David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122
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 better help 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 is 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 and 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 at lex friedman as usual i'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle more and more i'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less adzy more personal but i give you timestamps so you can skip but still please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description it is honestly the best way to support this podcast this show is brought to you by 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 the 24-hour fast and i think it goes even deeper for the 48 72 and even week-long fasts anyway i always break my fast with athletic greens it's delicious refreshing just makes me feel good so go to athleticgreens.com lex to claim a special offer a free vitamin d for a year again go to uh threaded greens.com lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast this show is also sponsored by expressvpn get it at expressvpn.comspod to get a discount you probably know there's a show called the office that i fell in love with first with the british version with ricky gervais and then the american version with steve carell expressvpn lets you pretend your location is somewhere else choosing from nearly 100 different countries and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions of the office and other countries also it protects you when you do shady things on the internet that you shouldn't be doing like checking the website of this very podcast that for some reason was not available in russia for a long time not sure if it still is but if it isn't you can use expressvpn to access it i think of expressvpn like a pirate ship and regular vpn free life as a boring cruise from one place to another with no excitement in between choose wisely my friends again get it on any device at expressvpn.com flexbod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast this show is sponsored by betterhelp spelled h-e-l-p help like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane to notice you check it out at betterhelp.com lex they figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours you can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions now hard left turn let me talk about desert islands whatever you think of it i love the movie castaway with tom hanks and the idea of spending time on an island alone with potentially no hope the natural question is if i could what would i bring to this island the answer is complicated but let me pick one thing the first thing that popped into my crazy mind which is the introduction to algorithms book also called clrs for the first letters of the last name of its four authors i find algorithms beautiful like a little toolbox for a simple world inside computers when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess i would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months far away from human civilization anyway check out betterhelp betterhelp.comlex to get a discount and to support this podcast and now finally here's my conversation with david fraver you're a graduate of the navy fighter weapons school yeah i am better known as top gun so yeah let me 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 cut instructor uh said this there's two things in the 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 other than that uh you know i went through in 97 uh class 497 and there's actually a log of every single person that's went through kind of like seal training you know there's a list so people because there's a lot of posers out there i was a navy seal no you weren't well i went to top gun you could actually go to top gun and matter of fact just to get a top gun patch the real patch uh you have to have gone there so a lot of the patches you see running around are not real there's the real ones are controlled the people that make them uh honor that and when you go in they look up your name if you want to get one they look up your name you just tell them they go okay here and i'll sell them to you if you are not on the list you ain't get no patch because it is it's it's it's a pretty big deal to go through but it's for me uh probably the best experiences of flying uh because everyone there is extremely competent it's it's very very challenging but it's what we all signed up to do so it's uh it's just the entire group that is when you want to be that you know that level uh you know where you go everyone really cares and everyone really wants to be good is it competitive like what was it in the movie or no it's when you go through it's you know it's if anything it's more of the students you know and then there's the instructor side and the instructor sides are really you know they're guys that you know they just chose to stay up and fallon and it's extremely uh difficult job uh because they have they have a very small tolerance for um 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 um the guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple what they call a 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 it's and it's standardized so they are extremely extremely standardized when you go through school and there's a reason for that because what they're doing is they're training so when you come out a top gun you're called a strike fighter weapons and tactics instructor okay so your 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 there's a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the course it's it is literally one of the best things and it's not it's not a rank based thing because think oh navy you can come in as a you know like a an o4 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 ranked so when the the tactical decisions are made which are based on fact and and trying things out in the fallon ranges uh they set this the top x number of folks that have been there seniority wise is and i mean time wise uh 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 it's 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 uh that the instructors demand well 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 uh 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 la moore 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 it's 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 you know and then everyone else who's been through the school including them have the patch on their sleeve so there's a standard that's expected when you come out of there so you're a navy pilot for 18 years yes can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot yeah um so you know first i was in i was enlisted i was a marine and then the marines actually sent me recommended me to go to the naval academy uh so it's always better to be lucky than good but i got to go to naval academy and i finished and i've 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 um i was at that point i asked my mom i remember watching it i was 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 uh then at that point it was like i'm gonna be a pilot and if you knew me growing up because i was a little bit of a delinquent um people are just like yeah right i used to joke i'm gonna fly i'm gonna fly jets and i'm gonna drop bombs then and if people that knew me 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 funny story and i'll get to it and i'll finish my career but i was at my cousin's wedding and uh we all grew up in the same neighborhood uh we kind of that italian side of the family that's how we grew up so it was my house right down the street is my cousin chad and right around the corner with 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 neighborhoods they all knew me and uh i went to my cousin's wedding and he and mr race looks at me and he says david fravor i go mr race how are you doing you guys you fly jets top gun and all that i go yes sir i guess i figured he'd be in jail by now um it was kind of a to me it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on you know i kind of overcame that but uh what do you attribute that to so you i've heard you before and just now i'll say that uh it's better be it's better to be lucky than good and you you talk modestly about uh about just being lucky but if you were to describe your trajectory maybe in a way of advice like retrospectively uh how did you pull it off to be like to be truly a special person the easiest way is one never never take no don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it or those i mean i knew i knew what i was capable of inside you know and if i really believe if you want something and you want to do something then you 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 but i'm really not that good at basketball it's probably not ever going to happen no matter how hard i try and practice it's just the way it is or for me to be in the nfl i'm not fast you know i'm not that big it's just physically i'm incapable of doing that um but there's things that don't really tie to a true physical ability as far as size and strength but it's it's mental uh 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 uh 80 solution is typically good enough because if you overthink it you're you're behind and then in an air-to-air fight that's what happens people try and overthink it and before you know it because it's happening so fast you don't have you can't get to the nth degree you know six decimal places eighty percent solution is good enough you build up a really strong gut for the 80 solution just yeah i'm a big believer in 80 percent solution i love that if you get 80 percent you can go and then you can always adjust which is exactly what like 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 going to 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 his error is and then i capitalize so my might i don't have to be perfect you know i have to go i need to go to 47 degrees nose high if i just kind of get above 40 then i'm good and i can watch how he reacts and then i can adjust for that and you and you continually work that problem and you chip away because if you start neutral you're just basically chipping away and gaining advantage advantage advantage till eventually you know and if you're really you know fighting you know just guns only rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy kind of world war ii dogfighting type stuff um then it's it's literally it's a it's a very very fast chess game that happens at you know 400 knots 300 knots depends so to get to be one of the rare individuals that uh are able to do that he just had the dream and didn't take no for an answer well you know you know part of it is family you know uh my dad was uh i used to call him a fire ready aim guy you know he'd smack me and then ask me what i did wrong yeah good parenting um back then you know i i joke and and people look because you know at times it was kind of tough you know because he can be pretty demanding but on the other side you know i probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times uh but then everyone else my family you know my mom was really awesome when i was a kid uh my uh my grandfather who is a big big part of it my mom's dad uh who he taught me a lot and you have a question there that we'll talk about uh about him but uh 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 um and uh you know and i figured you know it was the first funeral i ever went to and it was uh 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 there someone asked who died the pope um so a lot of people love them so back to back to my career yeah the first question because i'm getting down on rabbit hole uh no i when i was at the i was gonna i was gonna stay in the marines i really wanted to go man i love the core i think it's uh 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 uh but i went out to the nimitz on my uh freshman cruise after your freshman year at the naval academy you go out on a ship and you you're an enlisted person you get to experience that half when i already was enlisted so it's fine with me because it comes up a lot would you mind saying what the nimitz is what a ship is like yeah so nimitz is uh an aircraft carrier so it's uh four and a half acres of sovereign u.s territory that floats around the u.s oceans does it have weapons on it uh 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 an f-14 squadron and then a couple of a6 squadrons and we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a6 pilots and bn's so it was really a neat experience and i said i want to do that and the way to do it was to not to to go in the navy because there are marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers but most of them are land-based you know to support the marines because they're that that unit that whole unit you know the marine corps is that one service has it all and so when i graduated and i got to uh you know i worked hard through primary and that's where you know i knew missy uh we were actually went through together missy cummings uh we went through primary together and then uh i went to kings we all selected the same time i went to kingsville there was another guy scott wiedemeyer uh 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 that's how besides from school i knew her at school too the long story i got done uh got winged it took me two years to the day from the time i graduated the naval academy until i got my wings and uh through some luck i ended up getting asics's 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 jets as a broad category for for the public yeah that's probably how many fighter jets are side by side like that that was uh 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 and now that those are all gone the a6b's just went away a few years ago and now the e18g growler is the replacement for the a6b 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 and uh the horn is the f-18 yeah is there usually two people in the plane but they're usually like in front and behind in a the modern two-seaters yes uh but most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat so you can see 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 is was it two-seater i was about half and half so i started off an 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 ease and the s but i deployed when i had command of vfa41 i had the two seat they were f squadron so you eventually ended up commanding the the strike fighter squadron i love the the name the black aces what uh is there some parts of that journey that are amazing parts of it that are tough that kind of stand out to me it was one it was a huge honor uh and i got to serve with uh you know i got pulled up because the the guy who the the people that are exos because we fleet up you go from the number two guy to the number one guy so the exo becomes the ceo so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer so i had worked with uh now soon to be vice admiral weitzel uh was the he was commander whitefield at the time was the exo and he really wanted because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the super hornets came into lamore lamore 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 weapon systems operators in the back that are not pilots they're weapon systems operators and there's a difference and kenny is a weapon systems operator and uh kenny knew because of my a6 background that i have a switch that i can go one seat 2c1 c2c because when you fly 2c there's a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take the advantage of the weapon systems operator and it's not that one plus one equals two in that environment because it really there's a huge amount of capabilities that the single seat has and the autonomy that comes for the ability to make decisions quickly and how well the airplane flies but it does it does equal more than one and i would say that one plus one with two people as well as 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 like a human factors perspective and also an ai perspective what's how difficult uh 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 that's correct 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 interesting interplay that you get to learn and also as that change throughout your career i imagine it got gotten better in terms of the automation or perhaps not well i can tell you so that let's say there's a bunch of stars this is no this is this is good this is good and this is i'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tic tac so um 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 uh 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 you're gonna fly in the mountains at night you're gonna be at you know 500 to 1000 feet above the ground ripping through like fog layers because you don't need to see outside you're you're literally 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 so is it similar to like the flair stuff is that is no are you is it this thing is totally radar based now the airplane had a flear ball it's a target recognition and multi-sensor it's called a tram um you're looking at like basically like dots of hard objects no actually what it is is the 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 mountain so if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it the front side is going to be it's going to give you a really bright return and on the back side it's just going to be a giant shadow because you can't see on the other side so the bomb of your navigators would do that and we 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 back side of the mountain which is what the airplane would do and so and sorry to interrupt i'm going to just keep asking dumb questions i apologize but the pilot can you can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the bomb bombardier uh so you're you're actually just control i'm flying the jet i have the throttles the stick and i have a uh 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 the the bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane so he has the range really scoped down because 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 been it's a thing and 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 for let's say we're on a flat plain and there's a mountain out in the distance at 15 miles and we 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 arrangement would pop up and show it and i could see that that bump was moving towards me and then if i turned a little bit you know to go over here i'd see the mountain go over to the right hand side and i could do that but it wasn't like a video game it was it's literally like if you think of the original ataris yeah but you build up i imagine that you start to get uh a really deep sense of like the actual three 3d environment based on that little atari's it's solid you're exactly right and you have to you have to train so there's been studies a matter of fact a lot of the basis and people probably argue with me but it's true there were studies done watching asics crews in our simulators we called 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 they had terrain that they would inject into the system uh but the crew coordination so you get so my first uh my first fleet bombardier navigator who who i'll name him his name's crusado uh he's uh works at apple uh pretty high up bro mit grad i think computer engineering he's scary smart so chris could really work and 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 going to forget but chris and i when we started flying together we were actually the most junior crew in the squadron uh we'd spent a lot of time training and and and chris was amazing at how he could work the system uh one because he was extremely brilliant and he was had that inquisitive mind of oh we could 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 partial so as the bn is looking at his radar scope chris would say i've got rising terrain that's just what they say showing rising terrain at 12 miles and i'd see the little bump and i'd say got it this is going to go to your question on the autonomy and how you work with two heads yes so when you first get together the interaction it's it's it's almost like you have to rehearse it you have to know and you talk in full senses 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 there can be no i can have no doubt that he knows how to do his job because i'm literally looking at this little scope that's not giving me this continuous picture of that mountain moving remember the mountain's here and then it's going to pop up here and then it's going to pop up here because there's gaps in the coverage on how the system was set up remember it's an analog system to where he is telling me like i can't see all the way to the left and he he's got a wider scope on the radar but my screen doesn't show that so he's telling me start a left turn how to avoid a hard turn you know and we would do that so my channel this is all happening quick very quick well you're doing we we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground 70 miles an hour uh well 427 miles a minute okay or eight months between seven and eight miles a minute is what you're flying as fast at night i mean i broke out of clouds i mean i remember him and i flying we're on it's the ir it's called an ir route uh an instrument route that's low they're all around the country there's ir344 that we used to fly which would coast in off of or you'd fly from the land you 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 1000 feet in the mountains and we're in the clouds like you can't see anything and it had to turn off our red lights that flash you know they're called the 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 we're flying we're flying we're flying we break out of that coastal marine layer and poof we break out and it's 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 because 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 uh uh 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 talk and he's got actually he uses the feet that's the weapon systems operator in the back of an f-18f so he's going to run well the radar kind of runs itself now but we have a situational awareness display and it's it's linked to all the other errors just like curiosity what's the situational awareness display because that term comes up a lot think of it as uh think of it as a god's eye view so if you have a the back of the super hornet has well the block twos has about an eight by ten display for the wizzos um that they can look at the pilots is smaller it's down between us it's a six by six between his legs and they're they're getting ready to redesign that boeing is but when you look it'd be like if you put your airplane and you're looking down so all the stuff like if your radar seeing bad guys out in front of you be like looking down going oh i'm right here and now 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 okay 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 uh the 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 with 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 this guy it's sending it out through the link so all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network you know that we don't even see it just says that airplane says hey i'm over here and it tells us and we go oh he's right there and then we can go he's his airplane says oh i'm looking at this airplane this bad guy and it shows us oh he's he's over there and he's looking at this guy i mean it's an incredible amount of uh visual intake because your eye you can hear a lot but when you look down at stuff it's uh you know you can solve the picture really quick the third brain is doing the sensor fusion uh 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 you know 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 there um the ai piece would be more of a control loop because the digital flight controls so the airplane actually they had to make the airplane easier to fly and when i say easy it's relative because people go i could do it because i did it on flight sim it's real life is a lot different in flight sim you have no apparent fear of death you'll do things in simulator that you would never do in real life but uh the the autonomy in the airplane to allow you to manage i mean because you think about it you've got a radar that's feeding you data you've got a targeting pod that's feeding you data all that stuff is hooked to your head because you've got a joint helmet mounted queuing system on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your heads at looking so if i turn my head to the right the radar will actually look to the right the targeting flare will look to the right and oh by the way the backseater 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 want to 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 you know get the because it's a it's a phase array radar now it doesn't really scan uh there's there's all kinds of cool stuff that uh that technology uh brings because if you just if you went back 30 years and said hey or 40 years ago and said hey we're gonna have this helmet and 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 then i can i can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer you know high quality coordinates from a system into a joint you know 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 i'm solving this problem in seconds by minutes or hey i got it we're gonna have to menstruate coordinates and you know 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 mines 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 can what is the ceiling of a current ai technology for controlling the plane like how much does the human contribute uh 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 in flying a fighter jet lane so i would say systems are usually black and white when you write the algorithm for an ai system it's it's it's it's really it's basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing right so you've got this logical math problem math problems are there's there's there's a line it says i can or i can't and it's a 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 maybe yeah i'll try it um so he just can operate within that gray so if you took if you take an airplane and say and i'll just take a hornet for a while a super horn it doesn't matter any airplane and you go here is the flight performance model of the airplane so if you know an uh 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 g's 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 going to fly you know because 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 want to maintain it so that it is flying in a controlled envelope or there are times and you can go back to world war one where people intentionally departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage which is that's where the human goes 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 you know in a way you could probably program it but i still think that when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage um there are things that a human can will do that ai won't and i don't think we've got to the point because how do you how do you map illogical solutions you know most ai is logical it's based on some type of premise when you write the algorithm to control it um 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 uh somehow the the fear of death all of that beautiful mess comes into play like is there a comment you can make on commercial flight like with sully landing uh that plane famously uh versus the simulator all of those discussions is there some well it's it's very it's very similar what i was talking about earlier with the a6 so one is when you're flying with a crew uh their standardization so you gotta remember when sully flew when his first officer that's the co-pilot showed up you know first time they met and this happens all the time in the commercial world you know there's six seven thousand pilots at united airlines you know your chance of flying with the same guy all the time is slim and none we're in the navy we were crude so i had a primary and a secondary wizzo that flew with me for a while for months oh hell yeah for like all of the deployment so because you want to use you have to trust all of those things it increases the capability 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 you have to be melded when you do that you have to have trained to do that job otherwise you're going to be ineffective so when you get to the commercial world and i've got tons of friends at fly commercial there is a standardization like we know that at this point i'm going to put this switch you're going to do that and everyone they know their rules captain's going to do this first officer's going to do this and they know that when the emergency breaks out so in sully's case when they take the birds and they know they've got a problem and if you've listened to the cockpit recordings of him the two of them talking you know 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 is 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 got to think his decision process like they're trying to get him to go into an airport into new jersey and he realizes not happening we're going to put this thing and he made a decision soon enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was going to put this thing in the hudson river and he did it flawlessly 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 um 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 uh you know an aviation is a self-cleaning oven so if you make bad decisions you're you know and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions oh man um so when you look at what he did or the way we train because the the commercial industry and the navy and the air force for all that we have what's called we have emergency procedures that we have to know like engines on fire the first three steps you just have to know what they are right so they know the airline uh same type you know they go hey i know this is they pull the book out because the airplanes are designed they're built to have some time but there's a point where you have to make a decision and you can't second-guess it so when he decided i'm putting this in the hudson river he couldn't all of a sudden halfway through it go well maybe i can get over to that airport he he looked he made a quick assessment this is that 80 solution where you go these are not i'm 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 yeah gone so the jersey airport and going back to laguardia gone yeah 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 the motors and then if i can get a restart now can i take it someplace else he had to make really really fast decisions and then once they as they they go that 80 solution you realize all right i'm going into the hudson there's the 80 percent get the book out let's see if we can get an error star because 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 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 on the hudson but you got to remember every s 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 you know and all these and it's you know you know we used to refer to it in the navy as the pain cave where you're gonna get in because you know that when you get in for your check ride in a simulator that the airplane is going to break you're going to lose hydra and it's sometimes there 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 you know because 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 want to shut the right motor down because that's going to kill my hydraulic system that's good and now i'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics the airplane won't fly so they it's a really 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 going to break out it 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 you know 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 your your cognitive abilities start to shut down your you're running 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 in the cockpit in that time his his mindset was probably i can do this i'm trained i'm going to do the procedures i've practiced this before i've done these things and you know i'm assuming that in his mindset because i never thought about when things were really bad you know if you're having problems with the airplane that you know that i was going to mort you know and and planted into the ground it was always you know maybe it's an ego thing where you think i can do this i mean so you never have you experienced fear during flight like um i mean one one way who just offline mentioning mike tyson he talked about like uh as he's uh walking up to the ring he's like he starts out basically in fear and uh yeah 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 is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could uh defeat me so like that's that's his experience of overcoming fear but do you uh did you experience any kind of thing like that or is that or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and then you just go to the instinctual 80 solution i wouldn't say i was never afraid i think that would be i can't 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 it's usually especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the weather sucks and the deck's moving you know the ship's going up and down because it will scare lover living shit out of you can i say that you can definitely say that so it's about landing or take off that that is if you even they used to wire people up they did it during vietnam you know guys that go flying missions you know when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and people were getting shot down a lot uh the highest 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 for a civilian i guess like me it 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 oh yeah 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 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 because you what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights because it is so dark you know you can get outside you get outside 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 uh 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 uh we have two systems uh you know there was a there's an automatic system that's actually uh 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 it's not stabilized at all that and i've been where you can actually watch the needle and the and the attack hand needle will move there's all kinds of stuff moving because the base that it's all sitting on is doing this and ships don't just go up and down they 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 um so and it's i mean i remember landing as i was with chris uh sado and uh chris and i we're off the uss ranger which is now decommissioned it's sitting getting turned into razor blades um we're flying the old a6 and we come in and it was off of san diego and it was just an ugly night because san diego always has a marine layer that is about 1200 feet 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 caught the six-pack so it's right in front of the island so if you see an aircraft carrier of the island and the number of the ship on it we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area so it's like you get front row seats to the concert and and this this this ea 6b comes in you know ugly pass he ends up catching a one wire which is the first one you never want to 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 ea 6 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 a cross i mean i could see the front of my airplane his airplane and then it was just white because of the water being blown off the deck and i'm shaking and i i i'll never forget i looked over at chris and i said oh my god i go hey dude man ten thousand foot runway looks really good right now and i go and i'm shaking my hands like this and i said i'm not even this is i'm not faking this dude i know that's literally i cannot stop shaking i said that scared the evil out of me yeah um but you but it scares you afterwards you don't during it you're not i'm not you don't have time to think about that you're doing it you got to do this you know kind of the quote from tom hanks and uh what's that the girls baseball movie where he goes there's no crying in baseball oh yeah that's our joke there's no crying in naval aviation i said you can fly around and cry all you want at night but you know there's only one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it so you try all you want wipe the tears away you know putting on your big kid pants and it's it's time to it's time to you know man up and land atlanta jet sorry for the romantic question but going back to the the kid that dreamed to fly what's it like to fly an airplane what it looks incredible like as a human like a descendant of vape 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 you know i'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like how was i said the greatest job on the planet i said you know you it's it's an office with a view because you're sitting in a glass um you you can do uh you know it's like roller coasters you go oh it does all these cool stuff so we take people flying every once awhile and it's like oh yeah i like roller coasters like you know take any roller coaster the coolest roller coaster you've ever been on and multiply it by a thousand i said it's an experience uh you know to put your body under you know you know the jets rated at seven and a half but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it over stresses depends on fuel weight so i mean you routinely get up there towards eight g's um 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 and stuff like that but uh would i trade it i mean it was a childhood dream and how many people get to do that you know professional i want to be a nfl you know and you end up to the nfl which is a very small percentage but well i want to fly jets and and to fly you know at the time when i was flying the super hornets that we had 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 going to get delivered to me in a couple of months that i'm going to fly so uh just i mean the whole of it is it's incredible i i it's i'll tell you what when i left when i decided to walk away uh yeah did i 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 and you're an airwing 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 because 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 because i watched them when they were little and now you know one of them who was good friends uh is 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 joe's a top gun you know and i'm like that's cool because you know i went there and i knew him he would come down to my house and now to see these kids that are because typically military breeds military you know because the kids grew up in it i mean and i the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind so it it disqualifies you for being a pilot being a seal because he he talked about doing that because he's an incredible swimmer and he likes doing that stuff and water polo player but he's you know both my kids are well my daughter is a doctor and my son's in his third year so but there's a i suppose i mean from my perspective a bittersweet handover of this incredible experience of flying to the younger generation so you don't you told yourself you're not going to miss it you miss it uh 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 going to 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 ego i had the opportunity and i think as automation moves on especially with ai that you know when will 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 uh attributable platforms that you can go oh we can because if you don't put a man in the box or a person because there's a lot of incredibly talented women that do this too um so i'll just say that as person yeah so we say man and he we mean both men and women because offline you've told me about a lot of incredible women that flown so i had i had three three female actually four one of them didn't fly anymore she actually lives right around here she she's uh she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn't fly anymore uh 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 is sarah incredible and then i had uh paige who ended up taking command uh she got out of fighters and went into other platforms and she was a commanding officer and then the other one is a teacher's leadership and she is all three of them actually all four of the women that were direct uh i'm not forgetting i don't think i'm forgetting someone uh incredibly incredibly talented uh and a great addition to the reading room so anyone who gets into the oh you know women can't do it that's all total horse crap you know 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 woman in it it really comes down to uh stick and throttle the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be where the airplane would be if you're fighting another one you have to be able to think fast anyone has those characteristics uh can do it and then i think most important besides that there has to be a desire yeah and i'm not saying that everyone if you took because we used to track so when i ran we call it the rag it's the replacement air group it's where so the the super hornet training squadron there's two of them there's one on the east coast 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 hundred students right so everyone goes ah it's funny to hear students talk because oh he's awesome he's super if you took the hundred there's three at the top of the list that are just naturally gifted aviators they're well well well above average 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 kind of average sometimes it's just the way your mind works not everyone is good at everything if you took the 94 of them 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 because they're going to 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 uh piper warriors low wing to see can you are you adaptable to this and there's an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark then you're good to go and then they put you into primary it's kind of like a it's like a pre-check you know like the preset the pre-sat to go hey how am i going to do on the sat it's 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 uh 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 the than that of an aviator very much and here's why yeah so we look at uh let's look at a tall building let's look at one world trade center in new york because that's everyone knows what it looks like big tall building um it's what maybe 1800 feet tall even the burjal dubai which is like what 20 700 feet tall it's not that big so a super hornet to do a what a split s is which is i'm flying i'm just going to roll the airplane upside down and then i'm going to do basically a c the letter c i'm going to go in the top and out the bottom so and i'm just basically a vertical displacement of the airplane so i'm going from high to low it's very very tight and it doesn't in about roughly about 2 500 feet give or take a little so you go that is that is a really tight vertical turn yeah for example the a6 in order to do that was about 9 000 feet and we look at a building that's 2000 feet high and think that is tall right all right so in an 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 i see 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 want to start to flatten out because that's where we're comfortable yeah it's very profound do you still think in like stacks of 2d layers or no or do you do you truly start to think in that third dimension like the rich 3d world of uh like a fighting like do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3d nature you do because you have to project where you're going to be so you have to know the performance of the airplane knowing that hey if i do this maneuver that i am going to go it's it's kind of like when i when i talk about when we were chasing the tic tac so the tic tac's coming up and i'm in 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 going to do a vertical displacement i'm going to go like this i'm going to cut across a circle and i'm not going to him i'm going out in front of him i'm going over here because i know that by the time i get through this maneuver that's where he's going to be and i'm trying to you know basically join up on him but i also i also had to look at it to go do i have enough altitude to do this because what i didn't if we're here and i do this i'm going to end up over here and he's going to be above me and then you know i have to get that energy back to get up to him and when you're doing a max performance it's a trade so you have this is this is really important when you're when you're fighting airplanes and you're really max performing so when you go to an air show and you see the air demo he's literally playing with it he's got a finite amount of energy right he can add some with the motors and stuff but you're what you're really doing is it's a trade-off and you can trade off kinetic energy speed for altitude which gives you potential energy the other 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 what doesn't bleed energy but i know if i do a real tight that 2500 foot split s that it's going to cost me energy so if i enter the split s at 200 knots and i do it right i'm going to come out at the bottom at probably 200 knots although i lost 2500 feet of potential energy i converted that to that to kinetic and that kinetic was transitioned and bled off the wings in order for me to get that high performance turn 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 going to pull away drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds right it's it's overall energy package and that's that you've got to be constantly evaluating where you're at and this is that 80 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 is just incredible i know a million people want me to talk about tic tac and i i definitely will but let me ask the one last uh ridiculous uh uh subjective question what's the greatest plane ever made in you don't history 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 when you get into history of it you know how they actually built uh 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 it's an incredible engineering marvel i think that like the x-15 you know by the way this sr sorry to interrupt sr-71 still holds the the speed record for of 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 2500 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 you know some mod notch it's actually slow for the airplane it's you know you're getting you know it's kind of like it's not you know there's maneuvering speeds you know that if i hit a certain speed and a super hornet that i have the full capability of the airfoil if i'm below that speed i'm going to stall the airfoil before i get to the maximum g okay so when you look at something like that you go 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 so thin you know just like the x15 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 ketostatic system to show that you're going 300 knots you're you're screaming i mean the fastest i ever got was i was with the uh well soon to be vice admiral white so we had taken a check flight and uh and i got it up to 1.78 i got a super horn up to mach 1.78 and it was and we were started by pebble beach too and then it what's that feel like or is it when you get that fast it start to me it got a little bit weird because 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 um or no that okay maybe not i always want to push the limit you know it's like how fast i could have got it going faster it was it was literally still accelerating when i stopped but i had it was fuel limited and space limited because i you know i'm off the coast of california big sur and i'm going and i can see pebble beach out in the distance uh you know the whole monterey peninsula just going 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 because we got to go to the exit point for the area and i'm trying to get it down below to subsonic and there's a bunch of things that are disabled like the speed brakes that normally we pop out 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 um so it's just it's crazy it's incredible that a human can do this yes uh human can engineer that the system which allows another human to control that system it's to me it's it's uh i think it's just it's one 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 do you guys romanticize the different planes um we would see it flying when i was flying hornets because we i the west coast flies in it's called r2508 which is covers the navy china lake area and edwards it's a huge area it's it's actually i think the we had a guy from switzerland come out because they were they had hornets and he's like this is bigger than our whole country because it's a pretty big area in california that you fly but you would see the sr-71s they had a loop because nasa was flying them out of palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards washington state and montana and they do a loop and so you'd see them coming back down they'd descend out of you know above 60 000 you'd see them you they get contrails you know the white lines behind airplanes they'd come down and hit the tanker and they'd go back up so it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying uh but uh you know i think with money age um the advent of satellites you know because they're everywhere now i mean you've got commercial companies putting satellites up uh how much of that need was really there because you gotta remember when those things started in the 50s sputnik wasn't flying around you know it was it was the u2 and the sr-71 that were out there doing that work um so at the time it was needed it was at the if you think about it really it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time yeah i mean literally we have yet to pass that and you also ask 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 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 uh 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 so let me just lay out i think it's easier than you telling the story maybe me and my dumb simpleton waste trying to explain the stories i understand it and then maybe you can correct me so on uh november 10 2004 the uss princeton which is one of the the carriers that's cruiser it's a it's a cruiser it's a cruiser so you can't land on the uh no helicopter 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 that incredible spy one system phased array four panels so looks in quadrants perfect so they they started noticing on november 10th that there is a few objects flying around at 28 000 feet with speed of uh with what's i guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an hour i don't know what that in knots but uh out 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 i you flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white tic-tac-shaped object with no wings flying in ways you've never thought possible and in some interview somewhere you said i think it was not from this world so there's a mysterious aspect to this object this entire situation uh there's videos involved the video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver receiver there's also a visible light so you can switch yeah i mean tv mode as a tv mode so that gives you visible light and then it has ir mode and uh 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 uh go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something 14-15 uh 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 in the degree of weirdness but uh the differences is actually on the the east coast of 2014 case very few people have spoken about it and even in your situation very few people have spoken about it so there's a mystery to it but it's in some sense 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 uh it's a mysterious i mean it truly is a ufo in the sense that uh uap uh what is it i i 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 uh on our mission to go train uh and they canceled the mission and they set 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 their f-18s 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 and um so when you say eyeballs you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing yeah so so as we're flying out we get we get vectored they come up and tell us hey we're gonna cancel training this is the uss princeton so this is the siege's cruiser so we're talking to one controller um who is like hey sir first you ask what ordinance we have on board and i laugh because we don't carry live ordinance in training typically because batch 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 catom9 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 so you put a wrench in 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 wingmen 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 since we're going out they're calling ranges they're called bra calls bearing range in 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 i say so we got our radars we had 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 uh 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 i said sir we've been tracking these things for about two weeks that's we had been at sea for two weeks because this is the first time we've had planes airborne we want you to go see what these are gotcha so they kind of interrupt the mission to say check it out so we start driving out there and uh 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 because radars don't see everything they're 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 yeah yeah so they call merge plot when we say merge plot to us it means he's right around something's around you get your head out so we're not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizards the wizards can look but everyone 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 because he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up now keep in mind the ship is like probably 60 miles away so it can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go hey it's the the thing is 40 feet off the water the panel can 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's it at so as we're looking around we see now 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 owned a sailboat it was that five to ten 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 coming it was the perfect date on a sailboat how many miles out do you see like seven like you see just it's a clear day it's 50 it's unrestricted visibility you can see literally all the way to horizon it's just clear it's nothing and we're basically off the coast 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 price i don't know eighty hundred i don't know but somewhere out it's pretty far off the coast perfect 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 gaps 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 ships just kind of barely be moving when we land on it it makes it actually easier if the ship has to move where it's got a big weight because it has to make its own wind when we land which is the day that it was this day you go oh okay and it creates what's called we call the verbal but when the air flows across the flight deck it drops behind the ship you know and then it kicks back up so when you're coming board to land it's going to make you go up a little bit and then you're going to fall and you've got to con you've got to anticipate that to stand glideslope so we're pretty 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 if you put a piece of land a sea mount below the surface like you know even 20 feet below the surface that'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 the top and yeah and that's where you get the white so what happens is at sea when you get a sea mount 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 in 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 will 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 see we don't see an object because there's all kinds of oh they saw this they saw another craft below the way we didn't see anything below the water we just saw white water but the white water and i like to shape it you can say it was 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 waves breaking over the top and you're going to get white water where the plane is at you'd see this this kind of shape so it looks like a cross so as we're looking down off the right side the back seater in the other airplane jim says this is that talking in parcels 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 do you see that essentially so we see the white water and that's what draws our eyes down or otherwise we'd have never seen it so we see this i would love to see the look on your face when you see that and then we see this little white tic tac because we're about 20 000 feet above it and it's doing it's going basically north south and then east west north and so it's abrupt it's very abrupt so it's not uh like a helicopter if a helicopter is 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 because there's inertia yeah 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 doesn't feel intuitive to you at all of the things you've seen in the past so as a pilot the first thing you think is it's a helicopter right right so you go oh what is because 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 the water comes up besides because the downdraft you know like a thunderstorm will do that it pushes the air down and then it has to come out the sides so you see it and you go well there's no 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 it's going up just kind of so now we're like 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 because now we get we get a different perspective so she's up here and i'm down here as i'm descending she can watch because right now all i'm watching is the tic tac she can watch me and the tic tac so she gets a god's eye view of everything that's going on which is really important you can you'll hear people say it's high cover whatever she's watching me which is it's perfect as the story goes on because it 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 because if it's 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 it's an easy descent i'm doing about 300 knots which is a really good air speed for the airplane for maneuvering because i have i have everything available to me at that speed so i'm coming down and as i get to 12 o'clock as the tic takes doing this it literally it's like it's aware of us and it just goes blue and it kind of points out towards the west and starts coming up so now it's obviously knows that we're there whatever this thing is and knows over there so as we drive around it's coming up and i'm just coming down we're just i'm just watching it now you remember this whole thing is like this is like five minutes this is not like we saw it it was gone or oh i saw lights in the sky and they were gone we watched this thing on a crystal clear day with four trained observers watch this thing fly around so we're like 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's about 15. it's just estimating so you can see it's just really easy to set because so what's 15k 15 000 feet i thought it was 8 000 uh the the other airplane ends up about yeah okay so they're still about twenty thousand feet so they're all right slowly and i'm descending they're staying up there so i'm kind of doing this okay as they drive around 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 i've got enough altitudes i'm gonna i'm gonna cut across the circle and i tell the guy in my back seat dude i'm gonna i'm gonna do this he's like go for it skip because 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 i'm gonna meet it and i'm driving and uh i get to probably it's i'm probably about a half mile away which you think well a half miles pretty far a half mile in aviation isn't it's nothing that's i mean you can tell there's a pilot in an airplane you can see all kinds of stuff at a half mile you can see pretty good detail so i'm like right there and it's coming across my nose so now i'm basically pointing back towards the east so i'm cutting across because 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 goes it just accelerates and disappears so it's this happens at around estimating 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 it accelerates and literally in less than you know probably less than a half second it just goes and it's gone and so we're like and i the first thing is dude did you guys see it the other airplane's like it's gone we don't we have no idea where it's at so we kind of spin around rook i go let's see what's down here and i turn around we're looking for the white water we can't the white water's gone there's nothing it's literally all blue so now you go and i remember telling the guy in my back seat like a dude i'm i don't know about you but i'm pretty weirded out because this is i mean you know 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 well let's just go back you know because now i got to put on my real hat which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to you know overseas so we got to get our training done so that's my mindset especially as a ceo because i got to get i got it training out of the flight time because i'm responsible to do that so hey let's go back and the the the guy who's going to be the bad guys is the ceo of the marine squadron and uh so cheeks is at the end he's listening to all this happen you know because he's just like because he they when he first went out they were gonna do him but the little hornets the legacy hornets 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 cat point down south and we're going to send we'll pass this off to the supermarkets what's the cap point uh 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 each think 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 set reset points okay so you're talking to him he's he's he's listening to the he's just listening we don't talk to him at all he's just listening he just dials up because they know that we all know the frequency so he's listening to what's going on because he's like because they cancel training so what else is he gonna do he's just gonna hang out there and do circles while he's waiting him and his wingmen so they're just 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 because we're talking to the the kid on the princeton the uh the uh they're called os's 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 gonna believe this but that thing is at your cap it showed back up it just popped up you know 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 uh we get out there we never see it we never see it again uh we do what we need to do we come back to the ship of course now we're like oh this is gonna be we're you know i told i told him i go dude you know we're gonna catch we're gonna catch shit for this when we get back to the ship word's gonna get out and we're just gonna catch maximum shit and we did yeah and it's kind of that joking you know so the ship plays movies we have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies so they repeat because there's a day check and a night check so the same movies in the morning and night play so you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat which drives my wife crazy because i'll watch stuff on tv that way too i'll be like oh hey i've seen this and i'll jump into a movie in the middle and then i'll pick it up later and i'll see the beginning and i'll put it all together because that's how we have to do it because we're so busy well the movies became and i it was men in black aliens uh independence day definitely gonna catch some shit oh let me just ask some dumb questions so just take him because it's whatev whatever the heck you saw whatever the heck happened it's you know one of the most fascinating things um events in recent history so whatever it was it's interesting to talk about it 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 see you saw at some point xy and then uh somebody in the princeton said you're not going to believe the sir it's at your cap point that 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 if you don't no one you know you don't we don't tell it it's we don't broadcast it we have a waypoint in the system but i don't know maybe it knew where we were going because we used the same one day after day after day but it it obviously knew but you never saw it there never saw their chad when he took off when he got the video we landed we told them hey look we just we just chased this thing they're like when i go chased it and they're like why go dude and i told him i said dude get video and he goes so and that's how he is he's like i'm gonna go and he he was he he was determined 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 flare tape that's the targeting pod the forward-looking infrared receiver um i'll probably overlay the video when he goes out it's uh 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 the azimuth and elevation on the left one so this is called the as 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 taken this it's taking a cone because a radar really looks left and right from a point and it squares it out so the entire bottom of the scope that we look at is us because they do this they square it off so so he goes out and when he first sees it he gets a radar return on it because when he's not trying to lock it so the radar'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 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 because it's it's sitting in one spot in space he locks it up when he goes to lock it up now he's putting a bunch of energy on it but 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 in the direction that it's going okay the radar smart enough that when the signal comes back if it's been messed with it will tell you it'll give you indications that i'm being jammed so that's all it is is you send the signal out something it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever and it sends it back and the radar was smart enough to go that is not a return that i'm expecting something's messing with me i'm being jammed and it shows you and it puts strobes up it gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff so you can immediately well it does it goes full into it it's being jammed in about every mode you can possibly see because everything comes up and the the this aspect gets long it's all kinds i don't want to get into details but you can tell it's being jammed so and as you said on rogan by the way that jamming is an act of war active jamming isn't when you actively jam another platform yes it's technically an active work 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 controller so they can control all the sensors and they can just toggle around and do stuff so he can 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 because it goes down the line of sight because all the systems are hooked together you can decouple them but they're going to automatically couple up so when he castles over he it's a switch looks like a castle switch was a castle so when he moves that thing to the left and he swaps the displays out and he says instead of looking at the radar i want to look at the targeting pod he sees it on the targeting pod because the targeting pods already looking there and now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out he's just receiving 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 what those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up let's do some v vision based tracking that's exactly what it is um so that's the video he goes through changes zooms changes the momentum 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 um so he goes through all those things 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 um green so that the video has been out for it it actually was on youtube for years and before the government released it it was leaked at 2007. 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 because 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 yeah um and he says hey i can remember the email hey skip does this look familiar and i look at i'm like how the hell did that get on strangeland.com so the next thing you know it ends up on youtube which was cool because you can send a youtube link to someone you don't send strangeland.com to someone because you don't know what you're going to get it's like googling kittens yeah um 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 they go dude what's the coolest thing you ever saw flying you know it's kind of like you were asking what it's like and i go oh dude i chased the 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 my 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 you had to have faith in him he had to have faith in me you know they're they become like your brother yeah um and these are guys that literally you know i don't talk to him on a regular basis like chris who works at apple if if chris called me up tomorrow and said dude i need help i need this i'd be like all right let's figure this out and let's do it because it's they're like family you do it and most navy guys we don't we're not we don't send letters to each other weekly 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 it's like old times and it's it's amazing how fast this happens so incredible so i'm out to dinner with matt um 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 fightersweep.com it's a blog site so paco's obsessed like he is way into ufos yeah so paco calls me up he says dude i was talking to maddie that's what we call him he goes i was talking to maddie 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 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 i go hang on hang on i gotta put you on speakerphone i go what do you put me on speakers 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 store so he calls me up again he says hey i got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff like he wrote about that we call him the shit hot break that's a guy that when you're land on a carrier comes and turns and gets ready to land really fast like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and uh one of the guys when we were junior officers on the uss ranger one of the apartments the other squadrons guy nasty and nasty was notorious for coming in in the tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break right so he he he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with nasty and there's another guy or mav was our uh one of our landing signals officers for the air wing it just it was it's just it's a good article on how this was and how you know it it kind of forms you in naval aviation's kind of being kind of a part of the club so he's like i gotta write about this thing i'm like what are you guys i gotta write about i go all right i go because at first i would say no i'm like dude i don't want this out there just so you haven't really before then talked about it much because my wife didn't even really know the whole story what just as a comment is it just because you caught some no uh it was just i'll tell you what three days we we had the incident for about two days they played the goofy movies there 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 world protecting the nimitz battlegroup type stuff it's just funny shit like that yeah um so that was 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 because this is important because there's all kinds of rumors there's a group of folks no one ever came out in suits to talk to us nobody looking like me no came out on a uh no no one came out of the helicopter no one came out on an airplane you know you get oh i i was told to turn over this classified what's funny is all the cos and several are still in the navy uh there's one that is a he i think he just finished up he was a captain of an aircraft carrier you know so he'll end up making admiral and all that stuff those guys are all my friends i talk to them daily just just to clarify so just for people who don't know there's a story that both on the nimitz and the princeton folks in a helicopter landed they showed up they took the data quote-unquote so all the sort of recordings associated with this incident and they took it and presumably deleted it there's a kind of story to that and then uh from what i've seen you said that you believe just like we were talking about offline that jokes spread faster than uh or just rumors spread faster than anything on on these ships uh that it might have been a joke that started and uh well they did so here's here's the joke yeah so they had come down right we had the tapes um and they were chad's tapes so we use those tapes over and over again you know they're 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 use 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 the secure the intelligence guys the intel officers came down from what's called civic it's cvic which is carrier intel center came down and said hey we need the tapes these guys are going to come they're going to come and get them this is so we're like i'm like oh whatever you know so we hand them the tapes and then someone because 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 they're messing with you they're playing a joke so i said oh let's see how well that goes because you know i'm i'm a ceo and they're not and uh so i went down to civic and uh it was probably he was a lieutenant or a lieutenant jg so he's way junior to me and i said hey uh i want my tapes back and he looks at me and i go i know you guys are pulling my leg i know you there's no one came out and i go and you have about 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 because it's not going to go well i said because this is bullshit and i need those tapes then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet opened it up they weren't a safe he opened up a filing cabinet and pull them out and hand 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 flair video is 10 minutes long and there's some one of these petty officers 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 uh i apologize if i say stupid things please correct me but you you have mentioned that like on rogan i think that you watched it on you know on a bigger screen it felt like it was higher definition so let me ask the the question is there a higher definition version do you think of the flair video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the um because 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 you know someone pulled off of a secret it looks like a rack you know there's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on youtube um no it's it's just like you know 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 high eight tapes that's basically pulled off the back of the display so it's not filmed with cameras it's literally a digital feed it's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape that's how the recorders work now it's actually digital to digital it's not even on tapes anymore it's it's a digital recording system but we were still in that process of slowing up because originally we had little cameras here that shine so if the light hit it would wash out the displays so this it's a pretty good feed um when you put it on so we're instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor whatever i'm looking at it on a like a 19-inch because it was still normal tvs back there we had just put flat screens in the ready room that i had bought so we could watch movies so because a nice huge 19-inch screen it says maybe 20. it's nice wow that's huge gigantic um hey i can get for like 50 bucks you can get like 60 engines this is 2005. yeah um so so you look at this 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 little things out of the bottom to the bottom information so when you see it because he's coming almost co-altitude with it you can see the bottom of it it looks like little you know like if you look at a cessna there's a little antennas hanging on the bottom kind of like that there's two little things on the bottom there's nothing on the top there was no plume no ir no 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 the radar display uh which that that really raises the classification level especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed um you know matter of fact when they did the unofficial official investigation in about 2 000 and let me think about 2009 um i had gotten a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said hey told me who he was he's still in the government um i'm friends with him and he said hey we're going to investigate your tic tac thing this is literally five years later yeah five years later and i said okay whatever and he did a pretty good job i caught the unofficial official report because um it was really never official it wasn't but i'll give you the history of why i say that and why it never came out in foia requests so he does the report he sent me the report and all he said is hey i'm going to send 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 there's a few versions of it unredacted and i'm very protective of the other people that were involved in this so jim has talked but he's off the grid he doesn't talk to anyone now the pilot of his airplane she has come out on unidentified but they don't release her name although people are starting to do it and she's had weird shit happen around her house she's got kids you know so i'm very protective of her um and i've told people like jeremy and george if i know that the names ever came from you i will never talk to you again about this and jeremy's been really good about it and so is george and then but george george knew the names were because he had he got the report from senator reid um 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 um so it's it's you you need to protect because not everyone wants people knocking i don't want people knocking on my door and you know and there's rumors oh you talk to everyone i think you're about the 23rd person that i've talked to total yeah and that includes uh you know the the newspapers and stuff and i've been selective because there's so much i mean if i turn down like i turned down russian tv uh i can give you her name when we're done here 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 i'm pretty protect i'm very particular i mean the reason i'm talking to you is because i knew we would have a conversation that wasn't based just on the tic tac in the incident but we can actually talk about some of the science and some of the theoretical to get into to get more people involved to go because i think there's you know and when you talk to you know lou elizondo or chris mellon you know the group at ttsa you know that that whole thing was that's to the stars uh academy okay that's the tom delonge group that got started so and you go well uh you know because i think tom has caught a lot of crap for this but he's actually when you talk to him he's he's he's very smart and i asked 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 that'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 under secretary of defense for intelligence and he's part of the melon you know dynasty you know from carnegie mellon type very very smart he knows he he he definitely knows how the government works because 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 uh tucker carlson about a month ago month and a half ago i asked i i he texts me i i texted him tom lu to go hey because they were like you got to do it because i turned to i turned tucker down a couple times before and his uh his producer had called me and i'm like all right i'll do it because those guys like you gotta you gotta do this for us so from my perspective just to give you some context so um 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 the people who listen to this include you know uh faculty fellow faculty at mit and major universities and it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from from the scientific community a lot of people especially when they hear your story are like wow this is really interesting but you you don't even know you 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 uh properly you know to try to communicate try to uh interpret this in in the best way possible from a scientific perspective and i i just would love to remove stigma from this subject uh well i think that's the first step we have done in this country an absolutely terrible job with these things so you go and i joke you know go back to roswell so the first reports that came out of roswell was we have this crash flying saucer that's literally what came out and then magically the next day it's a weather balloon and they're showing you 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 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 i'm not a you i'm not a ufo guy i'm not a junkie if you ask me do i believe that there's life outside of earth i would say you probably have a better chance of winning the mega ball lottery than 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 because it 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 has shown 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 uh life well we we as humans you know and even more as americans we have this hubris about us that says are it and you go not so much we're not so intelligent um because we are it's just how we learn so you know our main mode of transportation and what people figured out you know 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 didn't you figured out uh the ability to create a gravity field or you used you know because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger you know catapults on ships were steam powered and the new gerald ford is electromagnetic roller 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 you know sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support theory you know we are just now proving you know recently theories that einstein had where people actually joked about them and now we actually have the technology to prove that gravity can bend light you know we have proven that so you look at that when you go well does that mean that you know 70 years ago einstein was wrong or eight 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 you know and i've seen and that's just a hundred years and and the kind of things that can happen if you say look what we've done in the last 20 years yeah it's crazy all right let me direct because it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective from a science perspective you're i mean you've spoke you've been brave in you know telling your story not some dramatic thing but just telling the things you've seen did it encounter uh did it impact your career is that why more people haven't come out like uh you've mentioned uh 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 uh 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 just divorce the two little green men and you know and i've talked to lou elizano about this you know and 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 you know projects now louis and she mentioned was a program director he ran the a-tip program at the pentagon and a-tip was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of uh on ufo's uap 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 atip and the original stuff that atip did was foia exempt and people how do you know that i go because i stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are did literally i watched the dod memo that said it and it was signed so he was one so that's why the that's why i call it the unofficial official report it was never it was never releasable because people go oh i put in a foil request and i didn't get that i go well just because you put an effort requesting get it i go because how much how much time do you think that guy is going to spend to get you the information that you requested if you can't find it i actually got called by the navy i had a commander in a navy call me about uh right before the article came out in the new york times it was this was starting to come back and she had called me because there's been there was a foia request for stuff about the nimitz incident and i said do you know of anything she called me she goes do you know of anything else besides the the situation reports that come off the ship you know 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 you know 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 um so she called me and said is there anything out there and i said officially out there she said yes i said i don't know anything i knew of the unofficial official report which is that one but i'm not you know if you don't know about it i'm not going to tell you because it's not my job and nor did i care i mean did in that whole situation you mentioned lube i mean did you think about your impact your career like just to get back to the question did do you think others other pilots other thing 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 you know especially when i do even the tv shows you know because i've been on a couple shows when you look at it you know they come to my house and they film me for two hours yeah and then what you see on the screen is five minutes well and yeah 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 journals they're not thinking i mean so so here's the thing i've 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's not gonna push the story forward in an interesting way not the story but the actual investigation of uh perhaps one of the most amazing things that humans have witnessed in history like you it might have been nothing who knows what you witnessed might have been from a sort of debunking perspective might have been some kind of trick of mine if you and others have hallucinated something it could be some simple explanation but possibly it was uh 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 it's true for others we it's just it's human nature yeah if we if we can't if we see something that we can't explain then sometimes if you just yeah maybe it's just me and you let it go away and you don't think about it you know maybe it'll just you know it's it's you ignore it um the other side is the inquisitive mind that says well what was that and i wanna i wanna dig more into it you know and if you you you look at it or you're going against the norm um you can get ostracized you know and if you look at you know einstein's the perfect example i mean he started coming up with some of his theories some of the top physicists in the world were like dude you're you're a nut job and he's he's literally proving them but he didn't have you know he proved him 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 like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that einstein made with uh with his theories it's fascinating but yes at the time it's kind of crazy what he's saying yeah if you look at it back at the time don't we 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 you know but one of the challenges is your eyewitness one of the challenges is you're essentially an eyewitness account like we don't have good data we have very limited data of um of the incident that you've experienced so let me kind of dig in let me just ask some questions of uh 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 the eyewitness account that you saw with your own eyes what's the what can you say about the shape of the thing is there interesting aspects outside of the tic tac like is there any appendages is there um some texture to it that no smooth white tic tac no we don't you don't see there's no 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 um but remember we're looking at the original tape so there's not there's basically no degradation but when you saw your eyes there's no kind of appendages no no 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 uh did you i mean you chased it so we flew close to it relatively speaking was there did you feel any wake like any did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction like aerodynamically no nothing nothing so uh another aspect of it there's an interesting thing you've developed a feel for for objects in the air did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival or did it let me ask a few questions around it so did you did it feel like the thing was surprised did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability did uh and did it what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a um an air fight against uh sort of like a i don't know a a foreign jet so one i think it i think it knew we were there when we showed up it's just it's me uh 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 because you move closer to the deer then it goes oh it's there and i'm going to react or i'm going to move so as we were up high and it's down doing whatever it was doing um you know which i don't know someone asked what do you think 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 show up to talk to us but maybe he's talking to the dolphins maybe it was whatever you know because it was hanging around that white water and i don't know if was there something there was a seamoth we just didn't find it again i don't know but once we started the descent and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up and it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming up just you know you figure i'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12. uh where i cut across the 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 um but uh you know was it was 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 uh especially as long as much times i'd spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff i felt totally it was like a safe zone i mean i i felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most part you can't if you're in the airplane and you feel scared it's not the job for you you have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now yes you know i am inside i have the stick i have the throttles i've got my wizard in the back seat he's running all the displays we are a team we're in the state-of-the-art airplane you know brand new you feel pretty good and then you get something that you know can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did like it was like no big deal you know for an airplane if you just put me from a standstill let's just say slow flight just get me at 100 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 like just did it like it was like no big deal yeah you mentioned that like you kind of your reaction to it was uh it like it's something that you would love to fly almost uh 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 because another perspective on it is it was uh 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 an a physical hard object that would could be flied oh yeah yeah i think all four of us will say the same thing it wasn't it wasn't this was not because 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 you know and they're you know she's probably not directly above me she's kind of hanging out watching this whole thing happen you know you're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue you know if you've ever been at sea and i don't mean like coastal i mean like when you get out at sea the ocean is the bluest it's incredible um you know you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean you got pretty high contrast and for this thing just to disappear uh it's it's was i'm telling you i would i mean i know we we all have the same uh recollection of what happened you know there's some details because it's so long ago but for the most part we know what we saw and we all came back and looked at each other like what the hell was that what if i mean do you think about the thing under the water that's not often talked about if there's something under the water couldn't have been something gigantic like it could be what like do you ever see this big ship 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 because the abyss anything could be under there i like there's not enough focus on that perhaps because there's no visibility but is it is there anything interesting to say about the possibility there was anything underneath there it could be i mean think about if you're going to hide on this planet where's what's the least explored spot on the planet two-thirds of it's the ocean you there's there's there's literally i mean come on the the the malaysia airplane the the triple seven it was a triple seven that crashed you know they turned they didn't go where they're supposed to and they just disappeared and they've been searching for it and they found pieces of it but you would think there's large objects that you know when that thing hit the water depending on how it broke up there's big pieces that would you'd find something they haven't found anything except what floated um 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 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 uh 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 that humans don't really understand is it uh like i said some perception cognition that led you uh 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 uh like an ice cloud or something like that what do you think it was well it's definitely i don't think it's an ice cloud because ice clouds don't fly around yep 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 uh their experience like plasma you can do plasma and you go i can see it but it's really not you know it's plasma i don't think so um so you would see distortions i think is it moved maybe not i mean i'm not the theoretical physicist in some you know you know i'm not in mit uh i would say no i mean it looked for from all my experience and and i had quite a bit of it when this happened no i i think it was a it was a hard object it be 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 fought behind us and never it was never offensive on us it never did that it just mirrored us so as we're coming out it's just like you know you're you're kind of you know you said you do martial arts you know or wrestling you know you see people out on the the uh when they get into the ring especially with collegiate wrestling because my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler so i de facto became a wrestler because he he beat me up every night yeah we joke i talk to him literally probably three four times a week um but you know you see wrestlers when they get out they kind of you're kind of feeling each other as you walk 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 going to 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 but i could have just watched it i mean my one regret out of the whole thing is uh we have a camera in our helmet in the joint helmet there's a little camera but we never use it because it's nauseating to watch because you've ever put a gopro on someone's head where they're looking around like this all the time it'll it'll nauseate you so we never turn that on and all you know it's the one thing i didn't do is reach down and hit the switch yeah you know and then we didn't go back and because our tapes didn't have anything because we didn't get it on radar um because i tried to lock it up because i can move the radar with my head but i couldn't it wouldn't lock the radar would lock and so so then the question is and this is unanswerable but let's try did you 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 you if you'd asked me in 2004 i just said i don't know if you ask me now so we're coming up on 16 years ago for a technology like that you know and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it because 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 you know and i understand uh you know and i don't speak for the united states government 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 you know is it 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 know you talk about you know are we gonna go to mars well if you have something that has the ability to go because 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 in 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 so the whole the whole of it indicates of a kind of technology that's uh 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 skunk works if you think about like that cannot be more than 15 years ahead i would say for a leap like that and 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 you know yeah you can i think you can hide things for a while um but i think a technology a leap i mean this is not this is not a hey we developed this and we're kind of pushing the edge of technology this is a giant leap in technology you know and the other one is do we have the basis to do that you know because usually when you have a technology like that universities especially the one you're working at mit a lot of the leading edge stuff is coming out of the top tier universities you know so you've got mit you've got caltech you've got stanford georgia tech virginia tech carnegie mellon i'm just naming schools naval post graduate 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 because how do you how much power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant orb that we live on so by the way you mentioned gravity-based that's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of uh propulsion like what kind of propulsion would have to uh would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement to me all the gravity discussions just seems insane uh from a physics perspective but of course uh it would seem insane uh until it's not but because remember we only know what we know yeah and and which is very little and someone has relatively think out of the box to go is this possible at all yeah well okay so this so you're you're saying that if you had to bet money all your money it would be something that's alien technology so it's not human-created technology well i don't like to get into little green men but i would say that i don't i don't think people development right i don't think we've developed it i just you know because 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 um so i don't 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 them uh but such topic which uh you mean look for drones for just uh just space travel technology because if you look at where we're going you know because everyone talks about mars you okay and you know we're hey are we gonna be able to colonize you know and i know elon is big into that you know yeah what do you think about what do you think about elon spacex nasa we put humans back up uh back up there my theory so it's funny because i i know one of the guys that was he 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 yeah he knows elon and uh yeah and he actually worked on the entire falcon one project he's one of the lead guys on that so he's got some great matter of fact he's there's a movie there's a book coming out that comes out in about a year on this the original the first years of space for six years of spacex you know and he's named in the book you know and they're supposed to make a movie on it so i'm like hey who's gonna play it um but uh what he's done to me it changed the game and here's why because i said you know in i think it was 62 and eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex you know which it has become everything he warned us of you know it has become and it's really driven by there's the big three in defense which is really you know northrop lockheed and boeing those are the big those are your biggest raytheon's kind of write like a subset of that but they're raytheon's pretty big too big in u.s defense those are the big guys right that's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire they go to stuff like that so um when you look at that and you go and the way government contracting is working and how we charge and you know why things cost so much and then you go you got elon who's got an ego you know and he doesn't like to do things certain way and i've talked to the guy that worked there on you know because the government likes to have oversight of contracts where he was like no just tell me what you want i'll build it i'll give you a bill when it's done and then if i do it for half the price i make a ton of money because he's money-driven guy which i like capitalism at its best so now you look at the two things so you got the the spacex which is the dragon capsule right and then you've got boeing so elon did what boeing is contracted to do in less time for half the money and oh by the way because he can reuse the boosters because they come back and land and you don't have to like morton thigh call we reused them on the space shuttle but they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff because they landed in salt water and then you had to put them all back together where elon gets them down because i was joking with this guy go what do they do they like re rehaul you know overhaul because no actually they clean them up and they can use them 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 in 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 because i have some friends that are astronauts uh they all have to learn russian right they have to and they have to do it's what level five where the test is a phone call yeah where they call you up and they you know because they would go so i went to the pinning two 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 space walk you know because i would pull up because if i knew what was going on i'd pull up the nasa thing i was in a meeting one day and i've got nasa on and 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 um so when you when you look at what those they're capable of doing and then you go what elon is bringing to the fact that now it's back in america it's actually to me it's it's cost effective for us to be able to do more stuff i think it opens the door to do we go back to the moon is there a reason to go back to the moon personally i think if we're 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 uh because we did this on a less than a compact computer in the 60s which is the whole reason that i flew because i'm obsessed 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 wapicanet ohio at the parade after he walked on the moon because his parents didn't live far from my aunt uncle in wapa kineta and they were out at the parade so i've been obsessed with this since i was a child do you hope to uh do you think do you hope that you'll go out to the space one day me if i had the opportunity i'd go in a second you know i am not i mean that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight is that you know uh like people like i mean it would be to us tourism but you certainly wouldn't want to 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 pilot currently but it seems like if we send a civilian up there would be somebody like you in the next like 20 years i i'd be you know if elon wants to throw me one of those things i'd be all over i don't know what my wife would say but you know sometimes you gotta 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 uh she's she's i mean i've known she's on board 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 um 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 to out to space what 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 uh take the next step and go you know we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid you know whatever we do but it's 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 um if you have something that you can contain that is a as a fuel source that would last a significant amount of time you know those rocket boosters go and when they're done they're done there's enough to get them back down and that's it there's not a huge you know not coming back and go well i still got three quarters of a tank let's hold him on and do it again his system's not doing that um but you know the way the way contracting especially in the government the government has tons of money but you got to 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 going to throw a few out there but if you look at what amazon you know does with bezos and you've got elon um there's some there's some big money out there yeah i mean you're talking you know bezos alone could buy companies like big companies apple is another one these companies had 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 and because when you work outside of what the government would want to do let's so let's let's we're not working on this necessarily for the united states although i am a huge giant i will be 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 um but but when i you know haven't killed me yet yeah well you're here yeah and you've been here for a while no no i'm joking i'm i'm an american citizen i'm actually pretty much american too when you do that so you look at let's just look at american universities yes so there's some brilliant minds and we'll just use mit because you work 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 want to 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 want to work together they can split it up 50 50 the two of them when the technology gets developed but now i'm not constrained by who has to do the work i just want to make sure that i try and keep it in the united states because technology is technology and if it gets developed and gets over to where you know a country gets a hold of it and then just basically uses it for their own because you save them all the research time you don't want to do that but if we can get to the point where we can we do it on the international space station we 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 u.s 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 pull the money together and come up with a something that would literally change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of exploring because if you develop that technology i'm not you don't even have to send a man person if you can develop a technology that's so and with our automation and we're progressing in our our computing power to send something out that's not just floating around when you know that it 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 then it just sends data back it analyzes it but 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 yeah 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 the sense the the the tic tac is a symbol so uh 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 like it's almost uh 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 that's out there floating around these private companies you know i think if you said hey i've got let's just say a hundred million dollars which really a hundred million dollars relative to bezos has got 100 and some billion dollars in the network so if he said hey 100 100 million dollars you drop 100 million dollars and i go and i'm gonna put a you know 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 want to go pool universities because they have fewer restrictions because it's not tax dollars they don't have the checks and bound they can do whatever they want it's their money oh sorry about that um to go hey i'm going to put this out and i'm going to get the best physicists that are working at cern that are at mit that are at caltech at the schools i mentioned and oh by the way a few of these guys are propulsion experts and i'm going to basically i'm going to fund you guys for 10 years so you get 10 million a year and i'm gonna give 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 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 them those 10 scientists come up with something and they put out a paper there might be another a number 11 at another university that reads that paper and says hey i kind of had this idea and now you can get a thought pool that pushes us in and gets us out of the the mindset because we have a tendency to we evolve the stuff that we create but yeah it's like i was joking because you know i 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 like engineering how much new math is really being done i said there's a handful of people in the world that are really doing i'm talking i'm talking stephen hawkins type brilliance that is going i'm really doing something that's yeah that's totally different that's a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everyone is just everybody's conversed towards this local minima or local maximum whatever you think about it and it's it's again same as with the tic tac thinking outside the box is not is uh 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 the he was out of the box yeah he did not think that the true jesus 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's uh let me jump back to a few questions that folks had i have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because i think not the actual idea not the actual facts of the debunking but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other but let me kind of bring it up uh 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 a career out of trying to debunk sort of he's a his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic i think it's it's very useful and powerful especially for me coming from a scientific perspective to take the approach he does 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 uh here's a bunch of videos a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible other explanations of the things that were out there he has some explanations of the things that you've seen in it with the tic tac like with your own eyes like he says that uh 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 fight that as uh i mean maybe you can comment on that person let me do it right now sure so because that comes up like how 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 pish right around there so when i look down i know what a hornet looks like looking down on him because i've done it for all those years i mean i got a good idea so that's that's why i said 40 feet because it's about hornet size so and as i go around you you get to the point where you have to be able to judge distance when we fly out of experience and you can tell if something small or big you know 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 um and having done it for so long no it was and everyone came back with the same thing they're like yeah i was about size of hornet from a human factors perspective how often in your experience of those 16 years do you find that eyes 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 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 got to trust your instruments let's let's go back to landing at night so your you're right i eyes that the runway and your brain assumes that the runway is fixed but you know that the runway is moving so if i try and do stuff visually i would you die every time 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 multi-spatial disorientation device or the spin and puke it looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules and when you get out you think the thing goes really fast and they can you can make yourself think that i'm descending or climbing but you're actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate as fast as a human can talk but as they spin you around 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 because 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 um you you do all that because it gives you a sense of the a but you're really not doing you're sitting there so we get trained on all that stuff so if you if you want to look at it and go well you're you're disoriented or this side bill 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 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're calling the instruments you're giving you and that that in turn is a loop that adjusts the perception system that like that that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're saying yeah you'd be amazed at how good so here's here's another example so if we go out over the water so there's no land in sight and we're gonna fight so when we fight you know two airplanes we're gonna dog fight as an instructor and i was for all most of my time you have to come back and you have to recreate it so we we call it drawing arrows so um 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 uh and i know where the sun is at because in the short couple minutes we're going to fight the sun's really not going to move much it's going to be an irrelevance 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 because in the water you don't have any reference like oh i passed land i passed like no you don't and you can't use clouds because clouds do move but you got to come back because you go here's where i started and then you when 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 arrows so 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 while i'm flying you can do it and but usually it's you memorize it all and you get done and then you re you 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 card you go out the stack of cards and you stick a new one on your knee board card so you're ready to go and here's the next setup um it's kind of it's in some way similar to what uh like at the at the highest level chess players do i mean you're i mean they they they recap the games but the the richness of the representation that they use and remembering like how the games evolved it's not like it's much richer than the actual moves it's like these a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words like like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved it's more like instinctual from years and years of experience so they try to put it into words but they really can't it's it's just not i understand that it's because for us if we don't come back with anything then there's no learning to be had right because the whole thing is the debrief when we get back and we talk about that's really where the learning is um and it's the same thing if you want to go back to chess you know 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 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 uh we'll call him tom i won't give his call sign because i don't know he wasn't so tom took me out and taught me how to fight uh because tom had just left hopkins he was the the training officer top gun which so that's the guy yeah the training officer is the main guy at top gun so tom was a training officer top gun so tom when i learned because i come out of a6 and we really don't fight because it was a bomber so i get in f-18s and i want to learn how to fight because it's a whole other side of the mission it's the f and f fighter attack the 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 going to 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 because you know no one walks out into that world i don't care how gifted of an aviator and go i i am the man yeah or the woman i'm it yeah 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 okay yeah 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 i don't find that that particular debunking case that you saw but i'm glad you put it you um you said those words out loud so for me from my perspective uh coming into this world and looking at it i'm a little bit more skeptical uh so your eye account i think is the most fascinating story and that uh i think uh 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 we can actually build that can do some crazy amazing stuff so it's a at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring i just want to say that but on the video side it's like it's uh the videos for the fleur video the go fast and the gimbal video they are only interesting to me to me in the context of your story like without that they're kind of low resolution it's like it it's easier to build a debunking story to be skeptical so it's just 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 flair video and he says that one of the most amazing video parts of the flare video for people who haven't seen it is at the end of it uh the the the tic-tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen off the screen and what midwest says is uh that it you know midwest probably others that the way to explain that is the tracking system like we said this vision based tracking simply loses the like the object the tracking loses it and so it simply allows the object to uh 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 uh to that debunking uh sure so um it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system no for sure and that's like me going because i'm a big formula one fan you know that's like me going oh my god louis what were you doing you could have done this with the car and you need to won the race right you know and lewis hamilton right now is you know defending world champion two time he's four-time four-five-time world champion but um that would be pretty stupid to me to try and tell lewis hamilton how to drive a car yeah um or a matter of fact anyone driving a formula one car so i i can't tell you how many times i've watched you gotta remember when we looked at this thing when when chad came back with the video we sat there and watched it i mean i can't tell you how many times i've watched it off the original tapes going all right right all right let's look at this um you know because you can look and see where the you can see where the airplane is going you can see if it's looking left or right and if you actually watch all that stuff it doesn't do that it actually when the vehicle starts to move the bars the tracking gate starts to open up and the people at raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod the tracking gate will start to open up and and but the thing when it leaves so fast off the screen the pod can't move fast enough it has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around because there's another theory that oh with the pods looking forward when the pod passes underneath the airplane so if i'm looking at you and you pass underneath me as does this the ball will actually flip around to kind of finish off and it'll it'll it swaps ends because it has you know it's a gimbal it can't just it's not free-floating um 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 that yet another another debunker who doesn't know this so you know and mick has had several theories on other of 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 he's on black hot so the the white object is actually colder than the ocean that's flying 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 make west suggests that uh flare like reflections or whatever can explain no because what mick west doesn't see is so when they take because i've talked to the one of them actually i work with so i know him i know i talk to him all the time so uh and it's his best friend actually shot the video one of his best friends for the giveaway video the game both of them the go fast and the gimbal were shot by the same person okay so uh 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 that are 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 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 there's a heat signature and you go hey dot heat signature something's there it's real it's not you're not picking up some extraneous 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 you know 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 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 in 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 uh ryan has come out and talked about it but when you see it you go you know if you take it in context because 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 mike who was running the wing at the time the fighter wing i said what are you guys doing about this he goes well we got to know tam 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 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 because people are like oh they're balloons well balloons float balloons don't sit in in in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location they don't say they had an airplane because 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's that transparent how is that and so i've heard they almost hit one it's almost hit hit them so that's another that's one of the biggest another biggest account it's like almost hit a plane uh uh something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere what do you make of that again you know what i mean that that's that's the most dangerous you're right the biggest frustration is when you do that you go okay so this thing passed between two airplanes and it was i think it was in like 100 feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it so they do is they come back and go hey i had a near midair what do you have in your mid-air with this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it and you go huh you know so they send out a no tam again and they they do a what's called a hazard report that says hey there's these objects out there we almost hit one you know and that gets sent off to the naval safety center um [Music] what was done i mean what are you going to do you can you know catch one go out with a giant net and try and bag one you 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 i'm gonna do what yeah what are you gonna do well and that let me ask this because this is what people kind of think about after you witnessed tic tac and after this these incidents as far as we know uh with the gimbal and the go fast it seems like people in the military did not did not react like what like did not freak out it almost like was a like a mundane event how do you explain that why didn't the people on the ship not the higher-ups why did wasn't there a big freak out or as some people suggest the higher-ups knew about it all along and just we're not letting everyone know that there's some kind of secret military uh uh you know it's like like tests yeah so let's talk about so let's say you've got this cool new toy which you 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 you know 80 million airplane that's now in the bottom of the atlantic you know tests are normally done in controlled environments just it's like any test a lab test or whatever when you take things out into the real world you know you're still going to test it in an area where 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 going to land on you so you're worried about where else is it going to land and it actually crashed next to the atoll and and you know elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus so um that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen so because 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 unknowing pilots you can't control a lot of things you're exactly right so you go you know it's you know it's not the doctor evil scientist that's going to throw shit out there to get there's control and there's reasons that we do it because a lot of stuff especially when you get to there's there's you build something in theory you model it you go hey this is it looks like it's going to work you get funding you build it you test it some more you bench test it you know you like an airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the ground they've got things over the pedostatic system that are changing the what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it and it's probably up on jack so the gear up so it doesn't it thinks it's flying it doesn't know it's sitting on jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic 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 going to work and then there's when there's a bunch of stuff that they do that's a control environment which you can do the testing yeah throwing shit out in the middle of where people are doing exercises is the most preposterous thing that i've heard is it possible yes is it more really is it is it is it more likely it's more likely they're not doing that yeah and the other the other side of that question is why do you think people on the nimitz and in the us government in general not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen freak out in a positive way freak out in the negative way like what are the russians up to again or or more like what is this like so more turmoil so if you to put a chinese flag on the side of it or a russian flag on the side of it i said yeah it had a big russian flag on the side of it dude then it would have got a lot of attention it would have went high order yeah right if it was you don't have to say russia or china just say if there was another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said oh it belonged to them then it's a big deal so here's what's going on so we're literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup normally they we go out for a month go come back do stuff go out for a month this was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at thanksgiving so we could run home up to the central valley have thanksgiving with our family and then run back down and do this okay so you know and i had just taken over i had the squadron for a month right so i'm a a brand new ceo i'm the most junior guy on the as as far as the commanding officer goes for time in the navy and actually at the time i think it was the most junior ceo 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 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 well-being 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 exo snap and 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 got to remember you got the captain of the ship you got the airwing commander and you got the admiral those are the top three and you got the ceo of the the princeton who is a major command guy and that's really your big major command and then everything else is you got all the squadrons with your o5 command and you got the small boys that are out there which is 05 commands 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 uh and the admiral right and then he's got some post-command guys on his staff that we were friends with i thought you were responsible for a lot of things yes oh yeah this 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 we're the integration you know when 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 and the people on his staff that i was friends with never saying to me the other ceos that i talk 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 because 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 because i'll talk for free because you're not paying me i said i said and then i got paid to go to the mcminnville fest because they my wife and i got to go because it was just look like fun because the whole town gets involved yeah and it's the only time i've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because it was just you know it was fun and i got asked and jeremy and george napping went the year before so i went with with bob lazar so i got to hang out with bob and his wife and his wife and my wife and you know we all hung out kind of you know talking not about ufo stuff but just getting to know each other as people because you know bob's like me the stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life if anything it ruined his life you know he's just a really really smart guy that's just like the rest of us trying to get through life yeah that's nevertheless i mean that was one of the sad things reading um uh louis lozando's resignation note from his uh uh he was the program director at the uh atip program like alright yeah one of the sad things is that he's mentioned that you know people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat like ufos as a threat like you said if it doesn't have a russian label on it it's a it's a sad thing to think about that that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly it doesn't is a distraction that we don't want to deal with and it kind of just fades into history like literally it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up like and uh it just didn't it because they're not like when aliens show up they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule and if they don't start killing people they just kind of show up in some very uh nonchalant peaceful way briefly people would be like that's that that's uh i don't have time for this that's so sad it's like anywhere in the world so you know go back let's go back way back way back in the time machine you know there were people kind of scattered around the globe you know in 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 kind of jump over and germans or german and the polish people everyone speaks a different language because if you look at the way the 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 because 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 because 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 you're actually you think about you're an alien if i go to a different area if i just you know go back 500 years 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 the vikings probably were um because 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 in a human alien world you know and when i say alien i mean you are not from that area the other we we take what we want and that's what happened i mean we literally 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 let's just go off the grid and go ah let's say there are little green men yeah what are their intentions lou asked me this when we were talking to lou alezando and he said what do you think they were here for us i don't know he goes what i go hello they were observing they'd come down they'd hang out he goes 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 these 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 because they always have a tendency to hang out around nuclear right and you go well you know they're 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 the 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 uh what is it ufo sightings since since the nuclear since the nuclear era yeah that's you go um let me ask a little bit out there 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 very 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 oh it was what forget how many thousands of sightings and there's a percentage it's like 10 or 15 percent they still can't explain like our tic tac is one of them you know they basically the government has come out and said we don't know what that was okay so so if you go okay of that fifteen percent that we don't know and of these thousands they're 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 a intact system or you got pieces of it of a metal that we can't explain or some some um biological matter to say the least it could be intact or it couldn't but the the odds of that now are starting to go down that you know that could never happen and i'm not talking just the united states i'm talking the world globally so is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone in the in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something that is not from this world and i'm not talking to meteor but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation it 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 there's stuff out there floating around and what about ours it's going to crash into jupiter eventually or whatever because we've had stuff crashing the 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 lou there's stuff that we can't explain you know and i would assume that lou who ran atip has has seen stuff that he can't openly talk about because you know because i had a clearance when you have a clearance you were you sign your name you're bound to that and to me that's an important oath that you hold to you know this is kind of where uh 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 sorry 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 he was under an oath to not say anything but he did if you asked bob why did you say something his the 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 if you believe bob that's that's kind of what bob says and that 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 the snowden question this is the question of like do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature of human civilization like the the way we the way we think about our place in the world also the if that technology is potentially useful for military applications the nature of military conflict should we release that information or not if you were the government so here well here's exactly how so for for classified information the government is the people that classify it so i can't go i can't look at something and go oh my god this avion bottle is now top secret i can't i don't have the authority the ability or anyone to do that that's the guard that's up to the government i agree with that because i worked for the government for 24 years of my life so um i understand that but now you go there's reason stuff is classified okay and it has to do with uh 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 uh it's the tom cruise movie what is it air america or whatever but he he plays the guy in louisiana who was hauling drugs for pablo escobar and he ended up getting a cargo plane and the government the cia was kind of funding him to do stuff that's how he got hooked up with pablo but they put cameras on his airplane and when reagan had come out and said here's pictures we have proof that they're running these drugs it didn't take 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 u.s government and our well-being as a country and we owe it to this because we're all americans you know to me no matter what some people will say even in this country this is the greatest country on the planet this is the only country that you have the ability to do what you want to do it's just don't be lazy and i have stories of people that came over here and started with nothing and they're they're living the american dream and they'll tell you and they didn't get it because of you know 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 you're religious you're over you but you come over here i kind of knew that from the last time but um 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 um i can do whatever the hell i can create and with a bit of with a lot of hard work i can do quite a and no one gave it to you yeah so i mean i'm a believer that like i mean we are uh a community so like there is a social aspect to it but the freedom and the american dream is a real thing and that this is this i you know i joke about being russian but i i'm an american and this is i do believe the greatest country on earth so there's a reason the nationalist pride uh 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 it's not so much a threat as a 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 because i've talked about so bob is a propulsion guy right right bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor he built the rocket car you know so he did that so if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system let's just say this is i'm just talking this is dave's theory i am i own i have i have custody of this thing from a technology that i don't understand and i know it's a propulsion system so now i 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 a shit in his garage hey he's super smart why don't we bring him in so you hire him on a contract and you go hey we're going to brief you into a program and he goes and works on wherever he says he worked you know that's not important but you get access to the technology to try and figure it out and then you go well you know bob comes out and says you know like 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 you know and let's just say bob doesn't come out and tell anyone he he works on it until he gets to the point where he's stagnated he he said he's in a wall you go 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 in a propulsion you bring them and they work they can't figure it out or they get to the point where kind of back to the einstein theory where hey i've got all these theories on how it works but we don't have the technology we haven't advanced enough to actually do what we need to do we still have to advance technology more so then what do you do you shelve it you go hey good project's over and the contract you shelf it and you wait another 10 years and you wait another 10 years until technology and our abilities and our our research advances more and then you go find new people to bring in that are experts in that 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 because because remember if you if you reveal someone else's research you can taint their beliefs they'll start to sway in that direction so you go i'm not going to tell you anything i'm going to give you this thing and now you tell me what you think and as they progress if they get stuck on a problem that maybe bob and someone else solved earlier you can go hey what about this you don't have to tell where it came from what about this and now they can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer and then we get stuck by our evolution of technology do you shelve it again do you think that's the right way to do it because it's heartbreaking i don't listen i love government but we just had this discussion about elon and so on the 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 who 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 like that's within a lot of us and like money aside people in their garage just will but you're thinking like a scientist now let me 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 yeah and still to the state 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 that that got into the hands of the nazis that it would be the end and and that's that's a tough call to do that knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the wrong 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 going to work on it together in uh you know like antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from any weapons or anything we're supposed to we got the international thing down there we're all going to 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 the someone stealing information and getting it back to where and countries are notorious to do this hey we're doing internationally but we're secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first that's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power 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 uh yeah yeah i guess so beautifully beautifully presented and there's i feel like there's a tension between those two places the scientists view the world and the national security view of the world let me 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 uh i agree with you but the there does seem to be and i tend to think of government as unfortunately uh uh 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 it's uh suspicious it's just not even the way they release the videos you know the tic tac if presented correctly could just inspire generation of scientists it's like at the you know us going to the moon and it's inspiring i mean it's incredible like you know and and the way it was released was suspicious it was like low resolution video on a crappy website like with some crappy documents and uh i mean why what i don't know how to ask this question but can government do better why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the public because i don't think they know how especially in this topic it's been hidden for so many years and i don't think uh because i don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff i just think that you know when it comes in like i said you know the government has a right to classify stuff they they classify everything because they don't know you have something you don't know what it is you don't know so we just go well it must be must be top secret and let's put it in a vault you know it's kind of like the indiana jones where they take the ark and they put it in the it's in the giant army warehouse um you know we don't even know what we have so but i also believe that you know and i'll say this openly i don't think that the american people need to know everything i think there's a reason that stuff is classified for the protection of this country and i totally believe in that so you know and i was joking with joe when he was talking about 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 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 a perfect example the u.s and the 60s developed a bomber it was a mach 3 compression lift bomber called the xb70 okay there was three of them built three of them ever built it was a like 60 000 foot high you know mach 3 it was an incredible airplane when you see it there's actually the last one remaining is in dayton ohio at the museum you know it would go that wingtips would fall down it looks like a concord 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 right we built three xb70s and we scrapped the program right because now you go well it's 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 you know it's constant it's a chess game we do something they do something we do something they do something and it's we do something and then they counter it they got a fee it's you got to figure out how to defeat it so you go oh we'll build something so the more we keep uh quiet especially from a defense standpoint the better we actually at person i think we talk too much and i think the the military and the dod is starting to see that you know we're too open you know you know you announce hey we're building this because there's a budget line and we live in a free society um 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 want to go do work with mit and you want to partner with mit and you're a defense company and you want to partner you know you guys have a rule that if you create it then it can be open source because the university owns it and we are an institution of learning yeah where the defense side might go we don't we don't really want that published in a paper in scientific america or i call it a break i talked to the cto of lockheed kaoko jackson and just just conquers the some of the best if not the best engineering and science but engineering really ever is done in secrecy and it sucks because it's so inspiring and they can't talk about it it is due to funding the us government has deep pockets you know some of this new technology that you develop for an open source unless this goes back to the original conversation we now there's enough money in the private sector that individuals control yeah bezos i'm not talking amazon i'm talking jeff bezos a single individual worth over a hundred billion dollars he has the ability to do stuff i'll tell you what the gates foundation with between bill gates and and and his his wife and warren buffett and some of the other money because i think uh bezos's 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 if 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 non-profit they can go hey i want to fund this i want to 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 we classify how to do uh you know the whole nuclear you know how to create critical mass right but there's really smart high school kids that have figured out mathematically and they do their science project and then the government comes in and says hey we got to classify your government because we just don't want this out in the public domain which i understand but they never stop them from free thought and developing that it's just we really don't want this out there okay so i understand that i totally understand that but if they you know if if bill and melinda want to do this and go hey we want to do this and they're going to work with bezos and they're going to work with elon and we're going to be 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 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 that 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 want to work there's brilliant minds that don't want to do anything with defense because they just disagree with what it does so they go to another path they can do something else and that in a sense like the elon's of the world that jeff bezos actually in a certain sense much better than uh 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 a an end in mean you know they have an idea that this is what i want it to be where if you go to like spacex where you know they come up with why don't we just land these things on a pad and reuse them yeah well if the government scientists if you're on a government contract says no that's not the requirements we're not paying for that we want you to do this you're kind of controlled or when elon does it his company they can do whatever the hell they want to do because they have no bounds the only bounds they have is the liability if it doesn't work and it lands on something so what do you do you go out to kwajalein and you test it and if it crashes and it lands in the ocean hey we clean it up no big deal we lost some money but we'll move on it's you know money makes the world go round contrary to what everyone thinks but you know there's a lot of money that's sitting around that you can do a lot of really cool stuff with and i don't know i mean i'll guarantee that uh what is it blue origin isn't that amazon 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 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 he goes dude i worked he goes i worked with he goes because 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 his elon money where it was like don't i'll throw them and he would throw the money at it and make it happen and it's i'm talking this fast yeah i mean he talks about he has a great story about this i mean this is elon 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 a 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 the story he 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 board room we'll be there in 20 minutes so he grabs this guy who's literally going to fold his company they go over to spacex and i may be getting some of this wrong if people are going to fact check me but this is pretty close they go in the boardroom and and he said literally within like you know an hour or two elon has bought the guy's company that guy is now a senior vp running the 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 it's not just money it's because i've seen i witnessed it too with elon i think it's uh whatever the whatever the forces of capitalism that that uh allow a person like elon musk to rise to the top but like because i've also worked for darpa like for research for in terms of a source of funding i i there's a weight of bureaucracy when i was working like being funded by darpa and with elon like i was literally in the presence of like anything is possible cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork of the way things were done in the past of the bureaucracy the rules the constraints the all of that stuff just you can cut across immediately 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 i honestly when i went back to the industrial defense complex that we were warned about when you look at it and go spacex can do something for half the price ahead of schedule that would 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 yeah 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 you know 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 going to reuse that dragon capsule it came down they're going to 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 and 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 but it's limitless the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism i think it's exciting yeah i think we live in an exciting time right now besides everything that's messed up in the world right now well this is a this is a hopeful like there's so much conflict going on so much tension uh that's to me space exploration at the moment is a reason to uh get up in the morning and have a hope for the future to look up to the sky and we're humans we can like solve so many we can solve all of this i was talking about when i was doing the tucker thing and i said uh this would be great you know because when the government had come out you know a month ago and said hey this does exist we're doing this and we're going to release more stuff and i was texting like lou and chris mellon and those guys before i went on because they had called me up to be on tucker's show and i'm like hey i go you know this would be great you know just come out with this find the the relic of a spaceship like pull out the roswell wreckage if you have it pull out the roswell wreckage and do it god it would be so nice to not have to deal with the the riots in the cities and i mean i know it's an election year and all that but god it would be something it would be refreshing to not have to turn on my tv and see everything that is just depressing in the world to begin 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 look on jeff bezos's face and all the brilliant engineers we changed the game it would change it would change the game completely let me ask the big question i apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it uh 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 there could be other sightings that have legitimacy to them what to use the outside of your own sighting is the most interesting citing or ufo related event in history i think there's several what is it ramishine forest in england uh the u.s guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns one guy was medically disabled but they weren't going to give it and he had help from jim carr john mccain his office helped get the guys uh disability reestablished i think that's a big one uh i think there's people out there that have seen stuff and i'm talking credible uh because there's you gotta remember there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven they're they're actually explainable yeah uh you know you had sent me the question the the phoenix lights i think there's what's that so i'm sorry i'm not familiar with some of these the the uh i'm not either it's i want a funny story on that so i was at a i was at a conference and hopefully he doesn't watch us to get offended but we had this uh this it was i call it speed dating so there's a table there's 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 yeah it was kind of funny but i'd sat down and it's always funny because some people will try and dominate it but you know you have to kind of push the dominators away so that you know if you're quiet and introverted you can ask your question 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 he goes he looks at me and he goes well you're not a ufo guy i go no i'm not but i chase one so i'm an expert have you and you could see him get deflated because i'm kind of a smart ass like that yeah i mean the first hand experience from a credible in some sense these sightings have to do both with the evidence and the human well i think part of that is to us that's a credibility piece because the four of us that actually saw it plus you know the other two that were in the airplane that shot the video none of us are ufo obsessed people so when we come out and say because to me it's just it's five minutes of my life i mean i did a lot of really cool i've had really kind of neat things i've been able to do um but when you look at it and go uh we don't it to me it wasn't it's not the pinnacle of my life you know to other people that they live in the ufo world and it's like they you know if you talk to people they'll go that are really into it who've never seen one 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 yeah that was an engaged five-minute thing and there's other stories from other countries like there's a story of in the back in when the soviet union existed that they actually would chase these things and one of them shot at some you know it shot it because they said shoot at it and it shot it and then it got shot down and then they said don't ever shoot at them again and don't chase them just you can observe them but don't go after them because obviously they have firepower that we can't control because if you can make something float around and jam radars at will and do whatever you want you know modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful you know you can go to independence day they add that force field around oh we gotta 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 slices somebody on i think read it said uh ask him any thoughts on mass ufo sightings like the phoenix lights so the interesting thing like you said with the tic tac is that multiple people laid their eyes on this what what are your thoughts about the phoenix lights or many people have seen here's the deal with massive sightings so the phoenix lights is unexplainable although i know the air force had said something about it was an a10 drop in flares no i don't think so yeah oh flares don't burn that long they just come out and they you know they detract when they go away although on the other hand there's you know because clouds can do things so 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 you know they were doing icbm tests at one time where they shoot from vandenberg and they fly across and they go land in the atoll at kwajalein you know and then they can check the displacement the accuracy and all that stuff you know it's stuff that we do because we're a power but when you see them go up you know especially if you've ever watched a rocket really launch on a clear night it'll have 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 you can watch this on tv when leaving the spacex ones go 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 there's 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 then you get stage separation then you see the next one go off and then it's gone um and people don't understand that because they didn't watch it from launch because we used to sit in our driveway and you know vandenberg is it was a three hour drive but you could sit and watch it go you knew they're launching at night you'd watch you watch thing it's really cool if you don't see anything what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume you know what's left the residue that's sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing it so you get these really kind of weird shapes in the sky you know that's part but when you go to phoenix lights and you go hey you know when when a thousand people see something you're gonna discredit all a thousand people are you gonna try and explain it away with something else you know you know the big it's a weather balloon you know it's a weather balloon again just like the tic tac i think is just inspiring uh for the limitless nature of the science i think you're i think more is going to come out i think some of the stuff that the the to the stars folks have done uh so there's a stars academy yeah what are your thoughts about them are they um i talk to them quite a bit um i am not a part of to the stars academy i you know but you know like i talked to lou i just was texting him before this yeah so he they're what's their mission what's their hope what's their what's there when they started their mission was to try and don't look at this as little green men but let's look at this as a technology and let's try and almost reverse engineer and figure out how these things operate and how can we explain this from using our knowledge you know physics based knowledge to go how would something like this operate that's really their bottom line was to try and use and then couple that with because they've got the series unidentified um couple that with television to get the word out so you're actually putting something instead of because everyone has a theory you know ancient aliens covers all kinds of theories you know it's kind of off of oh my god and i've seen the stuff and i've seen stuff that i've said taken out of context on shows that i did not talk to uh so there's all that because you can take a clip and go oh it's this it's that you know and if i know about stuff like you can't technically use my likeness unless i tell you you can so if i haven't signed something you can't do there was a guy who put something out and i was in it i told him you can take it down and you talk to lawyers because i'm not i'm not supporting you so they use it to tell some kind of narrative that this is not connected to let's face it if you're making tv shows there's two reasons to do it one you want to get word out or two you want to make money or three both and so usually it's i would say the the make money is probably the biggest thing to put a tv show out and the the mission of the to the stars academy is to not do that this is is to try to get some when i when they started and i talked to them because i've talked to tom and i've talked to lou and those are the two main players it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid of the the stigma that's tied to ufos and let's look at it from a science base and then use tv to get the word out on the progress and they've done some pretty cool things i mean you know they've the the italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been you know property their government they got a bunch from it might have been argentina gave them all kinds of stuff like here's all our records what can you do with it to try and now pull from country based to a more global based research which is what you were talking about and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government i mean any government but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some of the metallurgy because you go oh i found this 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 you know and i think uh and your hope is the us government will release well the government is the government the us government came out a month ago and said you know we have we have uh we have material that we cannot explain the origin they have said that they just haven't released the wreckage from the roswell thing which i keep joking about i'm like come on it's 70 some years old i mean let it out i i think he put it beautifully that in this time that would be a heck of an inspiring hopeful thing to see like people don't just to distract them yeah the division is i mean nothing will unite us humans descendants of chimps uh like uh the idea that there's life out there oh it would literally change i said this a while ago i forget i think as the london sun times had called me and i said you know personally i think this is a global issue it's not if there is stuff coming down which we're pretty sure there is there's enough stuff that we can't explain if there is stuff coming down then this is not a country based thing and it's not about technology and it's not about who's going to win the next war because you don't know what they're doing so you got really a couple of theories one you've got e.t or close encounters and the other extreme is you've got independence day are you going to prepare and bet on et and close encounters or do you actually try and do stuff in case it is independence that you actually have a game plan and when you get into independence day that scenario you know 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 us 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 you know we're divided it it's been that way forever so if you think we won't get through this we'll get through it because we've had times just like this before until nazi germany pops up but in nazi germany pops up or someone flies two airplanes into the world trade center and then all of a sudden we're all like united we also have very very short memories yes we do exactly it's when you look and go uh well we can do this and you go no no if 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 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 just 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 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 to the jews i mean it's you look at that going if you really want to see evil and then there's the whole side of what stalin did because he actually exterminated more people than hitler did but that never gets the press and the thing is we forget this 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 um the thing to fight that evil is to be united to be uh both it's like this interesting line like you talked about joe rogan of being both like kind to each other compassionate empathetic but also being like strong and a bad motherfucker when you need to to make sure that you that like there's a balance between kindness and force that is you 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 him they never got in fights because one even people that didn't know them because they were actually nice guys you know they were they're just good dudes but you know if you cross them like i had a friend of mine uh he was he's a nationally ranked wrestler he went to went to naval academy with me he's a very very good friend of mine um and uh 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 we joke about it even with him because when you meet him he's like the nicest like lo go hey hey dude you know 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 like super humble and they'd raise his hand and he would he he'd have this blank expression they'd raise his hand and he'd walk off and as soon as he crossed the line he'd he'd look up and smug hey hi guys how you doing like he literally just went could rip someone's arms off but as soon as he crossed line he's a totally different person he's like and he's that way today yeah 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 oh he's that wrestler he's across the line you're you're uh you could be hard but when once you're off the mat you're just a kind human being yeah i know you're super humble uh 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 that wants to fly or wants to go to space who wants to build the rocket is there advice you could give them about life about career about anything yeah yeah um first let me start with uh and you had a question on inspirational people so my grandfather i had mentioned him earlier a huge funeral a beer delivery guy um was delivering beer and the 60s riots were the the guys the black in the black neighborhoods where you know white people didn't go and my grandfather's sicilian he was one of the first ones in his family born in the united states so my great grandmother and i had aunts and uncles that i knew growing up that actually came over on the boat um 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 in toledo ohio the mafia guys were at his funeral in toledo ohio uh i mean it was literally a mix of of of who's who and he had told me once you know because when you're little you start looking 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 my grandfather one day and he said something to me and this is this is literally how i run my life he said it was about money because you'd see you know back in the day if you saw someone in a mercedes that was rare you know they weren't everywhere and you know people didn't you couldn't lease a car you actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash um so it's a 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 got to 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 him a bad person it just that's that's who they chose to be and you make choices in your life but never ever look down on someone because you know there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should never ever do that and i kept that close to me he was a huge influence was my mom's dad um just a big big influence in my life and the way i carried myself um and he was one that would say you know you can be anything you want to be you know he grew up dirt poor you know 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 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 um and i was just fascinated with flight and i just looked at that going that's really what i want to do and i never lost sight of that there was always i could do this or do that and when i was going to go to college before i enlisted in the marine corps i was accepted into natural resources at ohio state and i'm like ah if i can't fly i'll go be a forest ranger because i wanted to hang out in one of those towers in colorado and look for fires because that's just i like that stuff you know it was that or be an oceanographer because i was fascinated with jacques cousteau and i actually that's my degree my undergrad degree is jacques cousteau so influences are neil armstrong and jack cousteau i have an oceanography degree i got an mba from university of houston goku's got to mention them and then uh and so you're looking people go what are you what are you going to do with that and i said you know i got an oceanography degree because i go well i'm going to sail on the ocean so at least if the ship sinks i'll know where i'm at and that was a kind of a running joke and then and then there's so these passions and underneath it is the is the belief that you can be anything you want to 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 my wife's brothers are both colorblind it's really color deprived cleared applying you see black and white he can't tell he has issues with greens reds browns it's funny if you're ever around someone like that because 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 like he had a hat on one dagger which one are you gonna eat 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 in my head i go nate that one's brown he's like leave me alone dad he got the brown hat because to him it looked great yeah so he couldn't fly he came he said i go what do you want to do nate you know you're talking to your kids and what do you want to use i want to be a pilot no now i got to tell him because he's looking at me because i'm a pilot do you can't be a pilot he's like why can't i be a pilot i said because you you got eye issues you know so you got to redirect and the other one was because i had 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 you know 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 you do when 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 um so i told them i said look i was talking to both my kids and i said you know find something that you want to do that you love to do and that you can do your whole life and you should be able to do good things for other people you want to be able to help other people that's what i said 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 residency in internal medicine right now and my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors and until i look at it is you know people go oh you got two dogs i don't care i told my kids if you want to be a garbage man or you want to dig ditches i don't care just be be the best ditch digger that you can be i said and be happy doing it because what you also find is that we are in this big pursuit of money money money money money might be that's what makes the world go around 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 he died at 65 he had a massive heart attack because he didn't tell that he he kind of knew what was happening and he just made the choice to to do and it was devastating to the entire family but he didn't he didn't have a lot of money but i'll tell you what i know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there's nobody adam yeah and my grandfather who's a beer delivery guy had i i i it literally it was like three miles long the pope it was crazy yeah who died that was because it was like he's a catholic he's just you know italian he goes you know who died the pope and i go now that's my grandfather and then the next funeral i went to was my aunt his sister and there was like you know 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 it's you know 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 you know it's easy it's it it's easy to be nice it doesn't cost you anything i said you know and get rid of the hate and number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything and there's a there's a self realism like you know if you really have trouble with math getting a 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 and and you can do anything it's just it's it's a great the world's incredible it really is let me ask the last yeah big ridiculous question uh 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 uh several different ways the same kind of question one d do you have you pondered your mortality the finiteness of it and the bigger question to ask even in the context of your uh tic tac encounter is uh what do you think is the meaning of this uh 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 um 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 atsugi 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'd come to the same company and we were doing an event together and he was opening up to me because we were actually the demo pilots we do the demonstration for air shows and stuff and uh him and i were sitting there talking and uh he was giving me the whole story and and how he 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 fit their you know close to the water where they could do stuff and i won't say where um and he was doing what he loved to do and he got diagnosed with throat cancer and i was talking to him uh it was probably about maybe two months before he died um and i said dude hey you're sad you mean this is your friend and i'm kind of really bummed out and this is the guy this is a guy that's dying of cancer and here's what he tells me he says dave dude we're all going to die he goes but i have to look at it i have to make the best of the time that i have and i said i understand that 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 and um about because actually the original announcement when he when he finally passed away a buddy of mine called me because i don't do facebook and his wife had put it on facebook that he had passed and about the day before he died for some reason i was thinking about him and i had a dream or i think it was a dream or an altered reality you can get into whatever uh 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 and uh because he's a navy and we were just talking and he looked at me and he said and this is in my dream he's like dave it's all gonna be okay and this is this is like and this is a vivid conversation i have this people are don't think i'm weird about this but um but you know i know what my dream was and you know maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream but in in reality to me this was real that it was put there for a reason he's and he basically explained everything he's it's okay i'm gonna be fine my wife is fine he goes this is this is what's meant to be you know but you know and 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 um so but ultimately he accepted the finiteness of it he did well you have to and it's like i talk about you know money and job position and this and that i said you can get in any you know you can go to a company just remember when you want to be a vp of a company you sell your soul to the company you have to i said if you look i joke with people at work and i said i said you know when you ever think that you're important or this guy has that i said when you're sitting on 93 or 95 128 and you're sitting in traffic and we're stopped which doesn't happen right now because of covet but normally it's stop it's bumper to bumper and you're sitting here like i was coming down here by the gas tank um 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 because the most important thing that we have it ain't money it ain't our job it's not our position i go because when it's all said and done you could be you know you can be with the exception of the presidents of the united states i mean name the vice presidents most people can't and eventually they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the 1700s in the boston area and you're going to go i don't even know who that guy was did he impact my life he probably did but eventually people forget yeah you you realize what's important now and the one thing that you have is your family and your close friends and that's that's it you can take all the money or everything else if you're down on your luck you know who is going to be a we is joke who are your true friends it's the person while there's 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 it's 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 might be nice i mean i have there's acquaintance friends that i'll do anything for and then come to my house and stuff but then there's the people that you know you know like my cousins who are like my brothers that you know at a moment's notice you know when when my uncle passed away at a young age you know who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin chad and i got two 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 play football together all that i said if one of those if rare chad ever needs me if something happens like when my uncle died it wasn't it wasn't an issue if i'm coming home it's i'm booking the ticket and i don't give a shit what it costs because i will be there to to be here with you and and then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that i'm very very close with you know you know if there's there's i have a handful of people that you know i will drop literally everything even if my wife would be pissed at me at times she's like seriously i gotta do it yeah 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 uh come here and talk to me and take the time dave is one of the best conversations i've ever had thank you so much it's a pretty long one it probably sets the record for the longest one so i i i mean i i'm a loss awards one of my favorite conversations thank you so much for talking to you dave you're welcome thanks for listening to this conversation with david fraver and thank you to our sponsors athletic greens expressvpn and better help please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review it with five stars napa podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now let me leave you with some words from carl sagan somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known thank you for listening hope to see you next time