The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people. He's also famously one of the people who, with his own eyes, saw and chased a UFO, an identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac, and the incident more formally referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident.

His story, corroborated by several other pilots, from my perspective as a curious scientist and an open-minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at least that I'm aware of. He's a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to. I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places, and tried to ask as many of the questions that people posted as I could.

And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I'm sure if the world wants us to, and if there's more questions to be had, we'll talk on this podcast again. Quick summary of the sponsors. Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general, is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open-minded one, often looking and thinking outside the box.

I'm often disheartened by the closed-mindedness of the scientific community. And in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists. I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds should walk. I think we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars, and the nature of reality, and the nature of our very own minds.

The path to understanding can only be walked humbly. The very idea that there's a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology, whether human-made or alien-made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this Earth. There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings.

Paradigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review the Five Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

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It is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all-in-one daily drink to support health and performance. I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need. Now, let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting.

I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an eight-hour eating period of two meals, sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next. I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72-hour fast that some people I look up to have done. People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits, it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life.

Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal, that every day is precious. I certainly experienced this with a 24-hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the 48, 72 and even week-long fast. Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens. It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good.

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And now, finally, here's my conversation with David Fravor. - You're a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School. - Yeah, I am. - Better known as Top Gun. - Yeah. - Let me ask the most ridiculous question. How realistic is the movie "Top Gun"? - So it's funny, we used to joke, and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said this.

There's two things in the original "Top Gun" that are true, that are very realistic. One, there is a place called Top Gun. And number two is they do fly airplanes there. (Dave laughs) Other than that, I went through in '97, class 497, and there's actually a log of every single person that's went through, kind of like SEAL training.

There's a list. So people, 'cause there's a lot of posers out there, oh, I was a Navy SEAL. No, you weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun. You can actually go to Top Gun. And matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the real patch, you have to have gone there.

So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real. The real ones are controlled, the people that make 'em honor that. And when you go in, they look up your name. If you wanna get one, they look up your name. You just tell 'em, they go, "Okay, here." And they'll sell 'em to you.

If you are not on the list, you ain't getting no patch. Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go through. But it's, for me, probably one of the best experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent. It's very, very challenging. But it's what we all signed up to do.

So it's just the entire group that is, when you wanna be that level, where you go, everyone really cares, and everyone really wants to be good. - Is it competitive, like in the movie? - No, it's, when you go through, it's, if anything, it's more of the students, and then there's the instructor side.

And the instructor sides are really, they're guys that you know. They just chose to stay up in Fallon. And it's extremely difficult job, because they have a very small tolerance for not being good. So they're briefs, the guys, when they give a lecture. So let's just say there's a fighter employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones.

It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture. The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, they call them murder boards, where he's scrutinized by his peers, and he practices. By the time they actually stand in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized, and they don't even turn around.

They just click, and they know them in order. And they repeat the same thing over. And it's standardized. So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the school, and there's a reason for that. Because what they're doing is they're training. So when you come out of Top Gun, you're called a Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics Instructor, okay?

So you're SFTI. When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools on the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons, and then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that. So there's a reason that they're extremely particular when you go through the course.

It is literally one of the best things, and it's not a rank-based thing, 'cause think, oh, Navy. You can come in as an '04 Lieutenant Commander. The lieutenants, the hierarchy, or at least to be, I don't know how it is exactly today, but I imagine it's the same. The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank.

So when the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in the Fallon ranges, they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority-wise, and I mean time-wise, are the ones that actually make the decision. And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out from the staff, they all speak the same language.

And it has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded. So it's just a, it's an incredible group of individuals. - So there's a bar of excellence that the instructors demand. - Oh, very much so, and they're held to it.

So it's not a, "Hey, I'm now an instructor, "so I can do what I want." There is a standard, and they have to live up to that standard. They have to, and I mean every moment of every day. So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon and they come down and do, they're called site visits where they come down and they'll come to Lemoore, California, which is where the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy, and they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on some of that knowledge, that's that same high level of standard.

They can't just drop your guard because you wear the Top Gun patch, and people know that. And they wear light blue shirts, so it's pretty easy to identify them when they're out there. And then everyone else who's been through the school, including them, have the patch on their sleeve.

So there's a standard that's expected when you come out of there. - So you were a Navy pilot for 18 years. - Yes. - Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot? - Yeah. So first I was enlisted, I was a Marine. And then the Marines actually sent me, recommended me to go to the Naval Academy.

So it's always better to be lucky than good, but I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished. And I had that dream to fly, so when I got selected-- - They've always dreamed of flying. - Yeah, since 1969 when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

I was, at that point I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five. And I said, "Wow, yeah, it's so cool, Mom." And she said, "Well, you know, they were all pilots." And then at that point it was like, "I'm gonna be a pilot." And if you knew me growing up, 'cause I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just like, "Yeah, right." I used to joke, "I'm gonna fly jets "and I'm gonna drop bombs." Then, and if people that knew me when I was a kid, they'd be like, "Yeah." And they'd be like, "Not a chance." And then when I did, I actually had a, it's a funny story and I'll get to it, I'll finish my career, but I was at my cousin's wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood.

We kind of, they had Italian side of the family, that's how we grew up. So it was my house right down the street, it was my cousin Chad, and then right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff. The guy two doors down from my, and I was a paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all knew me.

And I went to my cousin's wedding and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, "David Fravor." I go, "Mr. Race, how you doing?" He goes, "You fly jets, top gun and all that." I go, "Yes, sir." He goes, "Man, I figured you'd be in jail by now." (laughing) And it was kind of a, to me it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on.

I kind of overcame that, but-- - What do you attribute that to? So you, I've heard you before and just now say that it's better to be lucky than good. And you talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory, maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how'd you pull it off to be truly a special person?

- The easiest way is one, never take no. Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it. I mean, I knew what I was capable of inside, and if I really believe if you want something and you want to do something, then you can achieve it.

Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball and I really wanted to be in the NBA, there's a realism that says I'm five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap, and I'm really not that good at basketball, it's probably not ever gonna happen no matter how hard I try and practice.

It's just the way it is. Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast, I'm not that big, it's just physically, I'm incapable of doing that. But there's things that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and strength, but it's mental, and I'm not saying you have to be a genius and super smart to be a fighter pilot.

Matter of fact, you don't. It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly. 80% solution is typically good enough, 'cause if you overthink it, you're behind. And in an air-to-air fight, that's what happens. People try and overthink it, and before you know it, because it's happening so fast, you can't get to the nth degree, six decimal places.

80% solution's good enough. - You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution. - Yeah, I'm a big believer in the 80% solution. - I love that. - If you get 80%, you can go, and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what, if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is.

It's like a chess game, but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this, and then I know that if I do a maneuver, if he's gonna counter it correctly, he should do A. If he doesn't do A, he does some degree less, like B, C, D, and then I know how bad his error is, and then I capitalize.

So I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees nose high. If I just kinda get above 40, then I'm good, and I can watch how he reacts, and then I can adjust for that. And you continually work that problem, and you chip away, 'cause if you start neutral, you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage, advantage, advantage, 'til eventually, and if you're really fighting just guns only rear quarter, where you gotta get behind the guy, kinda World War II dogfighting type stuff, then it's literally, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at 400 knots, 300 knots, depends.

- So to get to be one of the rear individuals that are able to do that, he just had the dream and didn't take no for an answer. - Well, part of it is family. My dad was, I used to call him a fire-ready aim guy. He'd smack me and then ask me what I did wrong.

(laughs) - Good parenting. - Back then, I joke, and people look, 'cause at times it was kinda tough, 'cause he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times. But then everyone else in my family, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid.

My grandfather, who is a big, big part of it, my mom's dad, who, he taught me a lot, and you have a question there that we'll talk about him, but huge, huge influence, very, very positive. And a lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught me.

And I figured, it was the first funeral I ever went to, and it was about three miles long, and church was overfilling, and people were out. He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious. And you go, someone asked who died, the Pope? - So a lot of people loved him.

So back to my career, to your first question, 'cause I'm getting down a rabbit hole. No, when I was at the, I was gonna stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man, I love the Corps. I think it's, of all services, it's that one. Everything is in a ball, and they're very, very professional, and it was a great, great organization to join.

But I went out to the Nimitz on my freshman cruise. After your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship, and you're an enlisted person. You get to experience that half an hour. He was enlisted, so it was fine with me. - Because it comes up a lot.

Do you mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is? - Yeah, so Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. So it's four and a half acres of sovereign US territory that floats around the US oceans. - Is it a giant thing? Does it have weapons on it? - The air wing is really the weapons.

It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part, it's a giant moving airport, is what it is. So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off, and I'm like, "Oh." And the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a VF-41 and a 14 squadron, VF-84 and a 14 squadron, and then a couple of A6 squadrons.

And we actually ended up pairing up and hanging out with some of the A6 pilots and BNs, so it was really a neat experience. And I said, "I wanna do that." And the way to do it was to not to go in the Navy, because there are Marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land-based to support the Marines, 'cause they're that unit, that whole unit.

The Marine Corps is that one service that has it all. And so when I graduated and I got to, I worked hard through primary, and that's where I knew Missy. We were in, actually went through together. - Missy Cummings. - Missy Cummings. We went through primary together, and then I went to Kingsville.

We all selected the same time. I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Wiedemeier, the three of us. So I went to Kingsville, Scott went to Beeville, and Missy went to Meridian. So the three of us that we had all went through, we got, we selected out of primary together.

We all ended up going jets. And that's how, besides from school, I knew her at school too. Long story, I got done, got winged. It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings. And through some luck, I ended up getting A6s on the West Coast, which is a side-by-side bomber.

So it's a pilot on the left seat and the bombardier navigators on the right seat. It was built in the '60s. It is all weather and it flies low at night. It's got a terrain mapping radar. - How many, I guess, is that a good term to use, fighter jet, as a broad category for the public?

- Yeah, that's fine. - How many fighter jets are side-by-side like that? - That was, in the Navy, that was the only one. The Air Force, the F-111 was a side-by-side, but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of that. Now those are all gone.

The EA6Bs just went away a few years ago. And now the E18G Growler is the replacement for the EA6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew. It really became the F-18, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance-wise by fuel than the Hornet.

- The Hornet is the F-18. - The F-18, yeah. - Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually in front and behind? - The modern two-seaters, yes. But most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single-seat. - Single-seat, just one person? - One person, with the exception of, I'll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the exception of the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two-seater, and the G is also a two-seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say, full-up fighter, bomber.

- So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18-year career, was it two-seater? - No, it was about half and half. So I started off in A6, was a two-seater, then I went to single-seat F-18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and, let me think, 2001, to the end of 2001.

And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets and I've flown both of those, the Es and the S. But I deployed when I had command of VFA-41, I had the two-seat, they were F squadron. - So you eventually ended up commanding the strike fighter Squadron 41.

I love the name, the Black Aces. Is there some parts of that journey that are amazing, parts of it that are tough, that kind of stand out? - To me, one, it was a huge honor, and I got to serve with, you know, I got pulled up because the guy, the people that are XOs, 'cause we fleet up, we go from the number two guy to the number one guy.

So the XO becomes the CO, so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had worked with, now soon to be Vice Admiral Weitzel, was the, he was Commander Weitzel at the time, was the XO, and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L'Amour.

L'Amour had been a single-seat fighter community since the forever. And now all of a sudden you've got the F-18F coming in, which has the weapons systems operators in the back that are not pilots, they're weapons systems operators, and there's a difference. And Kenny is a weapons systems operator. And Kenny knew because of my A6 background that I have a switch that I can go one seat, two seat, one seat, two seat, because when you fly two seat, there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take the advantage of the weapons systems operator.

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

And I would say that one plus one with two people is a minimum of 1.5, because you've got an extra head, you've got extra eyes, you've got someone that can monitor systems, the airplanes can do two things at once. I mean, there's an incredible amount of capability that we add when we do that.

- Can we just pause on that just for me, from a human factors perspective and also an AI perspective, how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people, there's also a third person that's the AI part, there's some level of automation, like autopilot maybe even. Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions really quick, 80%.

How do you deal with another brain working with you? And then also the automation. Is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn? And also as that changed throughout your career, I imagine it gotten better in terms of the automation or perhaps not? - Well, I can tell you, so let's-- - Sorry, there's a bunch of questions in there.

- No, this is good, this is good. And I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tic-tac. So let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the '60s, all right? And there's been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between the pilot and the bombardier navigator.

So we would fly low at night in the mountains. So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington. So you've got the Cascades and incredible amount of time. And we would get in the simulators because unlike, normally people think terrain following and there's the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it'll, the radar can see and it'll fly, it basically flies a straight line.

So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6 was really manual. So you do this low level routes where you're gonna fly in the mountains at night, you're gonna be at, you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground, ripping through like fog layers 'cause you don't need to see outside.

You're literally flying a little TV screen and a radar. - What are you looking at most of the time? So you just as a screen? - It's this really primitive, if you look at it now what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun.

- Is it similar to like the FLIR stuff? Is that, is-- - No. This thing is totally radar based. Now the airplane had a FLIR ball, it's a target recognition and multi-sensor, it was called a tram. - So you're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects. - No, actually what it is is the bombardier navigator had a radar and he was getting raw feed off of a pulse radar in front.

Okay, so it's just basically mapping the mountains. So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is gonna be, it's gonna give you a really bright return. And then the backside, it's just gonna be a giant shadow because you can't see on the other side.

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

- And sorry to interrupt, I'm gonna just keep asking dumb questions, I apologize. But the pilot, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the bombardier? - Yes, so-- - You're actually just controlling. - I'm flying the jet. I have the throttles, the stick, and I have a, it's about a, probably a four inch or six inch wide by maybe four inches, five inches high.

It looks like, it's literally a CRT. That's how old it is. A CRT screen and what it would do, what the radar would do is the bombardier navigator is looking at his radar. He's looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scoped down 'cause the radar can see a lot further.

He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode where we're dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is there's, they're called range bins and there's eight of them. So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and the closest range bin, it's a thing, it'll be like between like a half a mile and or a quarter mile to three quarters of a mile.

The next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles. And then it just keeps going out like that. So if there's a mountain in front, let's say we're on a flat plane and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles and we're just driving right at it.

So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar is going to see it on his scope, my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show like a big bump, like a mountain. And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show it.

And I could see that that bump was moving towards me. And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I'd see the mountain go over to the right-hand side and I could do that. But it wasn't like a video game. It's literally like, if you think of the original Atari's.

- Yeah. But you build up, I imagine, that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual 3D environment based on that little Atari's. - It's, you're exactly right. And you have to train. So there's been studies. As a matter of fact, a lot of the bases, and people probably argue with me, but it's true.

There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators. We call it the WIST, the Weapon Systems Trainer. And it was not even a motion. It just kind of sat there and you just, you could fly these things and they had terrain that they would inject into the system.

But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, who I'll name him, his name's Chris Sato. He's a, works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad. I think computer engineering, he's scary smart. So Chris could really work. A matter of fact, all the guys that flew us, so there's another guy, Matt, who also worked at Apple, who's now at SAP.

We did our first night traps together. The bond between us, I mean, it's one of those things that you just, you're never gonna forget. But Chris and I, when we started flying together, and we were actually the most junior crew in the squadron, we'd spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the system.

One, because he was extremely brilliant and he was, had that inquisitive mind of, oh, we can do all these different things and there's all these degradation modes. But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get. Because, and it's, you almost talk in partials.

So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, "I've got rising terrain." That's just what they'd say, "Showing rising terrain at 12 miles." And I'd see the little bump and I'd say, "Got it." This is gonna go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads.

So when you first get together, the interaction, it's almost like you have to rehearse it. You have to know, and you talk in full sentences. The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, "I'm showing," and he'd get like rising out. And before he finished, I'd say, "I've got it." So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him.

Like, I mean, I can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job. Because I'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain moving. Remember the mountains here, and then it's gonna pop up here, and then it's gonna pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up.

Remember, it's an analog system. To where he is telling me, like, "I can't see all the way to the left." And he's got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn't show that. So he's telling me, "Start a left turn." - How to avoid the mountain. - Or start a hard turn.

And we would do that. So my truck-- - And this is all happening quick? - Very quick. What you're doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed. - Which is how many miles an hour? - Well, four, 27 miles a minute. - Okay, seven miles.

- Between seven and eight miles a minute is what you're flying. - That's fast. - At night, I mean, I broke out of clouds. I mean, I remember him and I flying. We were on it's IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low. They're all around the country.

There's IR-344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, you'd fly from the land, you'd go out over the ocean, turn around, and then you could practice actually coming in on a coastline. And we were flying, and we ended up in the clouds. Keep in mind, we're between 500 and 1,000 feet in the mountains, and we're in the clouds.

You can't see anything. And I had to turn off our red lights that flash. You know, they're called anti-collision lights. Because it was reflecting off the clouds, and it starts to bother you. Just gets annoying. So I turned it off, and we were flying, we're flying, we're flying. We break out of that coastal marine layer, and poof, we break out.

And it's a decent night. And this is right by Mount St. Helens. This is kind of where we're coming in. So we're coming in from the east, and we're just north of Mount St. Helens, is where the route goes. And you look up, you know, 'cause you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's right next to you.

But you're flying along, you're just like, you know, you gotta trust. And you can see houses. You can see the lights, they're above you. We're literally below people's houses, flying down these valleys and stuff. So just incredible experience. So when you take that, and then you move into an F-18F.

So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century. And you're flying, so now, you know, the Wizzo is behind us. And we're not doing those night low levels, but that same type of crew coordination that has to happen, because what you're doing is, you're sharing the load.

So most of the communications that go out of the airplane, the Wizzo does all the talking. He's got actually, he uses his feet. That's the weapon systems operator in the back of an F-18F. So he's gonna run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational awareness display, and it's linked to all the other airplanes.

- Just out of curiosity, what's the situational awareness display? 'Cause that term comes up a lot in- - Think of it as a God's eye view. So if you have a, the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block IIs has about an eight by 10 display for the Wizzos, that they can look at.

The pilot's is smaller, it's down between his, it's a six by six between his legs, and they're getting ready to redesign that Boeing is. But when you looked, it'd be like if you put your airplane and you're looking down. So all the stuff, like if your radar's seeing bad guys out in front of you, it'd be like looking down and going, "Oh, I'm right here.

"I know there's bad guys out here. "And my wingman is over here." And it shows everything. It's just like, it gives you, you can look at that display and go, "Oh, I can see where everything's at. "I can see if one guy's trying to target another guy." It shows you all this.

It's an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall picture of what's going on. - Big picture sense of what's going on. - Because it's happening so fast. And this is where that autonomy piece, this is the third brain. So we're all looking at it, and the third brain is doing fusion.

It's pulling stuff together going, "Oh, this is all this guy, this is this guy, "this is this guy." It's sending it out through the link. So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network that we don't even see. It just says, that airplane says, "Hey, I'm over here." And it tells us, and we go, "Oh, he's right there." And then we can go, his airplane says, "Oh, I'm looking at this airplane, this bad guy." And it shows us, "Oh, he's over there, "and he's looking at this guy." I mean, it's an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot, but when you look down at stuff, it's all, you can sell the picture really quick.

- The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors, and gives you a big picture view. What about the control? Like, is there, and I apologize, as if this is a dumb question, but people use the high-level term of autopilot. How much is there, let's use a loose term of AI, how much automation is there?

How much AI is there in helping you control the airplane? - The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls. So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly. And when I say easy, it's relative 'cause people go, "I can do it," 'cause I did it on Flight Sim.

Real life is a lot different. In Flight Sim, you have no apparent fear of death. You'll do things in a simulator that you would never do in real life. But the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage, I mean, 'cause you think about it, you've got a radar that's feeding you data, you've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data.

All that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got a joint helmet-mounted cueing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head's at looking. So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right, the targeting FLIR will look to the right.

And oh, by the way, the back seater has a helmet on too, so he can look to the left and he can do things. So depending on what sensor he's controlling, so if he's got control of the targeting pod and he looks left, the targeting pod looks left. But if I have something where I wanna lock a guy up that I don't see, that maybe the radar didn't see, but I can get over and now point the radar, 'cause it's a phased array radar now, it doesn't really scan.

There's all kinds of cool stuff. That technology brings, 'cause if you just, if you'd went back 30 years and said, "Hey," or 40 years ago and said, "Hey, we're gonna have this helmet." Now you're gonna be able to slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're just gonna map magnetic resonance and go, "Oh, look." And I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, a JDAM, which is a joint direct attack munition that is the GPS bombs that you see all the time.

And then let that thing fly. And I'm solving this problem in seconds, vice minutes, or, "Hey, I got it. "We're gonna have to mensurate coordinates." And you bring back the data and then they do all the targeting for it and then they send another group out to get it.

Instead of all that, now it's that fast. - So there's a, okay, I mean, we probably don't have enough time to talk about the beautiful fusion of minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane. But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don't know what they're talking about, like me, which is what is the difference between a human being and an AI system?

Like what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane? Like how much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated flight, for example? Like what is the hardest part about flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot? In warfare situations, in flying a fighter jet plane.

- So I would say AI systems are usually black and white. When you write the algorithm for an AI system, basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing, right? So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are, there's a line that says, I can or I can't.

And it's a very finite line, you know, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have gray areas where we go, eh, maybe, yeah, I'll try it. - So humans can operate within that gray. - So if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while, a Super Hornet, it doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane.

So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy. So it basically says the airplane can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs, force of gravity, you know, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then based on the airfoil design and everything else and how it can pull, here's how it's gonna fly, you know, 'cause it's really physics-based.

Well, if you, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight, right? You wanna maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope. Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is, that's where the human goes, can I do this?

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

Like, it'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I guess, in a way, you could probably program it, but I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage, there are things that a human will do that AI won't. And I don't think we've got to the point, which is how do you map illogical solutions?

Most AI is logical. It's based on some type of premise. When you write the algorithm to control it, there's bounds. - Yeah, there's this giant mess. Like you said, the difference between the simulator and real life also gets at that somehow, that there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play.

Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight? Like with Sully landing that plane famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some? - Well, it's very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6. So one is when you're flying with a crew, there's standardization.

So you gotta remember when Sully flew, when his first officer, that's the co-pilot, showed up, it's the first time they met. And this happens all the time in the commercial world. You know, there's six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines. You know, your chance of flying with the same guy all the time is slim and none.

Where in the Navy, we recruit. So I had a primary and a secondary Wizzow that flew with me. - For months? - Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment. So because you want it to know. - So these brains fuse. - You have to. - Trust and all of those things.

- It increases the capability of the airplane. It's not to say we can't swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex missions like a forward air controller, we're in the air actually controlling ground assets and supporting ground troops. If you're in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you do that.

You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you're gonna be ineffective. So when you get to the commercial world, and I've got tons of friends that fly commercial, there is a standardization. Like we know that at this point, I'm gonna put this switch, you're gonna do that.

And everyone, they know their roles. Captain's gonna do this, first officer's gonna do this. And they know that when the emergency breaks out, so in Sully's case, when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem, and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings of the two of them talking, you gotta remember, they're talking to each other when you hear the full tapes, but they're also talking to the air traffic controllers in the New York area.

And it's like, we got a bird strike and the first officer already knows, hey, silence the alarm, they silence the alarm. The first officer's pulling out the book, he's going through the procedures, while Sully's actually flying the airplane, knowing that they've lost their motors. And you gotta think his decision process, like they're trying to get him to go into an airport in New Jersey, and he realizes, not happening, we're gonna put this thing, and he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was gonna put this thing in the Hudson River, and he did it flawlessly.

I mean, every single person walked away from that wreck. The only thing that didn't survive was the airplane, you know, and it got fished out of the Hudson, but. - What is it about those human decisions he had to make? Is that something you put into words, or is that just deep down some instinct that you develop as a pilot over time?

- It's when we, when you train, and aviation is a self-cleaning oven, so if you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions. - Oh, man. - So when you look at what he did, or the way we train, 'cause the commercial industry and the Navy and the Air Force, for all that, we have what's called, we have emergency procedures that we have to know.

Like, the engine's on fire, the first three steps, you just have to know what they are, right? So they know. The airline, same type, you know, they go, "Hey, I know this is," they pull the book out, 'cause the airplanes are designed, they're built to have some time, but there's a point where you have to make a decision, and you can't second guess it.

So when he decided, "I'm putting this in the Hudson River," he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go, "Well, maybe I can get over to that airport." He looked, he made a quick assessment, this is that 80% solution where you go, "These are not, you know, "it's like a multiple choice test," when you go, "Oh my God, I don't really know the answer, "but I know A and D are wrong." Gone.

So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone. So what's my next option? Well, the Hudson River's there, and that's probably looking pretty good, or what is my other one? Can I get a restart on the motors? And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else?

He had to make really, really fast decisions, and then once they go, that 80% solution, you realize, "All right, I'm going into the Hudson, "there's the 80%, get the book out, "let's see if we can get an air start," 'cause if you listen to the tapes, they're trying to get it air started.

The closer he gets to the water, the more he's going, "I'm ditching the airplane." So the original decision to, "This is my best option right now, "this is where I'm going," and you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events, which they tried to do, and then he gets to that last minute, he says, "We're going in the water," they change the plan, they secure the airplane, they do exactly what they're doing, and he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson.

But you gotta remember, every, it's every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research in the airplane in the simulator, where they train to the airplane being broken. You just lost a motor, you just lost another motor. So they go through this extensive training, and all these, and it's, we used to refer to it in the Navy as the pain cave, where you're gonna get in, and you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator, that the airplane is going to break.

You're gonna lose hydraulics, and it's sometimes they're a problem, like, "Oh, I just lost this hydraulic system, "but I'm having an issue on the other motor. "Well, if I shut down this motor, "and I've got a hydraulics, "'cause there's two hydraulic systems, "one on each motor, "well, if I've got an issue "with the left motor hydraulic system, "and my right motor is starting to give me indications, "do I wanna shut the right motor down, "'cause that's gonna kill my hydraulic system that's good, "and now I'm flying on a good motor "with a bad hydraulic system, "and without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly." So they're challenging problems that you have to think through in real time, and of course, the weather's never good.

It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're gonna break out at midnight. I mean, it's just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you, and it's intended to increase the level of stress, because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's going to stem power, where the functional part of your brain shuts down, and you are literally on instinct, like an animal.

Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you're going to have, when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down, that instinct is ingrained so much into you that you know exactly what to do, and that's literally how it happens. - So there's no, how do I put it, fear of death?

Like in Sully's case, do you think he was at all ever thinking about the fact if his decision is wrong, a lot of people are going to die? - You know, I can't speak for him, but I would say there was so much going on at the cockpit in that time, his mindset was probably, I can do this, I'm trained, I'm going to do the procedures, I've practiced this before, I've done these things, and I'm assuming that in his mindset, 'cause I never thought about when things were really bad, if you're having problems with the airplane, that I was going to mort and plant it into the ground.

It was always, maybe it's an ego thing where you think, I can do this. You know what I mean? - So you never, have you experienced fear during flight? I mean, one way, we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about as he's walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically in fear and worried about how things are going to go.

I mean, it's purely to put in towards his fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring, the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could defeat me. So that's his experience of overcoming fear, but did you experience any kind of thing like that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training, and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution?

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

Can I say that? - You can definitely say that. So it's about landing and takeoff that- - That is, if you, even they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know, guys would go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and people were getting shot down a lot.

The highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier. - How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible, like for a civilian, I guess, like me, just seems crazy that a human can do that. - The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day.

I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, "Woo!" You know, this is not that bad. But you gotta remember at night, I think everyone can associate with, you're driving in your car and it's just a, it's an overcast, dark night and you're on a country road with no side lights.

Most people have a tendency to slow down just by nature of, "Oh my God," 'cause what you'll do is you'll outdrive your headlights 'cause it is so dark, you know, and you can get outside of the city and get up into New Hampshire, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good.

It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception. What you think is fixed, the runway, is actually moving. - Up and down and left to right. - Yeah, oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move.

And we have two systems, you know, there's an automatic system that's actually, it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship. And then there's the ILS. Now, civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope. You know, you come down, it's like a plus.

On the carrier, it's not. It's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a non-precision approach. It's not stabilized at all that. And I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the tack hand needle will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving 'cause the base that it's all sitting on is doing this.

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

And you're gonna land on that. So, and it's, I mean, I remember landing, so I was with Chris Sato, and Chris and I, we were off the USS Ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into razor blades. We're flying the old A6 and we come in and it was off of San Diego and it was just an ugly night 'cause San Diego always has a marine layer that is about 1200 feet.

It was lower than that that night. And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around. It was just the craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego. And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop.

And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack. So it's right in front of the island. So if you see an aircraft carrier with the island and the number of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area.

So it's like, you get front row seats to the concert. And this EA6B comes in, you know, ugly pass. He ends up catching a one wire, which is the first one. You never wanna catch the first one, which means you were not really high above the back of the ship when you landed.

And it comes in and the exhaust on an EA6 or an A6 actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see across. I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white 'cause of the water being blown off the deck.

And I'm shaking and I'll never forget, I looked over at Chris and I said, "Oh my God." I go, "Hey dude, man, "10,000 foot runway looks really good right now." And I go, and I'm shaking my hands like this. And I said, "I'm not even, I'm not faking this, dude." I go, "That's literally, I cannot stop shaking." I said, "That scared the everyone out of me." But it scares you afterwards.

During it, you don't have time to think about that. You're doing it, you gotta do. There's kind of the quote from Tom Hanks in what's that, the girl's baseball movie, where he goes, "There's no crying in baseball." Well, that's our joke. There's no crying in naval aviation. I said, "You can fly around and cry all you want at night, "but there's only one pilot in those airplanes "and you gotta land it." So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away, put on your big kid pants and it's time to man up and land the jet.

- Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what's it like to fly an airplane? It looks incredible. - To me-- - As a human, like a descendant of ape, I sit here on land and look up at you guys. It seems incredible that a human being can do that.

- You know, people ask, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like, "How was it?" I said, "The greatest job on the planet." (Lyle laughs) I said, "It's an office with a view "'cause you're sitting in a glass bubble." - Office with a view. - You can do, it's like roller coasters.

You go, "Oh, it does all these cool stuff." So we take people flying every once in a while. And it's like, "Oh yeah, I like roller coasters." They go, "No, take any roller coaster, "the coolest roller coaster you've ever been on "and multiply it by 1,000." I said, "It's an experience to put your body under "the jets rated at seven and a half, "but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it overstresses, "depends on fuel weight." So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight Gs.

To be able to do that to your body, I mean, it takes a toll. Like I can't really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that, but would I trade it? I mean, it was a childhood dream. And how many people get to do that? You know, professional, I wanna be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which is a very small percentage.

Well, I wanna fly jets and to fly, you know, at the time when I was flying, the Super Hornets that we had on our squadron were brand new, like literally right out of the factory. I'd come off our first Super Hornet cruise. We had went to the Boeing factory in St.

Louis where they were building my new jets that I was going to get and I actually signed the inside of one of the wings while they were putting it together. So, I'm meeting the people that are putting the jet together that's gonna get delivered to me in a couple of months that I'm gonna fly.

So, just, I mean- - The whole of it is incredible. - I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away- - Yeah, did you miss it? - I told myself I wouldn't. I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command, your flying really starts to tag, to come down.

You know, even if you go and you're an air wing commander, which is, we call them CAG, carrier group commander, you're not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should you be. I mean, there's young people that are coming up and it's training your relief 'cause that's the next generation.

So, like currently I have friends of mine that we serve together, their kids are flying Super Hornets, right? So, to me, that's really neat 'cause I watched them when they were little. And now, you know, one of them who is good friends, I won't get his last name, but Joey, who lived down the street from us, is a top, was a Top Gun instructor.

And I'm like, "Hey, Joey's a Top Gun." You know, and I'm like, "That's cool." Because, you know, I'd went there and I knew him, he would come down to my house. And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know, because the kids grew up in it.

I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind. So, it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL, 'cause he had talked about doing that 'cause he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and the water polo player.

But he's, you know, both of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his third year, so. - But there's a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation. So, you don't, you told yourself you're not gonna miss it.

You miss it? - There are days I do. When I hear jets, like if I'm around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memories. So, I can look at it and go, it can't go on forever. You know, Tom Brady can't play football. There's gonna come a time where he has to stop.

- He seems to have done it for a long time. - But, you know, typically when you look at it, you go, I had the opportunity. And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI, that, you know, when will the last manned fighter be built? You know, and that's that big question.

You know, we just did F-35. It's over budget, it's seven years late. There's all kinds of issues when we try and do it. And then you look at some of the new stuff that's coming out that the Air Force is working on with smaller, cheaper, attritable platforms that you can go, oh, we can, 'cause if you don't put a man in the box, or a person, because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this too, so I'll just say that as person.

- Yeah, so we say man and he, we mean both men and women, 'cause offline you've told me about a lot of incredible women that flown, so it's-- - I had three female, actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore. She actually lives right around here. She ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore.

One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she's one of the most gifted people I've ever met in my life, she is the vice president of Amazon Air. You can see her on TV, her name's Sarah. Incredible, and then I had Paige, who ended up taking command. She got out of fighters and went into other platforms, and she was a commanding officer.

And then the other one is a, teaches leadership, and she is, all three of them, actually all four of the women that were direct, I'm not forgetting, I don't think I'm forgetting someone, incredibly, incredibly talented, and a great addition to the ready room. So anyone that gets into the, oh, women can't do it, that's all total horse crap.

Hey, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy. - So women can fly as good as the guys? - Yeah, you can't tell if you pass another airplane, you can't tell if there's a man or a woman in it.

It really comes down to stick and throttle, the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle's going to be, where the airplane would be if you're fighting another one. You have to be able to think fast. Anyone who has those characteristics can do it. And then I think most important besides that, there has to be a desire.

- Yeah. - And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, 'cause we used to track, so when I ran, we call it the RAG, it's the Replacement Air Group, it's where, so the Super Hornet Training Squadron, there's two of them, there's one on the East Coast, at 106, and there's one on the West Coast, which is VFA 122.

122 is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up being the Operations Officer and Training Officer, okay? So we tracked the last 100 students, right? So everyone goes, "Ah, it's funny to hear students talk, "'cause oh, he's awesome, he's super." If you took the 100, there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally gifted aviators.

They're well, well, well above average. It's like the person in a math class that sits down in complex math and they just get it. You know? At the bottom, there's the three at the bottom that are gonna struggle and there's a good chance they won't get out. And if they do get out, they're gonna have to work really hard to just maintain kinda average.

Sometimes it's just the way your mind works. Not everyone is good at everything. If you took the 94 of 'em in the middle, they're within one mean deviation of, you know, it's there. They're all, you know, it's a, the bell curve doesn't look real good. It's just a big hump and it comes back down and everyone's right there within one mean deviation.

And then you have the outliers, usually not on the high side 'cause they're gonna get through but the outliers on the low side that don't make it through. So for the most part, the Navy does a really good job, as does the Air Force, of screening. So now what they do, when I went, you just showed up and you started.

Now what you do is you actually go fly a Piper Warriors, low wing, to see, are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go and then they put you into primary. It's kinda like a, it's like a pre-check, you know, like the pre-sat, the pre-SAT to go, hey, how am I gonna do on the SAT?

It's very similar to that but it's more of a hand skill, can you adapt? Because although we live in three dimensions, like this table is not, you know, we, this is, you know, this is all, has depth with all that. Where it's really, relative to aviation, we are two-dimensional, very two-dimensional.

- Can you explain that? So our perception is actually more limited than that of an aviator? - Very much and here's why. So we look at, let's look at a tall building. Let's look at one World Trade Center in New York 'cause that's, everyone knows what it looks like, big, tall building.

It's what, maybe 1800 feet tall? Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like, what, 20-some hundred feet tall, it's not that big. So a Super Hornet, to do what a Split S is, which is I'm flying, I'm just gonna roll the airplane upside down and then I'm gonna do basically a C, the letter C.

I'm gonna go in the top and out the bottom. So, and I'm just gonna, it's basically a vertical displacement of the airplane. So I'm going from high to low. It's very, very tight and it does it in about, roughly about 2,500 feet, give or take a little. So you go, that is a really tight vertical turn.

For example, the A6, in order to do that, was about 9,000 feet. And we look at a building that's 2,000 feet high and think that is tall. - Right. - All right, so in aviation sense, when you're starting to do vertical displacement maneuvers, going from 35,000 feet down to 20,000 feet in a matter of seconds and maneuvering the airplane, because the human brain thinks, we really are, we like to be flat.

- 2D, I see what you mean. - We think 2D. So if I'm fighting, how you really get an advantage when you're fighting another airplane is to work in the vertical. Because most people will do like one move in the vertical and then they wanna start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable.

- Yeah, it's really profound. Do you still think in like stacks of 2D layers or no? Or do you truly start to think in that third dimension, like the rich 3D world of fighting? Do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3D nature? - You do, because you have to project where you're gonna be.

So you have to know the performance of the airplane, knowing that, hey, if I do this maneuver that I am gonna go, it's kinda like when I talk about when we were chasing the Tic Tac. So the Tic Tac's coming up and I'm at about, you know, and I've been doing this for at the time, 16 years.

So I'm looking and I'm going, hey, I'm here, he's there on the other side of the circle. I'm gonna do a vertical displacement. I'm gonna go like this. I'm gonna cut across the circle and I'm not going to him. I'm going out in front of him. I'm going over here.

'Cause I know that by the time I get through this maneuver, that's where he's gonna be. And I'm trying to basically join up on him. But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this? 'Cause what I didn't, if we're here and I do this, I'm gonna end up over here and he's gonna be above me.

And then I have to get that energy back to get up to him. And when you're doing a max performance, it's a trade. So you have, this is really important when you're fighting airplanes and you're really max performing. So when you go to an air show and you see the air demo, he's literally playing with it.

He's got a finite amount of energy, right? He can add some with the motors and stuff, but what you're really doing is it's a trade off and you can trade off kinetic energy, speed for altitude, which gives you potential energy. The other piece is, is I can trade some of that kinetic energy for performance.

Because I know if I do a nice easy turn, the airplane will make it at what doesn't bleed energy. But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 foot split S, that it's gonna cost me energy. So if I enter the split S at 200 knots and I do it right, I'm gonna come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots.

Although I lost 2,500 feet of potential energy, I converted that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance turn. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's your overall energy package. So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just gonna pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds, right?

It's overall energy package and that's that, you gotta be constantly evaluating where you're at. And this is that 80% solution. Can I afford to do this or not? Yes, no, and you have literally a split second to make the decision. - The most incredible dance of human decision-making. It's just incredible.

I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me ask the one last ridiculous subjective question. What's the greatest plane ever made in history? You don't get to like- - From pure speed, I would say SR-71. I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually developed in the '50s by Kelly Johnson, you know, Skunk Works, for what that was able to do.

And then when you get into history of it, you know how they actually built, the CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia. To me, that's an incredible- - Engineering marvel.

- I think that like the X-15, you know- - By the way, this SR, sorry to interrupt, the SR-71 still holds the speed record for any plane as far as I can understand. - Yeah, what's funny when you get into it is it's, remember, fast is relative. And when I say that, I mean, so if you're going 3,000 miles an hour, 100 feet above the ground, you're going 3,000 miles an hour through, you know, that's how fast you're going.

When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's a, you know, your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots. But at 300 knots, you're really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground.

So, you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200, you know, and some odd knots, it's actually slow for the airplane. It's, you know, you're getting, you know, it's kind of like, it's not, you know, there's maneuvering speeds.

You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability of the airfoil. If I'm below that speed, I'm gonna stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G. Okay? So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast?

And when you look at an SR-71 that's flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air is so thin, you know, just like the X-15, you can get to a much higher speed, but the relative speed of the air going over you is actually relatively low. So the stresses on the airframe are not like they would be if you were down low, but because you're going fast to get enough air over your pitot-static system to show that you're going 300 knots, you're screaming.

I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the, well, soon to be Vice Admiral White. So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78. I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78. And it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach too.

And then it- - What's that feel like? Or is it just like- - When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird. 'Cause you realize in your brain, and I did, that there's no out. If something happens, I can't eject. The ejection would kill me.

- Isn't that kind of liberating in a way? (laughing) - Or no, that, okay, maybe not. - You always wanna push the limit. You know, it's like how fast, I could have got it going faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was fuel limited and space limited.

'Cause I, you know, I'm off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I'm going, and I can see Pebble Beach out in the distance, you know, the whole Monterey Peninsula. - You're just going fast. - And you're doing almost 18 miles a minute. I mean, you're screaming. - Yeah.

- I mean, that's, and then you have to turn, well, the airplane didn't have anything on it. It was a slicked off Super Hornet. So it was basically just the airplane, no pylons, no pods, no nothing. And then we had to get it turned around 'cause we got to go to the exit point for the area.

And I'm trying to get it down below to subsonic. And there's a bunch of things that are disabled, like the speed brakes that normally we pop out when you're going that fast, they don't, because the Super Hornet really doesn't have speed brakes. It deforms the flight controls. They don't function.

So you really, you're trying to maneuver. And when you're going that fast, you can't turn because a 7G turn at 1.5 Mach is a pretty big turn. So it's just, it's crazy. - It's incredible that a human can do this. And a human can engineer that, the system which allows another human to control that system.

- It's, to me, it's, I think it's just, it's a great experience. - Was it sad to see the SR-71 go? I think it was during your career. I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes? - We would see it flying when I was flying Hornets, 'cause we, West Coast flies in, it's called R-2508, which is, covers the Navy China Lake area and Edwards.

It's a huge area. It's actually, I think the, we had a guy from Switzerland come out 'cause they had Hornets and he's like, "This is bigger than our whole country." 'Cause it's a pretty big area in California that you fly. But you would see the SR-71s, they had a loop 'cause NASA was flying them out of Palmdale.

And they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington State and Montana and they do a loop. And so you'd see them coming back down. They descend out of, you know, above 60,000. You'd see them, they get contrails, you know, the white lines behind airplanes. And it'd come down and hit the tanker and then they'd go back up.

So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying. But, you know, I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, you know, 'cause they're everywhere now. I mean, you've got commercial companies putting satellites up. How much of that need was really there? 'Cause you gotta remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around.

You know, it was the U-2 and the SR-71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was needed, it was at the, if you think about it, really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time. - Yeah. - I mean, literally, we have yet to pass that.

And then you also asked, well, is there a need to pass that? I go, I don't know, we got stuff in space. So do we need to make an airplane that goes that fast? I think the next one is you get into the hypersonics where you don't have to put a person in and it does all kinds of crazy stuff.

- You know, the work with automation, all that kind of stuff, yeah. - So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO, literally an identified flying object.

And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it, like chase it, essentially? - Chased it. - Chased it. So let me just lay out, I think it's easier than you telling the story, maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories, I understand it, and then maybe you can correct me.

So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers. - That's a cruiser. - It's a cruiser. - It's a cruiser. - So you can't land on a-- - No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back. - Gotcha, and it has weapons on it, okay, gotcha.

- It shoots the missiles up. But it has a nice radar, just like-- - It's got an incredible SPY-1 system, phased array, four panels, so it looks in quadrants. - Perfect, so they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28,000 feet with speed of, what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour, don't know what that's in knots, but on the coast of California.

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

There's videos involved, the video of a flare forward looking infrared-- - Receiver. - Receiver, there's also visible light, so you can switch-- - Yeah, it's TV mode. - It's a TV mode, so that gives you visible light, and then it has IR mode. And Chad Underwood recorded that video.

So, and those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later, one of the three videos. The two other videos, Go Fast and Gimbal, were recorded in 2000 and something, '14 or '15, on the East Coast of the United States. They had different kinds of objects, but they were weird in the same kind of way, in terms of at least the videos and the experiences that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness.

But the difference is, actually, on the East Coast, the 2014 case, very few people have spoken about it. And even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it. So there's a mystery to it, but in some sense, this is a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery.

And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions. There's division of opinions, because it's a mysterious, I mean, it truly is a UFO, in the sense that UAP. What is it? Unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I've gotten wrong, elaborate on some key things, and describe that experience in general?

- So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train, and they canceled the mission. And they sent us down. There's all kinds of rumors out here. There's all kinds of, after this has come out. So originally it was the four of us.

There's two jets, two people in each jet. They're F-18Fs. Okay? There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it, when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it.

And we're like, that's it. That's exactly, that's it. - So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing? - Yeah. So as we're flying out, we get vectored. They come up and tell us, hey, we're gonna cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is a Seagis cruiser.

So we're talking to one controller, who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance we have on board. And I laugh, 'cause we don't carry live ordinance in training typically, because bad stuff happens. Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a good airplane and it's not good.

So we had what's called a CATM-9, which is really just a blue tube with the AIM-9 seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile. So there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off with a sledgehammer. You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the lugs back in that hold it on.

When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and breaks that release and it comes off down the rail. That's how it works. So they said, "Hey, well, we have real world tasking." So as we're going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left-hand side of me.

So she's kind of stepped up like this. And I'll use your mic box to start. So as we're going out, they're calling ranges are called BRA calls, bearing range and altitude. And they're telling us, "Hey, it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles." So they're saying, "Hey, 270, 30, 20,000." That's all they say.

So we got our radars and we had mechanically scanned radars at the time, APG-73. Good piece of gear, APG-79, new one's way better. But anyway. - And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it's useful. But they're telling you a location of a thing that you should look at?

- Yep, they're telling us. They have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things. And what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving. He says, "Sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks." We had been at sea for two weeks.

He goes, "This is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are." - Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, "Check it out." - That's exactly it. So we start driving out there. And as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles.

And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar. 'Cause radars don't see everything. So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution. Right? So, and it's basically, think of a little cube. So they can, and the whole sky is made of all these little cubes and they're looking.

So if you're inside a cube with something and you're both inside the same little cube, then the radar can only see one thing. Does that make sense? - Yep. - So they call merge plot. Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he's right around, something's around you, get your head out.

So we're not looking at radar scopes anymore. And the Wizzos, the Wizzos can look, but everyone, it's heads out. When they say merge plot, you're done looking at your displays inside, you're doing this and you're trying to find it. So as we look out to the right and you look high and low, 'cause he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up.

Now keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away. So it can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, hey, it's the thing is 40 feet off the water, the panel. Can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time.

So you go, is it, you know, where is it at? So as we're looking around, we see, you know, this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no white caps. It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day. If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind.

And you just want to kind of go out there and you're not going to get beat up and have white water come out. It was the perfect day to own a sailboat. - How many miles out do you see like seven, like you see just, it's a clear day.

- That's 50, it's unrestricted visibility. You can see literally all the way to the horizon. It's just clear, it's nothing. And we're basically off the coast. If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we're kind of in between that. And we're probably about, by the time this all hits, we're probably, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast.

- Perfect visibility. - From 20,000 feet, you'd be amazed. You can do the calculation. You can see stuff, you know, you'll see land 50 miles away. You can see, you know, and when you're looking at a continent it's really easy to see you're not looking at an island. I mean, you're looking at Mexico.

- And you can see on the white caps in the water. If there is any. - Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah, for us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or, so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when we land on it.

It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move or it's got a big weight 'cause it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call it the burble, but when the air flows across the flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know?

And then it kicks back up. So when you're coming aboard to land, it's gonna make you go up a little bit and then you're gonna fall and you gotta anticipate that to stay on glide slope. So we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind.

So we look, there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no white caps, and we look down and we see white water. So if you put a piece of land, a seamount, below the surface, like, you know, even 20 feet below the surface, it's big enough, as the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length.

When they come in, that's what happens on the shore. When a wave comes in, it hits and then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can't go anymore. And then it breaks off the top and you get- - And it crashes, yeah. And that's where you get the white.

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

You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense? - Yep. - So that's what it was. We don't see an object 'cause there's all kinds of, "Oh, they saw another craft below the wave." We didn't see anything below the water. We just saw white water.

But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was across. I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water so the wave's breaking over the top and you're gonna get white water where the plane is at, you'd see this kind of shape.

So it looks like a cross. So as we're looking down off the right side, the back seat or any other airplane, Jim, says, this is that talking in partials again, he says, "Hey, Skipper, do you?" And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, "What the hell is that?" In a nice way.

- Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? - So we see the white water, and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we see this white water. - I would have loved to see the look on your face when you see that.

Like, "What?" - And then we see this little white tic-tac 'cause we're about 20,000 feet above it. And it's doing, it's going basically north, south, and then east, west, north, south. It's abrupt. It's very abrupt. It's not like a helicopter. If a helicopter's going sideways, and it goes once, it's going sideways, left, and it goes right, what it'll do is it'll go, it's got a speed, it slows down 'cause there's inertia, and it stops, and then it goes back the other way.

This thing's not. It's like left, right, left, right, with no- - So moving in ways that doesn't feel intuitive to you of the things you've seen in the past. - So as a pilot, the first thing you think is, it's a helicopter, right? So you go, "Oh." What is, 'cause when we see it's moving, we're like, "Oh, helicopter." So the first thing you look for to see if it's a helicopter when they're doing that, because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you'll get rotor wash.

You see it in the movies when the helicopter's by the water, it kicks, water comes up the sides 'cause the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that. It pushes the air down, and then it has to come up the sides. So you see it, and you go, "Well, there's no rotor wash.

"What is that thing?" So by this time we're driving around, so as we're, if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position, and we're just watching this thing. And it's just, it's still pointing north, south, and it's going left, right, and it's kind of moving around the object.

And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east, west, and then the north, south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out. It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's crossing over it, and it's going up.

It's just kind of, so now we're like, "Oh, what the hell is that?" So then I go, "Hey, I'm gonna go check it out." And the other pilot says, "I'm gonna stay up here." And I said, "Yeah, stay up high." 'Cause now we get a different perspective. So she's up here, and I'm down here.

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

Which is, it's perfect as the story goes on, 'cause it gives us two perspectives, you know, of a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. And they don't, you know, 'cause if it just like, "Oh, I lost it." And they go, "No, it's over to the right.

"We can still see it." We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm descending, and it's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering, 'cause I have everything available to me at that speed.

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

So as we drive around, it's coming up and I'm just coming down, I'm just watching it. Now you gotta remember, this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes. This is not like we saw it and it was gone. Or, "Ooh, I saw lights in the sky and they were gone." We watch this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers to watch this thing fly around.

So we're like, "Okay." So I get over to the eight o'clock position, and I'm a little, I'm a couple thousand feet above it, and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15K, I think it is, I think that's my story, is about 15. That's just estimating. So you can see it's just a really easy descent because-- - So what's 15K?

- 15,000 feet. - I thought it was 8,000. - No, the other airplane ends up about, so you can go back to that. - Okay, gotcha. - So they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around above us. - Okay, and then you're slowly-- - And I'm descending, they're staying up there.

So I'm kind of doing this as a driver, okay? So I'm looking at this thing and it's about the two o'clock position, we're about the eight o'clock position, and I'm like, "Oh, I've got enough altitudes. "I'm gonna cut across the circle." I tell the guy in my back seat, "Dude, I'm gonna do this." He's like, "Go for it, skip," 'cause I was a skipper.

So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming out, I'm gonna meet it. And I'm driving and I get to probably, I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, "Well, a half mile's pretty far." Half mile in aviation, it's nothing.

I mean, you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane, you can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile. You can see pretty good detail. So I'm like right there and it's coming across my nose. So now I'm basically pointing back towards east. So I'm cutting across 'cause I'm going to the three o'clock position, it's at two o'clock, and I'm gonna meet it at three o'clock.

So as I do this, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around, estimate in about 12,000 feet. So they're at 20, so they've got about 8,000 foot of altitude above us when this happens. And it just, as it crosses our nose, it just accelerates and literally in less than, probably less than a half second, it just goes, and it's gone.

And so we're like, and the first thing is, "Dude, did you guys see it?" The other airplane's like, "It's gone. "We have no idea where it's at." So we kind of spin around real quick. I go, "Well, let's see what's down here." And I turn around, we're looking for the whitewater.

And we can't, the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go, and I remember telling the guy in my back seat, I go, "Dude, I don't know about you, "but I'm pretty weirded out 'cause this is, "I mean, I had at the time, like 30 some hundred hours "of flying, I'd been doing it for 18 years." - It's nothing like anything you've seen.

- No, no. So as we turn, we go, "Oh, well, let's just go back." 'Cause now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train 'cause we're getting ready to deploy to overseas. So we got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CO, 'cause I got to get training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that.

So, "Hey, let's go back." And the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the CO of the Marine Squadron. And so Cheeks is at the, he's listening to all this happen. 'Cause he's just like, I don't know. 'Cause when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F-18Cs, don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets.

So he had launched first and they were going to do him. And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, "Hey, go to your cap point down South. And we're going to send, we'll pass this off to the Super Hornets." - What's the cap point, by the way?

- That's where we hold. So it's called a combat air patrol point. So we're just going to hold at one end. He's going to hold at the other end. It's kind of like, "Hey, you guys are going to get each." It's thinking about, if it's a football field, we're going to sit on one goal line.

He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say, "Go," we're going to run at each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our reset points. - So you're talking to him. He's listening to all the stuff.

- He's just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up 'cause they know that, we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on. 'Cause he's like, 'cause they canceled training. So what else is he going to do? He's just going to hang out there and do circles while he's waiting for him and his wingman.

So they're listening to all this go on. - And then at this point you move on. - Yeah, we come back up to train. We go back as we're flying back, the controller, 'cause we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OSs, they're operation specialists. They're the ones that run the radars.

And we're talking to him and he's like, "Hey sir, you're not going to believe this, but that thing is at your cap." It showed back up, it just popped up. This is like 60 miles away. It just reappears. We're like, "Oh, okay." So we got the radars out, we're looking for it.

We get out there, we never see it. We never see it again. We do what we need to do. We come back to the ship. Of course, now we're like, "Oh, this is going to be." I told him, I go, "Dude, you know, we're going to catch shit for this.

When we get back to the ship, word's going to get out and we're just going to catch maximum shit." And we did. And it's kind of that joking. So the ship plays movies. We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat, 'cause there's a day check and a night check.

So the same movies in the morning and night plays. So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy 'cause I'll watch stuff on TV that way too. I'll be like, "Oh, here, I've seen this." And then I'll jump into a movie in the middle and then I'll pick it up later and I'll see the beginning and I'll put it all together because that's how we have to do it 'cause we're so busy.

Well, the movies became, it was Men in Black, Aliens, Independence Day. - Definitely going to catch some shit. - Oh, we did. (laughs) - But let me just ask some dumb questions. So just take it, 'cause it's, whatever the heck you saw, whatever the heck happened, it's one of the most fascinating things, events in recent history.

So whatever it was, it's interesting to talk about at different kinds of angles. There's no good answers, but it's interesting to ask some dumb questions here. So first of all, you mentioned, so you saw at some point X, Y, and then somebody in the Princeton said, "You're not gonna believe this, sir.

"It's at your cap point." Now, that's a different place. How the heck did it know what your cap point is? - That's a good question. And that's the one, no one, we don't tell it, we don't broadcast it, we have a waypoint in the system. But I don't know, maybe it knew where we were going, 'cause we use the same one day after day after day.

- Right, it's just using. - But it obviously knew where we were going. - But you never saw it there. - Never saw it there. Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, "Hey, look, "we just chased this thing." They're like, "What'd I go?" "Chased it." And they're like, "What'd I go?" "Dude, I told him, I said, 'Dude, get video.'" And he goes, and that's how he is.

He's like, "I'm gonna go." And he was, he was determined that he was gonna find this thing. So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn't out, that they don't see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward-looking infrared receiver.

- I'll probably overlay the video for people who've seen it. - When he goes out, it's, you know, what he's looking at on his displays is, he has basically two radar displays up. He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left one.

So this is called the az-L display, and this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square. It's really taking this, it's taking a cone, 'cause a radar really looks left and right from a point, and it squares it out.

So the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us, 'cause they do this, they square it off. So he goes out, and when he first sees it, he gets a radar return on it, because when he's not trying to lock it, so the radar's just throwing energy out and getting it, you know, it's a Doppler radar.

So when it's in search mode, that's all it's doing. It's going, "Oh, I can see you, I can see you." And it's looking for return. So he gets a return, so he wants to see what it is, because all you get is a little green square, unless it builds a track file on it.

But a little green square is just sitting there. It's not moving, 'cause it's sitting in one spot in space. He locks it up. When he goes to lock it up, now he's putting a bunch of energy on it. He's telling the radar, "Stare down that line of sight, and whatever's there, I want you to grab it and build a track file on it, which will tell us how high it is, how fast it is, and the direction that it's going, okay?" The radar's smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed.

So that's all it is, is you send a signal out, something, it manipulates the signal, either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back. And the radar was smart enough to go, "That is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me, I'm being jammed." And it shows you, and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar, and it does some stuff.

So you can, well, it does, it goes full into, it's being jammed at about every mode you can possibly see, 'cause everything comes up, and this aspect gets along, it's all kinds of, I don't wanna get into details, but you can tell it's being jammed. So, and it's what does- - As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right?

- Act of jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it's technically an act of war. - Feels like you should be freaking out at this point. I mean- - So, well, he does it, and then in the back seat, so they don't have a stick and throttle, they have their side stick controllers, so they can control all the sensors, and they can just toggle around and do stuff.

So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick, and it will go from that azimuth elevation on the radar to the targeting pod. Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes, "Oh, what's over there?" And it'll stare, 'cause it goes down the line of sight, 'cause all the systems are hooked together.

You can decouple them, but they're gonna automatically couple up. So when he castles over, it's a switch, it looks like a castle switch, what's a castle switch? When he moves that thing to the left, and he swaps the displays out, and he says, "Instead of looking at the radar, "I wanna look at the targeting pod," he sees it on the targeting pod, 'cause the targeting pod's already looking there.

And now he's on a passive track, 'cause he's not literally sending any energy out, he's just receiving IR energy from the TIC-TAC, and then the system itself will track the pixels and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in. So it says, "Oh," and that's where those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up left and right.

- He's doing some vision-based tracking. - That's exactly what it is. So, and then- - And that's the video. - He goes through- - Changes zooms, changes the mode. - He goes through all the modes, so there's a narrow, medium, and wide. So wide is far away, medium, and then narrow, and then there's the TV mode, and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode.

The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode. So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode, it's got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode. So he goes through all those things, and that's when you see it going from a black background to a white background.

- He's trying to figure out what the heck is this. - Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going, "What is that thing?" Granted, so the video has been out, it actually was on YouTube for years before the government released it.

- It was leaked in 2000, what, seven? - About, no, I got a, the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email, and I had retired. So this is about, nope, 'cause I was working, I was working down in San Diego. So this is about 2008, early 2009.

He sends me a link to strangeland.com, which is not suitable for work. Oh yeah, it's top notch. And he says, "Hey," I can remember the email, "Hey, Skip, does this look familiar?" And I look at it, I'm like, "How the hell did that get on strangeland.com?" So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube link to someone.

You don't send strangeland.com to someone 'cause you don't know what you're gonna get. It's like Googling kittens. So-- - So it ends up there somehow. - So it gets on YouTube, which was cool because I would go out with my friends and we'd be drinking and they'd go, "Dude, what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying?" You know, it's kinda like you were asking what it's like.

And I go, "Oh dude, I chased a UFO." And they're like, "Get out." And I'm like, "No, serious." So this is literally how it happened. So I was sitting with my friend Matt. So Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first night trap, right?

And we were friends to this day, right? Because when you do stuff like people like that, you know, I had to have faith in him, he had to have faith in me. You know, they become like your brother. And these are guys that literally, you know, I don't talk to them on a regular basis.

Like Chris, who works at Apple, if Chris called me up tomorrow and said, "Dude, I need help, I need this." I'd be like, "All right, let's figure this out and let's do it." 'Cause it's, they're like family. You do it, and most Navy guys, we don't, we're not, we don't send letters to each other weekly.

You know, I have friends that could, I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door. You know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes to catch up. And then it's like old times. And it's amazing how fast this happens.

So I'm out to dinner with Matt, and I'm telling him this story, and he's like, "Get out of here." So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco. Paco has a fightersweep.com, it's a blog site. So Paco's obsessed, like he is way into UFOs. So Paco calls me up, he says, "Dude, I was talking to Matty." That's what we call him.

He goes, "I was talking to Matty." He goes, "Dude, you got to tell me this story." So I'm like, all right. So I spend a chunk of time. And so he calls me one day and I'm like, "I gotta get a voicemail. Hey, give me a call." So I call him up and he answers the phone, but I can hear people in the background.

And I go, "Hey dude, what's going on?" And he goes, "Hey, hang on, I gotta put you on speakerphone." I go, "What are you putting me on speakerphone?" He goes, "You got to tell the story. I'm having a dinner party." You got to tell the story. So he's literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table as I tell a Tic Tac story.

So he calls me up again, he says, "Hey, I got this blog." And he just writes about fighter stuff. Like he wrote about, we call him the shit hot break. That's a guy that when you're landing on a carrier, comes and turns and gets ready to land really fast, like breaks it off right at the back of the ship.

And one of the guys, when we were junior officers on the USS Ranger, one of the partners in our squadron was a guy, Nasty. And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break. So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty.

And there's another guy, Mav, was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing. It's just a good article on how this was and how it kind of forms you in naval aviation, it's kind of become part of the club. So he's like, "I got to write about this thing." I'm like, "What do you guys, I got to write about it." I go, "All right." I go, 'cause at first I would say no.

I'm like, "Dude, I don't want this out there." - You haven't really before then talked about it much. - No, my wife didn't even really know the whole story. - What, just as a comment, is it just because you caught some-- - No, it was just, I'll tell you what, three days, we had the incident.

For about two days, they played the goofy movies. There's a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put. It was like, first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat. And it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting the Nimitz battle group type stuff.

It was just funny shit like that. So, no, it's just, to me it wasn't that big of a deal. It was like, okay, that's weird. We're never gonna know what it was. I want to get out there, 'cause this is important, 'cause there's all kinds of rumors. There's a group of folks there.

No one ever came out in suits to talk to us. - Nobody looking like me came out on a-- - No, no one came out on a helicopter. No one came out on an airplane. You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified. What's funny is all the COs, and several of them are still in the Navy.

There's one that is a, I think he just finished up. He was a captain of an aircraft carrier. You know, so he'll end up making Admiral and all that stuff. Those guys are all my friends. I talk to them daily. - Just to clarify, so just for people who don't know, there's a story that both on the Nimitz and the Princeton folks in a helicopter landed.

They showed up. They took the data, quote-unquote, so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident, and they took it and presumably deleted it. There's a kind of story to that. And then from what I've seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about offline, that jokes spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships, that it might've been a joke that started and-- - Well, they did.

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

I have to, all that stuff that we used, I'm accountable for. And the tapes are actually classified secret because of the data that's on them, okay? So we had the tapes. So the security intelligence guys, the intel officers, came down from what's called CIVIC, it's C-V-I-C, which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, "Hey, we need the tapes.

"These guys are gonna come, "they're gonna come and get 'em." So we're like, "Oh," I'm like, "Oh, whatever," you know? So we hand 'em the tapes. And then someone, 'cause I have, you know, you know people, shortly after they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, "You know, they're messing with you.

"They're playing a joke." So I said, "Oh, well, let's see how well that goes "'cause, you know, I'm a CO and they're not." And so I went down to CIVIC and it was a, I think he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant JG, so he's way junior to me.

And I said, "Hey, I want my tapes back." And he looks at me and I go, "I know you guys are pulling my leg. "I know there's no one came out." And I go, "And you have about 30 seconds "to get me my tapes before I start "tearing this place apart." That's literally what I told him.

And I said, "And if your boss has an issue, "he can come and see me "'cause it's not gonna go well." I said, "'Cause this is bullshit "and I need those tapes." Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet, opened it up, they weren't in a safe.

He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled them out and handed them to me. I said, and I basically said a few things to him, like, "Don't ever fuck with me again." And I left, I had the tapes. So this, no one came out. There's no flying going on when all this is happening.

And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes. So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor too that, "Oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long "and there's some, one of these petty officers "is saying I saw it." That's total crap.

The original video is about a minute 30 seconds long. What you see on the release video is the entire video. - So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me. But you have mentioned that, like on "Roguen" I think, that you watched it on a bigger screen.

It felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the FLIR video that would give us more pixels and more information, presumably because of the high number of-- - I would doubt it 'cause I don't know where, the stuff that the government released, I don't know where they got.

Okay, so the stuff that was on "Strangeland" and YouTube, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like a rack. There's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive. And they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube.

No, it's just like, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets, it degrades. So this, you don't know how many times this has been copied. So we were looking, the videos I've seen are right off the original, they're Hi8 tapes, that's basically pulled off the back of the display.

So it's not filmed with cameras, it's literally a digital feed that's pulled off the back and put onto a Hi8 tape. That's how the recorders work. Now it's actually digital to digital, it's not even on tapes anymore. It's a digital recording system. But we were still in that process of slowing up 'cause original we had little cameras here that shine.

So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays. So this is, it's a pretty good feed. When you put it on, so we're, instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on a, like a 19 inch, 'cause it was still normal TVs back there.

We had just put flat screens in the red room that I had bought so we could watch movies. So, 'cause we- - A nice, huge 19 inch screen. - It's maybe 20, it was nice. - Wow, that's huge. - It was gigantic. - I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches.

- This is 2005. So- - So you look at it as big thing and- - But you could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those. It was very clear. - But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, was it, did you get much more information from the higher, from the clear- - The little things out of the bottom.

We didn't see those visuals. - So the bottom information, got it. - When you see it, 'cause he's coming almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there's little antennas hanging out of the bottom, kind of like that.

There was two little things out of the bottom. There was nothing on the top, there was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature. You know, it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display, which that really raises a classification level, especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed.

You know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2000, and let me think, about 2009, I had gotten a call on my cell phone from a guy who, government employee, and said, "Hey," he told me who he was, he's still in the government, I'm friends with him, and he said, "Hey, we're gonna investigate your Tic Tac thing." This is literally five years later.

Yeah, five years later. And I said, "Okay, whatever." And he did a pretty good job. I call it the unofficial official report because it was really never official. It wasn't. But I'll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests.

So he does the report, he sent me the report, and all he said is, "Hey, I'm gonna send you this report. "Please don't distribute this report." I said, "Okay." The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp, and they were good enough to redact it but there's a few versions of it unredacted, and I'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this.

So Jim has talked, but he's off the grid. He doesn't talk to anyone now. The pilot of his airplane, she has come out unidentified, but they don't release her name, although people are starting to do it. And she's had weird shit happen around her house. She's got kids, so I'm very protective of her.

And I've told people like Jeremy and George, "If I know that a name's ever came from you, "I will never talk to you again about this." And Jeremy's been really good about it, and so has George. But George knew who the names were 'cause he got the report from Senator Reid.

And then the other crew. So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that individual, they really don't have the recollection. They were just out flying that day, and it wasn't a big deal. So you need to protect, 'cause not everyone wants people knocking.

I don't want people knocking on my door. And there's rumors, "Oh, you talk to everyone." I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much. I mean, if I turned down like, I turned down Russian TV.

I can give you her name when we're done here. But she called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter, she called my son, and she called my son-in-law. Because they're persistent. So I'm pretty, I'm very particular. I mean, the reason I'm talking to you is 'cause I knew we would have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic-tac and the incident, but we could actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into, to get more people involved to go.

'Cause I think there's, you know, and when you talk to Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon, you know, the group at TTSA, you know, that whole thing was-- - What's TTSA? - That's To The Stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLonge group that got started. So, and you go, well, you know, 'cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him, he's very smart.

And I ask him, how'd you get into this? And he goes, oh, when I was traveling around with Blink-182, he goes, you read a lot of books when you're laying in a van as you're driving to your next gig before you make it big. And he goes, and he read, he was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs.

I'm trying to think the title. It's one of the big ones that's out there, real popular. And so he started just, he started asking more and through his fame with Blink-182 in the band, he got more and more connected. You know, if you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, and he's part of the Mellon dynasty, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.

He knows, he definitely knows how the government works 'cause he worked there. And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, a month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me.

I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, hey, 'cause they were like, you gotta do it. 'Cause I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. 'Cause those guys are like, you gotta do this for us.

- So from my perspective, just to give you some context. So to me, there seems to be some stigma. So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today. And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, fellow faculty at MIT and major universities.

And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from the scientific community. A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting. But you don't even know, one, you're afraid to talk about it and two, you don't know what the next steps are.

Like how can we seriously try to think about what you saw? How to think about how we further look for things like it? How we develop systems and plans for how in the future we can immediately collect a lot more data and try to react properly, you know, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective.

And I just would love to remove stigma from this subject. - Well, I think that's the first step. We have done in this country an absolutely terrible job with these things. So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell. So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer.

That's literally what came up. And then magically the next day, it's a weather balloon and they're showing your pieces of Mylar. And you go, well, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday. Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there's that whole series about Project Blue Book.

But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things. It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove, to the point where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look. So there's always been this, I don't know if you'd call it an aura around it or a mystique about UFOs that if you're talking about them, they're nuts.

With ours, because I'm not a UFO guy, I'm not a junkie. If you asked me, do I believe that there's life outside of earth, I would say you probably have a better chance of winning the Mega Ball lottery than we're the only planet that has life on it in the universe.

It's just, the odds are against it. If you do, just do the math. You have to accept, 'cause if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it, and then I win and you lose. - And then more and more science is showing that there's habitable planets out there.

That yeah, everything we've learned so far, and we know very little, but everything we've learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, earth-like planets, it seems that it's very likely that there's life out there. Intelligent life is another topic, but life-- - Well, we as humans, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says, ha ha, we're it, and you go, not so much.

- Maybe we're not so intelligent. - Because we are, it's just how we learn. So our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel. What if you're in another planet where you figured out the ability to create a gravity field, or you used, 'cause electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

Catapults on ships were steam-powered, and the new Gerald Ford is electromagnetic. Roller coasters used to use a chain to get you to the top of the hill. Now they shoot you with electromagnetics and you're going. So there's a whole new realm of propulsion that sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support theory.

We are just now proving recently theories that Einstein had where people actually joked about 'em, and now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light. We have proven that. So you look at that when you go, well, does that mean that 70 years ago Einstein was wrong, or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong, or do you go, we just didn't have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find something that we could to actually measure, and I've seen this stuff-- - And that's just 100 years, and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries.

- Look what we've done in the last 20 years. - Yeah, it's crazy. Let me direct, 'cause it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science perspective. I mean, you've spoke, you've been brave in telling your story, not some dramatic thing, but just telling the things you've seen.

Did it encounter, did it impact your career? Is that why more people haven't come out? Like you've mentioned Roswell, like how, what advice do you give to people, to the community, to me as a scientist, for ways to go forward about this topic, and still have a, you know, not being put in a bin in society, that he's a loon, or she's a loon, or that person-- - Mine is to get away from the little green men.

Divorce the two little green men, and I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this, and the group that they're working with, which is incredible. I mean, they've got Steve Justice, who used to run Skunk Works, where they built projects. - Now, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director.

- He ran the AATIP program at the Pentagon. - And AATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs. So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote the unofficial official report was actually an original member of AATIP, and the original stuff that AATIP did was FOIA exempt.

And people go, "How do you know that?" I go, "'Cause I stood there with the memo in my hand "that said these are, it literally, "I watched the DOD memo that said it, and it was signed." So he was one. So that's why I call it the unofficial official report.

It was never releasable, 'cause people go, "Oh, I put in a FOIA request, and I didn't get that." I go, "Well, just 'cause you put in a FOIA request "didn't get it." I go, "Because how much time do you think "that guy's gonna spend to get you the information "that you requested if he can't find it?" I actually got called by the Navy.

I had a commander in the Navy call me about, right before the article came out in the New York Times. This was starting to come back, and she had called me 'cause there was a FOIA request for stuff about the Nimitz incident. And I said, "Do you know of anything?" She called me, she goes, "Do you know of anything else "besides the situation reports that come off the ship?" And you gotta remember, when the situation report comes off the ship, that's like third hand.

So we tell someone, they tell someone, that person has to write it up. So there's all kinds of inaccuracies in it. But then there's the unofficial official report that's actually pretty well written. There's some errors in it, but it was, I didn't help write it, I just did it.

And he did a really good job of researching it and figuring out who's who in the zoo and the players. So she called me and said, "Is there anything out there?" And I said, "Officially out there?" She said, "Yes." I said, "I don't know of anything." I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one, but I'm not, if you don't know about it, I'm not gonna tell you, 'cause that's not my job, and nor did I care.

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

- Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust, I'll just tell you that right now. We typically don't like talking to the press, because if I talk to you, especially when I do, even the TV shows, 'cause I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, they come to my house and they film me for two hours.

And then what you see on the screen is five minutes. - Well, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from autonomous vehicles, is the clipping happens, yes, but also the incompetence. Let me just call out journalism. They're not thinking, I mean, so here's the thing.

I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes from like physics and math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the world. I read a lot. That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to a person who is not gonna push the story forward in an interesting way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed in history.

Like it might've been nothing, who knows? What you witnessed might've been, from a sort of debunking perspective, might've been some kind of trick of mind. You and others have hallucinated something. It could be some simple explanation, but possibly it was something not of this world. And to not do justice to this story from a scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence.

And so, yeah, that's true for journalists, that's true for other scientists. - It's just, it's human nature. If we see something that we can't explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it's just me, and you let it go away and you don't think about it, and maybe it'll just, you ignore it.

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

And he's literally proving them, but he didn't have, he proved them in theory, but he didn't have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory. - There's a great book that I recommend people read called "Proving Einstein Right" by Jim Gates that talks about the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with his theories.

It's fascinating. But yes, at the time, it's kind of crazy. What are you saying? - Yeah, if you look at it back at the time, don't we look at it now and go, well, the guy was a walking genius, and he was. But if you go back in time when he was doing it, it was like, what are you talking about?

- But one of the challenges is your eyewitness, one of the challenges is your, essentially an eyewitness account. Like we don't have good data. We have very limited data of the incident that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there's, just to paint more and more of the picture.

One, you kind of mentioned, so tic-tac shape. Let's break apart two situations. One is the video. Let's look at the actual eye account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes. What can you say about the shape of the thing? Is there interesting aspects outside of the tic-tac?

Like, is there any appendages? Is there some texture to it that-- - No, smooth, white, tic-tac. You know, you don't see, there's no wings, no visible propulsion, no windows, no probes that we could see. We don't notice, like I said, we don't see the little things on the bottom of it until we see the video in the TV mode when it's zoomed in, right before.

It's shortly, you kind of see them zoom in. You don't see it typically on the YouTube stuff that's out there. But remember, we're looking at the original tape, so there's basically no degradation. - But when you saw with your eyes, there's no kind of appendages. - No, none. - What about, like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions, so I appreciate you spending your time here.

Let me ask some of them. Did you, I mean, you chased it, so you flew close to it, relatively speaking. Was there, did you feel any wake? Like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically? - No. - Nothing. - Nothing. - So another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing you've developed, a feel for objects in the air.

Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival? Or did it, let me ask a few questions around it. So did it feel like the thing was surprised? Did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability? And did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing an air fight against sort of like a, I don't know, a foreign jet?

- So one, I think it knew we were there when we showed up. It's just, it's me. It's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up, and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the field, it'll actually go, no threat, and it'll start eating.

You know, they don't put their tail up. As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it's there, and I'm gonna react, or I'm gonna move. So as we were up high, and it's down doing whatever it was doing, you know, which I don't know, someone asked, what do you think?

I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something. I joked on "Good Morning America." Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like "Star Trek," you know? And I actually used that clip. It was kind of funny, but. - Yeah, we're a little human-centric. We think like it would, it'd show up to talk to us, but maybe it's talking to the dolphins.

- Maybe it was, yeah, it was to whatever, you know, 'cause it was hanging around that whitewater, and I don't know, was there something there? Was there seamount? We just didn't find it again? I don't know. But once we started to descend, and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis, and it started mirroring us coming up, then it was obviously where we were there, and it was really coming up, just, you know, you figure I'm at 20, and it's coming up, and it ends up getting up to 12, where I cut across a circle.

I think it was very aware that we were there, because it interacted. We call it a two-circle fight when you're fighting another airplane. But, you know, was it, were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me, it was more curious. You know, the curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have, and I always felt, to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, especially as long, as much time as I'd spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a safe zone.

I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can't, if you're in the airplane and you feel scared, it's not the job for you. You have to feel that, because the airplane is part of you now. You know, I am inside. I have the stick, I have the throttles, I've got my wizard in the back seat, he's running all the displays.

We are a team, we are in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new. You feel pretty good. And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did, like it was like no big deal. You know, for an airplane, if you just put me from a stance, so let's just say slow flight, just get me at a hundred knots above the water, and for me to, you can't just start a climb.

I'd have to lower the nose, I'd have to accelerate, and then I'd have to start coming up, and this thing just did it like it was like no big deal. - Yeah, you mentioned that, like kind of your reaction to it was, like it's something that you would love to fly almost.

So this object, just the curiosity you experience is like, like what it almost like, what the heck is that piece of technology and I want to fly it? Like what made you feel like it's something that you could fly? Do you think it's something that a human could fly?

Like in terms of interpreting what you saw as a piece of technology, 'cause another perspective on it is it was not, that the thing under the water was the key thing. And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like- - I don't think it was a projection.

I think it was a real object. - It was a physical hard object that could be flied. - Oh yeah. Yeah, I think all four of us will tell you the same thing. It wasn't, this was not, 'cause you go, okay, let's just go on, it's a light projection.

Well, if we were both sitting next to each other, we were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that and I go, "Oh, okay, there's a, in theory you could have that." But with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, and she's probably not directly above me, she's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen.

You're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue, if you've ever been at sea, and I don't mean like coastal, I mean like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest, it's incredible. You got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean.

You got pretty high contrast. And for this thing just to disappear, it's wasn't, I'm telling you, I would, I mean, I know we all have the same recollection of what happened. There's some details because it's so long ago, but for the most part, we know what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like, "What the hell was that?" - What if, I mean, do you think about the thing under the water that's not often talked about if there's something under the water?

Couldn't have been something gigantic? - It could be. - Like what, like do you ever think of-- - It's the abyss. Big ship comes up. - I mean, that's why, as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean, my mom's an Olympic swimmer, so like, I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim 'cause the abyss, anything could be under there.

Like there's not enough focus on that, perhaps because there's no visibility, but is there anything interesting to say about the possibility that was anything underneath there? - Could be, I mean, think about it. If you're gonna hide on this planet, what's the least explored spot on the planet? Two thirds of it's the ocean.

There's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the 777, I think it was a 777 that crashed, they turned, they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared and they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it, but you would think there's large objects that, when that thing hit the water, depending on how it broke up, there's big pieces that would be, you'd find something, they haven't found anything except what floated.

So to hide something underwater, I think would be easy. - So, okay, let's go a little bit in speculation land, but it's the best we can do, which is the basic question of what do you think was it? So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology?

Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomena? You know, like a ball lightning, for example, there's a lot of fascinating things we probably humans don't really understand. Is it, like I said, some perception, cognition that led you, some kind of hallucination that made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?

Let me put those things on the table. Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was? - Oh, it's definitely, I don't think it's an ice cloud 'cause ice clouds don't fly around and react to you.

Do I think it was a light? I'd say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do, I'd say no. - What do you mean by light? - Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there's, like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it's really not, you know, it's plasma.

I don't think so. So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved. Maybe not, I mean, I'm not a theoretical physicist in some, you know, I'm not an MIT. I would say no, I mean, it looked, from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it when this happened, no, I think it was a hard object.

It was aware that we were there. It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something, exactly what I would do, you know, it mirrored me. It wasn't aggressive, you know, there was taco, it flopped behind us and never, it was never offensive on us, it never did that.

It just mirrored us. So as we're coming down, it's just like, you know, you're kind of, you know, you said you do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the, when they get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, 'cause my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler.

So I de facto became a wrestler 'cause he beat me up every night. We joke, I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week. But, you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you're kind of feeling each other as you're walking. Boxers do the same thing.

It was doing that same thing. It's like, what's going on as it comes around, as it comes around. And then it was like, hey, we're gonna get here. And when I got too close to it, you know, it decided I'm out of here. And then it did something that we've never seen.

The other question is, what if I didn't cut across the circle? What if I just kept going around a circle? - We just keep going like that? - I could have just watched it. I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is, we have a camera in our helmet, in the joint helmet.

There's a little camera, but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch 'cause you've ever put a GoPro on someone's head where they're looking around like this all the time, it'll nauseate you. So we never turn that on. And all, you know, it's the one thing I didn't do is reach down and hit the switch, you know?

And then we didn't go back and, 'cause our tapes didn't have anything 'cause we didn't get it on radar because I tried to lock it up 'cause I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't, it wouldn't lock. The radar wouldn't lock. And so- - So then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try to get some hints at it.

Do you think it's human, like advanced human-created technology that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of? Or is it not something not of this world? - So if you'd asked me in 2004, I'd have said, "I don't know." If you ask me now, so we're coming up on 16 years ago, - Yeah.

- for a technology like that, and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it, 'cause I don't think it did. I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do, then it would start coming out.

But to hide something like that for 16 years, and I understand, and I don't speak for the United States government, and I never will speak for the United States government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and why we classify stuff. Is it detrimental to national defense?

But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that could literally change the way mankind travels, how we get things into space, our ability to do things. You talk about, are we gonna go to Mars? Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, 'cause remember, these things were coming down when the cruiser tracked them from above 80,000 feet, which is space, and they would come down and they would come straight down, they'd hang out at like 20,000 feet, and then three or four hours later, they'd go back up.

We don't have anything that can come down, hang out, and once, you know, and I'm talking hold out in a spot. Well, we all know there's winds. They're not drifting like a balloon. They're just sitting there. And then they would go back up. And they tracked up to the, when I talked to the controller, he's like, "We've seen up to 10 of these things." There's other guys, and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked a groups of these things coming down, hanging out, and going up.

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

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

- What's the 117? - That's the stealth fighter. The original stealth fighter, not the B-2, but the stealth fighter. So you look at that, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while. But I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology.

This is a giant leap in technology. And the other one is, do we have the basis to do that? Because usually when you have a technology like that, universities, especially the one you're working at, MIT, a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top tier universities.

So you've got MIT, you've got Caltech, you've got Stanford, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, I'm just naming schools. Naval Postgraduate School is another one. There's usually indicators, there's papers of, hey, this is where we're going. I don't think there's a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity-based propulsion system that literally, I've got an object, 'cause how much power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant orb that we live on?

- So by the way, you mentioned gravity-based. That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane from a physics perspective, but of course, it would seem insane until it's not.

Because remember, we only know what we know. - Yeah, and which is very little, relatively. - And as someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all? - Yeah, well, okay, so you're saying that if you had to bet money, all your money, it would be something that's alien technology, so it's not human-created technology.

- Well, I don't like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don't think we've developed it. I don't think we've developed it. You know, 'cause the other one, someone had asked me, they said, "What if there wasn't, "maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV "that got sent here from someplace else." I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around, so I don't know.

I mean, I'd like to sit around and talk to some of the giant brains that think this stuff up. I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of 'em. But-- - Which topic? Which, you mean for drones? - Just space travel, technology, because if you look at where we're going, 'cause everyone talks about Mars.

- Yeah, okay, and we're, hey, are we gonna be able to colonize, and I know Elon is big into that. - Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA? We put humans back up there. - My theory, so it's funny, 'cause I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original employees at SpaceX.

He's a friend of mine, and I won't say his name, but he knows Elon, he knows Elon, and he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project. He's one of the lead guys on that. So he's got some great, as a matter of fact, there's a movie, there's a book coming out that comes out in about a year on this, the original, the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX, and he's named in the book, and they're supposed to make a movie on it, so I'm like, hey, who's gonna play it?

But what he's done, to me, it changed the game, and here's why, because I said, I think it was '62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex, which it has become, everything he warned us of, it has become, and it's really driven by, there's the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing.

Those are the big, those are your biggest, and Raytheon's kind of like a subset of that, but they're, Raytheon's pretty big too, but in US defense, those are the big guys, right? That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like that.

So when you look at that, and you go, and the way government contracting is working, and how we charge, and why things cost so much, and then you go, you got Elon, who's got an ego, and he doesn't like to do things a certain way, and I've talked to the guy that worked there on, 'cause the government likes to have oversight of contracts, where he was like, no, just tell me what you want, I'll build it, and I'll give you a bill when it's done, and then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money, 'cause he's a money-driven guy, which I like, capitalism at its best.

So now you look at the two things, so you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule, and then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money. And oh, by the way, because he can reuse the boosters, 'cause they come back and land, and you don't have to, like, Morton Thaikol, we reused 'em on the space shuttle, but they had to take 'em all apart and do a bunch of stuff, 'cause they landed in salt water, and then you had to put 'em all back together, where Elon gets 'em down, 'cause I was joking with this guy, I go, "What do they do?

"Do they, like, rehaul, you know, overhaul?" He goes, "No, actually, they clean 'em up, "and they can use 'em again. "They're reusable systems." Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company. So being able to put people on, and the capsule and the spacesuits, I mean, it's literally like sci-fi, when you watch when they went up.

So I'm a huge fan of what he and his company have been able to do, because, you know, the fact that we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, you know, and oh, by the way, if you didn't know, 'cause I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn Russian, right?

And they have to do, it's what, level five, where the test is a phone call, where they call you up, and they, you know, 'cause they would go, so I went to the pinning, and two friends of mine, the one actually had a mission date, the one got one later, so it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a spacewalk, you know, 'cause I would pull up, because if I knew what was going on, I'd pull up the NASA thing, I was at a meeting one day, and I've got NASA on, and makers out there floating around, you know, doing his stuff, and I saw one, he's in the space station while they're doing a spacewalk, so it's kind of cool when you go, oh, yeah, I know that dude, he's up there in space floating around.

So, when you look at what those, they're capable of doing, and then you go, what Elon is bringing to the fact that now, it's back in America, it's actually, to me, it's cost-effective for us to be able to do more stuff. I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon?

Is there a reason to go back to the moon? Personally, I think if we're gonna, if they're really gonna go, you know, in years from now, go to Mars, I think that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology, to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the moon, because we did this on a, less than a compact computer in the '60s, which is the whole reason that I flew, 'cause I'm obsessed, matter of fact, I have the giant Lego Apollo at home, and the lander, and I have one that my dad built me in 1969, right after that.

And Neil Armstrong's an Ohio boy, and so am I. Matter of fact, I have a picture of him in a car in Wapakoneta, Ohio, at the parade after he walked on the moon, 'cause his parents didn't live far from my aunt and uncle in Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade.

So, I've been obsessed with this since I was a child. - Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you'll go out to space one day? - Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. You know, I am not-- - 'Cause I mean, that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you know, like people like, I mean, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn't wanna, in terms of, you're now kind of a civilian, right?

I mean, in a sense that you're just a normal person, you're not a fighter jet pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up there, it would be somebody like you, in the next, like, 20 years. - I'd be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I'd be all over it.

I don't know what my wife would say, but you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you're alive. - I'd love to hear that discussion with your wife. Listen, there's the pros and cons. - She's, I mean, I've known her since high school, so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know.

Most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person you were in high school. You know, I was a class clown, and I still am that way. So-- - Let me ask you this question about, so I'm talking to Elon again soon. I'm curious to get your perspective on it.

If I wanted to talk to him about Tic Tac, about these weird, out-there propulsion ideas, which are obviously, just like you said, if there's something to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply out to space.

What should Elon think about this stuff? What should he do? What should people like him-- - I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and go, you know, we are tied to fuels, and either solid rocket or liquid, or whatever we do, but it's a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really, in layman's terms, you know, we can get into what, but that's what it does.

If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go, and when they're done, they're done, there's enough to get 'em back down, and that's it, there's not a huge, you know, not coming back and go, "Oh, I still got three quarters of a tank, "let's bolt 'em on and do it again." His system's not doing that.

But, you know, the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons of money, but you gotta remember the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars for the most part. There's times where they can hide money in the budget to get stuff done, but then when you look at, and I'm just gonna throw a few out there, but if you look at what Amazon, you know, does with Bezos, and you've got Elon, there's some big money out there.

I mean, you're talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy companies, like big companies. Apple's another one. These companies got huge, huge amounts of money, and then just go over to the Gates Foundation, and they've got gazillions and gazillions of dollars. We've got universities. There's so much money out there.

If we really wanted to do it, aside from what the government wants to do, because we do live in a free society, I think there's enough to go, "How do we do this?" Because when you work outside of what the government would wanna do, so we're not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant.

- American. - I would never, yeah, I am an American. - You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union. I can't believe you agreed to this. - But when I, no. - You haven't killed me yet. (laughs) - Yeah, well, you're here. And you've been here for a while.

- No, no, no, I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American through and through. - But see, when you do that, so you look at, let's just look at American universities. So there's some brilliant minds, and we'll just use MIT, 'cause you worked down there. There's some brilliant minds, but there's a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that are not American citizens.

So if you wanna get into government stuff, and you are not an American citizen, it gets really, really, really hard. But if I take money, like Bezos money, Elon money, and they, let's just say they wanna work together, they can split it up 50/50, the two of 'em, when the technology gets developed.

But now I'm not constrained by who has to do the work. I just wanna make sure that I try and keep it in the United States, because technology is technology, and if it gets developed and gets over to where, a country gets ahold of it, and then just basically uses it for their own, because you save 'em all the research time.

You don't wanna do that. But if we can get to the point where we can, we do it on the International Space Station. We realized that space was too expensive for one country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station, and we have a conglomerate. It's the one thing that the Russians and the US actually work together on.

Think about it, that's it. We work together on space, because we realize it's way too expensive for us to do alone, and effective. So we've got this thing that's been out there floating around for God now, what is it, like 20 years, that thing's been up there floating around?

So it's getting old, we're gonna have to replace parts and do stuff, but if we can pool the money together and come up with something that would literally change mankind and change travel, and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of exploring, 'cause if you develop that technology, I'm not, you don't even have to send a man person.

If you can develop a technology that's so, and with our automation and where we're progressing and our competing power, to send something out that's not just floating around, when, you know, that can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface and come back up, so right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and it just sends data back, you can analyze it.

But if I've got a technology that can go up there really quick, I'm not worried about, man, I don't have life support systems and all that, but it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples, and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back so we can analyze it here, that's a game changer.

It's a complete game changer, because it opens up all the planets. - Exactly, so in a sense, the tic-tac is a symbol, so whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there's a non-zero probability that it's alien technology, and in that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box.

It's almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion, we can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way, and it's worthwhile to try. - I think, and I don't think the money, if you look at the big picture with the amount of money, some of that's out there floating around in these private companies, I think if you said, hey, I've got, let's just say $100 million, which really, $100 million relative to, Bezos has got, what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that work.

- A billion, yeah. - So if he said, hey, $100 million, you drop $100 million, and I go, and I'm gonna put a, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that says, hey, we're looking for this technology, or a DARPA program, but what if I just said, hey, who's to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own to say, hey, I wanna go pool universities 'cause they have fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars, they don't have the checks and balances, they can do whatever they want, so their money, oh, sorry about that, to go, hey, I'm gonna put this out, and I'm gonna get the best physicists that are working at CERN, that are at MIT, that are at Caltech, at the schools I mentioned, and oh, by the way, a few of these guys are propulsion experts, and I'm gonna basically, I'm gonna fund you guys for 10 years.

So you get $10 million a year, and I'm gonna give you your salaries, and we're gonna do that, or whatever the amount works, so let's cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right, to do the research, but oh, by the way, the research is, it's not classified, but it's controlled.

So we're not gonna publicly just put this out in journals, but if we make a leap that we think would advance, because although those, let's say there's 10 of 'em, those 10 scientists come up with something, and they put out a paper, there might be another, a number 11 at another university that reads that paper and says, hey, I kinda had this idea, and now you can get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the mindset, 'cause we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it's like I was joking, 'cause I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls, and I said, but you know, how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering, how much new math is really being done?

I said, there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I'm talking Stephen Hawking's type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something that's totally different. - That's a big, dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody's converged towards this local minima or local maxima, however you think about it, and it's, again, same as with the TIC-TAC, thinking outside the box is not accepted, and it probably should be.

- But it's hard, because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original, he was out of the box. He did not think the norm. - That's a true genius. - Had he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories, where would we be?

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

Mick West, I've just recently started to pay attention, just in preparing to talk to you about this world, and Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to debunk. So his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic.

I think it's very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective, to take the approach he does. It's valuable, and I think no matter what, I think there's, I hope that people, quote unquote true believers, are a little bit more open-minded to the work of Mick West.

I think it's quite useful and brilliant work. So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas, where he kind of suggests possible other explanations of the things that are out there. He has some explanations of the things that you've seen with the Tic Tac, like with your own eyes.

Like he says that it's possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing, and so on, when you were flying around. I don't find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that. - No, let me do it right now. - Sure. - So, 'cause that comes up.

Like how did you know it was about 40 feet long? I go, okay, so 16 years, flying against other airplanes, know what stuff looks like, you know, I've looked down on things. So if I know, I know, here's the known things. I know when we saw the Tic Tac, I was at 20,000 feet-ish, right around there.

So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like looking down on 'em, 'cause I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's why I said 40 feet, 'cause it's about Hornet size. So, and as I go around, you get to the point where you have to be able to judge distance when we fly out of experience.

And you can tell if something's small or big, you know. So I would argue the fact of, you know, peer experience. There's, you know, professional observers, which is what we're actually trained to do, and having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing.

They're like, yeah, it's about the size of a Hornet. - From a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years do you find that what you see is the incorrect state of things? So like how often do you make mistakes with vision? - You actually, you make vision issues a lot, because you're, and the sad part is, is your brain believes what your eyes see.

We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly, because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you gotta trust your instrument. So let's go back to landing at night. So your eyes-- - How do you do that? Yeah, land at night, that's the problem.

- Your eyes assume that the runway, and your brain assumes that the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving. So if I try and do stuff visually, you die every time. Not every time, but you die close to every time trying to land on a boat.

So we actually use instruments which are counter to your brain, so, and there's actually all kinds of things that we go through in training. They have this thing, I think they still use it, it's called the MSDD, multispatial disorientation device, or the spin and puke. (laughing) It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules, and when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but you're actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk, but as they spin you around in a little sub thing, and slow it down and speed it up, your body does this, and you, you know, and then by visuals of showing you, like they can spin it sideways to the outside wall, but they can show like lines that are, they can make the line stand still 'cause they're moving the same velocity, they can move the other way, and you'll think you're screaming.

You see it in amusement parks all the time. You do all that because it gives you a sense of the A, but you're really not doing, you're sitting there. So we get trained on all that stuff, so if you, if you wanna look at it and go, well, you're disoriented or this, I'd be like, I'd argue going, no, I'm not, because, you know, when I'm flying the airplane, even as I'm looking at the tic-tac, I've got a heads up display that tells me what my airplane's doing.

So I've got, I know what I'm doing, I can look outside, I've got a sense of what I'm doing, but I'm also looking inside to cross check of what I'm seeing is in reality what I'm doing. - So you actually, your brain gotten good at combining, almost adding extra sensory information.

- You have to. - You have like supervision. So you're combining what you're seeing and adjusting what the sensors, what you call an instrument, so giving you, and that in turn, it's a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're seeing.

- Yeah, you'd be amazed at how good, so here's another example. So if we go out over the water, so there's no land in sight, and we're gonna fight. So when we fight, you know, two airplanes, we're gonna dog fight. As an instructor, and I was for most of my time, you have to come back and you have to recreate it.

So we call it drawing arrows. So you have to recreate that stuff. So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would take off and say, all right, we're starting heading due east. And I know where the sun is at, 'cause in this short couple minutes that we're gonna fight, the sun's really not gonna move much, it's gonna be in a rel, so now I know that the sun is at, you know, let's just say 195 degrees, right?

So I'm starting going east, and it's actually be down off my right-hand side. So now I know as I'm fighting, 'cause in the water, you don't have any reference, like, oh, I passed land, I passed land. No, you don't, and you can't use clouds 'cause clouds do move. But you gotta come back 'cause you go, here's where I started, and then you, as soon as you end, you go, all right, I ended heading 355.

And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns, and use the sun relative, so you can create this entire battle that went on with Aero, so that you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened. And you get really, really good at that.

So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six o'clock? And he went around and he came up here. I go, because I'm trained to do all that, and I take all the notes, why I'm flying, you can do it. But usually, you memorize it all, and you get done, and then you read, as soon as you're done, you knock it off, you look at the other airplane, you get set, and you start writing all your notes down.

- Yeah. - And you're writing it really fast on your cart, and you go out with a stack of cards, and you stick a new one on your kneeboard cart, so you're ready to go, and here's the next setup. - It's kind of, it's in some way similar to what, like, at the highest level chess players do.

I mean, you're, I mean, they recap the games, but the richness of the representation that they use in remembering, like, how the games evolved. It's not like, it's much richer than the actual moves. It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved.

It's more, like, instinctual, from years and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really can't. It's just-- - No, I understand that. It's because, for us, if we don't come back with anything, then there's no learning to be had. 'Cause the whole thing is, the debrief, when we get back and we talk about it, that's really where the learning is.

And it's the same thing if you wanna go back to chess. When you start off, you try and learn, because you're remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place, play with someone better than you. That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything.

You're just learning that they're not good, and you're better. When you challenge yourself against someone that is going to, is better than you, you learn. So I learned how to fight an airplane with, he's actually one of my best friends, we'll call him Tom. I won't give his call sign, 'cause I don't know what he wanna say.

So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight, because Tom had just left Top Gun. He was the training officer at Top Gun, which, so that's the guy. The training officer's the main guy at Top Gun. So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun. So Tom, when I learned, 'cause I had come out of A6, and we really don't fight, 'cause it was a bomber.

So I get in F-18s, and I wanna learn how to fight, 'cause it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the F in F fighter attack. The F-A-18 is fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight. So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world, who's gonna teach me how to do it.

And he did, and I would do something, and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never been, and then I would go, "Well, I'm gonna do this." And then he would destroy me, and he would come back and go, "Here's why you don't do that." And then I would take that knowledge, and I would put it in my little basket of tricks.

And over time, 'cause you don't, no one walks out into that world, I don't care how gifted of an aviator, and go, "I am the man," or the woman, "I am it." No, it's a learning process. - And so, over all those years, you've gotten good. So I mean, so what are the chances that your eyes betrayed you when you saw the Tic Tac?

Low. - Zero. - Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So let me be clear. - Okay, 90, I am 99.9%. So 0.1%, my eyes deceive me. But remember, if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. So the percentage is even lower. - Yeah, okay. Well, I don't find that a particular debunking case that you said, but I'm glad you put it, you said those words out loud.

So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical. So your eye account, I think, is the most fascinating story. And I think that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there. On so many levels, just like we said, on the engineering level, that maybe there's propulsion systems where we can actually build, that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.

So it's at the very least intriguing and at the best, inspiring. I just wanna say that. But on the video side, it's like, it's the videos for the FLIR video, the GoFast and the Gimbal video, they are only interesting to me in the context of your story. Like without that, they're kind of low resolution.

It's like, it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical. So this is where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me otherwise. But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the FLIR video and he says that one of the most amazing parts of the FLIR video, for people who haven't seen it, is at the end of it, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left-- - Off the screen.

- Off the screen. And what Mick West says is that, Mick West, probably others, that the way to explain that is the tracking system. Like we said, it's vision-based tracking simply loses the object, the tracking loses it. And so it simply allows the object to float off screen because it's no longer tracking it.

So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video. Looking at your face, you do not. So can you maybe comment to that debunking aspect? - So it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system. - No, for sure. - And that's like me going, 'cause I'm a big Formula One fan, that's like me going, oh my God, Lewis, what were you doing?

You could have done this with the car and you'd have won the race. And Lewis Hamilton right now is defending world champion two-time, well he's four-time, four or five-time world champion. But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.

Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car. So I can't tell you how many times I've watched. You gotta remember when we looked at this thing, when Chad came back with the video, we sat there and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all right, right, all right, let's look at this.

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

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

It can't just, it's not free floating. But there's a theory on one of them, oh, it's here and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front. It stays like this. So yet another debunker who doesn't know this. So, and Mick has had several theories on some of the other videos, like one of them, the go fast as a bird, and Jeremy Corbell actually did a nice job of saying, no, it's not because he's on black hot.

So the white object is actually colder than the ocean. That's fine. Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd be dead. - So the gimbal video, to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the apparent rotation of the object that is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of.

And Mick West suggests that a flare, like reflections or whatever can explain. - No, because what Mick West doesn't see is, so when they take, 'cause I've talked to the, one of them actually I work with. So I know him, I know I talk to him all the time.

So, and it's his best friend actually shot the video. One of his best friends. - For the gimbal video. - The gimbal video, both of them. The go fast and the gimbal were shot by the same person. Okay. So, and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each other.

Okay. So what you don't see is, so the airplanes they're flying still super Hornets, but they have the APG-79, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon, things incredible. Okay. It doesn't, usually if it's out there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff.

And then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting pod, if there's heat signature and you go, hey, dot heat signature, something's there. It's real. You're not picking up some extraneous things. So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit, look at that thing.

It's just sitting there and it's in the wind and it's going against the wind. Why it's doing this. Someone goes, oh, it's an airplane. Now, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect. It just rotates.

- It's just rotating. - Right. The other thing that you see when you talk to them is, so they're on their radar, there's an object that they identify as their number one priority or their launch and steering. So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pod is going to look.

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

Well, if you take the video with the radar going, no, there's actually other things out there because there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the vacates. It was, it actually became, I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time, the fighter wing.

I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this? He goes, well, we got a NOTAM out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area. So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area it's all the warning area tells you is that there's high military traffic and training out here.

It's probably best not to be here, but there's nothing that prohibits you from going in there. So these things have the right, wherever they're from or whatever they are, you know, cause people are like, oh, they're balloons. Well, balloons float. Balloons don't sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location.

They actually, they had an airplane cause there was two. There's the gimbal thing. That's a pretty big object. There's also, they talk about, it looks like a cube that's inside of a sphere. - A translucent sphere. What the hell is that? - And they almost hit one. - It's almost hit them.

So that's another, that's one of the biggest, another biggest account is like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere. What do you make of that? - Again, you know. - What, I mean, that's the most dangerous thing. - You're right. The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go, okay, so this thing passed between two airplanes and it was, I think it was in the like a hundred feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it.

So what they do is they come back and go, hey, I had a near midair. What'd you have a near midair with? Well, this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it. And you go, huh? And you know, so they send out a NOTAM again and they do what's called a hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there.

We almost hit one. You're right, and that gets sent off to the Naval Safety Center. What was done, I mean, what are you gonna do? Can you catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one? You don't know because they've seen them. They've picked them up like hovering on radar.

And then all of a sudden they're traveling at really high rates of speed. So, you know- What are you gonna do? Yeah, what are you gonna do? Well, let me ask this 'cause this is what people kind of think about. After you witnessed Tic Tac and after these incidents, as far as we know, with the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not react like, did not freak out.

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

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

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

Well, when you're out on an atoll in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is it's gonna land on you so you're worried about where else is it going to land and it actually crashed next to the atoll and Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus.

So, that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So, 'cause someone said, well, when we chased the Tic Tac, well, it could have been some secret government thing. Well, secret government things typically just don't come out and test to where-- - On unknowing pilots, you can't control a lot of things.

- You're exactly right. So, you go, it's not the doctor evil scientist that's gonna throw shit out there to get, there's control and there's reasons that we do it because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to, you build something in theory, you model it, you go, hey, it looks like it's gonna work, you get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it.

Like an airplane with digital flight controls, before it even leaves the ground, they've got things over the pitot-static system that are changing what the airplane thinks is the airspeed, talking to it and it's probably up on jacks, so the gear up. So, it thinks it's flying, it doesn't know, it's sitting on jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pitot-static system so they can actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, hey, it looks like it's gonna work.

And then there's a bunch of stuff that they do. - That's a control environment which you can do the testing in. - Yeah, throwing shit out in the middle of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that I've heard. Is it possible? Yes. Is it more really, is it-- - It's more likely-- - It's more likely they're not doing that.

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

Or more like, what is this? Like, so more turmoil up the ranks. - If you were to put a Chinese flag on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side of it, and I said, yeah, I had a big Russian flag on the side of it, dude, then it would have got a lot of attention.

It would have went high order. You don't have to say Russia or China, just say, if there was another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, oh, it belonged to them, then it's a big deal. So here's what's going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup.

Normally we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving so we could run home up to the Central Valley, have Thanksgiving with our family and then run back down and do this.

Okay? So, you know, and I had just taken over, I had had the squadron for a month, right? So I'm a brand new CO, I'm the most junior guy on the, as far as a commanding officer goes, for time in the Navy. And actually at the time, I think it was the most junior CO for O5 command in the Navy, right?

So you go, okay, so I'm out here, I got my squadron, I'm running it, I see this thing, you know, we catch shit for it. I have a squadron to run. I have the, the Tic Tac was over here and although an extraordinary event, I have 17 air crew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for, right?

Their wellbeing, making sure they're fed, making sure they're happy, they're birthing, you know, and I'm working with my master chief and I'm working with my XO, SNAP, and we're going through all this stuff. I don't have a lot of time to worry about the Tic Tac. - Yeah. - If people need to talk to me, so you gotta remember, you got the captain of the ship, you got the air wing commander and you got the admiral.

Those are the top three. And you got the CEO of the Princeton, who is a major command guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are O5 command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is O5 command.

So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what's going on, I'm pretty much in the top 20 with all my peers. And then I've got obviously the captain and the admiral, right? And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with.

- So you're responsible for a lot of things. - Yes. Oh yeah. - Busy schedule. - Yeah. - There's missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done. And there's no time for silly things. - That's exactly right. So, and we're the integration, you know, when a battle group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the key.

It's we take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want and we can do what we need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me.

The admiral never saying to me, the people on his staff that I was friends with never saying to me, the other COs that I talked to on a daily basis never said anything to me. And no one ever came and talked to me and I'm the guy that chased it.

So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories, because I don't know if people think they're gonna get rich on this, 'cause I made a big donut on this. I can tell you what I got paid for. I got paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my day going to LA and do a five minute talk for someone.

And I'm like, and it wasn't for the talk 'cause I'll talk for free 'cause you're not paying me. I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because my wife and I got to go 'cause it was just looked like fun 'cause the whole town gets involved.

And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because it was just, it was fun. And I got asked and Jeremy and George Knappen went the year before. So I went with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife.

And we all hung out kind of talking, not about UFO stuff, but just getting to know each other as people because Bob's like me. The stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life. He's just a really, really smart guy that's just like the rest of us trying to get through life.

- Nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lou Elizondo's resignation note from his, he was a program director at the AATIP program. One of the sad things is that he's mentioned that people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, like UFOs as a threat.

Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it. It's a sad thing to think about that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that we don't wanna deal with. And it kind of just fades into history. Like literally, it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up, like, and it just didn't, 'cause they're not, like when aliens show up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule.

And if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up in some very nonchalant, peaceful way, briefly, people would be like, that's, I don't have time for this. That's so sad. That's so sad. - It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back, let's go back way back, way back in the time machine.

You know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe. You know, and Europe's a perfect example. Why does France speak French? And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish. And then you'd kind of jump over and Germans are German and the Polish people, everyone speaks a different language because if you look at the way the terrain kind of subdivide the original people that were there, you know, thousands of years ago, they speak differently, right?

You'd be like the US, but see, the US is different. We all speak English 'cause what happened? We came over and we started on the East Coast and we migrated West. We won't get into the, you know, what happened. And, you know, 'cause the Native Americans all spoke different languages.

- Yeah. - You know, it's that same type of thing. So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up, you're actually, you think about it, you're an alien. If I go to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years where, you know, or a thousand years where travel, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time.

We were, well, we don't think we were, but the Vikings probably were. 'Cause we had limited, you know, we had to have supplies and the boats weren't as big. We had to build them by hand. We didn't have power tools and all that stuff. So, you know, if you show up someplace, like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know?

And then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in a human alien world, you know? And when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other, we take what we want. And that's what happened. I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are, you know?

Humans are, we're an interesting group. So you go, now what, what if something is from someplace else? Just, let's just go off the grid and go, let's say there are little green men. What are their intentions? Guy, Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo. And he said, what do you think they were here for?

I said, I don't know. He goes, what? I go, oh, they were observing. They'd come down, they'd hang out. And he goes, well, what if they were prepping the battlefield? What if they were observing to figure out what we do? And you go, that's interesting. The other theory is, maybe there's a more advanced civilization out here and they just check in on us.

Because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization that's inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above. Because now they become the threatened type. So you watch us grow until we start getting too much. You know, it's kind of like you go, well, 'cause they always have a tendency to hang out around nuclear, right?

And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced civilization, I'm gonna go science fiction, kind of comical. They come down and watch us and go, look at the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't destroy themselves. - Yeah, if I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb.

That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of, what is it, UFO sightings since-- - Since the nuclear era. - Since the nuclear era. - Yeah. - That's-- - You go-- - Hmm. (laughs) Let me ask a little bit out there a question. Maybe it's a speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell.

Do you think it's possible that there is out of this world aircraft or beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth, like the US government? Is it possible? So the one perspective of that, if it's possible, is it possible to keep a secret like that?

- I would say this. I think it's highly possible. Because if you go, if you just look at all the sightings, and let's go, just look at Project Blue Book. It was what, I forget how many thousands of sightings. There's a percentage, it's like 10 or 15% and they still can't explain.

Like our Tic Tac is one of them. They basically, the government has come out and said, we don't know what that was. Okay, so if you go, okay, of that 15% that we don't know and of these thousands, there's still that 15% makes up a pretty big number. What are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?

And I don't care if it's an intact system or you got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain or some biological matter, to say the least. It could be intact or it couldn't, but the odds of that now are starting to go down that that could never happen.

And I'm not talking just the United States, I'm talking the world. - Globally. - So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone in the world, on the globe, of the seven plus billion people has something that is not from this world, and I'm not talking a meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation.

Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff. And we got stuff that just went past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper belt. You know, there's stuff out there floating around. And what about ours that's gonna crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, 'cause we've had stuff crash into planets.

So if that's the case, you would think something is out there that we have something that we can't explain. And according to Lew, there is stuff that we can't explain. You know, and I would assume that Lew, who ran AATIP, has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about, because, you know, 'cause I had a clearance.

When you have a clearance, you sign your name, you're bound to that. And to me, that's an important oath that you hold to. You know, and this is kind of where, you know, people have issues with Bob. So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not.

I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy. - Bob Lazar, yeah. - Yes. There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked? You know, to those who owe clearance who, you know, are true to the government, you would say, he should have never spoke.

He was under an oath to not say anything, but he did. If you ask Bob, why did you say something? His answer was, I understand there's an oath, but I felt that the technology could benefit all of mankind and it shouldn't be locked away. And I'll leave it, if you believe Bob, that's kind of what Bob says.

- And that's such a interesting key point. If there is aircraft, a technology, that's in the possession of the, say, the US government, should they make that publicly known? This is this note in question. This is the question of, like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature of human civilization?

Like, the way we think about our place in the world. Also, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that information or not, if you were the government? - So here, well, here's exactly how. So for classified information, the government is the people that classify it.

So I can't go, I can't look at something and go, "Oh my God, this Avion bottle is now top secret." I can't, I don't have the authority, the ability, or anyone to do that. That's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life.

So I understand that. But now you go, there's reasons stuff is classified, okay? And it has to do with, sometimes information is classified by how it was obtained. It's just like the mob. If I have a spy and I'm a mobster and you're the counter mobster, but I have a guy on the inside that's feeding me information, I can't do it.

And a perfect example is if you've ever seen the, it's the Tom Cruise movie, what is it, Air America or whatever? But he plays the guy in Louisiana who was hauling drugs for Pablo Escobar. And he ended up getting a cargo plane and the government, the CIA was kind of funding him to do stuff.

That's how he got hooked up with Pablo, but they put cameras on his airplane. When Reagan had come out and said, "Here's pictures, we have proof that they're running these drugs." It didn't take Pablo long to figure out those pictures were taken from inside of the plane of this guy he had been working with and that guy ends up dead.

Does that make sense? So you classify to protect the source. You classify to protect the technology because if the technology would get out, it could be grave damage or there's levels, depending on if it's a secret or top secret. There are levels of damage that can be done to the US government and our wellbeing as a country.

And we owe it to this because we're all Americans. To me, no matter what some people will say, even in this country, this is the greatest country on the planet. This is the only country that you have the ability to do what you wanna do. It's just don't be lazy.

And I have stories of people that came over here and started with nothing and they're living the American dream. And they'll tell you, and they didn't get it because of, like you, you came over here from Russia, you get no minority status or anything else. You get, you're a white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, whatever your religion, whatever.

But you come over here, I kinda knew that from the last time. But you come over here, you basically have made yourself. You're educated, you're working at literally the top research university in the world, to be honest. - I can do whatever the hell I can create. With a bit of, with a lot of hard work, I can do quite a lot.

- And no one gave it to you. So, I mean, and I have people-- - I'm a believer that, I mean, we are a community. So there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing. And this is, I joke about being Russian, but I'm an American, and this is, I do believe, the greatest country on Earth.

So there's a reason the nationalist pride, the pride in your nation is a powerful thing. And around that, this secrecy holds value. But to me, alien technology is bigger than that. I mean, it's not so much a threat as you're holding back something that could inspire the world, like human knowledge.

- So let's talk in theory. So I'm gonna go back to Bob, 'cause I've talked to Bob. So Bob is a propulsion guy, right? Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor. He built a rocket car, so he did that. So if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory.

I am, I own, I have custody of this thing from a technology that I don't understand, and I know it's a propulsion system. So now I gotta figure it out, right? So who are you gonna go to, right? You go find someone, so you go, wait, here's a guy who at the time was working at Los Alamos, which they have proven, who is big into propulsion.

He designs all this, he builds his shit in his garage. Hey, he's super smart, why don't we bring him in? So you hire him on a contract and you go, hey, we're gonna brief you into a program, and he goes and works on wherever he says he worked. That's not important, but you get access to the technology to try and figure it out.

And then you go, well, Bob comes out and says, you know, we're figuring out these things, but there's a part where our technology isn't advanced enough for us to figure the whole thing out. So then, and let's just say Bob doesn't come out and tell anyone, he works on it until he gets to the point where he's stagnated.

He's at a wall. You go, ah, I can't do it. So sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So you go find someone else who's into propulsion, you bring him in, they work, they can't figure it out, or they get to the point where, kind of back to the Einstein theory where, hey, I've got all these theories on how it works, but we don't have the technology.

We haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do. We still have to advance technology more. So then what do you do? You shelf it. You go, hey, good, project's over, end the contract. You shelf it, and you wait another 10 years. And you wait another 10 years until technology and our abilities and our research advances more.

And then you go find new people to bring in that are experts in that field and go, hey, we want you to work on this thing. And here's what we know about it so far. Or you don't tell them anything, 'cause remember, if you reveal someone else's research, you can taint their beliefs.

They'll start to sway in that direction. So you go, I'm not gonna tell you anything. I'm gonna give you this thing, and now you tell me what you think. And as they progress, if they get stuck on a problem that maybe Bob and someone else solved earlier, you can go, hey, what about this?

You don't have to tell them where it came from. What about this? And now they can leapfrog, and they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology, and you shelve it again. - Do you think that's the right way to do it?

Because it's heartbreaking. - Listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on. The alternative approach is to release this to the world and say there's a mystery here. And then the Elons of the world, the Jeff Bezos, we talked about money, but it's also not just money.

It's like this engine that's within, we talked about the American dream, to say I'm gonna be the one that cracks this mystery open. And that's within a lot of us. And money aside, people in their garage just will-- - But you're thinking like a scientist. So now let's shift to, let me think like a country.

So we have country A, B, and C. And you can look at the nuclear arms race. So we know that Germany was really close. We know that Russia was getting pretty close. We just won the race, and we were the first ones with it. And still to this day-- - And Germany could have won.

- They could have won. They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they knew they had the answer. It's literally what it comes down to. Someone was smart enough to realize that if that got into the hands of the Nazis, that it would be the end.

And that's a tough call to do that, knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the wrong hand. And that's kind of the fear when you look at this. You go, okay, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we've got this technology, if we don't work on it kind of International Space Station like we're all gonna work on it together, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty-free from any weapons or anything, we got the international thing down there, we're all gonna work together.

If you did it in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out, because what you don't want is someone stealing information and getting it back to where, and countries are notorious to do this. Hey, we're doing it internationally, but we're secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first.

That's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power. It would literally change the game of the way the world operates. And from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it's got huge, huge. - Yeah, yeah, so beautifully, beautifully presented.

And I feel like there's a tension between those two places, the scientist view of the world and the national security view of the world. Let me get to this kind of interesting point, which is a lot of conspiracy theorists kind of paint a picture of government as an exceptionally, as a hierarchical system that's exceptionally competent and good at hiding secrets.

And then, I mean, I tend to not subscribe to almost any conspiracy theory, to the degree at least that the conspiracy theorists do. - I agree with you. - But there does seem to be, and I tend to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy. It seems that the communication, like the three videos that were released and just the way of DoD in general talks about the things we've been talking about, it's just confused, it's contradictory, it's not inspiring, it's suspicious.

It's just not, even the way they released the videos. You know, the TikTok, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists. It's like us going to the moon. It's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible. And the way it was released, it was suspicious, it was like low-resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents.

And I mean, why, I don't know how to ask this question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the public? - 'Cause I don't think they know how. Especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years.

And I don't think, 'cause I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that when it comes in, like I said, the government has a right to classify stuff, they classify everything 'cause they don't know. You have something, you don't know what it is, you don't know, so we just go, "Well, it must be top secret and let's put it in a vault." It's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the ark and they put it in, it's in the giant army warehouse.

We don't even know what we have. So, but I also believe that, and I'll say this openly, I don't think that the American people need to know everything. I think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection of this country, and I totally believe in that. So, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about the Storm Area 51 stuff.

I'm like, "Yeah, that's probably the worst idea "you could possibly have "is to just storm a military installation. "It's just stupid." There are reasons that we have things that we don't just let out to the public because if we do, as soon as you do let someone know that you have something, they immediately try and encounter it.

And perfect example, the US in the '60s developed a bomber. It was a Mach 3 compression lift bomber called the XB-70. Okay, there was three of them built, three of them ever built. It was a 60,000 foot high Mach 3. It was an incredible airplane when you see it.

And there's actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum. It would go, the wingtips would fold down. It looks like a Concorde, but it's way faster. When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG-25, literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber.

And they built an entire fleet of MiG-25s. We built three XB-70s and we scrapped the program. Because now you go, well, the technology is cool. We proved it, but now it becomes obsolete. So it's not even worth building a whole fleet of these things. It's a chess game. We do something, they do something.

We do something, they do something. And it's we do something and then they counter it. You gotta figure out how to defeat it. So you go, oh, we'll build something. So the more we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better. Actually, I personally think we talk too much.

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

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

Where the defense side might go, we don't really want that published in a paper in Scientific America or I can't believe. - It's so heartbreaking. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concord's, some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever is done in secrecy.

And it sucks because it's so inspiring and they can't talk about it. - It is, but some of it's due to funding. The US government has deep pockets. Some of this new technology that you develop for an open source, unless, and this goes back to the original conversation. We now, there's enough money in the private sector that individuals control.

Bezos, I'm not talking Amazon, I'm talking Jeff Bezos. - A single individual. - It's worth over $100 billion. He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what, the Gates Foundation, between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other money, 'cause I think Bezos' ex-wife actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation.

So, I mean, what's the Gates Foundation worth these days? You know, and these are guys, you know, brilliant, brilliant. I mean, some of the greatest minds that we have to go, you know, what are they doing? Because they have the ability, it's a nonprofit. They can go, hey, I wanna fund this.

I wanna fund this research. - They can look beyond the conflict between nations. - You can look beyond the conflict of having to have, you know, classification. You can do what you want. You know, it's just like, you know, we classify how to do, you know, the whole nuclear, how to create a critical mass, right?

But there's really smart high school kids that have figured it out mathematically and they do their science project and then the government comes in and says, hey, we gotta classify your government 'cause we just don't want this out in the public domain, which I understand, but they never stop them from free thought and developing that.

It's just, hey, we really don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that. I totally understand that. But if they, you know, if Bill and Melinda wanna do this and go, hey, we wanna do this and they're gonna work with Bezos and they're gonna work with Elon and we're gonna, I mean, you think about it.

There's a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D and I'm not talking just science like this. I'm talking medical research and all this. But then you go, well, who gets it? Because now you're competing against the companies that actually do it. You go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds?

I'd say, you know, we have a tendency to go, these are the best that we have. And I'd say, well, no, that's the best that we know we have. But there's probably people out there that don't wanna work. There's brilliant minds that don't wanna do anything with the fence 'cause they just disagree with what it does.

So they go do another path. They go do something else. - And in a sense, the Elons of the world, the Jeff Bezos, actually, in a certain sense, much better than DOD at finding the brilliant, weird minds out there. - Because they're not tied to the government. So when you work a government contract, the government writes, they tell you what they want, and then they work with you on the requirements.

And they usually have an end in mean. They have an idea that this is what I want it to be. Where if you go to like SpaceX, where they come up with, why don't we just land these things on a pad and reuse 'em? Well, if the government scientist, if you're on a government contract, says no, that's not the requirements.

We're not paying for that. We want you to do this. You're kinda controlled. Or when Elon does it, his company, they can do whatever the hell they wanna do 'cause they have no bounds. The only bounds they have is the liability if it doesn't work and it lands on something.

So what do you do? You go out to quadulene and you test it. And if it crashes and it lands in the ocean, hey, we cleaned it up, no big deal. We lost some money, but we'll move on. Money makes the world go round, contrary to what everyone thinks.

But there's a lot of money that's sitting around that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with. And I don't know. I mean, I'll guarantee that, what is it, Blue Origin? Isn't that Amazon? - Blue Origin, yeah. - You know, that they're doing some cool stuff because they have funny, and I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX.

And he was funny because they were building the first test thing and they were limited. And Elon found this like 400 acre thing, I think it's about 400 acres, down by Waco, Texas. And he's like, I go, "How?" He goes, "Dude, I worked with," he goes, 'cause he's done government contract, he goes, "There's government contract "and then there's working at SpaceX with Elon money." And that's what he refers to it as, is Elon money, where it was like, I'll throw them, and he would throw the money at it and make it happen.

And I'm talking this fast. I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this. I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the private sector, vice the government, where there's the bureaucracy is. They had a company that was basically a tool and die machine shop that did a lot of their high precision parts for the rockets.

They had went to the guy, but he had contracts with other companies. And when the economy was down, the guy was actually looking at going out of business. So the guy I know, he's telling me this story. He was talking to the guy, he had to go over there and get something.

And he's like, "Holy shit," he goes, "Hang on." So he calls up on the phone, SpaceX. He says, "Hey, is Elon there? "Can you get him in the boardroom? "We'll be there in 20 minutes." So he grabs this guy who's literally gonna fold his company. They go over to SpaceX, and I may be getting some of this wrong if people are gonna fact check me, but this is pretty close.

They go in the boardroom, and he said, literally, within like an hour or two, Elon has bought the guy's company. That guy is now a senior VP running his company, and they're gonna pull all the stuff into the SpaceX thing so they can actually build the parts, and they can still contract out to make the money outside.

And it happened like that fast. - And it's not just money. It's 'cause I've witnessed it too with Elon. I think it's whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise to the top, but 'cause I've also worked for DARPA for research in terms of a source of funding, there's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, being funded by DARPA.

And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of anything is possible, cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately. - How much money and time do you waste dealing with your bureaucracy when you could actually be doing real work?

That's the difference. This is why, honestly, when I went back to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about, when you look at it and go, SpaceX can do something for half the price ahead of schedule that what Boeing were paying Boeing, and you go, oh, well, this just came out.

You go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with this side? Because you've got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to fly around in. It worked like a champ. It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down.

It worked perfectly. We're gonna dust it off. And oh, by the way, unlike the Apollo capsules that were used and then put to museums, they're gonna reuse that dragon capsule. It came down, they're gonna dust it off, put a new coat of paint on it, slap it on top of another rocket, and away it goes.

Holy cow. - It's amazing. - It's a shift, it's a complete shift in mentality. And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost. - Yeah, it's exciting, especially given putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky, or it's limitless, the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism.

- I think it's exciting. - Yeah, super exciting. - I think we live in an exciting time right now, besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. - Well, this is a hopeful. Like there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have a hope for the future, to look up to the sky.

And we're humans, we can solve so many, we can solve all of this. - I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing, and I said, "This would be great." 'Cause when the government had come out a month ago and said, "Hey, this does exist, we're doing this, "and oh, by the way, we're gonna release more stuff." And I was texting like Lou and Chris Mellon and those guys before I went on, 'cause they had called me up to be on Tucker's show.

And I'm like, "Hey," I go, "This would be great. "Just come out with this, find the relic of a spaceship, "like pull out the Roswell wreckage, if you have it. "Pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it." God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with the riots in the cities.

And I mean, I know it's an election year and all that, but God, it would be something, it'd be refreshing to not have to turn on my TV and see everything that is just depressing in the world. To be, "Holy cow, we actually do have this, "and we're working on this technology." - Imagine if there is a Roswell aircraft and they pull it out.

Imagine the innovation that happens in the next 10 to 20 years without any more information than that. Just the innovation that happens, the look on Elon Musk's face, the look on Jeff Bezos's face, and all the brilliant engineers. - It would change the game. - It would change the game.

- It would change the game completely. - Let me ask the big question, I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it. Outside, I mean, one of the things, the fact that you've laid your eyes on a UFO, probably opened your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings, there could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them.

What to you is the, outside of your own sighting, is the most interesting sighting or UFO-related event in history? - I think there's several. What is it, Rameshawn Forest in England? The US guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns. One guy was medically disabled, but they weren't gonna give him, and he got help from John McCain.

His office helped get the guy's disability reestablished. I think that's a big one. I think there's people out there that have seen stuff, and I'm talking credible, because you gotta remember, there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven. They're actually explainable. You had sent me the question, the Phoenix Lights.

- Phoenix Lights, yeah, somebody sent. What's that? So I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these. - I'm not either. (Lex laughs) You want a funny story on that. So I was at a conference, and hopefully he doesn't watch this and get offended. But we had this, I call it speed dating.

So there was a table, about eight people at a table, and we would go sit at the table, and they could ask us questions. And then after 10 minutes, we moved to the next table. So I was speed dating all these people that are really into this. It was kind of funny, but I'd sat down.

And it's always funny, 'cause some people will try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the dominators away so that if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too. So we got into this, and the guy starts naming all these. Well, what about this?

What about the Phoenix Lights? I'm like, I don't know about the Phoenix Lights. What about this event? I don't know about that. And he goes, he looks at me and he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not, but I chased one, so I'm an expert.

Have you? And you could see him get deflated 'cause I'm kind of a smart ass like that. - Yeah, I mean, that first-hand experience from a credible, in some sense, these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human. - Well, I think part of that is, to us, that's a credibility piece, 'cause the four of us that actually saw it, plus the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video, none of us are UFO-obsessed people.

So when we come out and say, because to me, it's just five minutes of my life. I did a lot of really cool, really kind of neat things I've been able to do. But when you look at it and go, to me, it's not the pinnacle of my life.

To other people that, they live in the UFO world, and it's like they, if you talk to people, they'll go, they're really into it, who've never seen one. It kills them that they didn't see one. When here we are, because, and what's unique with ours, which kind of adds that level, is it wasn't, we just didn't see it.

It wasn't like, oh, look, something in the sky, and it was weird. We actually engaged with it. You know, it was an engaged five-minute thing. And there's other stories from other countries. Like, there's a story in the, back when the Soviet Union existed, that they actually would chase these things, and one of them shot at some, you know, it shot at it, because they said, "Shoot at it," and it shot at it, and then it got shot down.

And then they said, "Don't ever shoot at 'em again, "and don't chase them, just so you can observe them, "but don't go after them," because obviously, they have firepower that we can't control, 'cause if you can make something float around and jam radars at will and do whatever you want, you know, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful.

You know, you can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around. Oh, we gotta, now you gotta cyber warfare, you gotta take the bug down, you gotta take the warfare, so now we can actually inhibit some type of damage. - So there's a, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix Flies.

This is somebody on, I think Reddit said, "Ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings "like the Phoenix Flies." So the interesting thing, like you said, with the Tic Tac is that multiple people laid their eyes on this. What are your thoughts about the Phoenix Flies, or many people have seen it?

- So here's the deal with massive sightings. So the Phoenix Flies is unexplainable, although I know the Air Force had said something about it, it was an A-10 drop in flares. I don't think so. It's the, oh, flares don't burn that long, they just come out and they detract and they go away.

Although on the other hand, there's, because clouds can do things. So I lived in Central California for 18 years, and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky? And it was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off. They were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across, then they go land in the ATOL at Kwajalein.

And then they can check the displacement, the accuracy and all that stuff. It's stuff that we do 'cause we're a superpower. But when you see 'em go up, especially if you've ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night, it'll have the stream, the glow, and you can tell it's a rocket.

But if you don't look up until later, when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, but, and you can watch this on TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it's nice and narrow, narrow, narrow, and then it hits a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because the forces aren't holding that all into one unique thing.

And it looks really odd. And then it'll go off because it burns out and you get state separation. Then you see the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand that because they didn't watch it from launch. 'Cause we used to sit in our driveway and Vandenberg is, it was a three-hour drive, but you could sit and watch it.

Go in there and launch it at night, you'd watch. You'd watch and think it's really cool. If you don't see anything, what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume, what's left, the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing it. So you get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky.

That's part, but when you go to Phoenix Lights and you go, "Hey, when a thousand people see something, "are you gonna discredit all a thousand people "or are you gonna try and explain it away "with something else?" It's a weather balloon. It's a weather balloon. - Again, just like the Tic Tac, I think is just inspiring for the limitless nature of the science.

- I think more is gonna come out. I think some of the stuff that the To The Stars folks have done. - So there's a To The Stars Academy. What are your thoughts about them? - I talk to them quite a bit. I am not a part of To The Stars Academy.

But I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this. - What's their mission? What's their hope? What's their-- - When they started, their mission was to try and, don't look at this as little green men, but let's look at this as a technology and let's try and almost reverse engineer and figure out how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge, physics-based knowledge to go, "How would something like this operate?" That's really their bottom line, was to try and use, and then couple that with, 'cause they've got the series unidentified, couple that with television to get the word out.

So you're actually putting something instead of, because everyone has a theory. Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories. It's kind of off of, "Oh my God." And I've seen the stuff and I've seen stuff that I've said taken out of context on shows that I did not talk to.

So there's all that, because you can take a clip and go, "Oh, it's this, it's that." And if I know about stuff, like you can't technically use my likeness unless I tell you you can. So if I haven't signed something, you can't do it. There was a guy who put something out, and I was in it and I told him, "You can take it down and you can talk to lawyers "because I'm not supporting you." - So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that's not connected to reality.

- 'Cause let's face it, if you're making TV shows, there's two reasons to do it. One, you wanna get word out, or two, you wanna make money, or three, both. And so usually it's, I would say the make money is probably the biggest thing to put a TV show out.

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

And they've done some pretty cool things. I mean, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property of their government. They got a bunch from, it might have been Argentina, gave them all kinds of stuff, like, "Here's all our records, what can you do with it?" To try and now pull from country-based to a more global-based research, which is what you were talking about, and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government, I mean, any government, but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some of the metallurgy, 'cause you go, "Oh, I found this.

"We had this piece of metal, what is it?" And some of the stuff has been explained. They've got some objects, artifacts that have not been explained. And that's slowly coming out, and I think-- - And your hope is the US government will release some more things. - Well, the government, the US government came out a month ago and said, "We have material that we cannot explain the origin." They have said that.

They just haven't released the records from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about. I'm like, "Come on, it's 70-some years old. "You can classify it, let it out." - I think you put it beautifully, that in this time, that will be a heck of an inspiring, hopeful thing to see.

People don't-- - Just to distract. - Yeah, the division is, I mean, nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps, like the idea that there's life out there. - Oh, it would literally change. I said this a while ago, I forget, I think it was the London Sun-Times had called me, and I said, "Personally, I think this is a global issue.

"It's not." If there is stuff coming down, which we're pretty sure there is, there's enough stuff that we can't explain. If there is stuff coming down, then this is not a country-based thing, and it's not about technology, and it's not about who's gonna win the next war, because you don't know what they're doing.

So you got, really, a couple of theories. One, you've got E.T., or close encounters. And the other extreme is you've got Independence Day. Are you gonna prepare and bet on E.T. and close encounters, or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is Independence Day, you actually have a game plan?

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

We all, we're divided. We've been that way forever. So if you think we won't get through this, we'll get through it, 'cause we've had times just like this before. - Until Nazi Germany pops up. - But if Nazi Germany pops up, or someone flies two airplanes into the World Trade Center, and then all of a sudden, we're all united.

We all also have very, very short memories. - Yes. - We do. - Exactly. - It's when you look and go, well, we can do this, and you go, no, no, if you think that everyone on the planet is good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you're taking.

You know, we said this. There were people during the rise of Hitler. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay. We're not gonna do, we're not gonna stop. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay. And you gotta think, the only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia.

If he'd have stuck with the pact with Stalin, and not went to the East, and had to fight, and it was really the Russian winner that crushed him, and he would have put all his high troops to the other side, there would have been a totally different outcome. The man in the iron, the man in the high tower, or whatever, it's a Netflix show, where Nazi actually wins it.

And you look, you know, we didn't know everything that was going on, especially the atrocities with the concentration camps, and what he was doing to the Jews. I mean, you look at that going, if you really wanna see evil, and then there's the whole side of what Stalin did, because he actually exterminated more people than Hitler did, but that never gets the press.

- And the thing is, we forget this history in our conflicts today. We forget that there is the nature of evil. We forget that there's real evil in the world. And the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both, it's like this interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan, of being both kind to each other, compassionate, empathetic, but also being strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to, to make sure that you, there's a balance between kindness and force.

- What it is, you use force when force is necessary, but you don't have to walk around like Billy Badass all the time. I mean, some of the toughest people that I grew up with, that literally could kick the shit out of whoever came near 'em, they never got in fights 'cause one, even people that didn't know them, 'cause they were actually nice guys.

They were just good dudes, but if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he's a nationally ranked wrestler, went to Naval Academy with me. He's a very, very good friend of mine. And he is, when you meet him, and he wrestled at 190 pounds, and he did not lose a match his senior year until he went to nationals.

He just had a bad day. He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled the shit out of. And he would cross, it was funny, we joke about it, even with him, 'cause when you meet him, he's like the nicest local, hey, hey dude, hey, how you doing? He's super nice.

He would cross that ring on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally different person. And he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on. And he would get done, and he's super humble, and they'd raise his hand, and he'd have this blank expression.

He'd raise his hand, and he'd walk off, and as soon as he crossed the line, he'd look up and smile and go, hey, hi guys, how you doing? Like he literally just went and could rip someone's arms off. But as soon as he crossed the line, he was a totally different person.

He's like, and he's that way today. And man, he wouldn't even tell you he's a wrestler. - Yeah, that's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is, that wrestler. You cross the line, you can be hard, but once you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being.

- Yeah. - I know you're super humble, saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. That the entire trajectory of having a dream, of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career, what advice would you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and is inspired, and wants to fly, or wants to go to space, and wants to build the rocket?

Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything? - Yeah, yeah. First, let me start with, and you had a question on, inspirational people. So my grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier, huge funeral, beer delivery guy, was delivering beer in the '60s riots where the guys in the black neighborhoods where white people didn't go.

And my grandfather's Sicilian, he was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States. So my great-grandmother, and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat. Huge, huge guy, and just the nicest, friendliest, would give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his funeral.

And I'm talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. I mean, it was literally a mix of who's who. And he had told me once, because when you're little, you start looking.

And I grew up basically, I was probably middle-class, lower middle-class. My dad was a fireman. You're not rich, he's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up. And I was talking to my grandfather one day, and he said something to me, and this is literally how I run my life.

He said, it was about money, 'cause you'd see, back in the day, if you saw someone in a Mercedes, that was rare. You know, they weren't everywhere. You know, people didn't, you couldn't lease a car, you actually bought a car, and usually you bought a car with cash. So it was totally different than we are now.

And he said, he goes, you know, David, he goes, they're no better than you, and you're no better than anyone else. He goes, you gotta remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person.

It just, that's who they chose to be. And you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on someone, because, you know, there will always be someone that will look down on you, and you should never ever do that. And I kept that close to me. He was a huge influence.

He was my mom's dad. Just a big, big influence in my life, and the way I carried myself. And he was one that would say, you know, you can be anything you wanna be. You know, he grew up dirt poor, you know, and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that, you know, to him, that was a success.

And to me, it was always, you know, trying to better and move on. And he was the one, you know, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that, that anything is possible. So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969, you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, and I'm asking my mom, and she says, well, they were all military pilots, and, you know, we had an international guard that at the time was flying F-100, so I'm dating myself.

And I was just fascinated with flight, and I just looked at that going, that's really what I wanna do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always, oh, I could do this or do that. And when I was gonna go to college, before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into Natural Resources at Ohio State.

And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger, 'cause I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires, 'cause that's just, I like that stuff. You know, it was that or be an oceanographer, because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau.

And actually, that's my degree. My undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau. So influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques Cousteau. I have an oceanography degree. I got an MBA from University of Houston, go Cougs, gotta mention 'em. And then, so you look and people go, what are you gonna do with that?

And I said, you know, I got an oceanography degree, 'cause I go, well, I'm gonna sail on the ocean, so at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at. And that was kind of a running joke. And then-- - And then so these passions and underneath it is the belief that you can be anything you wanna be.

- You can. You know, I told my kids this, you know, when they were young. You know, it was tough, especially for my son. So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind. You know, my wife's brothers are both colorblind. It's really color deprived. Colorblind, you see black and white.

He can't tell, he has issues with greens, reds, browns. It's funny if you're ever around someone like that, 'cause he'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at? He goes, right over there by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go, this? I'm like, he had a hat on one day.

I go, which one are you getting? He had a hat in his hand, it was green. He goes, I'm gonna get the green one. I go, oh, this one right here. He goes, no, the one on my head. I go, Nate, that one's brown. He's like, leave me alone, Dad.

He got the brown hat, 'cause to him it looked green. So he couldn't fly. He came to me, he said, I go, what do you wanna do, Nate? You know, you're talking to your kids, and what do you wanna do? He goes, I wanna be a pilot. Now I gotta tell him, 'cause he's looking at me, 'cause I'm a pilot, dude, you can't be a pilot.

He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you got eye issues. You know, so you gotta redirect. And the other one was, because I stopped flying, I was 42 years old, and I was like, and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete.

I know exactly what it feels like when Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it. - Good choice of quarterback, by the way. The greatest of all time, but whatever. - So you do, and you look at it, and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.

So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids, and I said, you know, find something that you wanna do, that you love to do, and that you can do your whole life. And you should be able to do good things for other people.

You wanna be able to help other people. That's what I said. So both of my kids, and there's no one in my family, both of my children, one of them is, my daughter is a doctor doing a residency in internal medicine right now, and my son is in his third year.

And they're both gonna be doctors. And so I look at it as, you know, people go, oh, you got two doctors. I don't care. I told my kids, if you wanna be a garbage man, or you wanna dig ditches, I don't care. Just be the best ditch digger that you can be.

I said, and be happy doing it, because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of money, money, money, money, money, money, money. That's what makes the world go round. But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather, who didn't have a lot of money, and he was probably one of the most happy people on life.

And unfortunately, he died at 65. He had a massive heart attack, because he didn't tell that, he kind of knew it was happening, and he just made the choice to do it. And it was devastating to the entire family. But he didn't have a lot of money. But I'll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals, and there's nobody at 'em.

And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, had, literally, it was like three miles long. - The Pope. - It was crazy. Yeah, who died the Pope? That was 'cause it was like, hey, he's a Catholic. He's just Italian. He goes, who died, the Pope? And I go, no, that was my grandfather.

And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister, and there was like 30 people. And I looked at my mother, and I said, where's everybody at? She goes, oh, no, this is normal. This is what a normal funeral looks like. So for young kids, bottom line, one, be nice.

Kindness will get you, I'm a big believer in karma. Kindness will get you a long way in the world. It's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, and get rid of the hate. And number two is, follow your dreams. Because everyone is capable of everything.

And there's a self-realism. Like, if you really have trouble with math, getting a PhD in applied math is probably not something you're going to be able to do. But understand yourself what your own capabilities are, and you know inside your heart. Don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do.

You have to determine that yourself. And go for it. And you can do anything. It's just, it's a great, the world's incredible. It really is. - Let me ask the last big, ridiculous question. So you've lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.

So, let me ask kind of several different ways, the same kind of question. One, do you, have you pondered your mortality, the finiteness of it? And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of your tic-tac encounter, is what do you think is the meaning of this thing we got going on here?

The meaning of life, human life, in this sense? - So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often. And I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do believe in God. I've just seen too many things in the world that I can't explain.

And some people will explain it by subconscious. So I'll give you a story, and this kind of puts in the thing of, do I fear death? So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with. We were stationed in Japan together, and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins.

So there's a real high cancer rate for those that served on the base in Atsuki, Japan. Him and his wife had one son, and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday of cancer. And I was hanging out with, I'll call him John, and I was hanging out with John.

We were in oil and gas. He had come to the same company, and we were doing an event together. And he was opening up to me, 'cause we were actually the demo pilots. We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff. And him and I were sitting there talking, and he was giving me the whole story and how it really changed his look on life, that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die.

Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location that would fit there close to the water where they could do stuff, and I won't say where. And he was doing what he loved to do, and he got diagnosed with throat cancer.

And I was talking to him, it was probably about maybe two months before he died. And I said, "Dude, you're sad. "I mean, this is your friend." And I'm kind of really bummed out. And this is the guy, this is a guy that's dying of cancer. And here's what he tells me.

He says, "Dave, dude, we're all gonna die." He goes, "But I have to look at it. "I have to make the best of the time that I have." And I said, "I understand that." And he goes, "With the exception "of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly." He goes, "I'm okay with dying.

"I've had a really good life." 'Cause actually the original announcement when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me, 'cause I don't do Facebook, and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed. And about the day before he died, for some reason I was thinking about him.

And I had a dream, or I think it was a dream, or an altered reality, you can get into whatever. But he was there, it was just him and I. And I was really sad in the dream. I was actually crying, and he was there. And he was actually in his uniform, he was in his whites, 'cause he was a Navy.

And we were just talking, and he looked at me, and he said, "And this isn't my dream." He's like, "Dave, it's all gonna be okay." And this is a vivid conversation I have, and people are gonna think I'm weird about this. But I know what my dream was, and maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream.

But in reality, to me, this was real, that it was put there for a reason. And he basically explained everything. It's okay, I'm gonna be fine, my wife is fine. And he goes, "This is what's meant to be." But the bottom line was, "Make use of every day that you have, "because you don't know." And literally two days later, I find out that he passed.

- But ultimately, he accepted the finiteness of it. - He did, well, you have to. And it's like I talk about money, and job position, and this and that. And I said, "You can go to a company." Just remember, when you wanna be a VP of a company, you sell your soul to the company.

You have to. I said, "If you look," I joke with people at work, and I said, "You know, when you ever think "that you're important, or this guy has that," I said, "When you're sitting on 93 or 95, 128, "and you're sitting in traffic, and we're stopped." Which doesn't happen right now 'cause of COVID, but normally it's bumper to bumper, and you're sitting there, like I was coming down here by the gas tank.

When you're sitting there, look left and look right. You know, and there can be a Lamborghini, or an S550 Mercedes, and on the other side, there could be some piece of crap car. We're all sitting on the same freeway at the same time, trying to do the same thing, which is just get home so we can be with our family.

'Cause the most important thing that we have, it ain't money, it ain't our job, it's not our position. I go, 'cause when it's all said and done, you could be, you know, you can be, with the exception of the presidents of the United States, I mean, name the vice presidents.

Most people can't. And eventually, they're going to die. Or eventually, you're gonna see a statue of a guy from the 1700s in the Boston area, and you're gonna go, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life? He probably did. But eventually, people forget. You realize what's important now, and the one thing that you have is your family and your close friends, and that's it.

You can take all the money or everything else, if you're down on your luck, you know, who is gonna be, we always just joke, who are your true friends? It's the person, well, there's ones that I won't say, but you know, hey, you're broke down on a road in the middle of nowhere, and it's three o'clock in the morning.

Who you gonna call is gonna get in their car without complaining and come and get you. - And that's life. Those-- - That is life. - The people you love. - It's the people you truly care about. And contrary to, I have, you know, oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends.

You got about that many real friends that you can count on, and that's it. - Everything else doesn't matter. - No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you're not gonna be nice. I mean, I have, there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for, and they can come to my house and stuff, but then there's the people that, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right down the street from me, and my cousin Chad, and I got two boys, there's 14 of us, but there's only two boys.

There's three of us together. And we all grew up in the same neighborhood, same schools, played football together, all that. I said, if one of those, if Ray or Chad ever needs me, if something happens, like when my uncle died, it wasn't an issue if I'm coming home. It's I'm booking the ticket and I don't give a shit what it costs because I will be there to be there with you.

And then those two guys, and my college roommate is another one that I'm very, very close with, you know, I have a handful of people that, you know, I will drop literally everything, even if my wife would be pissed at me at times. She's like, seriously, I gotta do it.

And now she knows, and it's the same thing with her. I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her and she has to go, she would go and I would let her go. So. - Given all that, I'm honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time.

Dave, it was one of the best conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. - It's a pretty long one. - It's probably sets the record for the longest one. So I mean, I'm at a loss of words. One of my favorite conversations. Thank you so much for talking to me, Dave.

- You're welcome. - Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fravor, and thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFriedman.

And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)