19:15.260 | 'cause they would go, so I went to the pinning,

02:19:17.860 | and two friends of mine,

02:19:19.660 | the one actually had a mission date,

02:19:20.940 | the one got one later,

02:19:21.780 | so it's cool when you're watching your friends

02:19:23.620 | doing a spacewalk, you know, 'cause I would pull up,

02:19:26.020 | because if I knew what was going on,

02:19:26.940 | I'd pull up the NASA thing, I was at a meeting one day,

02:19:28.780 | and I've got NASA on, and makers out there

02:19:31.540 | floating around, you know, doing his stuff,

02:19:33.420 | and I saw one, he's in the space station

02:19:34.980 | while they're doing a spacewalk,

02:19:35.940 | so it's kind of cool when you go,

02:19:37.020 | oh, yeah, I know that dude,

02:19:37.940 | he's up there in space floating around.

02:19:40.620 | So, when you look at what those,

02:19:44.260 | they're capable of doing, and then you go,

02:19:46.820 | what Elon is bringing to the fact that now,

02:19:50.020 | it's back in America, it's actually,

02:19:52.820 | to me, it's cost-effective for us

02:19:56.760 | to be able to do more stuff.

02:19:58.540 | I think it opens the door to,

02:20:00.740 | do we go back to the moon?

02:20:01.860 | Is there a reason to go back to the moon?

02:20:03.240 | Personally, I think if we're gonna,

02:20:04.300 | if they're really gonna go, you know,

02:20:05.740 | in years from now, go to Mars,

02:20:06.860 | I think that the moon is the stepping stone

02:20:08.540 | to go back, to start proving some of the technology,

02:20:11.700 | to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon,

02:20:14.060 | and now we can get back off the moon,

02:20:16.200 | because we did this on a,

02:20:19.620 | less than a compact computer in the '60s,

02:20:21.700 | which is the whole reason that I flew,

02:20:23.420 | 'cause I'm obsessed, matter of fact,

02:20:24.740 | I have the giant Lego Apollo at home,

02:20:27.820 | and the lander, and I have one that my dad built me

02:20:30.620 | in 1969, right after that.

02:20:32.760 | And Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy, and so am I.

02:20:36.220 | Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a car

02:20:38.100 | in Wapakoneta, Ohio, at the parade

02:20:39.580 | after he walked on the moon,

02:20:40.500 | 'cause his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle

02:20:42.660 | in Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade.

02:20:45.020 | So, I've been obsessed with this since I was a child.

02:20:48.420 | - Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope

02:20:51.100 | that you'll go out to space one day?

02:20:55.640 | - Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second.

02:20:58.300 | You know, I am not--

02:20:59.140 | - 'Cause I mean, that's one of the hopes

02:21:01.180 | of the commercial space flight, is that, you know,

02:21:04.860 | like people like, I mean, it would be tourism,

02:21:08.300 | but you certainly wouldn't wanna, in terms of,

02:21:10.420 | you're now kind of a civilian, right?

02:21:13.140 | I mean, in a sense that you're just a normal person,

02:21:15.180 | you're not a fighter jet pilot currently,

02:21:17.600 | but it seems like if we send a civilian up there,

02:21:20.500 | it would be somebody like you, in the next, like, 20 years.

02:21:23.860 | - I'd be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me

02:21:25.980 | on one of those things, I'd be all over it.

02:21:27.220 | I don't know what my wife would say,

02:21:28.140 | but you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks

02:21:30.240 | while you're alive.

02:21:31.100 | - I'd love to hear that discussion with your wife.

02:21:32.900 | Listen, there's the pros and cons.

02:21:35.460 | - She's, I mean, I've known her since high school,

02:21:37.940 | so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know.

02:21:40.580 | Most people that know me are like,

02:21:41.740 | yeah, you're pretty much the same person

02:21:42.980 | you were in high school.

02:21:43.820 | You know, I was a class clown, and I still am that way.

02:21:46.520 | So--

02:21:48.300 | - Let me ask you this question about,

02:21:49.460 | so I'm talking to Elon again soon.

02:21:52.140 | I'm curious to get your perspective on it.

02:21:57.140 | If I wanted to talk to him about Tic Tac,

02:21:59.500 | about these weird, out-there propulsion ideas,

02:22:04.500 | which are obviously, just like you said,

02:22:07.260 | if there's something to it,

02:22:08.900 | if it can be investigated somehow,

02:22:11.160 | it would be extremely useful for us to understand

02:22:13.960 | in the effort of developing propulsion systems

02:22:17.180 | that can get us cheaply out to space.

02:22:20.420 | What should Elon think about this stuff?

02:22:23.320 | What should he do?

02:22:24.340 | What should people like him--

02:22:25.980 | - I think people need to open their aperture up

02:22:28.060 | and stay off of, take the next step and go,

02:22:32.500 | you know, we are tied to fuels,

02:22:35.220 | and either solid rocket or liquid, or whatever we do,

02:22:38.260 | but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas

02:22:41.340 | to create thrust, which is really, in layman's terms,

02:22:44.740 | you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does.

02:22:47.540 | If you have something that you can contain

02:22:52.200 | that is a fuel source that would last

02:22:54.940 | a significant amount of time, you know,

02:22:58.180 | those rocket boosters go, and when they're done,

02:22:59.840 | they're done, there's enough to get 'em back down,

02:23:01.620 | and that's it, there's not a huge, you know,

02:23:03.460 | not coming back and go,

02:23:04.300 | "Oh, I still got three quarters of a tank,

02:23:05.700 | "let's bolt 'em on and do it again."

02:23:07.260 | His system's not doing that.

02:23:08.860 | But, you know, the way contracting,

02:23:13.540 | especially in the government,

02:23:14.380 | the government has tons of money,

02:23:15.780 | but you gotta remember the government has to justify

02:23:18.060 | how they spend our tax dollars for the most part.

02:23:20.020 | There's times where they can hide money in the budget

02:23:22.600 | to get stuff done, but then when you look at,

02:23:24.920 | and I'm just gonna throw a few out there,

02:23:26.220 | but if you look at what Amazon, you know,

02:23:30.860 | does with Bezos, and you've got Elon,

02:23:33.580 | there's some big money out there.

02:23:37.100 | I mean, you're talking, you know,

02:23:38.580 | Bezos alone could buy companies, like big companies.

02:23:43.060 | Apple's another one.

02:23:44.060 | These companies got huge, huge amounts of money,

02:23:47.740 | and then just go over to the Gates Foundation,

02:23:49.840 | and they've got gazillions and gazillions of dollars.

02:23:52.800 | We've got universities.

02:23:53.940 | There's so much money out there.

02:23:55.120 | If we really wanted to do it,

02:23:57.580 | aside from what the government wants to do,

02:23:59.500 | because we do live in a free society,

02:24:02.020 | I think there's enough to go, "How do we do this?"

02:24:05.820 | Because when you work outside of

02:24:08.720 | what the government would wanna do,

02:24:10.540 | so we're not working on this necessarily

02:24:12.860 | for the United States, although I am a huge giant.

02:24:15.420 | - American. - I would never,

02:24:17.980 | yeah, I am an American.

02:24:18.820 | - You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union.

02:24:20.700 | I can't believe you agreed to this.

02:24:23.140 | - But when I, no. - You haven't killed me yet.

02:24:26.060 | (laughs)

02:24:28.180 | - Yeah, well, you're here.

02:24:29.480 | And you've been here for a while.

02:24:32.300 | - No, no, no, I'm joking.

02:24:33.460 | I'm an American citizen.

02:24:34.580 | I'm actually pretty much American through and through.

02:24:36.620 | - But see, when you do that,

02:24:37.460 | so you look at, let's just look at American universities.

02:24:40.060 | So there's some brilliant minds,

02:24:41.460 | and we'll just use MIT, 'cause you worked down there.

02:24:43.740 | There's some brilliant minds,

02:24:44.860 | but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds

02:24:46.900 | that are not American citizens.

02:24:48.100 | So if you wanna get into government stuff,

02:24:50.180 | and you are not an American citizen,

02:24:51.620 | it gets really, really, really hard.

02:24:53.860 | But if I take money, like Bezos money, Elon money,

02:24:57.660 | and they, let's just say they wanna work together,

02:25:00.460 | they can split it up 50/50, the two of 'em,

02:25:02.740 | when the technology gets developed.

02:25:04.500 | But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work.

02:25:07.160 | I just wanna make sure that I try and keep it

02:25:08.980 | in the United States, because technology is technology,

02:25:12.140 | and if it gets developed and gets over to where,

02:25:14.580 | a country gets ahold of it,

02:25:17.300 | and then just basically uses it for their own,

02:25:18.860 | because you save 'em all the research time.

02:25:21.460 | You don't wanna do that.

02:25:22.660 | But if we can get to the point where we can,

02:25:24.220 | we do it on the International Space Station.

02:25:25.660 | We realized that space was too expensive

02:25:27.860 | for one country to do alone.

02:25:29.820 | So we made the International Space Station,

02:25:31.300 | and we have a conglomerate.

02:25:34.540 | It's the one thing that the Russians and the US

02:25:36.460 | actually work together on.

02:25:38.060 | Think about it, that's it.

02:25:39.380 | We work together on space, because we realize

02:25:41.660 | it's way too expensive for us to do alone, and effective.

02:25:45.060 | So we've got this thing that's been out there

02:25:46.380 | floating around for God now, what is it, like 20 years,

02:25:48.540 | that thing's been up there floating around?

02:25:50.000 | So it's getting old, we're gonna have to replace parts

02:25:52.140 | and do stuff, but if we can pool the money together

02:25:55.140 | and come up with something that would literally

02:25:56.820 | change mankind and change travel,

02:25:58.420 | and allow us to actually do a more effective thing

02:26:00.740 | of exploring, 'cause if you develop that technology,

02:26:03.660 | I'm not, you don't even have to send a man person.

02:26:06.140 | If you can develop a technology that's so,

02:26:08.340 | and with our automation and where we're progressing

02:26:10.260 | and our competing power, to send something out

02:26:13.980 | that's not just floating around,

02:26:15.540 | when, you know, that can react a lot quicker,

02:26:18.460 | something that could actually go down to the surface

02:26:20.280 | and come back up, so right now,

02:26:21.480 | everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there

02:26:23.160 | and it just sends data back, you can analyze it.

02:26:25.560 | But if I've got a technology that can go up there

02:26:27.200 | really quick, I'm not worried about, man,

02:26:28.680 | I don't have life support systems and all that,

02:26:30.320 | but it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around,

02:26:32.920 | it can hover above, it can take samples,

02:26:34.760 | and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back

02:26:38.520 | so we can analyze it here, that's a game changer.

02:26:41.040 | It's a complete game changer,

02:26:42.080 | because it opens up all the planets.

02:26:44.920 | - Exactly, so in a sense, the tic-tac is a symbol,

02:26:49.920 | so whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective,

02:26:54.020 | there's a non-zero probability that it's alien technology,

02:26:58.380 | and in that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope

02:27:03.380 | and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture

02:27:08.060 | and to invest big amounts of money

02:27:11.300 | into thinking outside the box.

02:27:13.300 | It's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion,

02:27:18.300 | we can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way,

02:27:25.320 | and it's worthwhile to try.

02:27:27.280 | - I think, and I don't think the money,

02:27:28.500 | if you look at the big picture with the amount of money,

02:27:30.320 | some of that's out there floating around

02:27:31.420 | in these private companies, I think if you said,

02:27:34.220 | hey, I've got, let's just say $100 million,

02:27:36.700 | which really, $100 million relative to,

02:27:38.540 | Bezos has got, what, a hundred and some billion dollars

02:27:40.420 | in that work. - A billion, yeah.

02:27:41.460 | - So if he said, hey, $100 million,

02:27:44.140 | you drop $100 million, and I go,

02:27:46.180 | and I'm gonna put a, like the government will send

02:27:48.260 | a broad area announcement out that says,

02:27:50.540 | hey, we're looking for this technology, or a DARPA program,

02:27:53.420 | but what if I just said, hey, who's to stop Bezos and Elon

02:27:57.060 | from doing that on their own to say, hey,

02:27:58.740 | I wanna go pool universities

02:28:00.060 | 'cause they have fewer restrictions

02:28:01.540 | because it's not tax dollars,

02:28:02.700 | they don't have the checks and balances,

02:28:03.660 | they can do whatever they want, so their money,

02:28:05.460 | oh, sorry about that, to go, hey, I'm gonna put this out,

02:28:08.940 | and I'm gonna get the best physicists

02:28:11.300 | that are working at CERN, that are at MIT,

02:28:13.900 | that are at Caltech, at the schools I mentioned,

02:28:15.740 | and oh, by the way, a few of these guys

02:28:17.980 | are propulsion experts, and I'm gonna basically,

02:28:20.220 | I'm gonna fund you guys for 10 years.

02:28:23.380 | So you get $10 million a year,

02:28:25.300 | and I'm gonna give you your salaries,

02:28:26.620 | and we're gonna do that, or whatever the amount works,

02:28:28.180 | so let's cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right,

02:28:30.940 | to do the research, but oh, by the way,

02:28:32.500 | the research is, it's not classified, but it's controlled.

02:28:36.540 | So we're not gonna publicly just put this out in journals,

02:28:38.860 | but if we make a leap that we think would advance,

02:28:41.660 | because although those, let's say there's 10 of 'em,

02:28:44.220 | those 10 scientists come up with something,

02:28:45.820 | and they put out a paper, there might be another,

02:28:48.500 | a number 11 at another university that reads that paper

02:28:51.100 | and says, hey, I kinda had this idea,

02:28:53.740 | and now you can get a thought pool that pushes us in

02:28:56.300 | and gets us out of the mindset,

02:28:59.220 | 'cause we have a tendency to,

02:29:01.340 | we evolve the stuff that we create,

02:29:03.500 | but it's like I was joking, 'cause I know a ton of guys

02:29:07.060 | with PhDs and girls, and I said, but you know,

02:29:10.020 | how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering,

02:29:12.340 | how much new math is really being done?

02:29:14.180 | I said, there's a handful of people in the world

02:29:16.060 | that are really doing, I'm talking Stephen Hawking's type

02:29:19.460 | brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something

02:29:22.980 | that's totally different.

02:29:25.940 | - That's a big, dramatic thing now going on in physics

02:29:28.380 | that everybody's converged towards this local minima

02:29:32.140 | or local maxima, however you think about it,

02:29:34.260 | and it's, again, same as with the TIC-TAC,

02:29:38.260 | thinking outside the box is not accepted,

02:29:43.260 | and it probably should be.

02:29:44.980 | - But it's hard, because if you go back,

02:29:47.020 | go back to Einstein, back to the original,

02:29:49.700 | he was out of the box.

02:29:52.980 | He did not think the norm. - That's a true genius.

02:29:54.660 | - Had he not thought out of the box

02:29:56.860 | and came up with some of his theories, where would we be?

02:29:59.860 | - Okay, we're jumping around a little bit.

02:30:02.980 | So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space,

02:30:06.740 | but let me jump back to a few questions that folks had.

02:30:11.740 | I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff,

02:30:14.660 | because I think, not the actual facts of the debunking,

02:30:19.140 | but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers

02:30:24.140 | hurts my heart a little bit, because people are just

02:30:26.780 | talking past each other, but let me kind of bring it up.

02:30:30.780 | Mick West, I've just recently started to pay attention,

02:30:35.220 | just in preparing to talk to you about this world,

02:30:37.540 | and Mick West is one of the better known people

02:30:39.580 | who kind of makes a career out of trying to debunk.

02:30:44.500 | So his natural approach to all situations

02:30:48.480 | is that of a skeptic.

02:30:50.340 | I think it's very useful and powerful,

02:30:52.460 | especially for me coming from a scientific perspective,

02:30:55.180 | to take the approach he does.

02:30:56.980 | It's valuable, and I think no matter what,

02:31:00.260 | I think there's, I hope that people,

02:31:03.140 | quote unquote true believers,

02:31:04.820 | are a little bit more open-minded to the work of Mick West.

02:31:07.980 | I think it's quite useful and brilliant work.

02:31:10.940 | So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos,

02:31:14.020 | a bunch of ideas, where he kind of suggests

02:31:16.860 | possible other explanations of the things

02:31:19.020 | that are out there.

02:31:20.780 | He has some explanations of the things that you've seen

02:31:25.260 | with the Tic Tac, like with your own eyes.

02:31:28.660 | Like he says that it's possible that you miscalculated

02:31:33.540 | the size and the distance of the thing,

02:31:36.140 | and so on, when you were flying around.

02:31:37.820 | I don't find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that.

02:31:41.020 | - No, let me do it right now.

02:31:42.220 | - Sure.

02:31:43.060 | - So, 'cause that comes up.

02:31:43.880 | Like how did you know it was about 40 feet long?

02:31:45.900 | I go, okay, so 16 years, flying against other airplanes,

02:31:50.900 | know what stuff looks like, you know,

02:31:53.260 | I've looked down on things.

02:31:54.820 | So if I know, I know, here's the known things.

02:31:56.620 | I know when we saw the Tic Tac, I was at 20,000 feet-ish,

02:32:00.820 | right around there.

02:32:02.060 | So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like

02:32:04.300 | looking down on 'em, 'cause I've done it

02:32:05.780 | for all those years.

02:32:07.260 | I mean, I got a good idea.

02:32:08.340 | So that's why I said 40 feet,

02:32:09.700 | 'cause it's about Hornet size.

02:32:11.820 | So, and as I go around, you get to the point

02:32:14.380 | where you have to be able to judge distance

02:32:16.900 | when we fly out of experience.

02:32:19.380 | And you can tell if something's small or big, you know.

02:32:23.460 | So I would argue the fact of, you know, peer experience.

02:32:27.260 | There's, you know, professional observers,

02:32:30.040 | which is what we're actually trained to do,

02:32:32.180 | and having done it for so long, no, it was,

02:32:36.540 | and everyone came back with the same thing.

02:32:38.100 | They're like, yeah, it's about the size of a Hornet.

02:32:40.140 | - From a human factors perspective,

02:32:42.380 | how often in your experience of those 16 years

02:32:46.580 | do you find that what you see

02:32:50.860 | is the incorrect state of things?

02:32:52.900 | So like how often do you make mistakes with vision?

02:32:56.260 | - You actually, you make vision issues a lot,

02:33:00.180 | because you're, and the sad part is,

02:33:02.060 | is your brain believes what your eyes see.

02:33:04.620 | We are actually trained to do the opposite of that,

02:33:07.260 | especially when you instrument fly,

02:33:08.980 | because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing,

02:33:13.100 | but you gotta trust your instrument.

02:33:14.340 | So let's go back to landing at night.

02:33:16.100 | So your eyes-- - How do you do that?

02:33:18.580 | Yeah, land at night,

02:33:19.420 | that's the problem. - Your eyes assume

02:33:20.500 | that the runway, and your brain assumes

02:33:22.940 | that the runway is fixed,

02:33:24.180 | but you know that the runway is moving.

02:33:26.700 | So if I try and do stuff visually,

02:33:29.580 | you die every time.

02:33:31.220 | Not every time, but you die close to every time

02:33:33.060 | trying to land on a boat.

02:33:34.500 | So we actually use instruments

02:33:35.820 | which are counter to your brain,

02:33:37.660 | so, and there's actually all kinds of things

02:33:39.220 | that we go through in training.

02:33:41.060 | They have this thing, I think they still use it,

02:33:43.580 | it's called the MSDD,

02:33:45.180 | multispatial disorientation device,

02:33:47.380 | or the spin and puke.

02:33:50.080 | (laughing)

02:33:51.040 | It looks like a giant carousel

02:33:52.560 | and you're in these little modules,

02:33:53.680 | and when you get out,

02:33:54.520 | you think the thing goes really fast

02:33:55.800 | and you can make yourself think

02:33:58.040 | that I'm descending or climbing,

02:33:59.840 | but you're actually only going around in circles

02:34:01.800 | at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk,

02:34:04.080 | but as they spin you around in a little sub thing,

02:34:06.880 | and slow it down and speed it up,

02:34:08.280 | your body does this, and you,

02:34:09.640 | you know, and then by visuals of showing you,

02:34:11.880 | like they can spin it sideways to the outside wall,

02:34:14.480 | but they can show like lines that are,

02:34:16.320 | they can make the line stand still

02:34:17.520 | 'cause they're moving the same velocity,

02:34:18.600 | they can move the other way,

02:34:19.440 | and you'll think you're screaming.

02:34:20.600 | You see it in amusement parks all the time.

02:34:23.440 | You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A,

02:34:26.680 | but you're really not doing,

02:34:28.160 | you're sitting there.

02:34:29.000 | So we get trained on all that stuff,

02:34:29.940 | so if you, if you wanna look at it and go,

02:34:31.760 | well, you're disoriented or this,

02:34:33.440 | I'd be like, I'd argue going, no, I'm not,

02:34:35.160 | because, you know, when I'm flying the airplane,

02:34:37.440 | even as I'm looking at the tic-tac,

02:34:38.760 | I've got a heads up display

02:34:40.000 | that tells me what my airplane's doing.

02:34:42.280 | So I've got, I know what I'm doing,

02:34:44.680 | I can look outside,

02:34:45.520 | I've got a sense of what I'm doing,

02:34:46.580 | but I'm also looking inside to cross check

02:34:48.740 | of what I'm seeing is in reality what I'm doing.

02:34:51.120 | - So you actually, your brain gotten good at combining,

02:34:53.480 | almost adding extra sensory information.

02:34:56.400 | - You have to.

02:34:57.240 | - You have like supervision.

02:34:58.360 | So you're combining what you're seeing

02:35:00.280 | and adjusting what the sensors,

02:35:02.020 | what you call an instrument,

02:35:03.240 | so giving you, and that in turn,

02:35:06.000 | it's a loop that adjusts the perception system

02:35:08.680 | that like, that adjusts your brain's interpretation

02:35:12.400 | of what you're seeing.

02:35:13.240 | - Yeah, you'd be amazed at how good,

02:35:14.440 | so here's another example.

02:35:15.740 | So if we go out over the water,

02:35:17.960 | so there's no land in sight,

02:35:19.860 | and we're gonna fight.

02:35:20.820 | So when we fight, you know, two airplanes,

02:35:22.580 | we're gonna dog fight.

02:35:23.720 | As an instructor, and I was for most of my time,

02:35:29.380 | you have to come back and you have to recreate it.

02:35:31.420 | So we call it drawing arrows.

02:35:33.400 | So you have to recreate that stuff.

02:35:37.240 | So you get pretty good at going, you know,

02:35:39.480 | like I would take off and say, all right,

02:35:40.980 | we're starting heading due east.

02:35:43.040 | And I know where the sun is at,

02:35:45.920 | 'cause in this short couple minutes

02:35:47.360 | that we're gonna fight, the sun's really

02:35:48.360 | not gonna move much, it's gonna be in a rel,

02:35:49.800 | so now I know that the sun is at,

02:35:52.240 | you know, let's just say 195 degrees, right?

02:35:56.600 | So I'm starting going east,

02:35:58.000 | and it's actually be down off my right-hand side.

02:36:00.680 | So now I know as I'm fighting,

02:36:01.840 | 'cause in the water, you don't have any reference,

02:36:03.240 | like, oh, I passed land, I passed land.

02:36:04.600 | No, you don't, and you can't use clouds

02:36:06.000 | 'cause clouds do move.

02:36:07.300 | But you gotta come back 'cause you go,

02:36:08.580 | here's where I started, and then you,

02:36:10.160 | as soon as you end, you go, all right,

02:36:11.520 | I ended heading 355.

02:36:14.200 | And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns,

02:36:17.160 | and use the sun relative, so you can create

02:36:19.120 | this entire battle that went on with Aero,

02:36:21.800 | so that you can come back and debrief the guy

02:36:23.440 | that you were teaching on exactly what happened.

02:36:26.920 | And you get really, really good at that.

02:36:28.760 | So when you come up and go, well, Dave,

02:36:30.240 | how do you know you were at six o'clock?

02:36:31.400 | And he went around and he came up here.

02:36:32.820 | I go, because I'm trained to do all that,

02:36:36.120 | and I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do it.

02:36:38.920 | But usually, you memorize it all,

02:36:41.240 | and you get done, and then you read,

02:36:42.640 | as soon as you're done, you knock it off,

02:36:43.880 | you look at the other airplane, you get set,

02:36:44.960 | and you start writing all your notes down.

02:36:46.280 | - Yeah.

02:36:47.600 | - And you're writing it really fast on your cart,

02:36:49.120 | and you go out with a stack of cards,

02:36:50.120 | and you stick a new one on your kneeboard cart,

02:36:51.520 | so you're ready to go, and here's the next setup.

02:36:54.120 | - It's kind of, it's in some way similar

02:36:57.580 | to what, like, at the highest level chess players do.

02:37:01.640 | I mean, you're, I mean, they recap the games,

02:37:06.640 | but the richness of the representation that they use

02:37:12.000 | in remembering, like, how the games evolved.

02:37:15.080 | It's not like, it's much richer than the actual moves.

02:37:19.480 | It's like these, a bunch of patterns

02:37:21.880 | that are hard to put into words,

02:37:23.080 | like all the richness of thinking they have

02:37:27.520 | about the way the game evolved.

02:37:30.040 | It's more, like, instinctual,

02:37:31.680 | from years and years of experience.

02:37:34.120 | So they try to put it into words, but they really can't.

02:37:36.720 | It's just--

02:37:37.560 | - No, I understand that.

02:37:38.680 | It's because, for us, if we don't come back with anything,

02:37:41.760 | then there's no learning to be had.

02:37:43.400 | 'Cause the whole thing is, the debrief,

02:37:45.480 | when we get back and we talk about it,

02:37:46.720 | that's really where the learning is.

02:37:48.600 | And it's the same thing if you wanna go back to chess.

02:37:50.960 | When you start off, you try and learn,

02:37:53.600 | because you're remembering what you're doing.

02:37:55.000 | If you play against someone, I'm always a big place,

02:37:56.800 | play with someone better than you.

02:37:58.880 | That's how you learn.

02:37:59.720 | If you're constantly beating people,

02:38:00.720 | you're not learning anything.

02:38:01.560 | You're just learning that they're not good,

02:38:02.640 | and you're better.

02:38:03.960 | When you challenge yourself against someone

02:38:06.760 | that is going to, is better than you, you learn.

02:38:09.920 | So I learned how to fight an airplane with,

02:38:13.360 | he's actually one of my best friends, we'll call him Tom.

02:38:16.880 | I won't give his call sign,

02:38:17.720 | 'cause I don't know what he wanna say.

02:38:19.120 | So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight,

02:38:21.880 | because Tom had just left Top Gun.

02:38:23.840 | He was the training officer at Top Gun,

02:38:26.240 | which, so that's the guy.

02:38:27.840 | The training officer's the main guy at Top Gun.

02:38:30.800 | So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun.

02:38:32.360 | So Tom, when I learned, 'cause I had come out of A6,

02:38:35.320 | and we really don't fight, 'cause it was a bomber.

02:38:37.800 | So I get in F-18s, and I wanna learn how to fight,

02:38:39.680 | 'cause it's a whole other side of the mission.

02:38:41.040 | It's the F in F fighter attack.

02:38:42.680 | The F-A-18 is fighter attack.

02:38:44.380 | So I had to learn how to fight.

02:38:46.240 | So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world,

02:38:48.880 | who's gonna teach me how to do it.

02:38:51.200 | And he did, and I would do something,

02:38:53.000 | and then he would go,

02:38:54.360 | I'd get to a situation where I had never been,

02:38:56.400 | and then I would go, "Well, I'm gonna do this."

02:38:58.080 | And then he would destroy me,

02:38:59.480 | and he would come back and go,

02:39:01.300 | "Here's why you don't do that."

02:39:02.720 | And then I would take that knowledge,

02:39:04.160 | and I would put it in my little basket of tricks.

02:39:06.800 | And over time, 'cause you don't,

02:39:08.280 | no one walks out into that world,

02:39:09.880 | I don't care how gifted of an aviator,

02:39:11.440 | and go, "I am the man," or the woman, "I am it."

02:39:15.200 | No, it's a learning process.

02:39:17.360 | - And so, over all those years, you've gotten good.

02:39:19.800 | So I mean, so what are the chances

02:39:24.800 | that your eyes betrayed you when you saw the Tic Tac?

02:39:28.920 | Low. - Zero.

02:39:31.560 | - Well, I mean, I'm not zero.

02:39:34.160 | So let me be clear. - Okay, 90, I am 99.9%.

02:39:37.800 | So 0.1%, my eyes deceive me.

02:39:40.160 | But remember, if it deceived me,

02:39:42.160 | it had to deceive the other four people.

02:39:43.800 | So the percentage is even lower.

02:39:45.520 | - Yeah, okay.

02:39:46.560 | Well, I don't find that a particular debunking case

02:39:49.280 | that you said, but I'm glad you put it,

02:39:51.280 | you said those words out loud.

02:39:54.900 | So for me, from my perspective,

02:39:57.060 | coming into this world and looking at it,

02:39:59.760 | I'm a little bit more skeptical.

02:40:01.960 | So your eye account, I think,

02:40:04.480 | is the most fascinating story.

02:40:05.960 | And I think that's inspiring to me

02:40:10.960 | and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there.

02:40:13.880 | On so many levels, just like we said,

02:40:17.080 | on the engineering level,

02:40:18.400 | that maybe there's propulsion systems

02:40:20.080 | where we can actually build,

02:40:21.080 | that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.

02:40:24.680 | So it's at the very least intriguing

02:40:28.160 | and at the best, inspiring.

02:40:30.040 | I just wanna say that.

02:40:30.860 | But on the video side, it's like,

02:40:35.960 | it's the videos for the FLIR video,

02:40:40.960 | the GoFast and the Gimbal video,

02:40:45.560 | they are only interesting to me

02:40:50.360 | in the context of your story.

02:40:52.960 | Like without that, they're kind of low resolution.

02:40:56.680 | It's like, it's easier to build a debunking story

02:41:01.680 | to be skeptical.

02:41:02.680 | So this is where I'm coming from.

02:41:04.140 | Maybe you can convince me otherwise.

02:41:05.840 | But so to bring up Mick West one more time,

02:41:08.380 | he looks at the FLIR video

02:41:11.600 | and he says that one of the most amazing parts

02:41:14.960 | of the FLIR video, for people who haven't seen it,

02:41:17.400 | is at the end of it,

02:41:19.100 | the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly

02:41:26.840 | to the left--

02:41:28.840 | - Off the screen.

02:41:29.680 | - Off the screen.

02:41:30.900 | And what Mick West says is that,

02:41:35.900 | Mick West, probably others,

02:41:37.580 | that the way to explain that is the tracking system.

02:41:42.580 | Like we said, it's vision-based tracking

02:41:45.180 | simply loses the object, the tracking loses it.

02:41:50.180 | And so it simply allows the object to float off screen

02:41:55.580 | because it's no longer tracking it.

02:41:57.980 | So I find that at least a plausible explanation

02:42:02.360 | of that video.

02:42:03.240 | Looking at your face, you do not.

02:42:07.380 | So can you maybe comment to that debunking aspect?

02:42:12.380 | - So it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff

02:42:16.820 | who've never operated the system.

02:42:18.280 | - No, for sure.

02:42:19.120 | - And that's like me going,

02:42:20.800 | 'cause I'm a big Formula One fan,

02:42:22.920 | that's like me going, oh my God, Lewis,

02:42:25.020 | what were you doing?

02:42:25.860 | You could have done this with the car

02:42:26.760 | and you'd have won the race.

02:42:27.600 | And Lewis Hamilton right now is defending

02:42:29.960 | world champion two-time,

02:42:30.960 | well he's four-time, four or five-time world champion.

02:42:32.720 | But that would be pretty stupid of me

02:42:35.600 | to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.

02:42:38.100 | Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car.

02:42:43.060 | So I can't tell you how many times I've watched.

02:42:45.120 | You gotta remember when we looked at this thing,

02:42:47.040 | when Chad came back with the video,

02:42:49.080 | we sat there and watched it.

02:42:50.040 | I mean, I can't tell you how many times

02:42:51.160 | I watched it off the original tapes going,

02:42:52.800 | all right, right, all right, let's look at this.

02:42:56.240 | Because you can look and see where the airplane's going,

02:42:59.080 | you can see if it's looking left or right.

02:43:00.680 | And if you actually watch all that stuff,

02:43:01.920 | it doesn't do that.

02:43:02.760 | It actually, when the vehicle starts to move,

02:43:04.720 | the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up,

02:43:07.320 | and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this

02:43:09.080 | 'cause they built the pod.

02:43:10.880 | The tracking gate'll start to open up,

02:43:13.200 | but the thing, when it leaves so fast off the screen,

02:43:16.040 | the pod can't move fast enough.

02:43:17.400 | It has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around.

02:43:19.780 | 'Cause there's another theory that,

02:43:21.440 | oh, the pod's looking forward.

02:43:23.200 | When the pod passes underneath the airplane,

02:43:24.760 | so if I'm looking at you and you pass underneath me,

02:43:26.560 | as it does this, the ball will actually flip around

02:43:28.760 | to kind of finish off, and it swaps ends

02:43:32.480 | 'cause it has, it's a gimbal.

02:43:34.000 | It can't just, it's not free floating.

02:43:36.340 | But there's a theory on one of them,

02:43:39.040 | oh, it's here and it flipped over.

02:43:40.000 | It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front.

02:43:41.520 | It stays like this.

02:43:42.940 | So yet another debunker who doesn't know this.

02:43:45.840 | So, and Mick has had several theories

02:43:48.480 | on some of the other videos,

02:43:50.360 | like one of them, the go fast as a bird,

02:43:52.760 | and Jeremy Corbell actually did a nice job

02:43:54.920 | of saying, no, it's not because he's on black hot.

02:43:58.720 | So the white object is actually colder than the ocean.

02:44:01.380 | That's fine.

02:44:03.200 | Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean.

02:44:04.480 | They'd be dead.

02:44:05.700 | - So the gimbal video, to comment on the amazing aspect

02:44:10.160 | of that video is the rotation,

02:44:13.360 | the apparent rotation of the object

02:44:15.000 | that is something that is not possible to do

02:44:19.920 | with systems that we know of.

02:44:22.520 | And Mick West suggests that a flare,

02:44:27.160 | like reflections or whatever can explain.

02:44:30.960 | - No, because what Mick West doesn't see is,

02:44:32.820 | so when they take, 'cause I've talked to the,

02:44:35.120 | one of them actually I work with.

02:44:37.600 | So I know him, I know I talk to him all the time.

02:44:40.600 | So, and it's his best friend actually shot the video.

02:44:44.480 | One of his best friends.

02:44:45.680 | - For the gimbal video.

02:44:46.520 | - The gimbal video, both of them.

02:44:47.880 | The go fast and the gimbal were shot by the same person.

02:44:50.480 | Okay.

02:44:51.320 | So, and they were in each other's wedding.

02:44:53.960 | So that's how well they know each other.

02:44:55.480 | Okay.

02:44:56.320 | So what you don't see is,

02:44:58.520 | so the airplanes they're flying still super Hornets,

02:45:01.460 | but they have the APG-79,

02:45:02.880 | which is the new phased array radar

02:45:04.760 | that's made by Raytheon, things incredible.

02:45:06.840 | Okay.

02:45:08.360 | It doesn't, usually if it's out there

02:45:10.160 | and it sees it, it's real.

02:45:11.380 | So at first they thought they were ghost tracks

02:45:13.040 | when they started seeing stuff.

02:45:13.920 | And then they actually threw one

02:45:14.880 | of the targeting pods out there.

02:45:16.240 | Well, the targeting pod, if there's heat signature

02:45:17.840 | and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something's there.

02:45:19.840 | It's real.

02:45:20.680 | You're not picking up some extraneous things.

02:45:22.720 | So what you see in the gimbal video

02:45:25.320 | of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit,

02:45:27.360 | look at that thing.

02:45:28.200 | It's just sitting there and it's in the wind

02:45:29.100 | and it's going against the wind.

02:45:30.760 | Why it's doing this.

02:45:32.600 | Someone goes, oh, it's an airplane.

02:45:33.640 | Now, if an airplane does this,

02:45:34.680 | it's eventually going to start to change aspect

02:45:36.320 | because it's in a turn.

02:45:37.320 | This thing doesn't change aspect.

02:45:38.440 | It just rotates.

02:45:39.280 | - It's just rotating.

02:45:40.100 | - Right.

02:45:40.940 | The other thing that you see when you talk to them is,

02:45:43.300 | so they're on their radar,

02:45:44.680 | there's an object that they identify

02:45:47.720 | as their number one priority

02:45:49.400 | or their launch and steering.

02:45:50.860 | So when they designate that,

02:45:52.800 | that's where the targeting pod is going to look.

02:45:54.400 | That's what you get on the gimbal video.

02:45:56.320 | There's five other, I think it's five.

02:45:58.320 | They're kind of in a V, you know, like a geese would fly

02:46:01.080 | that are out in front of it.

02:46:01.960 | And they're actually coming, they're out in front of it.

02:46:04.120 | And they actually turn on the radar and go the other way

02:46:06.560 | while they're filming the gimbal video,

02:46:08.520 | which it's, I know Ryan has come out and talked about it,

02:46:14.400 | but when you see it, you go, you know,

02:46:17.520 | if you take it in context, cause you go,

02:46:19.080 | oh, it's just the video.

02:46:20.600 | Well, if you take the video with the radar going,

02:46:22.120 | no, there's actually other things out there

02:46:23.480 | because there's at least 60 people

02:46:25.380 | that have seen these things on radar off the vacates.

02:46:28.840 | It was, it actually became,

02:46:31.000 | I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing

02:46:32.920 | at the time, the fighter wing.

02:46:34.600 | I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this?

02:46:35.920 | He goes, well, we got a NOTAM out,

02:46:37.160 | which is a notice to airmen,

02:46:38.180 | which means there's these objects out there

02:46:40.480 | in the warning area.

02:46:41.720 | So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area

02:46:43.880 | it's all the warning area tells you is that

02:46:45.320 | there's high military traffic and training out here.

02:46:47.360 | It's probably best not to be here,

02:46:48.960 | but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there.

02:46:52.320 | So these things have the right,

02:46:53.760 | wherever they're from or whatever they are,

02:46:56.120 | you know, cause people are like, oh, they're balloons.

02:46:57.720 | Well, balloons float.

02:46:59.160 | Balloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind

02:47:01.960 | and stay in the same location.

02:47:02.960 | They actually, they had an airplane cause there was two.

02:47:05.200 | There's the gimbal thing.

02:47:06.040 | That's a pretty big object.

02:47:08.080 | There's also, they talk about,

02:47:09.360 | it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere.

02:47:11.480 | - A translucent sphere.

02:47:12.520 | What the hell is that?

02:47:14.600 | - And they almost hit one.

02:47:15.960 | - It's almost hit them.

02:47:17.360 | So that's another, that's one of the biggest,

02:47:20.360 | another biggest account is like almost hit a plane,

02:47:23.120 | something that appeared to be a cube

02:47:26.120 | in a translucent sphere.

02:47:27.400 | What do you make of that?

02:47:28.640 | - Again, you know.

02:47:31.560 | - What, I mean, that's the most dangerous thing.

02:47:35.960 | - You're right.

02:47:36.800 | The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go,

02:47:38.480 | okay, so this thing passed between two airplanes

02:47:40.880 | and it was, I think it was in the like a hundred feet

02:47:42.880 | or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it.

02:47:45.560 | So what they do is they come back and go,

02:47:46.680 | hey, I had a near midair.

02:47:48.320 | What'd you have a near midair with?

02:47:49.520 | Well, this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it.

02:47:52.080 | And you go, huh?

02:47:53.640 | And you know, so they send out a NOTAM again

02:47:55.440 | and they do what's called a hazard report that says,

02:47:57.920 | hey, there's these objects out there.

02:47:59.120 | We almost hit one.

02:48:00.240 | You're right, and that gets sent off

02:48:01.200 | to the Naval Safety Center.

02:48:02.560 | What was done, I mean, what are you gonna do?

02:48:06.520 | Can you catch one, go out with a giant net

02:48:08.720 | and try and bag one?

02:48:10.360 | You don't know because they've seen them.

02:48:11.440 | They've picked them up like hovering on radar.

02:48:13.240 | And then all of a sudden they're traveling

02:48:14.520 | at really high rates of speed.

02:48:15.600 | So, you know-

02:48:17.200 | What are you gonna do?

02:48:18.040 | Yeah, what are you gonna do?

02:48:18.880 | Well, let me ask this

02:48:20.240 | 'cause this is what people kind of think about.

02:48:22.600 | After you witnessed Tic Tac and after these incidents,

02:48:29.400 | as far as we know, with the gimbal and the go fast,

02:48:32.740 | it seems like people in the military

02:48:37.120 | did not react like, did not freak out.

02:48:42.880 | It almost like was like a mundane event.

02:48:46.480 | How do you explain that?

02:48:47.600 | Why didn't the people on the ship, not the higher-ups,

02:48:51.280 | why wasn't there a big freak out?

02:48:53.280 | Or as some people suggest,

02:48:55.400 | the higher-ups knew about it all along

02:48:57.960 | and just were not letting everyone know

02:49:00.040 | that there's some kind of secret military tests almost.

02:49:03.040 | So, let's talk about it.

02:49:07.720 | So, let's say you've got this cool new toy,

02:49:10.320 | let's call it a cool new toy.

02:49:12.240 | You typically don't take your cool new toy out

02:49:14.080 | into an area where the cool new toy could get damaged

02:49:16.320 | or what if the airplane would have actually

02:49:18.560 | hit your cool new toy and you got two people

02:49:20.560 | that are ejecting or dead and you got a $80 million airplane

02:49:23.960 | that's now in the bottom of the Atlantic.

02:49:25.960 | Tests are normally done in controlled environments.

02:49:30.720 | It's like any test, a lab test or whatever.

02:49:32.640 | When you take things out into the real world,

02:49:35.320 | you're still going to test it in an area

02:49:37.000 | where if something goes wrong.

02:49:38.200 | So, when they started, and we'll go back to Elon,

02:49:40.920 | so my friend that worked there,

02:49:42.800 | they had a rocket go off, they were out in Kwajalein

02:49:45.680 | and when the rocket went up,

02:49:47.200 | a fuel line ruptured in the rocket

02:49:49.320 | and it ran out of fuel before it got all the way up

02:49:51.520 | and it came falling back down.

02:49:53.280 | Well, when you're out on an atoll in the Pacific,

02:49:56.240 | if it's going up above you,

02:49:57.640 | the worst case is it's gonna land on you

02:49:59.240 | so you're worried about where else is it going to land

02:50:01.560 | and it actually crashed next to the atoll

02:50:03.440 | and Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus.

02:50:08.240 | So, that's a test environment

02:50:11.080 | because you don't know what's going to happen.

02:50:12.680 | So, 'cause someone said, well, when we chased the Tic Tac,

02:50:15.160 | well, it could have been some secret government thing.

02:50:16.800 | Well, secret government things

02:50:17.800 | typically just don't come out and test to where--

02:50:20.600 | - On unknowing pilots, you can't control a lot of things.

02:50:24.240 | - You're exactly right.

02:50:25.080 | So, you go, it's not the doctor evil scientist

02:50:29.440 | that's gonna throw shit out there to get,

02:50:31.680 | there's control and there's reasons that we do it

02:50:34.600 | because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to,

02:50:37.720 | you build something in theory, you model it,

02:50:40.920 | you go, hey, it looks like it's gonna work,

02:50:43.040 | you get funding, you build it, you test it some more,

02:50:46.440 | you bench test it.

02:50:47.720 | Like an airplane with digital flight controls,

02:50:50.640 | before it even leaves the ground,

02:50:52.400 | they've got things over the pitot-static system

02:50:54.440 | that are changing what the airplane thinks

02:50:56.600 | is the airspeed, talking to it

02:50:58.000 | and it's probably up on jacks, so the gear up.

02:51:00.400 | So, it thinks it's flying, it doesn't know,

02:51:03.040 | it's sitting on jack stands

02:51:04.640 | and they're just changing the pressure

02:51:05.960 | on the pitot-static system

02:51:07.000 | so they can actually make the flight controls move

02:51:09.040 | and they can get all the data back to go,

02:51:10.880 | hey, it looks like it's gonna work.

02:51:12.360 | And then there's a bunch of stuff that they do.

02:51:14.840 | - That's a control environment

02:51:15.920 | which you can do the testing in.

02:51:16.920 | - Yeah, throwing shit out in the middle

02:51:18.680 | of where people are doing exercises

02:51:21.000 | is the most preposterous thing that I've heard.

02:51:25.320 | Is it possible?

02:51:26.800 | Yes.

02:51:27.640 | Is it more really, is it--

02:51:30.960 | - It's more likely--

02:51:31.800 | - It's more likely they're not doing that.

02:51:34.280 | And the other side of that question is,

02:51:37.160 | why do you think people on the Nimitz

02:51:39.880 | and in the US government in general

02:51:41.800 | not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen?

02:51:45.720 | Freak out in a positive way,

02:51:46.960 | freak out in a negative way,

02:51:48.720 | like what are the Russians up to again?

02:51:50.760 | Or more like, what is this?

02:51:53.640 | Like, so more turmoil up the ranks.

02:51:56.440 | - If you were to put a Chinese flag on the side of it

02:51:59.080 | or a Russian flag on the side of it,

02:52:00.400 | and I said, yeah, I had a big Russian flag

02:52:01.760 | on the side of it, dude,

02:52:03.040 | then it would have got a lot of attention.

02:52:04.880 | It would have went high order.

02:52:06.520 | You don't have to say Russia or China,

02:52:08.720 | just say, if there was another country's emblem

02:52:11.560 | on the side of this thing that we saw and said,

02:52:13.920 | oh, it belonged to them, then it's a big deal.

02:52:17.640 | So here's what's going on.

02:52:18.640 | So we're literally in the middle of workups

02:52:20.440 | and it was a joint workup.

02:52:21.320 | Normally we go out for a month,

02:52:22.760 | go come back, do stuff, go out for a month.

02:52:24.240 | This was a two month at sea period

02:52:26.240 | where we actually had to beg for them to let us

02:52:27.840 | when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving

02:52:29.120 | so we could run home up to the Central Valley,

02:52:31.080 | have Thanksgiving with our family

02:52:32.120 | and then run back down and do this.

02:52:33.280 | Okay?

02:52:34.240 | So, you know, and I had just taken over,

02:52:38.000 | I had had the squadron for a month, right?

02:52:40.680 | So I'm a brand new CO, I'm the most junior guy

02:52:44.200 | on the, as far as a commanding officer goes,

02:52:47.480 | for time in the Navy.

02:52:48.720 | And actually at the time, I think it was the most junior CO

02:52:51.160 | for O5 command in the Navy, right?

02:52:53.680 | So you go, okay, so I'm out here,

02:52:55.920 | I got my squadron, I'm running it, I see this thing,

02:52:59.040 | you know, we catch shit for it.

02:53:00.640 | I have a squadron to run.

02:53:02.160 | I have the, the Tic Tac was over here

02:53:04.600 | and although an extraordinary event,

02:53:07.120 | I have 17 air crew and 300 sailors

02:53:10.320 | that I'm responsible for, right?

02:53:12.600 | Their wellbeing, making sure they're fed,

02:53:15.000 | making sure they're happy, they're birthing,

02:53:17.040 | you know, and I'm working with my master chief

02:53:18.640 | and I'm working with my XO, SNAP,

02:53:21.760 | and we're going through all this stuff.

02:53:23.800 | I don't have a lot of time to worry about the Tic Tac.

02:53:27.600 | - Yeah.

02:53:28.440 | - If people need to talk to me,

02:53:29.520 | so you gotta remember, you got the captain of the ship,

02:53:32.520 | you got the air wing commander and you got the admiral.

02:53:34.840 | Those are the top three.

02:53:36.000 | And you got the CEO of the Princeton,

02:53:38.360 | who is a major command guy.

02:53:40.160 | And that's really your big major command.

02:53:41.680 | And then everything else is you got all the squadrons,

02:53:43.560 | which are O5 command, and you got the small boys

02:53:45.880 | that are out there, which is O5 command.

02:53:47.160 | So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility

02:53:50.400 | of what's going on, I'm pretty much in the top 20

02:53:54.040 | with all my peers.

02:53:55.240 | And then I've got obviously the captain

02:53:57.800 | and the admiral, right?

02:53:59.000 | And then he's got some post command guys on his staff

02:54:01.720 | that we were friends with.

02:54:02.560 | - So you're responsible for a lot of things.

02:54:04.920 | - Yes.

02:54:05.840 | Oh yeah.

02:54:06.680 | - Busy schedule.

02:54:07.520 | - Yeah.

02:54:08.340 | - There's missions.

02:54:09.180 | You have to do a lot, get the job done.

02:54:11.440 | And there's no time for silly things.

02:54:13.760 | - That's exactly right.

02:54:14.640 | So, and we're the integration, you know,

02:54:17.600 | when a battle group deploys,

02:54:19.360 | especially when you go to the Middle East

02:54:20.960 | for what we were doing, the air power is the key.

02:54:24.040 | It's we take our airport with us,

02:54:25.980 | we can park it anywhere we want

02:54:27.280 | and we can do what we need to do.

02:54:29.560 | So we're kind of key players.

02:54:30.680 | So when you get the theory that,

02:54:32.120 | oh, all these men in suits showed up.

02:54:33.740 | So the captain of the ship never said anything to me.

02:54:36.120 | The admiral never saying to me,

02:54:37.320 | the people on his staff that I was friends with

02:54:39.080 | never saying to me, the other COs that I talked to

02:54:41.160 | on a daily basis never said anything to me.

02:54:43.040 | And no one ever came and talked to me

02:54:44.500 | and I'm the guy that chased it.

02:54:45.540 | So in all the theories and all the debunkers

02:54:47.880 | and all the stories, because I don't know if people think

02:54:49.480 | they're gonna get rich on this,

02:54:50.360 | 'cause I made a big donut on this.

02:54:52.120 | I can tell you what I got paid for.

02:54:53.320 | I got paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my day

02:54:55.480 | going to LA and do a five minute talk for someone.

02:54:58.040 | And I'm like, and it wasn't for the talk

02:54:59.440 | 'cause I'll talk for free 'cause you're not paying me.

02:55:01.600 | I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest

02:55:05.440 | because my wife and I got to go

02:55:07.920 | 'cause it was just looked like fun

02:55:09.040 | 'cause the whole town gets involved.

02:55:10.720 | And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly

02:55:12.960 | in front of a large audience about this

02:55:14.560 | because it was just, it was fun.

02:55:16.080 | And I got asked and Jeremy and George Knappen

02:55:18.000 | went the year before.

02:55:18.840 | So I went with Bob Lazar.

02:55:21.000 | So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife

02:55:22.720 | and his wife and my wife.

02:55:23.800 | And we all hung out kind of talking,

02:55:26.760 | not about UFO stuff,

02:55:27.840 | but just getting to know each other as people

02:55:29.640 | because Bob's like me.

02:55:32.600 | The stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life.

02:55:34.720 | If anything, it ruined his life.

02:55:37.080 | He's just a really, really smart guy

02:55:40.020 | that's just like the rest of us trying to get through life.

02:55:43.600 | - Nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things

02:55:46.200 | reading Lou Elizondo's resignation note from his,

02:55:53.400 | he was a program director at the AATIP program.

02:55:56.460 | One of the sad things is that he's mentioned

02:56:01.520 | that people in government

02:56:03.840 | just don't take this seriously as a threat,

02:56:07.000 | like UFOs as a threat.

02:56:09.680 | Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it.

02:56:12.600 | It's a sad thing to think about

02:56:14.680 | that we have such a busy schedule

02:56:18.160 | that the anomaly,

02:56:21.480 | it doesn't, is a distraction that we don't wanna deal with.

02:56:25.320 | And it kind of just fades into history.

02:56:29.080 | Like literally, it's kind of sad to think

02:56:32.040 | that if aliens showed up,

02:56:33.780 | like, and it just didn't,

02:56:39.600 | 'cause they're not, like when aliens show up,

02:56:42.600 | they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule.

02:56:46.560 | And if they don't start killing people,

02:56:49.720 | they just kind of show up in some very nonchalant,

02:56:54.320 | peaceful way, briefly,

02:56:57.400 | people would be like,

02:56:58.800 | that's, I don't have time for this.

02:57:01.340 | That's so sad.

02:57:03.480 | That's so sad. - It's like anywhere

02:57:04.720 | in the world.

02:57:05.560 | So, you know, go back, let's go back way back,

02:57:09.080 | way back in the time machine.

02:57:10.240 | You know, there were people kind of scattered

02:57:12.720 | around the globe.

02:57:13.720 | You know, and Europe's a perfect example.

02:57:15.900 | Why does France speak French?

02:57:18.680 | And then right next to them, Spanish,

02:57:21.000 | you know, Spain speaks Spanish.

02:57:22.880 | And then you'd kind of jump over and Germans are German

02:57:25.200 | and the Polish people,

02:57:26.760 | everyone speaks a different language

02:57:28.120 | because if you look at the way the terrain

02:57:29.600 | kind of subdivide the original people that were there,

02:57:32.920 | you know, thousands of years ago,

02:57:34.840 | they speak differently, right?

02:57:37.360 | You'd be like the US, but see, the US is different.

02:57:39.520 | We all speak English 'cause what happened?

02:57:40.920 | We came over and we started on the East Coast

02:57:43.400 | and we migrated West.

02:57:44.760 | We won't get into the, you know, what happened.

02:57:46.800 | And, you know, 'cause the Native Americans

02:57:48.520 | all spoke different languages.

02:57:50.120 | - Yeah.

02:57:50.960 | - You know, it's that same type of thing.

02:57:52.120 | So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up,

02:57:55.040 | you're actually, you think about it, you're an alien.

02:57:57.480 | If I go to a different area, if I just, you know,

02:58:00.160 | go back 500 years where, you know,

02:58:02.200 | or a thousand years where travel,

02:58:03.640 | we weren't traveling across oceans at the time.

02:58:05.600 | We were, well, we don't think we were,

02:58:06.800 | but the Vikings probably were.

02:58:08.240 | 'Cause we had limited, you know,

02:58:10.800 | we had to have supplies and the boats weren't as big.

02:58:12.580 | We had to build them by hand.

02:58:13.520 | We didn't have power tools and all that stuff.

02:58:14.980 | So, you know, if you show up someplace,

02:58:17.240 | like when the conquistadors from Spain

02:58:19.160 | came over into South America and you've got, you know,

02:58:21.840 | the natives, you're actually an alien, you know?

02:58:25.240 | And then you look at what typically happens

02:58:27.160 | when aliens show up in a human alien world, you know?

02:58:30.760 | And when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area.

02:58:33.760 | The other, we take what we want.

02:58:38.560 | And that's what happened.

02:58:39.440 | I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations

02:58:42.320 | because that's how we are, you know?

02:58:45.300 | Humans are, we're an interesting group.

02:58:47.940 | So you go, now what,

02:58:49.740 | what if something is from someplace else?

02:58:52.020 | Just, let's just go off the grid and go,

02:58:54.580 | let's say there are little green men.

02:58:57.460 | What are their intentions?

02:58:58.300 | Guy, Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo.

02:59:00.380 | And he said, what do you think they were here for?

02:59:01.700 | I said, I don't know.

02:59:03.100 | He goes, what?

02:59:03.940 | I go, oh, they were observing.

02:59:05.340 | They'd come down, they'd hang out.

02:59:06.460 | And he goes, well,

02:59:07.280 | what if they were prepping the battlefield?

02:59:08.620 | What if they were observing to figure out what we do?

02:59:11.740 | And you go, that's interesting.

02:59:12.760 | The other theory is,

02:59:14.220 | maybe there's a more advanced civilization out here

02:59:16.320 | and they just check in on us.

02:59:17.880 | Because the threat to an advanced civilization

02:59:20.160 | is when a civilization that's inferior to them

02:59:23.140 | actually develops enough and fast enough

02:59:25.240 | to become equal or above.

02:59:26.860 | Because now they become the threatened type.

02:59:29.080 | So you watch us grow until we start getting too much.

02:59:32.120 | You know, it's kind of like you go,

02:59:33.040 | well, 'cause they always have a tendency

02:59:34.280 | to hang out around nuclear, right?

02:59:35.880 | And you go, well, you know,

02:59:37.360 | if this is an advanced civilization,

02:59:38.880 | I'm gonna go science fiction, kind of comical.

02:59:40.760 | They come down and watch us and go,

02:59:41.920 | look at the crazy upright monkeys now

02:59:45.380 | have developed the atom bomb.

02:59:46.640 | Let's hope they don't destroy themselves.

02:59:48.160 | - Yeah, if I was an alien civilization,

02:59:49.800 | I would start paying attention with the atom bomb.

02:59:51.960 | That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of,

02:59:56.000 | what is it, UFO sightings since--

03:00:00.560 | - Since the nuclear era.

03:00:01.800 | - Since the nuclear era.

03:00:03.040 | - Yeah.

03:00:04.080 | - That's-- - You go--

03:00:05.280 | - Hmm. (laughs)

03:00:07.800 | Let me ask a little bit out there a question.

03:00:09.860 | Maybe it's a speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell.

03:00:14.340 | Do you think it's possible that there is

03:00:19.640 | out of this world aircraft or beings

03:00:25.640 | that are in the possession of one of the governments

03:00:30.320 | on this earth, like the US government?

03:00:32.680 | Is it possible?

03:00:34.440 | So the one perspective of that, if it's possible,

03:00:38.700 | is it possible to keep a secret like that?

03:00:40.880 | - I would say this.

03:00:42.120 | I think it's highly possible.

03:00:44.060 | Because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings,

03:00:46.800 | and let's go, just look at Project Blue Book.

03:00:49.240 | It was what, I forget how many thousands of sightings.

03:00:52.000 | There's a percentage, it's like 10 or 15%

03:00:53.920 | and they still can't explain.

03:00:55.680 | Like our Tic Tac is one of them.

03:00:57.000 | They basically, the government has come out and said,

03:00:58.680 | we don't know what that was.

03:00:59.880 | Okay, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that we don't know

03:01:04.000 | and of these thousands, there's still that 15%

03:01:06.560 | makes up a pretty big number.

03:01:07.680 | What are the chances that not one of them

03:01:09.460 | crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?

03:01:13.680 | And I don't care if it's an intact system

03:01:16.060 | or you got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain

03:01:20.120 | or some biological matter, to say the least.

03:01:25.120 | It could be intact or it couldn't,

03:01:28.260 | but the odds of that now are starting to go down

03:01:31.640 | that that could never happen.

03:01:33.140 | And I'm not talking just the United States,

03:01:34.540 | I'm talking the world. - Globally.

03:01:36.300 | - So is there a chance that a foreign government

03:01:38.340 | actually possesses or our government

03:01:40.280 | or someone in the world, on the globe,

03:01:42.280 | of the seven plus billion people has something

03:01:46.160 | that is not from this world, and I'm not talking a meteor,

03:01:48.300 | but something that was manufactured in some way

03:01:51.320 | that allowed transport or observation.

03:01:54.480 | Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone,

03:01:56.200 | you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff.

03:01:58.360 | And we got stuff that just went past Pluto

03:02:00.600 | that's out in the Kuiper belt.

03:02:02.320 | You know, there's stuff out there floating around.

03:02:03.960 | And what about ours that's gonna crash

03:02:05.520 | into Jupiter eventually or whatever,

03:02:07.320 | 'cause we've had stuff crash into planets.

03:02:09.480 | So if that's the case, you would think something

03:02:12.760 | is out there that we have something that we can't explain.

03:02:15.000 | And according to Lew, there is stuff that we can't explain.

03:02:18.880 | You know, and I would assume that Lew, who ran AATIP,

03:02:21.360 | has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about,

03:02:25.040 | because, you know, 'cause I had a clearance.

03:02:27.600 | When you have a clearance, you sign your name,

03:02:29.920 | you're bound to that.

03:02:30.960 | And to me, that's an important oath that you hold to.

03:02:34.520 | You know, and this is kind of where, you know,

03:02:37.120 | people have issues with Bob.

03:02:39.160 | So if, you know, and I leave it to you

03:02:41.080 | to determine if you believe Bob or not.

03:02:42.520 | I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward,

03:02:44.280 | very sane, normal, super smart guy.

03:02:47.400 | - Bob Lazar, yeah. - Yes.

03:02:49.280 | There is the other side that says,

03:02:50.640 | well, should he have come out and talked?

03:02:52.440 | You know, to those who owe clearance

03:02:54.600 | who, you know, are true to the government,

03:02:56.740 | you would say, he should have never spoke.

03:02:58.840 | He was under an oath to not say anything, but he did.

03:03:02.560 | If you ask Bob, why did you say something?

03:03:05.000 | His answer was, I understand there's an oath,

03:03:08.080 | but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind

03:03:12.040 | and it shouldn't be locked away.

03:03:13.760 | And I'll leave it, if you believe Bob,

03:03:15.280 | that's kind of what Bob says.

03:03:17.280 | - And that's such a interesting key point.

03:03:21.160 | If there is aircraft, a technology,

03:03:24.240 | that's in the possession of the, say, the US government,

03:03:27.840 | should they make that publicly known?

03:03:30.640 | This is this note in question.

03:03:32.160 | This is the question of, like,

03:03:34.000 | do we release stuff that can potentially change

03:03:36.920 | the nature of human civilization?

03:03:39.280 | Like, the way we think about our place in the world.

03:03:44.280 | Also, if that technology is potentially useful

03:03:49.800 | for military applications,

03:03:52.240 | the nature of military conflict,

03:03:55.160 | should we release that information or not,

03:03:57.080 | if you were the government?

03:03:58.440 | - So here, well, here's exactly how.

03:04:00.080 | So for classified information,

03:04:02.560 | the government is the people that classify it.

03:04:05.440 | So I can't go, I can't look at something and go,

03:04:07.960 | "Oh my God, this Avion bottle is now top secret."

03:04:10.560 | I can't, I don't have the authority,

03:04:11.800 | the ability, or anyone to do that.

03:04:13.320 | That's up to the government.

03:04:14.160 | And I agree with that because I worked for the government

03:04:16.280 | for 24 years of my life.

03:04:17.520 | So I understand that.

03:04:20.240 | But now you go, there's reasons stuff is classified, okay?

03:04:25.680 | And it has to do with,

03:04:27.720 | sometimes information is classified

03:04:29.480 | by how it was obtained.

03:04:31.360 | It's just like the mob.

03:04:32.760 | If I have a spy and I'm a mobster

03:04:34.960 | and you're the counter mobster,

03:04:36.240 | but I have a guy on the inside

03:04:37.360 | that's feeding me information, I can't do it.

03:04:39.760 | And a perfect example is if you've ever seen the,

03:04:42.680 | it's the Tom Cruise movie,

03:04:44.200 | what is it, Air America or whatever?

03:04:45.560 | But he plays the guy in Louisiana

03:04:48.080 | who was hauling drugs for Pablo Escobar.

03:04:50.520 | And he ended up getting a cargo plane

03:04:52.480 | and the government, the CIA was kind of funding him

03:04:54.720 | to do stuff.

03:04:55.960 | That's how he got hooked up with Pablo,

03:04:57.320 | but they put cameras on his airplane.

03:04:58.760 | When Reagan had come out and said,

03:05:00.200 | "Here's pictures, we have proof

03:05:01.440 | that they're running these drugs."

03:05:03.120 | It didn't take Pablo long to figure out those pictures

03:05:05.200 | were taken from inside of the plane

03:05:06.640 | of this guy he had been working with

03:05:07.920 | and that guy ends up dead.

03:05:09.680 | Does that make sense?

03:05:10.720 | So you classify to protect the source.

03:05:13.440 | You classify to protect the technology

03:05:15.560 | because if the technology would get out,

03:05:17.480 | it could be grave damage or there's levels,

03:05:19.920 | depending on if it's a secret or top secret.

03:05:22.120 | There are levels of damage that can be done

03:05:23.880 | to the US government and our wellbeing as a country.

03:05:26.800 | And we owe it to this because we're all Americans.

03:05:29.800 | To me, no matter what some people will say,

03:05:32.120 | even in this country,

03:05:33.080 | this is the greatest country on the planet.

03:05:35.320 | This is the only country that you have the ability

03:05:37.400 | to do what you wanna do.

03:05:38.840 | It's just don't be lazy.

03:05:40.240 | And I have stories of people that came over here

03:05:42.760 | and started with nothing

03:05:44.520 | and they're living the American dream.

03:05:47.480 | And they'll tell you,

03:05:48.360 | and they didn't get it because of, like you,

03:05:51.640 | you came over here from Russia,

03:05:53.960 | you get no minority status or anything else.

03:05:56.800 | You get, you're a white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant,

03:06:00.800 | whatever your religion, whatever.

03:06:02.800 | But you come over here,

03:06:04.120 | I kinda knew that from the last time.

03:06:06.720 | But you come over here,

03:06:08.000 | you basically have made yourself.

03:06:10.480 | You're educated, you're working at literally

03:06:12.960 | the top research university in the world, to be honest.

03:06:17.800 | - I can do whatever the hell I can create.

03:06:20.820 | With a bit of, with a lot of hard work,

03:06:22.800 | I can do quite a lot.

03:06:24.040 | - And no one gave it to you.

03:06:25.520 | So, I mean, and I have people--

03:06:27.080 | - I'm a believer that, I mean, we are a community.

03:06:32.080 | So there is a social aspect to it,

03:06:35.080 | but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing.

03:06:38.280 | And this is, I joke about being Russian,

03:06:41.560 | but I'm an American,

03:06:43.340 | and this is, I do believe, the greatest country on Earth.

03:06:46.160 | So there's a reason the nationalist pride,

03:06:50.560 | the pride in your nation is a powerful thing.

03:06:52.800 | And around that, this secrecy holds value.

03:06:57.800 | But to me, alien technology is bigger than that.

03:07:02.960 | I mean, it's not so much a threat

03:07:07.240 | as you're holding back something

03:07:11.160 | that could inspire the world, like human knowledge.

03:07:14.960 | - So let's talk in theory.

03:07:16.260 | So I'm gonna go back to Bob, 'cause I've talked to Bob.

03:07:20.200 | So Bob is a propulsion guy, right?

03:07:24.360 | Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor.

03:07:26.120 | He built a rocket car, so he did that.

03:07:29.320 | So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system,

03:07:32.160 | let's just say, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory.

03:07:36.080 | I am, I own, I have custody of this thing

03:07:41.960 | from a technology that I don't understand,

03:07:44.680 | and I know it's a propulsion system.

03:07:46.720 | So now I gotta figure it out, right?

03:07:49.240 | So who are you gonna go to, right?

03:07:51.480 | You go find someone, so you go, wait,

03:07:53.680 | here's a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos,

03:07:57.040 | which they have proven, who is big into propulsion.

03:08:00.040 | He designs all this, he builds his shit in his garage.

03:08:03.280 | Hey, he's super smart, why don't we bring him in?

03:08:06.560 | So you hire him on a contract and you go,

03:08:08.480 | hey, we're gonna brief you into a program,

03:08:09.760 | and he goes and works on wherever he says he worked.

03:08:11.920 | That's not important, but you get access to the technology

03:08:14.200 | to try and figure it out.

03:08:15.700 | And then you go, well, Bob comes out and says,

03:08:18.240 | you know, we're figuring out these things,

03:08:20.000 | but there's a part where our technology

03:08:21.480 | isn't advanced enough for us to figure the whole thing out.

03:08:24.320 | So then, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out

03:08:27.880 | and tell anyone, he works on it until he gets to the point

03:08:30.800 | where he's stagnated.

03:08:31.880 | He's at a wall.

03:08:34.680 | You go, ah, I can't do it.

03:08:35.600 | So sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind.

03:08:37.560 | So you go find someone else who's into propulsion,

03:08:39.120 | you bring him in, they work, they can't figure it out,

03:08:41.040 | or they get to the point where,

03:08:42.560 | kind of back to the Einstein theory where,

03:08:44.200 | hey, I've got all these theories on how it works,

03:08:45.860 | but we don't have the technology.

03:08:46.960 | We haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do.

03:08:49.240 | We still have to advance technology more.

03:08:51.240 | So then what do you do?

03:08:52.080 | You shelf it.

03:08:53.340 | You go, hey, good, project's over, end the contract.

03:08:55.640 | You shelf it, and you wait another 10 years.

03:08:58.880 | And you wait another 10 years until technology

03:09:01.080 | and our abilities and our research advances more.

03:09:04.520 | And then you go find new people to bring in

03:09:06.080 | that are experts in that field and go,

03:09:07.300 | hey, we want you to work on this thing.

03:09:08.760 | And here's what we know about it so far.

03:09:10.840 | Or you don't tell them anything,

03:09:13.400 | 'cause remember, if you reveal someone else's research,

03:09:16.380 | you can taint their beliefs.

03:09:17.560 | They'll start to sway in that direction.

03:09:18.920 | So you go, I'm not gonna tell you anything.

03:09:20.960 | I'm gonna give you this thing,

03:09:22.000 | and now you tell me what you think.

03:09:23.160 | And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem

03:09:25.960 | that maybe Bob and someone else solved earlier,

03:09:27.960 | you can go, hey, what about this?

03:09:28.920 | You don't have to tell them where it came from.

03:09:30.200 | What about this?

03:09:31.040 | And now they can leapfrog,

03:09:31.920 | and they get another two steps closer to the final answer.

03:09:35.760 | And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology,

03:09:38.400 | and you shelve it again.

03:09:39.240 | - Do you think that's the right way to do it?

03:09:41.360 | Because it's heartbreaking.

03:09:43.960 | - Listen, I love government,

03:09:46.140 | but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on.

03:09:49.940 | The alternative approach is to release this to the world

03:09:54.940 | and say there's a mystery here.

03:09:57.180 | And then the Elons of the world, the Jeff Bezos,

03:09:59.580 | we talked about money, but it's also not just money.

03:10:01.820 | It's like this engine that's within,

03:10:05.740 | we talked about the American dream,

03:10:07.500 | to say I'm gonna be the one that cracks this mystery open.

03:10:11.700 | And that's within a lot of us.

03:10:13.740 | And money aside, people in their garage just will--

03:10:17.880 | - But you're thinking like a scientist.

03:10:19.360 | So now let's shift to, let me think like a country.

03:10:22.280 | So we have country A, B, and C.

03:10:24.680 | And you can look at the nuclear arms race.

03:10:26.440 | So we know that Germany was really close.

03:10:28.880 | We know that Russia was getting pretty close.

03:10:30.880 | We just won the race, and we were the first ones with it.

03:10:34.600 | And still to this day--

03:10:35.440 | - And Germany could have won.

03:10:36.860 | - They could have won.

03:10:38.160 | They could have won, but someone was smart enough

03:10:40.240 | to not finish the equation

03:10:41.520 | when they knew they had the answer.

03:10:43.240 | It's literally what it comes down to.

03:10:44.740 | Someone was smart enough to realize

03:10:46.340 | that if that got into the hands of the Nazis,

03:10:49.780 | that it would be the end.

03:10:51.460 | And that's a tough call to do that,

03:10:54.700 | knowing that you have the answer

03:10:55.940 | and you can't solve the problem

03:10:56.940 | because it will go into the wrong hand.

03:10:58.220 | And that's kind of the fear when you look at this.

03:10:59.760 | You go, okay, so if we do this,

03:11:02.060 | if we put it out there, we've got this technology,

03:11:05.980 | if we don't work on it kind of International Space Station

03:11:08.220 | like we're all gonna work on it together,

03:11:11.300 | like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty-free

03:11:15.040 | from any weapons or anything,

03:11:16.560 | we got the international thing down there,

03:11:17.840 | we're all gonna work together.

03:11:19.120 | If you did it in the confines of that

03:11:21.420 | and you could control the flow in and out,

03:11:24.440 | because what you don't want

03:11:25.320 | is someone stealing information

03:11:27.040 | and getting it back to where,

03:11:28.120 | and countries are notorious to do this.

03:11:30.160 | Hey, we're doing it internationally,

03:11:31.120 | but we're secretly doing it ourselves

03:11:32.840 | to see who can come up with a solution first.

03:11:35.760 | That's the problem because we have this inherent thing

03:11:38.240 | of power and technology like that is power.

03:11:41.300 | It would literally change the game

03:11:43.500 | of the way the world operates.

03:11:45.180 | And from not just a transportation or mankind,

03:11:48.940 | but from a military aspect, it's got huge, huge.

03:11:52.240 | - Yeah, yeah, so beautifully, beautifully presented.

03:11:57.620 | And I feel like there's a tension between those two places,

03:12:00.620 | the scientist view of the world

03:12:02.580 | and the national security view of the world.

03:12:05.980 | Let me get to this kind of interesting point,

03:12:08.480 | which is a lot of conspiracy theorists

03:12:12.280 | kind of paint a picture of government

03:12:14.040 | as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system

03:12:17.280 | that's exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets.

03:12:21.880 | And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe

03:12:24.280 | to almost any conspiracy theory,

03:12:26.240 | to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do.

03:12:29.640 | - I agree with you.

03:12:30.480 | - But there does seem to be,

03:12:33.800 | and I tend to think of government

03:12:35.200 | as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy.

03:12:40.160 | It seems that the communication,

03:12:43.320 | like the three videos that were released

03:12:45.280 | and just the way of DoD in general talks

03:12:50.040 | about the things we've been talking about,

03:12:53.000 | it's just confused, it's contradictory,

03:12:55.760 | it's not inspiring, it's suspicious.

03:13:00.480 | It's just not, even the way they released the videos.

03:13:03.800 | You know, the TikTok, if presented correctly,

03:13:07.080 | could just inspire a generation of scientists.

03:13:09.760 | It's like us going to the moon.

03:13:13.220 | It's inspiring.

03:13:15.680 | I mean, it's incredible.

03:13:17.640 | And the way it was released, it was suspicious,

03:13:20.640 | it was like low-resolution video on a crappy website,

03:13:24.800 | like with some crappy documents.

03:13:27.240 | And I mean, why, I don't know how to ask this question,

03:13:31.200 | but can government do better?

03:13:32.840 | Why are they doing it this way

03:13:34.520 | in terms of communicating the things

03:13:37.020 | they do know to the public?

03:13:38.480 | - 'Cause I don't think they know how.

03:13:40.880 | Especially in this topic,

03:13:42.040 | it's been hidden for so many years.

03:13:44.420 | And I don't think,

03:13:46.000 | 'cause I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff,

03:13:48.380 | I just think that when it comes in, like I said,

03:13:51.240 | the government has a right to classify stuff,

03:13:53.560 | they classify everything 'cause they don't know.

03:13:56.420 | You have something, you don't know what it is,

03:13:57.560 | you don't know, so we just go,

03:13:58.400 | "Well, it must be top secret and let's put it in a vault."

03:14:02.000 | It's kind of like the Indiana Jones

03:14:03.240 | where they take the ark and they put it in,

03:14:05.120 | it's in the giant army warehouse.

03:14:06.920 | We don't even know what we have.

03:14:10.520 | So, but I also believe that,

03:14:13.240 | and I'll say this openly,

03:14:14.440 | I don't think that the American people

03:14:16.480 | need to know everything.

03:14:17.360 | I think there's a reason that stuff is classified

03:14:19.440 | for the protection of this country,

03:14:22.680 | and I totally believe in that.

03:14:24.520 | So, I was joking with Joe

03:14:27.440 | when he was talking about the Storm Area 51 stuff.

03:14:30.000 | I'm like, "Yeah, that's probably the worst idea

03:14:32.040 | "you could possibly have

03:14:32.960 | "is to just storm a military installation.

03:14:35.340 | "It's just stupid."

03:14:36.680 | There are reasons that we have things

03:14:39.440 | that we don't just let out to the public

03:14:41.160 | because if we do, as soon as you do

03:14:43.880 | let someone know that you have something,

03:14:46.280 | they immediately try and encounter it.

03:14:47.880 | And perfect example,

03:14:49.120 | the US in the '60s developed a bomber.

03:14:52.720 | It was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB-70.

03:14:56.720 | Okay, there was three of them built,

03:14:58.440 | three of them ever built.

03:14:59.840 | It was a 60,000 foot high Mach 3.

03:15:03.880 | It was an incredible airplane when you see it.

03:15:05.680 | And there's actually the last one remaining

03:15:07.120 | is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum.

03:15:08.960 | It would go, the wingtips would fold down.

03:15:10.640 | It looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster.

03:15:12.940 | When that got out that we were developing it,

03:15:17.480 | the Soviet Union developed the MiG-25,

03:15:20.480 | literally a high altitude interceptor

03:15:22.800 | to counter that bomber.

03:15:25.000 | And they built an entire fleet of MiG-25s.

03:15:29.520 | We built three XB-70s and we scrapped the program.

03:15:33.980 | Because now you go, well, the technology is cool.

03:15:38.680 | We proved it, but now it becomes obsolete.

03:15:40.360 | So it's not even worth building a whole fleet

03:15:41.760 | of these things.

03:15:42.680 | It's a chess game.

03:15:44.720 | We do something, they do something.

03:15:46.120 | We do something, they do something.

03:15:47.280 | And it's we do something and then they counter it.

03:15:50.040 | You gotta figure out how to defeat it.

03:15:51.640 | So you go, oh, we'll build something.

03:15:52.960 | So the more we keep quiet,

03:15:56.240 | especially from a defense standpoint, the better.

03:15:58.840 | Actually, I personally think we talk too much.

03:16:01.080 | And I think the military and the DOD is starting to see

03:16:03.800 | that we're too open.

03:16:05.680 | You announce, hey, we're building this

03:16:08.460 | because there's a budget line and we live in a free society.

03:16:11.400 | But you don't have to release all the specs.

03:16:15.800 | And you don't have to put everything in open source.

03:16:17.760 | But that's a problem when we go to the universities.

03:16:21.240 | If we wanna go do work with MIT

03:16:23.200 | and you wanna partner with MIT and you're a defense company

03:16:25.280 | and you wanna partner, you guys have a rule

03:16:27.880 | that if you create it, then it can be open source

03:16:30.160 | because the university owns it

03:16:31.320 | and we are an institution of learning.

03:16:34.120 | Where the defense side might go,

03:16:35.720 | we don't really want that published in a paper

03:16:38.160 | in Scientific America or I can't believe.

03:16:40.120 | - It's so heartbreaking.

03:16:41.120 | I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson,

03:16:44.040 | and just Concord's, some of the best,

03:16:47.920 | if not the best engineering and science,

03:16:50.720 | but engineering really ever is done in secrecy.

03:16:56.520 | And it sucks because it's so inspiring

03:16:59.520 | and they can't talk about it.

03:17:01.000 | - It is, but some of it's due to funding.

03:17:03.080 | The US government has deep pockets.

03:17:05.840 | Some of this new technology that you develop

03:17:07.660 | for an open source, unless,

03:17:08.840 | and this goes back to the original conversation.

03:17:11.060 | We now, there's enough money in the private sector

03:17:13.740 | that individuals control.

03:17:15.640 | Bezos, I'm not talking Amazon, I'm talking Jeff Bezos.

03:17:20.680 | - A single individual.

03:17:21.520 | - It's worth over $100 billion.

03:17:23.560 | He has the ability to do stuff.

03:17:25.320 | I'll tell you what, the Gates Foundation,

03:17:27.480 | between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett

03:17:31.880 | and some of the other money,

03:17:32.720 | 'cause I think Bezos' ex-wife actually donated

03:17:36.720 | a huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation.

03:17:39.400 | So, I mean, what's the Gates Foundation worth these days?

03:17:42.200 | You know, and these are guys, you know, brilliant, brilliant.

03:17:46.520 | I mean, some of the greatest minds that we have to go,

03:17:48.720 | you know, what are they doing?

03:17:49.560 | Because they have the ability, it's a nonprofit.

03:17:51.260 | They can go, hey, I wanna fund this.

03:17:52.560 | I wanna fund this research.

03:17:53.800 | - They can look beyond the conflict between nations.

03:17:55.960 | - You can look beyond the conflict of having to have,

03:17:58.600 | you know, classification.

03:17:59.700 | You can do what you want.

03:18:01.160 | You know, it's just like, you know,

03:18:02.960 | we classify how to do, you know, the whole nuclear,

03:18:07.400 | how to create a critical mass, right?

03:18:10.400 | But there's really smart high school kids

03:18:12.280 | that have figured it out mathematically

03:18:13.640 | and they do their science project

03:18:14.680 | and then the government comes in and says,

03:18:15.840 | hey, we gotta classify your government

03:18:17.040 | 'cause we just don't want this out in the public domain,

03:18:20.000 | which I understand, but they never stop them

03:18:21.920 | from free thought and developing that.

03:18:23.560 | It's just, hey, we really don't want this out there.

03:18:26.360 | Okay, so I understand that.

03:18:27.820 | I totally understand that.

03:18:28.860 | But if they, you know, if Bill and Melinda wanna do this

03:18:32.120 | and go, hey, we wanna do this

03:18:33.160 | and they're gonna work with Bezos

03:18:34.400 | and they're gonna work with Elon

03:18:35.440 | and we're gonna, I mean, you think about it.

03:18:37.520 | There's a significant amount of money

03:18:39.320 | that could be available to R&D

03:18:40.600 | and I'm not talking just science like this.

03:18:42.040 | I'm talking medical research and all this.

03:18:45.000 | But then you go, well, who gets it?

03:18:46.160 | Because now you're competing against

03:18:48.300 | the companies that actually do it.

03:18:49.720 | You go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds?

03:18:52.040 | I'd say, you know, we have a tendency to go,

03:18:55.900 | these are the best that we have.

03:18:58.160 | And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have.

03:19:00.720 | But there's probably people out there

03:19:01.800 | that don't wanna work.

03:19:02.920 | There's brilliant minds that don't wanna do anything

03:19:04.640 | with the fence 'cause they just disagree with what it does.

03:19:07.320 | So they go do another path.

03:19:09.080 | They go do something else.

03:19:10.200 | - And in a sense, the Elons of the world,

03:19:13.080 | the Jeff Bezos, actually, in a certain sense,

03:19:17.120 | much better than DOD at finding

03:19:20.720 | the brilliant, weird minds out there.

03:19:22.840 | - Because they're not tied to the government.

03:19:24.440 | So when you work a government contract,

03:19:26.840 | the government writes, they tell you what they want,

03:19:29.440 | and then they work with you on the requirements.

03:19:31.020 | And they usually have an end in mean.

03:19:33.800 | They have an idea that this is what I want it to be.

03:19:36.680 | Where if you go to like SpaceX,

03:19:40.580 | where they come up with,

03:19:43.160 | why don't we just land these things on a pad and reuse 'em?

03:19:46.840 | Well, if the government scientist,

03:19:48.160 | if you're on a government contract,

03:19:49.160 | says no, that's not the requirements.

03:19:50.440 | We're not paying for that.

03:19:51.280 | We want you to do this.

03:19:52.120 | You're kinda controlled.

03:19:53.760 | Or when Elon does it, his company,

03:19:55.560 | they can do whatever the hell they wanna do

03:19:56.800 | 'cause they have no bounds.

03:19:58.540 | The only bounds they have is the liability

03:20:00.560 | if it doesn't work and it lands on something.

03:20:02.140 | So what do you do?

03:20:02.980 | You go out to quadulene and you test it.

03:20:04.280 | And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean,

03:20:05.840 | hey, we cleaned it up, no big deal.

03:20:07.100 | We lost some money, but we'll move on.

03:20:09.420 | Money makes the world go round,

03:20:12.300 | contrary to what everyone thinks.

03:20:13.760 | But there's a lot of money that's sitting around

03:20:16.060 | that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with.

03:20:17.920 | And I don't know.

03:20:18.760 | I mean, I'll guarantee that, what is it, Blue Origin?

03:20:22.200 | Isn't that Amazon? - Blue Origin, yeah.

03:20:23.560 | - You know, that they're doing some cool stuff

03:20:25.240 | because they have funny, and I joke with the guy

03:20:28.200 | I know that worked at SpaceX.

03:20:29.600 | And he was funny because they were building

03:20:32.320 | the first test thing and they were limited.

03:20:35.200 | And Elon found this like 400 acre thing,

03:20:38.080 | I think it's about 400 acres, down by Waco, Texas.

03:20:40.580 | And he's like, I go, "How?"

03:20:43.040 | He goes, "Dude, I worked with,"

03:20:45.360 | he goes, 'cause he's done government contract,

03:20:47.800 | he goes, "There's government contract

03:20:48.880 | "and then there's working at SpaceX with Elon money."

03:20:51.620 | And that's what he refers to it as, is Elon money,

03:20:53.400 | where it was like, I'll throw them,

03:20:55.440 | and he would throw the money at it and make it happen.

03:20:57.400 | And I'm talking this fast.

03:20:59.480 | I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this.

03:21:01.800 | I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do

03:21:03.600 | in the private sector, vice the government,

03:21:05.160 | where there's the bureaucracy is.

03:21:07.100 | They had a company that was basically

03:21:09.420 | a tool and die machine shop that did a lot

03:21:11.200 | of their high precision parts for the rockets.

03:21:15.440 | They had went to the guy,

03:21:16.320 | but he had contracts with other companies.

03:21:18.160 | And when the economy was down,

03:21:20.000 | the guy was actually looking at going out of business.

03:21:22.120 | So the guy I know, he's telling me this story.

03:21:24.640 | He was talking to the guy,

03:21:25.640 | he had to go over there and get something.

03:21:26.840 | And he's like, "Holy shit," he goes, "Hang on."

03:21:28.120 | So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX.

03:21:30.400 | He says, "Hey, is Elon there?

03:21:32.020 | "Can you get him in the boardroom?

03:21:33.120 | "We'll be there in 20 minutes."

03:21:35.080 | So he grabs this guy who's literally

03:21:36.880 | gonna fold his company.

03:21:39.000 | They go over to SpaceX,

03:21:40.800 | and I may be getting some of this wrong

03:21:42.120 | if people are gonna fact check me,

03:21:43.200 | but this is pretty close.

03:21:44.680 | They go in the boardroom,

03:21:46.000 | and he said, literally, within like an hour or two,

03:21:50.880 | Elon has bought the guy's company.

03:21:53.560 | That guy is now a senior VP running his company,

03:21:57.180 | and they're gonna pull all the stuff

03:21:58.820 | into the SpaceX thing so they can actually build the parts,

03:22:01.560 | and they can still contract out to make the money outside.

03:22:05.240 | And it happened like that fast.

03:22:07.040 | - And it's not just money.

03:22:08.520 | It's 'cause I've witnessed it too with Elon.

03:22:10.800 | I think it's whatever the forces of capitalism

03:22:14.680 | that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise to the top,

03:22:19.680 | but 'cause I've also worked for DARPA for research

03:22:24.200 | in terms of a source of funding,

03:22:25.840 | there's a weight of bureaucracy

03:22:28.840 | when I was working, being funded by DARPA.

03:22:32.000 | And with Elon, I was literally in the presence

03:22:34.160 | of anything is possible,

03:22:36.440 | cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork,

03:22:39.920 | of the way things were done in the past,

03:22:42.000 | of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints,

03:22:45.040 | all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately.

03:22:48.240 | - How much money and time do you waste

03:22:49.760 | dealing with your bureaucracy

03:22:50.840 | when you could actually be doing real work?

03:22:52.960 | That's the difference.

03:22:53.920 | This is why, honestly, when I went back

03:22:56.080 | to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about,

03:22:59.600 | when you look at it and go,

03:23:01.080 | SpaceX can do something for half the price

03:23:03.320 | ahead of schedule that what Boeing were paying Boeing,

03:23:06.520 | and you go, oh, well, this just came out.

03:23:08.840 | You go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side

03:23:11.880 | when we can deal with this side?

03:23:13.440 | Because you've got a fully automated capsule

03:23:15.680 | that has a manual mode that they got to fly around in.

03:23:18.600 | It worked like a champ.

03:23:19.720 | It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down.

03:23:23.600 | It worked perfectly.

03:23:25.880 | We're gonna dust it off.

03:23:27.000 | And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules

03:23:29.160 | that were used and then put to museums,

03:23:32.400 | they're gonna reuse that dragon capsule.

03:23:34.120 | It came down, they're gonna dust it off,

03:23:35.560 | put a new coat of paint on it,

03:23:36.600 | slap it on top of another rocket, and away it goes.

03:23:39.600 | Holy cow. - It's amazing.

03:23:41.160 | - It's a shift, it's a complete shift in mentality.

03:23:43.360 | And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost.

03:23:46.240 | - Yeah, it's exciting,

03:23:47.960 | especially given putting the Tic Tac in context,

03:23:51.040 | like then the sky, or it's limitless,

03:23:55.400 | the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism.

03:23:57.520 | - I think it's exciting.

03:23:58.360 | - Yeah, super exciting. - I think we live

03:23:59.180 | in an exciting time right now,

03:24:00.160 | besides everything that's messed up in the world right now.

03:24:02.840 | - Well, this is a hopeful.

03:24:04.400 | Like there's so much conflict going on, so much tension.

03:24:07.800 | That's to me, space exploration at the moment

03:24:10.880 | is a reason to get up in the morning

03:24:13.280 | and have a hope for the future, to look up to the sky.

03:24:16.480 | And we're humans, we can solve so many,

03:24:20.880 | we can solve all of this.

03:24:22.120 | - I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing,

03:24:24.000 | and I said, "This would be great."

03:24:26.560 | 'Cause when the government had come out a month ago

03:24:28.680 | and said, "Hey, this does exist, we're doing this,

03:24:31.240 | "and oh, by the way, we're gonna release more stuff."

03:24:33.720 | And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys

03:24:37.120 | before I went on, 'cause they had called me up

03:24:38.600 | to be on Tucker's show.

03:24:39.840 | And I'm like, "Hey," I go, "This would be great.

03:24:42.460 | "Just come out with this, find the relic of a spaceship,

03:24:46.420 | "like pull out the Roswell wreckage, if you have it.

03:24:49.240 | "Pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it."

03:24:51.640 | God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with

03:24:54.860 | the riots in the cities.

03:24:56.740 | And I mean, I know it's an election year and all that,

03:24:58.680 | but God, it would be something, it'd be refreshing

03:25:00.960 | to not have to turn on my TV

03:25:02.600 | and see everything that is just depressing in the world.

03:25:05.440 | To be, "Holy cow, we actually do have this,

03:25:07.380 | "and we're working on this technology."

03:25:09.280 | - Imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft

03:25:11.240 | and they pull it out.

03:25:12.440 | Imagine the innovation that happens

03:25:14.720 | in the next 10 to 20 years

03:25:16.480 | without any more information than that.

03:25:18.440 | Just the innovation that happens,

03:25:21.120 | the look on Elon Musk's face,

03:25:22.800 | the look on Jeff Bezos's face,

03:25:24.520 | and all the brilliant engineers.

03:25:25.960 | - It would change the game.

03:25:26.800 | - It would change the game.

03:25:27.620 | - It would change the game completely.

03:25:28.520 | - Let me ask the big question, I apologize

03:25:31.040 | for the absurd romantic nature of it.

03:25:33.400 | Outside, I mean, one of the things,

03:25:35.360 | the fact that you've laid your eyes on a UFO,

03:25:40.360 | probably opened your eyes to the possibility

03:25:43.960 | that some of the other sightings,

03:25:45.780 | there could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them.

03:25:50.680 | What to you is the, outside of your own sighting,

03:25:53.740 | is the most interesting sighting

03:25:57.600 | or UFO-related event in history?

03:26:01.840 | - I think there's several.

03:26:03.600 | What is it, Rameshawn Forest in England?

03:26:06.200 | The US guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns.

03:26:09.540 | One guy was medically disabled,

03:26:11.160 | but they weren't gonna give him,

03:26:12.600 | and he got help from John McCain.

03:26:15.840 | His office helped get the guy's disability reestablished.

03:26:20.060 | I think that's a big one.

03:26:21.320 | I think there's people out there that have seen stuff,

03:26:25.000 | and I'm talking credible,

03:26:26.840 | because you gotta remember,

03:26:28.520 | there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven.

03:26:31.360 | They're actually explainable.

03:26:32.800 | You had sent me the question, the Phoenix Lights.

03:26:38.120 | - Phoenix Lights, yeah, somebody sent.

03:26:39.600 | What's that?

03:26:40.520 | So I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these.

03:26:43.400 | - I'm not either.

03:26:44.240 | (Lex laughs)

03:26:45.080 | You want a funny story on that.

03:26:46.160 | So I was at a conference,

03:26:48.320 | and hopefully he doesn't watch this and get offended.

03:26:49.820 | But we had this, I call it speed dating.

03:26:54.920 | So there was a table, about eight people at a table,

03:26:57.480 | and we would go sit at the table,

03:26:58.640 | and they could ask us questions.

03:26:59.720 | And then after 10 minutes, we moved to the next table.

03:27:01.920 | So I was speed dating all these people

03:27:03.640 | that are really into this.

03:27:05.560 | It was kind of funny, but I'd sat down.

03:27:07.440 | And it's always funny,

03:27:08.280 | 'cause some people will try and dominate it,

03:27:09.840 | but you have to kind of push the dominators away

03:27:12.240 | so that if you're quiet and introverted,

03:27:14.360 | you can ask your question too.

03:27:16.460 | So we got into this, and the guy starts naming all these.

03:27:18.720 | Well, what about this?

03:27:19.560 | What about the Phoenix Lights?

03:27:20.380 | I'm like, I don't know about the Phoenix Lights.

03:27:21.560 | What about this event?

03:27:22.400 | I don't know about that.

03:27:23.240 | And he goes, he looks at me and he goes,

03:27:24.960 | well, you're not a UFO guy.

03:27:26.520 | I go, no, I'm not, but I chased one, so I'm an expert.

03:27:30.040 | Have you?

03:27:31.000 | And you could see him get deflated

03:27:32.320 | 'cause I'm kind of a smart ass like that.

03:27:34.120 | - Yeah, I mean, that first-hand experience from a credible,

03:27:37.040 | in some sense, these sightings have to do

03:27:39.160 | both with the evidence and the human.

03:27:41.360 | - Well, I think part of that is, to us,

03:27:43.960 | that's a credibility piece,

03:27:45.080 | 'cause the four of us that actually saw it,

03:27:47.160 | plus the other two that were in the airplane

03:27:49.440 | that shot the video, none of us are UFO-obsessed people.

03:27:53.400 | So when we come out and say,

03:27:55.480 | because to me, it's just five minutes of my life.

03:27:58.320 | I did a lot of really cool,

03:28:01.000 | really kind of neat things I've been able to do.

03:28:03.720 | But when you look at it and go,

03:28:08.040 | to me, it's not the pinnacle of my life.

03:28:14.200 | To other people that, they live in the UFO world,

03:28:16.720 | and it's like they, if you talk to people,

03:28:18.880 | they'll go, they're really into it, who've never seen one.

03:28:22.120 | It kills them that they didn't see one.

03:28:25.080 | When here we are, because, and what's unique with ours,

03:28:28.880 | which kind of adds that level, is it wasn't,

03:28:30.560 | we just didn't see it.

03:28:31.960 | It wasn't like, oh, look, something in the sky,

03:28:33.760 | and it was weird.

03:28:34.840 | We actually engaged with it.

03:28:36.360 | You know, it was an engaged five-minute thing.

03:28:38.960 | And there's other stories from other countries.

03:28:41.440 | Like, there's a story in the,

03:28:43.480 | back when the Soviet Union existed,

03:28:45.800 | that they actually would chase these things,

03:28:47.880 | and one of them shot at some, you know, it shot at it,

03:28:50.320 | because they said, "Shoot at it," and it shot at it,

03:28:51.880 | and then it got shot down.

03:28:53.400 | And then they said, "Don't ever shoot at 'em again,

03:28:55.040 | "and don't chase them, just so you can observe them,

03:28:56.960 | "but don't go after them," because obviously,

03:28:58.520 | they have firepower that we can't control,

03:29:00.400 | 'cause if you can make something float around

03:29:02.320 | and jam radars at will and do whatever you want,

03:29:04.880 | you know, modern terrestrial weapons

03:29:07.440 | are probably not very useful.

03:29:09.720 | You know, you can go to Independence Day,

03:29:10.900 | they had that force field around.

03:29:11.960 | Oh, we gotta, now you gotta cyber warfare,

03:29:14.080 | you gotta take the bug down, you gotta take the warfare,

03:29:16.120 | so now we can actually inhibit some type of damage.

03:29:18.920 | - So there's a, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix Flies.

03:29:21.080 | This is somebody on, I think Reddit said,

03:29:24.720 | "Ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings

03:29:27.600 | "like the Phoenix Flies."

03:29:28.680 | So the interesting thing, like you said,

03:29:30.960 | with the Tic Tac is that multiple people

03:29:32.880 | laid their eyes on this.

03:29:34.400 | What are your thoughts about the Phoenix Flies,

03:29:36.200 | or many people have seen it?

03:29:37.040 | - So here's the deal with massive sightings.

03:29:39.840 | So the Phoenix Flies is unexplainable,

03:29:41.520 | although I know the Air Force had said something about it,

03:29:43.440 | it was an A-10 drop in flares.

03:29:45.200 | I don't think so.

03:29:46.040 | It's the, oh, flares don't burn that long,

03:29:48.160 | they just come out and they detract and they go away.

03:29:51.560 | Although on the other hand, there's,

03:29:53.160 | because clouds can do things.

03:29:54.400 | So I lived in Central California for 18 years,

03:29:58.080 | and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky?

03:30:00.720 | And it was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off.

03:30:03.400 | They were doing ICBM tests at one time

03:30:05.120 | where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across,

03:30:07.360 | then they go land in the ATOL at Kwajalein.

03:30:10.280 | And then they can check the displacement,

03:30:11.640 | the accuracy and all that stuff.

03:30:13.480 | It's stuff that we do 'cause we're a superpower.

03:30:16.640 | But when you see 'em go up,

03:30:17.920 | especially if you've ever watched a rocket

03:30:19.440 | really launch on a clear night,

03:30:20.560 | it'll have the stream, the glow,

03:30:21.720 | and you can tell it's a rocket.

03:30:22.720 | But if you don't look up until later,

03:30:24.680 | when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere

03:30:26.880 | where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained,

03:30:30.320 | but, and you can watch this on TV

03:30:31.640 | when even the SpaceX ones go up,

03:30:33.320 | it's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow,

03:30:34.560 | and then it hits a point where it really starts to go up

03:30:36.640 | and it starts to come to the sides

03:30:37.680 | because the forces aren't holding that

03:30:39.760 | all into one unique thing.

03:30:41.640 | And it looks really odd.

03:30:43.200 | And then it'll go off because it burns out

03:30:46.440 | and you get state separation.

03:30:47.560 | Then you see the next one go off and then it's gone.

03:30:50.120 | And people don't understand that

03:30:52.240 | because they didn't watch it from launch.

03:30:53.640 | 'Cause we used to sit in our driveway

03:30:54.840 | and Vandenberg is, it was a three-hour drive,

03:30:56.840 | but you could sit and watch it.

03:30:57.680 | Go in there and launch it at night, you'd watch.

03:30:59.920 | You'd watch and think it's really cool.

03:31:02.400 | If you don't see anything,

03:31:03.320 | what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume,

03:31:06.040 | what's left, the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere

03:31:08.520 | and the wind starts blowing it.

03:31:09.800 | So you get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky.

03:31:13.200 | That's part, but when you go to Phoenix Lights

03:31:14.960 | and you go, "Hey, when a thousand people see something,

03:31:17.360 | "are you gonna discredit all a thousand people

03:31:18.920 | "or are you gonna try and explain it away

03:31:20.440 | "with something else?"

03:31:21.720 | It's a weather balloon.

03:31:24.940 | It's a weather balloon.

03:31:27.360 | - Again, just like the Tic Tac,

03:31:28.880 | I think is just inspiring

03:31:30.760 | for the limitless nature of the science.

03:31:35.800 | - I think more is gonna come out.

03:31:37.400 | I think some of the stuff

03:31:39.560 | that the To The Stars folks have done.

03:31:41.880 | - So there's a To The Stars Academy.

03:31:44.800 | What are your thoughts about them?

03:31:46.760 | - I talk to them quite a bit.

03:31:48.560 | I am not a part of To The Stars Academy.

03:31:50.640 | But I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.

03:31:55.600 | - What's their mission?

03:31:58.000 | What's their hope?

03:31:58.840 | What's their--

03:31:59.660 | - When they started, their mission was to try and,

03:32:04.660 | don't look at this as little green men,

03:32:06.320 | but let's look at this as a technology

03:32:08.800 | and let's try and almost reverse engineer

03:32:11.560 | and figure out how these things operate

03:32:13.240 | and how can we explain this from using our knowledge,

03:32:17.000 | physics-based knowledge to go,

03:32:18.120 | "How would something like this operate?"

03:32:20.000 | That's really their bottom line,

03:32:21.160 | was to try and use, and then couple that with,

03:32:24.400 | 'cause they've got the series unidentified,

03:32:27.160 | couple that with television to get the word out.

03:32:31.560 | So you're actually putting something instead of,

03:32:34.600 | because everyone has a theory.

03:32:36.320 | Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories.

03:32:39.320 | It's kind of off of, "Oh my God."

03:32:41.040 | And I've seen the stuff

03:32:42.260 | and I've seen stuff that I've said taken out of context

03:32:44.840 | on shows that I did not talk to.

03:32:46.940 | So there's all that, because you can take a clip

03:32:49.680 | and go, "Oh, it's this, it's that."

03:32:51.440 | And if I know about stuff,

03:32:52.640 | like you can't technically use my likeness

03:32:54.760 | unless I tell you you can.

03:32:56.400 | So if I haven't signed something, you can't do it.

03:32:58.000 | There was a guy who put something out,

03:32:59.200 | and I was in it and I told him,

03:33:00.040 | "You can take it down and you can talk to lawyers

03:33:01.680 | "because I'm not supporting you."

03:33:04.160 | - So they use it to tell some kind of narrative

03:33:05.840 | that's not connected to reality.

03:33:07.680 | - 'Cause let's face it, if you're making TV shows,

03:33:09.760 | there's two reasons to do it.

03:33:10.840 | One, you wanna get word out,

03:33:12.220 | or two, you wanna make money, or three, both.

03:33:15.060 | And so usually it's, I would say the make money

03:33:18.020 | is probably the biggest thing to put a TV show out.

03:33:20.500 | - And the mission of the To The Stars Academy

03:33:22.660 | is to not do that.

03:33:23.820 | This is to try to get some--

03:33:27.100 | - When I started and I talked to them,

03:33:29.180 | 'cause I've talked to Tom and I've talked to Lou,

03:33:31.940 | and those are the two main players,

03:33:33.820 | it was to basically demystify the fact

03:33:37.620 | and get rid of the stigma that's tied to UFOs,

03:33:41.040 | and let's look at it from a science base,

03:33:42.880 | and then use TV to get the word out on the progress.

03:33:45.600 | And they've done some pretty cool things.

03:33:47.020 | I mean, the Italian government gave them

03:33:49.560 | all kinds of files that had been property

03:33:52.600 | of their government.

03:33:53.440 | They got a bunch from, it might have been Argentina,

03:33:56.920 | gave them all kinds of stuff, like,

03:33:58.320 | "Here's all our records, what can you do with it?"

03:34:00.160 | To try and now pull from country-based

03:34:02.760 | to a more global-based research,

03:34:04.500 | which is what you were talking about,

03:34:06.320 | and then using independent scientists

03:34:08.100 | that are not tied to a government,

03:34:09.840 | I mean, any government,

03:34:10.780 | but just using independent research agencies

03:34:12.860 | to start looking at some of the metallurgy,

03:34:14.940 | 'cause you go, "Oh, I found this.

03:34:15.780 | "We had this piece of metal, what is it?"

03:34:17.100 | And some of the stuff has been explained.

03:34:18.380 | They've got some objects, artifacts

03:34:20.380 | that have not been explained.

03:34:21.900 | And that's slowly coming out, and I think--

03:34:25.260 | - And your hope is the US government

03:34:26.460 | will release some more things.

03:34:27.300 | - Well, the government, the US government

03:34:28.820 | came out a month ago and said,

03:34:30.300 | "We have material that we cannot explain the origin."

03:34:34.220 | They have said that.

03:34:36.020 | They just haven't released the records

03:34:37.740 | from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about.

03:34:39.540 | I'm like, "Come on, it's 70-some years old.

03:34:41.760 | "You can classify it, let it out."

03:34:43.480 | - I think you put it beautifully,

03:34:45.260 | that in this time, that will be a heck

03:34:48.640 | of an inspiring, hopeful thing to see.

03:34:51.080 | People don't-- - Just to distract.

03:34:53.440 | - Yeah, the division is, I mean,

03:34:55.520 | nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps,

03:34:59.960 | like the idea that there's life out there.

03:35:05.200 | - Oh, it would literally change.

03:35:06.980 | I said this a while ago, I forget,

03:35:08.180 | I think it was the London Sun-Times had called me,

03:35:10.140 | and I said, "Personally, I think this is a global issue.

03:35:12.260 | "It's not."

03:35:13.340 | If there is stuff coming down,

03:35:14.820 | which we're pretty sure there is,

03:35:15.900 | there's enough stuff that we can't explain.

03:35:18.420 | If there is stuff coming down,

03:35:19.620 | then this is not a country-based thing,

03:35:21.140 | and it's not about technology,

03:35:22.340 | and it's not about who's gonna win the next war,

03:35:24.800 | because you don't know what they're doing.

03:35:26.860 | So you got, really, a couple of theories.

03:35:29.120 | One, you've got E.T., or close encounters.

03:35:33.460 | And the other extreme is you've got Independence Day.

03:35:36.580 | Are you gonna prepare and bet on E.T. and close encounters,

03:35:40.620 | or do you actually try and do stuff

03:35:42.360 | in case it is Independence Day,

03:35:43.660 | you actually have a game plan?

03:35:45.460 | And when you get into Independence Day,

03:35:46.980 | that scenario, and I don't like going too much into sci-fi,

03:35:50.920 | but let's just say, in theory, that that becomes a reality.

03:35:54.640 | It's not a U.S., Russia, China, England, France, Spain,

03:35:59.640 | name any country and any continent.

03:36:02.880 | It becomes a global issue.

03:36:05.380 | And the only way you can deny, it's just like Americans.

03:36:07.500 | We all, we're divided.

03:36:10.700 | We've been that way forever.

03:36:11.840 | So if you think we won't get through this,

03:36:13.140 | we'll get through it,

03:36:13.980 | 'cause we've had times just like this before.

03:36:15.820 | - Until Nazi Germany pops up.

03:36:17.300 | - But if Nazi Germany pops up,

03:36:18.780 | or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center,

03:36:21.060 | and then all of a sudden, we're all united.

03:36:22.660 | We all also have very, very short memories.

03:36:25.900 | - Yes. - We do.

03:36:27.100 | - Exactly.

03:36:27.940 | - It's when you look and go, well, we can do this,

03:36:31.020 | and you go, no, no, if you think

03:36:34.200 | that everyone on the planet is good,

03:36:37.120 | you need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking.

03:36:41.480 | You know, we said this.

03:36:42.420 | There were people during the rise of Hitler.

03:36:45.080 | No, no, it's okay.

03:36:46.920 | No, no, it's okay.

03:36:47.740 | We're not gonna do, we're not gonna stop.

03:36:48.720 | No, no, it's okay.

03:36:50.000 | No, no, it's okay.

03:36:51.280 | And you gotta think, the only thing that stopped Hitler

03:36:55.680 | was his ego by going into Russia.

03:36:59.120 | If he'd have stuck with the pact with Stalin,

03:37:01.720 | and not went to the East, and had to fight,

03:37:04.000 | and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him,

03:37:06.860 | and he would have put all his high troops to the other side,

03:37:10.700 | there would have been a totally different outcome.

03:37:12.580 | The man in the iron, the man in the high tower,

03:37:14.700 | or whatever, it's a Netflix show,

03:37:15.820 | where Nazi actually wins it.

03:37:17.700 | And you look, you know, we didn't know everything

03:37:20.220 | that was going on, especially the atrocities

03:37:22.580 | with the concentration camps,

03:37:23.900 | and what he was doing to the Jews.

03:37:26.180 | I mean, you look at that going,

03:37:27.820 | if you really wanna see evil,

03:37:29.180 | and then there's the whole side of what Stalin did,

03:37:30.860 | because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did,

03:37:33.860 | but that never gets the press.

03:37:35.740 | - And the thing is, we forget this history

03:37:40.740 | in our conflicts today.

03:37:41.780 | We forget that there is the nature of evil.

03:37:44.100 | We forget that there's real evil in the world.

03:37:47.000 | And the thing to fight that evil is to be united,

03:37:50.460 | to be both, it's like this interesting line,

03:37:55.340 | like you talked about Joe Rogan,

03:37:56.940 | of being both kind to each other, compassionate, empathetic,

03:38:01.940 | but also being strong and a bad motherfucker

03:38:07.900 | when you need to, to make sure that you,

03:38:11.420 | there's a balance between kindness and force.

03:38:14.860 | - What it is, you use force when force is necessary,

03:38:18.420 | but you don't have to walk around

03:38:19.460 | like Billy Badass all the time.

03:38:20.860 | I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with,

03:38:23.380 | that literally could kick the shit out

03:38:24.980 | of whoever came near 'em,

03:38:26.760 | they never got in fights 'cause one,

03:38:28.260 | even people that didn't know them,

03:38:29.420 | 'cause they were actually nice guys.

03:38:31.220 | They were just good dudes, but if you cross them,

03:38:35.860 | like I had a friend of mine,

03:38:37.580 | he's a nationally ranked wrestler,

03:38:40.100 | went to Naval Academy with me.

03:38:41.660 | He's a very, very good friend of mine.

03:38:43.560 | And he is, when you meet him,

03:38:47.980 | and he wrestled at 190 pounds,

03:38:50.060 | and he did not lose a match his senior year

03:38:52.380 | until he went to nationals.

03:38:53.340 | He just had a bad day.

03:38:54.380 | He actually lost to a guy

03:38:55.420 | he had pummeled the shit out of.

03:38:57.640 | And he would cross, it was funny,

03:38:59.120 | we joke about it, even with him,

03:39:00.560 | 'cause when you meet him, he's like the nicest local,

03:39:02.920 | hey, hey dude, hey, how you doing?

03:39:04.640 | He's super nice.

03:39:05.820 | He would cross that ring on a wrestling mat.

03:39:08.820 | As soon as he crossed that ring,

03:39:11.100 | it was like a totally different person.

03:39:12.680 | And he would go out there and just destroy people.

03:39:15.440 | I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on.

03:39:19.600 | And he would get done, and he's super humble,

03:39:22.160 | and they'd raise his hand,

03:39:23.320 | and he'd have this blank expression.

03:39:25.280 | He'd raise his hand, and he'd walk off,

03:39:27.120 | and as soon as he crossed the line,

03:39:28.520 | he'd look up and smile and go,

03:39:29.720 | hey, hi guys, how you doing?

03:39:30.980 | Like he literally just went

03:39:32.020 | and could rip someone's arms off.

03:39:33.440 | But as soon as he crossed the line,

03:39:34.280 | he was a totally different person.

03:39:35.320 | He's like, and he's that way today.

03:39:37.400 | And man, he wouldn't even tell you he's a wrestler.

03:39:39.360 | - Yeah, that's kind of a symbol of the best of America.

03:39:43.760 | That's what America is, that wrestler.

03:39:46.040 | You cross the line, you can be hard,

03:39:49.920 | but once you're off the mat,

03:39:52.420 | you're just a kind human being.

03:39:54.820 | - Yeah.

03:39:55.660 | - I know you're super humble,

03:39:57.140 | saying it's better to be lucky than good,

03:40:01.960 | but your story is inspiring.

03:40:04.980 | That the entire trajectory of having a dream,

03:40:09.440 | of accomplishing that dream,

03:40:11.060 | of having one hell of a career,

03:40:13.560 | what advice would you give to a young person,

03:40:17.720 | to a young version of yourself today

03:40:20.860 | that listens to this and is inspired,

03:40:23.040 | and wants to fly, or wants to go to space,

03:40:27.200 | and wants to build the rocket?

03:40:28.320 | Is there advice you could give them

03:40:30.960 | about life, about career, about anything?

03:40:33.880 | - Yeah, yeah.

03:40:35.040 | First, let me start with,

03:40:39.720 | and you had a question on, inspirational people.

03:40:42.480 | So my grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier,

03:40:45.400 | huge funeral, beer delivery guy,

03:40:48.300 | was delivering beer in the '60s riots

03:40:51.480 | where the guys in the black neighborhoods

03:40:54.160 | where white people didn't go.

03:40:56.160 | And my grandfather's Sicilian,

03:40:57.280 | he was one of the first ones in his family

03:40:58.560 | born in the United States.

03:40:59.640 | So my great-grandmother, and I had aunts and uncles

03:41:01.920 | that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat.

03:41:04.560 | Huge, huge guy, and just the nicest, friendliest,

03:41:09.400 | would give you the shirt off his back,

03:41:11.200 | obviously proven by his funeral.

03:41:12.720 | And I'm talking at his funeral,

03:41:14.400 | the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral

03:41:16.720 | in Toledo, Ohio.

03:41:18.420 | The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio.

03:41:21.600 | I mean, it was literally a mix of who's who.

03:41:25.400 | And he had told me once,

03:41:27.260 | because when you're little, you start looking.

03:41:28.780 | And I grew up basically,

03:41:30.620 | I was probably middle-class, lower middle-class.

03:41:32.300 | My dad was a fireman.

03:41:33.300 | You're not rich, he's working for the city.

03:41:34.900 | It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up.

03:41:38.300 | And I was talking to my grandfather one day,

03:41:39.540 | and he said something to me,

03:41:40.580 | and this is literally how I run my life.

03:41:42.220 | He said, it was about money,

03:41:43.860 | 'cause you'd see, back in the day,

03:41:45.180 | if you saw someone in a Mercedes, that was rare.

03:41:47.420 | You know, they weren't everywhere.

03:41:48.540 | You know, people didn't,

03:41:49.380 | you couldn't lease a car, you actually bought a car,

03:41:51.020 | and usually you bought a car with cash.

03:41:53.620 | So it was totally different than we are now.

03:41:55.860 | And he said, he goes, you know, David, he goes,

03:41:58.780 | they're no better than you,

03:41:59.780 | and you're no better than anyone else.

03:42:01.620 | He goes, you gotta remember that.

03:42:02.740 | He goes, everyone's different.

03:42:03.780 | He goes, treat everyone with the respect

03:42:05.580 | and dignity that they deserve.

03:42:07.620 | He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless,

03:42:09.400 | he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person.

03:42:11.860 | It just, that's who they chose to be.

03:42:14.540 | And you make choices in your life,

03:42:16.180 | but never ever look down on someone,

03:42:17.740 | because, you know, there will always be someone

03:42:19.840 | that will look down on you,

03:42:20.680 | and you should never ever do that.

03:42:22.180 | And I kept that close to me.

03:42:23.180 | He was a huge influence.

03:42:24.580 | He was my mom's dad.

03:42:25.880 | Just a big, big influence in my life,

03:42:29.100 | and the way I carried myself.

03:42:30.580 | And he was one that would say, you know,

03:42:34.420 | you can be anything you wanna be.

03:42:36.300 | You know, he grew up dirt poor, you know,

03:42:38.620 | and the fact that he had bought a house

03:42:40.540 | and took good care of my grandmother

03:42:42.060 | and did stuff like that, you know,

03:42:43.640 | to him, that was a success.

03:42:45.580 | And to me, it was always, you know,

03:42:46.660 | trying to better and move on.

03:42:48.580 | And he was the one, you know,

03:42:50.080 | my parents were a big part of this too,

03:42:52.380 | was instilling that, that anything is possible.

03:42:54.540 | So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969,

03:42:58.540 | you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon,

03:43:00.860 | and I'm asking my mom, and she says,

03:43:02.260 | well, they were all military pilots,

03:43:03.820 | and, you know, we had an international guard

03:43:05.300 | that at the time was flying F-100, so I'm dating myself.

03:43:08.140 | And I was just fascinated with flight,

03:43:11.180 | and I just looked at that going,

03:43:12.300 | that's really what I wanna do.

03:43:13.260 | And I never lost sight of that.

03:43:14.380 | There was always, oh, I could do this or do that.

03:43:16.220 | And when I was gonna go to college,

03:43:17.940 | before I enlisted in the Marine Corps,

03:43:19.580 | I was accepted into Natural Resources at Ohio State.

03:43:22.460 | And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly,

03:43:24.140 | I'll go be a forest ranger,

03:43:25.180 | 'cause I wanted to hang out

03:43:26.000 | in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires,

03:43:28.340 | 'cause that's just, I like that stuff.

03:43:30.780 | You know, it was that or be an oceanographer,

03:43:32.220 | because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau.

03:43:33.880 | And actually, that's my degree.

03:43:35.020 | My undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau.

03:43:36.700 | So influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau.

03:43:39.300 | I have an oceanography degree.

03:43:40.860 | I got an MBA from University of Houston, go Cougs,

03:43:43.200 | gotta mention 'em.

03:43:44.040 | And then, so you look and people go,

03:43:47.140 | what are you gonna do with that?

03:43:48.300 | And I said, you know, I got an oceanography degree,

03:43:50.740 | 'cause I go, well, I'm gonna sail on the ocean,

03:43:52.180 | so at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at.

03:43:54.860 | And that was kind of a running joke.

03:43:56.460 | And then--

03:43:57.300 | - And then so these passions and underneath it

03:44:00.620 | is the belief that you can be anything you wanna be.

03:44:03.980 | - You can.

03:44:04.820 | You know, I told my kids this, you know,

03:44:06.580 | when they were young.

03:44:07.780 | You know, it was tough, especially for my son.

03:44:09.460 | So when Nate was about five, six years,

03:44:10.940 | we knew Nate was colorblind.

03:44:12.520 | You know, my wife's brothers are both colorblind.

03:44:15.400 | It's really color deprived.

03:44:16.420 | Colorblind, you see black and white.

03:44:17.980 | He can't tell, he has issues with greens, reds, browns.

03:44:20.700 | It's funny if you're ever around someone like that,

03:44:23.100 | 'cause he'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at?

03:44:24.300 | He goes, right over there by the red thing.

03:44:25.420 | I'm like, what are you looking at?

03:44:27.300 | I go, this?

03:44:28.140 | I'm like, he had a hat on one day.

03:44:28.980 | I go, which one are you getting?

03:44:29.800 | He had a hat in his hand, it was green.

03:44:31.140 | He goes, I'm gonna get the green one.

03:44:32.100 | I go, oh, this one right here.

03:44:33.020 | He goes, no, the one on my head.

03:44:33.900 | I go, Nate, that one's brown.

03:44:34.940 | He's like, leave me alone, Dad.

03:44:37.140 | He got the brown hat, 'cause to him it looked green.

03:44:40.200 | So he couldn't fly.

03:44:41.600 | He came to me, he said, I go, what do you wanna do, Nate?

03:44:43.120 | You know, you're talking to your kids,

03:44:44.120 | and what do you wanna do?

03:44:44.960 | He goes, I wanna be a pilot.

03:44:45.800 | Now I gotta tell him, 'cause he's looking at me,

03:44:48.100 | 'cause I'm a pilot, dude, you can't be a pilot.

03:44:50.640 | He's like, why can't I be a pilot?

03:44:51.960 | I said, because you got eye issues.

03:44:54.840 | You know, so you gotta redirect.

03:44:56.520 | And the other one was, because I stopped flying,

03:44:58.920 | I was 42 years old, and I was like,

03:45:01.240 | and it was my childhood dream.

03:45:02.400 | So it's like a pro athlete.

03:45:03.560 | I know exactly what it feels like

03:45:05.240 | when Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL

03:45:08.300 | when you still can do it.

03:45:09.780 | - Good choice of quarterback, by the way.

03:45:11.340 | The greatest of all time, but whatever.

03:45:12.780 | - So you do, and you look at it, and you go,

03:45:16.180 | I understand what those guys feel like

03:45:17.660 | when you have to walk away from something that you love

03:45:19.180 | and you think you can still do it.

03:45:20.880 | So I told them, I said, look,

03:45:24.500 | I was talking to both of my kids, and I said,

03:45:25.820 | you know, find something that you wanna do,

03:45:29.700 | that you love to do, and that you can do your whole life.

03:45:33.500 | And you should be able to do good things for other people.

03:45:37.400 | You wanna be able to help other people.

03:45:39.760 | That's what I said.

03:45:40.600 | So both of my kids, and there's no one in my family,

03:45:43.800 | both of my children, one of them is,

03:45:45.720 | my daughter is a doctor doing a residency

03:45:48.160 | in internal medicine right now,

03:45:49.800 | and my son is in his third year.

03:45:52.080 | And they're both gonna be doctors.

03:45:53.720 | And so I look at it as, you know,

03:45:55.520 | people go, oh, you got two doctors.

03:45:56.680 | I don't care.

03:45:57.500 | I told my kids, if you wanna be a garbage man,

03:45:59.400 | or you wanna dig ditches, I don't care.

03:46:01.280 | Just be the best ditch digger that you can be.

03:46:04.620 | I said, and be happy doing it,

03:46:05.780 | because what you also find is that

03:46:07.860 | we are in this big pursuit of money, money, money, money,

03:46:09.740 | money, money, money.

03:46:10.580 | That's what makes the world go round.

03:46:11.980 | But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather,

03:46:14.260 | who didn't have a lot of money,

03:46:16.140 | and he was probably one of the most happy people on life.

03:46:18.300 | And unfortunately, he died at 65.

03:46:20.380 | He had a massive heart attack,

03:46:21.620 | because he didn't tell that,

03:46:23.140 | he kind of knew it was happening,

03:46:24.660 | and he just made the choice to do it.

03:46:26.860 | And it was devastating to the entire family.

03:46:29.900 | But he didn't have a lot of money.

03:46:32.160 | But I'll tell you what,

03:46:33.000 | I know a lot of rich people who have funerals,

03:46:34.560 | and there's nobody at 'em.

03:46:36.440 | And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, had,

03:46:39.040 | literally, it was like three miles long.

03:46:42.160 | - The Pope. - It was crazy.

03:46:43.440 | Yeah, who died the Pope?

03:46:44.280 | That was 'cause it was like, hey, he's a Catholic.

03:46:45.600 | He's just Italian.

03:46:46.560 | He goes, who died, the Pope?

03:46:48.440 | And I go, no, that was my grandfather.

03:46:49.720 | And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister,

03:46:52.820 | and there was like 30 people.

03:46:54.440 | And I looked at my mother, and I said,

03:46:55.800 | where's everybody at?

03:46:57.240 | She goes, oh, no, this is normal.

03:47:00.380 | This is what a normal funeral looks like.

03:47:02.540 | So for young kids, bottom line, one, be nice.

03:47:07.540 | Kindness will get you, I'm a big believer in karma.

03:47:10.340 | Kindness will get you a long way in the world.

03:47:12.600 | It's easy to be nice.

03:47:15.660 | It doesn't cost you anything.

03:47:17.580 | I said, and get rid of the hate.

03:47:19.740 | And number two is, follow your dreams.

03:47:22.140 | Because everyone is capable of everything.

03:47:23.660 | And there's a self-realism.

03:47:25.020 | Like, if you really have trouble with math,

03:47:27.880 | getting a PhD in applied math

03:47:29.480 | is probably not something you're going to be able to do.

03:47:32.080 | But understand yourself what your own capabilities are,

03:47:35.240 | and you know inside your heart.

03:47:36.280 | Don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do.

03:47:38.400 | You have to determine that yourself.

03:47:40.360 | And go for it.

03:47:41.280 | And you can do anything.

03:47:43.640 | It's just, it's a great, the world's incredible.

03:47:46.920 | It really is.

03:47:48.240 | - Let me ask the last big, ridiculous question.

03:47:52.460 | So you've lived much of your life,

03:47:55.880 | your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.

03:47:59.280 | So, let me ask kind of several different ways,

03:48:04.280 | the same kind of question.

03:48:05.960 | One, do you, have you pondered your mortality,

03:48:10.720 | the finiteness of it?

03:48:12.520 | And the bigger question to ask,

03:48:14.560 | even in the context of your tic-tac encounter,

03:48:21.340 | is what do you think is the meaning of this

03:48:24.200 | thing we got going on here?

03:48:25.680 | The meaning of life, human life, in this sense?

03:48:28.700 | - So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality?

03:48:33.640 | Yes, quite often.

03:48:35.380 | And I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am,

03:48:39.620 | but I will tell you that I do believe in God.

03:48:42.580 | I've just seen too many things in the world

03:48:44.600 | that I can't explain.

03:48:46.560 | And some people will explain it by subconscious.

03:48:48.520 | So I'll give you a story,

03:48:49.400 | and this kind of puts in the thing of,

03:48:50.880 | do I fear death?

03:48:52.720 | So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with.

03:48:54.760 | We were stationed in Japan together,

03:48:56.120 | and Japan had this incinerator

03:48:58.720 | that put all kinds of dioxins.

03:49:00.360 | So there's a real high cancer rate

03:49:01.720 | for those that served on the base in Atsuki, Japan.

03:49:04.620 | Him and his wife had one son,

03:49:09.500 | and their son passed away

03:49:11.600 | just before his 18th birthday of cancer.

03:49:13.680 | And I was hanging out with, I'll call him John,

03:49:18.300 | and I was hanging out with John.

03:49:19.800 | We were in oil and gas.

03:49:20.660 | He had come to the same company,

03:49:21.840 | and we were doing an event together.

03:49:24.320 | And he was opening up to me,

03:49:25.560 | 'cause we were actually the demo pilots.

03:49:27.080 | We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff.

03:49:29.920 | And him and I were sitting there talking,

03:49:32.520 | and he was giving me the whole story

03:49:36.200 | and how it really changed his look on life,

03:49:39.400 | that we're only here for a finite time

03:49:41.160 | and that we're all going to die.

03:49:42.960 | Well, unfortunately, after all that,

03:49:44.600 | when it was really going,

03:49:45.640 | him and his wife had moved to a location

03:49:48.300 | that would fit there close to the water

03:49:50.520 | where they could do stuff, and I won't say where.

03:49:52.880 | And he was doing what he loved to do,

03:49:55.200 | and he got diagnosed with throat cancer.

03:49:57.400 | And I was talking to him,

03:50:01.720 | it was probably about maybe two months before he died.

03:50:05.780 | And I said, "Dude, you're sad.

03:50:11.480 | "I mean, this is your friend."

03:50:13.360 | And I'm kind of really bummed out.

03:50:15.000 | And this is the guy, this is a guy that's dying of cancer.

03:50:18.080 | And here's what he tells me.

03:50:19.040 | He says, "Dave, dude, we're all gonna die."

03:50:23.360 | He goes, "But I have to look at it.

03:50:25.340 | "I have to make the best of the time that I have."

03:50:28.360 | And I said, "I understand that."

03:50:30.360 | And he goes, "With the exception

03:50:32.380 | "of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly."

03:50:36.040 | He goes, "I'm okay with dying.

03:50:39.320 | "I've had a really good life."

03:50:41.020 | 'Cause actually the original announcement

03:50:47.960 | when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me,

03:50:50.240 | 'cause I don't do Facebook,

03:50:51.280 | and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed.

03:50:54.680 | And about the day before he died,

03:50:57.460 | for some reason I was thinking about him.

03:51:00.200 | And I had a dream, or I think it was a dream,

03:51:03.760 | or an altered reality, you can get into whatever.

03:51:06.200 | But he was there, it was just him and I.

03:51:09.920 | And I was really sad in the dream.

03:51:13.440 | I was actually crying, and he was there.

03:51:15.240 | And he was actually in his uniform, he was in his whites,

03:51:17.920 | 'cause he was a Navy.

03:51:19.440 | And we were just talking, and he looked at me,

03:51:20.920 | and he said, "And this isn't my dream."

03:51:22.560 | He's like, "Dave, it's all gonna be okay."

03:51:25.480 | And this is a vivid conversation I have,

03:51:28.560 | and people are gonna think I'm weird about this.

03:51:31.480 | But I know what my dream was,

03:51:33.360 | and maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream.

03:51:36.120 | But in reality, to me, this was real,

03:51:38.160 | that it was put there for a reason.

03:51:39.920 | And he basically explained everything.

03:51:42.640 | It's okay, I'm gonna be fine, my wife is fine.

03:51:45.960 | And he goes, "This is what's meant to be."

03:51:49.320 | But the bottom line was,

03:51:50.720 | "Make use of every day that you have,

03:51:52.480 | "because you don't know."

03:51:54.400 | And literally two days later, I find out that he passed.

03:51:57.200 | - But ultimately, he accepted the finiteness of it.

03:52:04.040 | - He did, well, you have to.

03:52:05.680 | And it's like I talk about money,

03:52:07.480 | and job position, and this and that.

03:52:09.160 | And I said, "You can go to a company."

03:52:11.560 | Just remember, when you wanna be a VP of a company,

03:52:13.360 | you sell your soul to the company.

03:52:15.020 | You have to.

03:52:16.400 | I said, "If you look," I joke with people at work,

03:52:18.640 | and I said, "You know, when you ever think

03:52:20.640 | "that you're important, or this guy has that,"

03:52:22.320 | I said, "When you're sitting on 93 or 95, 128,

03:52:25.320 | "and you're sitting in traffic, and we're stopped."

03:52:27.060 | Which doesn't happen right now 'cause of COVID,

03:52:28.680 | but normally it's bumper to bumper,

03:52:30.520 | and you're sitting there,

03:52:31.360 | like I was coming down here by the gas tank.

03:52:33.480 | When you're sitting there, look left and look right.

03:52:36.800 | You know, and there can be a Lamborghini,

03:52:38.920 | or an S550 Mercedes, and on the other side,

03:52:41.560 | there could be some piece of crap car.

03:52:44.680 | We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time,

03:52:47.480 | trying to do the same thing,

03:52:48.780 | which is just get home so we can be with our family.

03:52:51.420 | 'Cause the most important thing that we have,

03:52:54.360 | it ain't money, it ain't our job, it's not our position.

03:52:57.420 | I go, 'cause when it's all said and done,

03:52:59.120 | you could be, you know, you can be,

03:53:01.900 | with the exception of the presidents of the United States,

03:53:04.340 | I mean, name the vice presidents.

03:53:07.020 | Most people can't.

03:53:08.460 | And eventually, they're going to die.

03:53:10.400 | Or eventually, you're gonna see a statue of a guy

03:53:12.500 | from the 1700s in the Boston area,

03:53:14.420 | and you're gonna go, I don't even know who that guy was.

03:53:17.060 | Did he impact my life?

03:53:18.140 | He probably did.

03:53:18.960 | But eventually, people forget.

03:53:21.180 | You realize what's important now,

03:53:23.140 | and the one thing that you have

03:53:25.420 | is your family and your close friends, and that's it.

03:53:29.460 | You can take all the money or everything else,

03:53:31.300 | if you're down on your luck, you know,

03:53:33.020 | who is gonna be, we always just joke,

03:53:34.460 | who are your true friends?

03:53:36.140 | It's the person, well, there's ones that I won't say,

03:53:38.400 | but you know, hey, you're broke down on a road

03:53:40.620 | in the middle of nowhere,

03:53:41.860 | and it's three o'clock in the morning.

03:53:43.120 | Who you gonna call is gonna get in their car

03:53:44.620 | without complaining and come and get you.

03:53:46.900 | - And that's life.

03:53:47.860 | Those-- - That is life.

03:53:48.980 | - The people you love.

03:53:50.820 | - It's the people you truly care about.

03:53:53.380 | And contrary to, I have, you know,

03:53:54.900 | oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends.

03:53:57.980 | You got about that many real friends

03:53:59.940 | that you can count on, and that's it.

03:54:01.820 | - Everything else doesn't matter.

03:54:03.180 | - No, it doesn't matter.

03:54:04.340 | It doesn't mean you're not gonna be nice.

03:54:05.240 | I mean, I have, there's acquaintance friends

03:54:06.780 | that I'll do anything for,

03:54:07.780 | and they can come to my house and stuff,

03:54:09.060 | but then there's the people that, you know,

03:54:11.060 | like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know,

03:54:15.220 | at a moment's notice, you know,

03:54:17.740 | when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know,

03:54:21.940 | who lived literally right down the street from me,

03:54:24.380 | and my cousin Chad, and I got two boys,

03:54:26.740 | there's 14 of us, but there's only two boys.

03:54:28.540 | There's three of us together.

03:54:29.600 | And we all grew up in the same neighborhood,

03:54:30.980 | same schools, played football together, all that.

03:54:34.020 | I said, if one of those, if Ray or Chad ever needs me,

03:54:37.020 | if something happens, like when my uncle died,

03:54:38.820 | it wasn't an issue if I'm coming home.

03:54:41.460 | It's I'm booking the ticket

03:54:42.620 | and I don't give a shit what it costs

03:54:44.060 | because I will be there to be there with you.

03:54:47.500 | And then those two guys,

03:54:49.740 | and my college roommate is another one

03:54:51.500 | that I'm very, very close with, you know,

03:54:55.020 | I have a handful of people that, you know,

03:54:59.380 | I will drop literally everything,

03:55:01.180 | even if my wife would be pissed at me at times.

03:55:03.660 | She's like, seriously, I gotta do it.

03:55:05.900 | And now she knows, and it's the same thing with her.

03:55:08.420 | I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life

03:55:11.180 | that if they really need her and she has to go,

03:55:13.340 | she would go and I would let her go.

03:55:15.580 | So.

03:55:17.300 | - Given all that,

03:55:19.100 | I'm honored that you would come here

03:55:21.820 | and talk to me and take the time.

03:55:24.040 | Dave, it was one of the best conversations I've ever had.

03:55:26.660 | Thank you so much.

03:55:27.500 | - It's a pretty long one.

03:55:28.500 | - It's probably sets the record for the longest one.

03:55:31.340 | So I mean, I'm at a loss of words.

03:55:35.580 | One of my favorite conversations.

03:55:36.820 | Thank you so much for talking to me, Dave.

03:55:38.220 | - You're welcome.

03:55:39.140 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:55:41.660 | with David Fravor, and thank you to our sponsors,

03:55:44.420 | Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.

03:55:48.040 | Please check out the sponsors in the description

03:55:50.060 | to get a discount and to support this podcast.

03:55:53.660 | If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,

03:55:55.940 | review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast,

03:55:58.140 | follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,

03:56:00.620 | or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

03:56:03.900 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.

03:56:07.860 | Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

03:56:11.620 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:56:15.440 | (upbeat music)

03:56:18.020 | (upbeat music)

03:56:20.600 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

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

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