Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #308
how are these interacting with our fighters if they are how are they interacting with the weather and their environment how are they interacting with each other so can we look at these and how they're acting perhaps as a swarm especially off the east coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects the following is a conversation with lieutenant ryan graves former navy fighter pilot including roles as a combat lead landing signals officer and rescue mission commander he and people in this squadron detected ufos on multiple occasions and he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences and about the importance of investigating these sightings especially for national security reasons ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from wpi and an interesting career roles in advanced technology development including multi-aging collaborative autonomy machine learning assisted air-to-air combat manned and unmanned teaming technologies and most recently development of materials through quantum simulation this is a lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's ryan graves what did you think of the new top gun movie how accurate was it let's start there i thought the flying was really accurate i thought the the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission um of course had a lot of liberties but one thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening the chess game between like in a dogfight between the the the pilots and the enemy or between the different pilots i'll even speak to just that particular mission they flew there and for that particular mission it's kind of a chess game with yourself to to get everything in place so what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario which means they uh have to ingress low due to uh the surface-to-air threats that integrate air defense systems that are nearby and they have to ingress low and pop up like we see in the movie and in that particular movie that was a pre-planned strike they knew exactly where they're going but there's a scenario where we have to operate in that type of environment and we don't know exactly where we're going to strike or we're going to be adapting to real-time targets and so in that scenario you would have one of those fighters down low like that operating as a mission commander as a forward air controller and he's out there calling shots joining on those other players in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target so so that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing can you actually describe for people who haven't seen the movie uh what the mission actually is yeah what's involved in the mission so in this particular mission it's kind of what we would call a pre-planned strike so there's a known location that's in a heavily defended area and the air crew in this case i believe it was four f-18s on the initial package their job was to ingress very low down a canyon to stay out of the radar window of the surfs to air threats what does ingress mean ingress means that they're going to be pushing from a start location towards the target or the objective so there's an ingress portion of the mission and an egress portion of the mission oh okay uh like the entrance and the exit correct type of thing got it but it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit right because when we're entering some place we have the option to enter but when we go drop a bomb on location we're exiting we don't have that luxury we don't have that option so it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level got it and so they were flying low to the ground and then there's a surface-to-air missiles that forced them to have to fly low is that a realistic thing it is realistic so driving those aircraft in the clutter uh you know all radar systems or most i should say are essentially line of sight and so they can be limited by the horizon or any clutter out there and even a number of radars if they are located up high and looking down towards that aircraft the clutter all the uh the objects such as trees and canyons can have effect on radar systems and so it can be a type of camouflage so that's the camouflage for the radar but what about the surface air missile is that is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles flies so low like fly i guess below their uh their level as far as i know you know you can fly under any radar right now we don't have necessarily radars that can look through anything so there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself but with a larger number of assets and distributed communication networks where those radars are looking makes all the difference and i said they are ingressing pass in is and that's an integrated air defense system and that linking of air defense systems is what makes it um so hard so complicated is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated from each other so that if you took out the target that was shooting at you it still has the ability to um to intercept you from another radar location so it's distributed and it's stronger that way you mean the the surface-to-air missiles if you like it's a it's a distributed system and that if you take out one they're still able to sort of integrate information about your location and strike at you correct and there's a lot of complication that can go you know once we start thinking about distributed systems like that and the ability to self-heal and repair and adapt to losses it's an interesting area are you responsible for thinking about that when you're flying an airplane to some degree when we ingress to an area like that we're presented with information about targets air to air or air to surface or surface to air i should say and we can essentially see where essentially the danger zone if you will is located and so essentially we would stay out of that and so having a full picture of the environment is extremely important because you know at the end of the day if we go in that circle we can die pretty quickly so it's absolutely crucial so there's regions that have higher and lower danger based on your understanding of the actual whatever the the the the surface-to-air missile systems are so you can kind of know that's interesting i wonder how automated that could be too especially when you don't know it seems like in the movie they knew the location of everything um i imagine that's less known in most cases and also a lot of those systems might be a little bit more ghetto if i can use that technical term like um i've gotten uh ad hoc maybe is the uh i don't know but you know having uh just recently visited ukraine and seeing a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought there's a lot of improvised type of systems so you take height uh high-tech like advanced technology but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding to the uncertainty in the dynamic environment and so from an enemy perspective or whoever is trying to deal with that kind of system it's hard to figure it out because uh it's like me i played tennis for a long time and it's always easier to play this is true for all sports uh play tennis against a good tennis player versus a crappy tennis because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty uh and that's really difficult to deal with it seemed like in the movie the systems were really well organized uh and so you could plan and there's a very nice ravine that went right down the middle of them that's how movies work isn't it yeah but no i i absolutely agree so you know um what you say is is a very good point and as you know if we were to take a a a chunk of airspace and break it up into little bits you know there'd be places that are better to fly or less less good to fly um and you know we are seeing that now with what they call manned unmanned teaming uh we see tactical aircraft or you know some type of aircraft or platform that's being uh automated and it's not being on made in traditional sense uh where people think air crew are flying around to conduct missions but it's very high level uh objective orientated uh mission planning that allows the air crew to act more as a mission planner mission commander versus having to just pick the right assets or fly them around and or manipulate them um somewhat physically so actually going back to the chest thing can you elaborate on what you mean playing a game of chess with yourself what's when you're flying that mission what exactly do you mean by that well there's a few people you're usually fighting against in the air you know there's the bad guys and then there's uh physics and and mother nature right so um when we're down at about 100 feet um it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot and it's a chess game for the wizzo to process the information he needs and then communicate it to all those other aircraft that were flying around to ensure that they're putting their weapons on the right target what's the wizzo wizzo is a weapons systems officer he's a backseater who is not a pilot but they're responsible for radar manipulation and communications and uh weapons appointments of certain natures so the the chess game is against physics against the enemy uh time time what about your own psychology fear uncertainty no no there's no time for that type of self-reflection while we're flying i want to get i want to get to that but i i don't want to forget the point that you made about increased randomness being a tactical advantage you know as we as you mentioned you know you can introduce autonomy in there and when you when you bring autonomy in there and my expectation would be as we bring different uh abilities and machine learning as we gather more data um we're going to be able to bring the the tactical environment around that jet the war space that it goes into will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly because the system is providing a new tactical solution essentially for that particular scenario instead of just training to particular tactics that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal right but not necessarily the most lethal because they have to be trainable uh but if we can introduce ai into that into and to have a level of randomness or at least the appearance of randomness due to the complexity you know i would say like a stochastic uh tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters won't be able to engage in that fight because it would it would be unsafe essentially for anything else uh and i think that's where we have to drive to because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse cat game about whose tactics and who knows what but if knowledge is no longer a factor um it's gonna make things a lot different that's really interesting so out of the many things uh that are part of your expertise your your journey you're also working on autonomous and semi-autonomous systems the use of ai and machine learning and uh man-to-man teaming all that kind of stuff we'll talk about it but you're saying sort of when people think about the use of ai in war in military systems they think about like computer vision for perception or processing of sensor information in order to extract from it actionable knowledge kind of thing but you're saying you could also use it to generate randomness that's difficult to work with in a like a game theoretic way like it's difficult to respo for human operators to respond to exactly that's really interesting okay so back back to tom cruise and top gun what about the dog fighting uh what aspects of that were accurate so dog fighting is kind of uh an interesting conversation because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set nowadays uh by traditional standards because the the ranges with which we engage and employ weapons are very uh significant uh and so if we're in a scenario we're in a dog fight like that um a lot of things have probably gone wrong right and that's kind of how this mission was set up right it was a you know a no-win type scenario most likely um and so for a dog fight the aircraft size and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it so it's not very theatrical right the aircraft looks small and while it's intense with the systems i have and the sensors and what i'm feeling and all that if i you know we've done it and we've done it right we take video of that and it's just like a blue sky and you see a little dot out there so not very interesting and so anytime it really looks interesting in dogfight arena um that's most likely uh fiction because we really only get close for you know a millisecond as we're zipping past each other at the merge you're breaking my heart right i know breaking my heart no i understand you can go and have fun but you know in a dog fight specifically maybe that was more common in the earlier wars of world war two and before that where the is it due to the sort of the range and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved exactly and the accuracy of the targeting systems at range but there's also a train of thought um that hasn't actually been tested out yet which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare ew and or unmanned assets the battle space may get so complex and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky or wasted such that you're going to be in close with either ir missiles or guns uh if it's a no kidding um you know must defend type scenario first of all what's electronic warfare you know it's basically trying to get control of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest of um whatever operation is going on so in the tactical environment a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar or can we deceive the missile or just you know stop their guide and things of that nature man it's a battle in the space of information of digital information yeah that well f-22 and f-35 right f-22 is a big expensive aircraft and it was made to be a great fighter but the f-35 is not as great of a fighter but it's it's an electronic warfare and mission commander platform of the future where information is what's going to win the war instead of the best dog fighter and so it's interesting dichotomy there what's the best airplane ever made fighter jet ever made i know the aviators in the in the audience are gonna hate my answer because they're gonna want that sexy you know muscly f-14 tomcat type fighter or or maybe p-51 type aircraft but the f-35 is maybe not the best dog fighter but it doesn't have to get in a dog fight right it's like how you'd be the best knife fighters not getting a knife fight sometimes lockheed martin f-35 lightning ii it looks pretty sexy there's two real strengths you can have as a fighter you can you can have the ability to kind of out muscle your fighter uh your your opponent and beat them on g's and power and rate around on them and then there's the other side of that which is uh you can be overly maneuverable uh you can bleed energy quickly and that's what the f 3 f 18 was good at because it had to be heavier to land on the aircraft carrier we had to give it extra bulk but it also needed special mechanisms to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier so it made it very maneuverable and what that leads to a lot of times the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight which is very good but if you do make that sharp turn you're going to bleed a lot of energy away and be more susceptible for follow-on shots if that one's less susceptible and so there's this kind of aggression non-aggression game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting where does the f-35 land on that spectrum the f-35 lands somewhere behind the f-22s so there'll probably be a row of f-22s or f-18s and f-35 will be out back but it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare that's happening in front is it one of the more expensive planes because of all the stuff on it it certainly is yeah in the movie they have tom cruise flied over mach 10. so maybe can you say what are the different speeds accelerations feel like mach 1 2 3 or hypersonic have you ever flown hypersonic no um does it get how tough does it get i'm just going to call out the the bs of ejecting at mach 10 just for the record because in the movie uh there's been i think at least one ejection that was super sonic uh and i'll just say you know it was not pretty but he survived um so there have to be some interesting mechanisms to eject successfully at mach 10 but i'll digress yeah uh but anyway so what um what's interesting to say about the experience of ma of the as you go up does it get more and more difficult in the end of the day crossing the sound bear is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway you don't really notice anything um to cross that at least an f-18 because we have a lot more weight than most fighters is typically we'll do that in a descent and we'll do that a full afterburner just dumping gas into the engine and so that'll get us over the fastest i think i've got about 1.28 but what's interesting people realize is that if i take that throttle and i'm an afterburner and i just bring it back and just bring it back to mill which is full power just not afterburner the deacceleration is so strong due to the air friction that it throw you forward in your straps almost you know i would say you know maybe like 70 of strong almost as has trapping on the boat it's pretty strong so it's almost like a reverse car crash just for the acceleration so the acceleration you know is usually kind of slow and you don't feel anything of course when you're crossing through it but the acceleration is pretty violent the deceleration is violent huh okay uh but is there is there a fundamental difference between like mach 1 and hypersonic mach 5 and so on does it require like super special training and is that something that's used often in warfare is that not really that no so hypersonic human flight in if it exists it's not something that's employed tactically in um in any sense right now that i'm aware of so um you know i think of hypersonic um technology i think of uh missiles and weapon systems and delivery platform i don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily i can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps but those would be more efficient very long long range i imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle honestly the thing you experience is the acceleration not the actual speed um there's been just a small tangent a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons like missiles from you know russia uh bragging about that is this something that's a significant concern or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapon systems hypersonics i do think pose uh a challenge for our detection systems because there are um you know there are design considerations in these sensor systems as always right and when you build them and the technology progresses to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology you know there's a problem but with the you know the all domain and kind of cross domain data linking capabilities we have um it's less of you know it's a more of an integrated picture i'll say um and so the hypersonics are really what it is is uh how fast can we detect and destroy problem you're just shortening the time available to do that we call something like that the kill chain right it's it's from um locating a target and identifying it and you know essentially authorizing its destruction by whatever means uh employing and then actually following up to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense right does it need another re-attack something of that nature and so there's an old dog fighting framework you could call it it's called the ooda loop that kind of made its way in the engineering business now but the old observe orientated side act was initially a a fighter mechanism in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent and break it up so that he can't uh process his kill chain on you and so hypersonic's a way of shortening those those windows of opportunity to to react to that i wonder what do like how much do you have to shorten it in order for the defense systems not to work anymore it seems like uh it's very you know i i'm both often horrified by the thought of nuclear war but at the same time wonder what that looks like when i i dream of extreme competence in defense systems i imagine that not a single nuclear weapon can reach the united states by missile with the defense system defense systems but then again i also understand that these are extremely complicated systems the amount of integration required and because you're not using them i mean this is exactly there could be you know there's like an intern somewhere that like forgot to update the code the fortran code that like is going to be make the difference because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test um which is really scary of course the systems are probably incredible if they could be tested but because they can't be really thoroughly tested in actual um in an actual attack i wonder i mean i guess one assumption there would be that these hypersonic missiles would only be launched and the case would attack um it'd be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects that we could use to flex those systems another thing that actually happened i just have a million questions i want to ask you it's fascinating to me uh is there's a bird strike on the plane does that happen often yeah it's a series they damaged the the engine and they made it seem like it's a serious exactly a serious issue i've hit birds um i've i know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face through the cockpit right shattered the cockpit knocked him out um i think the it actually i don't know personally about the story i know from uh the command i was at and uh i believe the backseater had to punch out uh and punch them both out because he was unconscious you know in the front seat from the bird um it can kill you from hitting you it's you know it's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour it can take out an engine uh very easily uh every airport i've flown at in the navy i've had to check the the bird condition if you will to see how many birds i've we've had to cancel flights because of because there's too many of them around the airport some airports even have bird radars with no tear ports there are systems that monitor the bird condition there is yeah there's actual radar systems and you can go in the certain bases you have to call up and they'll tell you what it is for the day or for that hour and other ones having like their their weather report that goes out with the radio what are some technological solutions to this or is this just uh because it's a low probability event there's no real solution for it i would say it's not a little probably develop event i mean this is happening a lot i mean although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common or i'll say a catastrophic hit either a near miss or a hit or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it is pretty common and in fact it seems stressful it is it's so common in fact that we know that you never want to try to go over or you never want to go under a bird if you see it in front of you you always want to try to go over it because what they'll do immediately if they see you is and you startle vegetables they'll bring their wings in and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path it's interesting i didn't know they did that but so if you immediately if you try to go under them they're going to be dropping into you so you typically want to try to go above them is this something you can train for or no um is this one of those things you have to really experience it's a skill set that um you somewhat trained for in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense right being able to react to your environment very quickly and make make decisions quickly so is that one of the more absurd things challenges you have to deal with in flying is there other things sort of maybe weather conditions like harsh weather conditions is there something that we maybe don't often think about in terms of the challenges of flying birds in a way aren't a ridiculous threat for us it's it's a safety threat that you know anything physical in the air is something that we really have to be careful about whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us or whether it's a turkey vulture at two thousand feet or a flock of five thousand birds like at the runway we have to wave off you know and although they're low probability a lot of bases will have like actual environmental protection agency employees that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds or different animals um that may be in the runways or flying about wow i didn't know what a turkey vulture is and it really does look like a mix between a vulture and a turkey and look kind of dumb no offense to turkey vultures um in that movie who was the enemy nation was it uh i mean i think i guess they were implying it's iran or or is it russia i didn't think they were implying any particular nation state frankly i think they did a somewhat decent job of having some ambiguous fifth generation fighters um the location and and the stockpile like i i get like how the story kind of insinuates certain things but they seem to a good job of not having anything directly pointing to another nation which i thought was you know the good move i i enjoy these type of movies as an aviator and you know as an american right because it's a feel-good movie but um you know we we shouldn't be celebrating going to war with any particular country you know china russia whoever may have these weapons it's it's fun to watch but it would be an incredibly serious event to be employing these weapons yeah we'll talk about war in general because yeah it's the the movie is kind of celebrating the the the human side of things and also the incredible technology involved but there's also the cost of of war and the seriousness of war and the suffering involved with war not just in the fighting but in the death of civilians and all those kinds of things um well you were a navy pilot let's let's talk a little bit more uh seriously about this and you were twice deployed in the middle east flying the fa-18f super hornet can you briefly tell the story of your career as a navy pilot sure so i joined the navy in 2009 right after college i went to officer essentially officer boot camp officer kinder school i applied as a pilot and i got into the pilot that was the advantage of going that way is that i essentially choose what i wanted and if i got in great if not i didn't get stuck doing something else so you knew you wanted to be a pilot i did i joined i went through my initial training i went through primary flight training that all aviators go through and i did well enough that you know one of the first lessons they teach in the navy is that um you know you can have a great career in the navy and you can you know see the world and do what you want but at the end of the day it's all about the needs of the navy and what they need so you know they may not have the platform you like or you know you may not necessarily get to choose your own own adventure here but uh i was lucky enough that there was one jet slot in my class and i was uh lucky enough fortunate enough to get it so it was a jet slot so well yeah what that means is that i was assigned actually a tail hook at that point which meant i would go train to fly aircraft and land on aircraft carriers um and there's essentially three aircraft that do that at the time is f18 and the um e2 and the c2 c2 is kind of like the male truck for the boat e2 is the one with the big radar dish on top and then there's all the f-18s so e2 is calms c2 male 2 yeah what's that c2 they're the ones that bring supplies to the ship via air and people sorry if i missed it is it a plane is it a helicopter it's a plane okay all right and the f-18 is a fighter jet correct okay so i selected tail hook which meant i could get one of those other ones but eighty percent of them were so are jets so i was in a good spot at that point and that's when i went to murder mississippi to fly my first jet which was the t-45 gauze hawk cool so what kind of plane is that is that is that that's what you were doing your training on that's the jet aircraft you get in before you actually go to the f-18 it is a carrier capable so go to the boat for the first time in it during the day drop uh fake bombs do dog fighting um low levels formation flying day and night well that's a pretty plain yeah yeah and it looks like a cone so that no one hits it okay so it's usually not used for fighting it's just for training it's used for training how to fight got it so what was that like was that the first time you were sort of really getting into it yeah that was really interesting because before that it was a 600 horsepower prop plane and going from that to the t45 is one of like the biggest jumps in power and like navy you know machine operation how much horsepower does the 245 have approximately like 15 000 or so so it's a huge jump from 600 you said horsepower about yeah so it's a big big leap but it's a jet you know so it performs differently it's faster and right and what that means not just because it's faster your whole mind needs to be faster everything happens faster in the air now right those calms happen faster um your landing gear has to come up faster everything just happens faster in a jet and so it's a big jump uh and i never forget going on my first flight in that aircraft it was a formation flight for someone else and i was just in the back watching and there was an instructor in the flight and so what that means is instructors in a single aircraft and then there's three or four other aircraft and they're learning how to do joins and they're learning how to fly in formation and as a new student in the back it's amazing right because you know photo op time and all this like i'm seeing aircraft up close for the first time it's awesome um and on the way back um we couldn't get our landing gear down uh ironically so it you know to make a long story short because it's overall not that exciting uh we couldn't get the gear down we actually went to go do a controlled ejection uh to the target area that where that is about 15 20 miles to the north of the base did you wait did you just say that's not that exciting well because that to me is pretty exciting so that i mean how first of all i mean uh i mean that must be terrifying like uh early on in your careers i haven't haven't seen those things um that yeah like how often does that kind of thing happen decent more than you would think more than you would think there was no significant panic this is like misunderstood this is what has to be done in this case i think i was probably just too dumb to realize the significance of it because as a new student you know not really appreciating you know just what is ahead of me if we are rejecting um but at the time it was more it was just like wrote right because i was back there and then i went from a observer mode to a i'm going to provide you the help that i can provide you as a member of this crew you know mode and so it was less about i'm you know on this 20-mile trip and thinking about my um how vulnerable i am you know we're going through checklists we're talking to people we're getting ready so no it wasn't it wasn't fearful and the whole time we were doing one of these to try to get the uh the gear down so we're unloading the jet and then loading it back to try to get the gear out with the stick and um and it came down it came down halfway um there just on its own so we came back around and we did like a safety trap in case there was a problem with the gear and that was my first flight you know uh a little bit of serendipity but i'm gonna fast forward a bit and i went back to the squadron's instructor about five or six years later and i was an aviation safety officer at this point which meant i was responsible for investigating mishaps and a a student went in and he he went in the back seat of a form flight just like the one i went on and he went out and he ended up projecting on that flight exact same type of flight they went out and they had a runaway trim scenario and it caused the aircraft essentially just inverted itself almost 180 degrees uh at about 600 feet over the ground and they punched out just slightly outside the ejection window at about 300 400 feet or so but they were completely fine um so you know and then about two months later we had another ejection about three months after that we had another rejection so um unfortunately you know it can it can be more common that people think what does it feel like to get ejected thankfully i don't know i could describe it to you i can tell you what it's like from what i've heard but i truly think it's one of those things that you just don't understand until it happens uh it's like instantaneous about 250 g's which is only possible because of inertia in our blood right so you can actually get like 250 300 g's for like a few milliseconds and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 g's to get you away from the vehicle itself and so um you know you may lose consciousness um if you do you know who knows where you wake up um you know you could be in a tree you could still be falling uh you could be in the water so the physics of that is fascinating how do you eject safely do you know the story about how that was tested at all i don't know the full story but uh there was i'm guessing nobody knows the full story there's probably a lot of shady stuff going on but anyway uh you mean like in the early early days or they suck a flight dock up to a rocket sled and just see how much their body could take it and he turned a lot of his body into in the mush in the in the process of getting that science done but he saved a lot of life people use it used to be tougher back in the day that's how science used to be done um so how did your training continue so how did take me and take me farther through your career uh as you work towards graduating towards the f-18s so in vt9 where i was a student there's two phases there's an intermediate and advanced intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft and at that point you truly hear all right you're going jets now or you're gonna go one of the other aircraft that land on the aircraft carrier i was told i was going to you know jets at that point and then we go into same squadron same aircraft same instructors but it's called advanced now and now we're learning how to dog fight for the first time we're doing what we call tactical formation which is uh just like aggressive position keeping um we are doing um dog fighting and low levels and all sorts of great stuff so it's really that first introduction to that tactical environment and putting really putting g's on the jet on your body and maneuvering is there like tactical formation is collaborating with other fighter jets a part of that it is so flying in a that's what you mean by formation so literally having an awareness all right is this done for you or are you as a human supposed to understand like where you are in the formation how to maintain formation all that kind of stuff yeah is it done autonomously or manually there's a great autonomy point on the end of this i've thought about so but what we do it's all manual so i'm looking at his wing and i'm looking at um different visual checkpoints that form like a triangle right like an equal out triangle essentially and then as that triangle you know is no longer equal i can tell my relative position against that aircraft right that's really cool uh and so that's what i'm staring at first sometimes hours on end you know several feet away doing with these if i'm in the weather that's all it is so you get it's almost like is it peripheral vision or is it no we're staring directly at it the peripheral is coming on my on my um that's interesting stuff right my sensors and my instruments and so here's my gyroscope at that point right while you're flying not looking straight correct i'm fly like this for hours it can hurt your neck we don't like doing this as much and i don't think it's just me right it's a weird thing where when you're like this it's actually harder to fly formation slightly than here because being in line of your hand movements and of the aircraft somehow has an effect on our ability to be more precise and comfortable it's strange uh yeah so but so the there's a symmetry to the formation usually so one of the people on the other side really don't like being on that side is it is it does it who gets like the short straw how do you decide which side of the formation you are it's a good question too because there's there's kind of rank in some sense so if it's a four-person formation right you have the division lead who's qualified to lead a whole division but maybe the other ones aren't and he has a dash too and that's his wingman essentially and then in a division there's two other aircraft and then you have another senior flight leader that's the dash three position and then you have dash four the last one and if you are all lined up on one side like fingertip one two three four that dash four guy is going to be at the end of that whip so if you're flying formation each one's making you know movements relative to the lead dash four is kind of you know at the end of that error you know and so his movements are kind of like a whip it's very difficult to fly in that position and close can you elaborate is it because of the air the aerodynamics what's the whip if this is the flight lead and this is dash two you know flightly is rock steady and just doing his thing yeah flight two is going to be working that triangle moving a little bit right and he has this small air bubble that he's doing his best to stay and then but dash three is flying off dash too and so his air bubble is dash two's plus his own and that's more and more stressful as you get further yeah okay um what's the experience of that staring for long periods of time and trying to maintain formation how stressful is that because like you know we're doing that when we drive staying in lane and that becomes after you get pretty good at it it becomes somewhat it's still stressful um which actually surprisingly stressful when you look at like lane keeping systems they actually relieve that stress somehow and it actually creates a much more pleasant experience while you're still able to maintain situational awareness and like stay awake which is really interesting like i don't think people realize how stressful it is to lane keep when they drive so this is even more stressful so are you do you do you think about that or is this um yeah i guess how stressful is it from a psychology perspective it's very stressful uh when so i taught students how to do this as well and so at our feet we have two writers and if i'm flying off a flight lead over here what you'll find a lot of times is you'll be flying or you like if i'm the structure and the students flying i'll start to notice that he's having a harder and harder time keeping position yeah and what i'll notice typically is he's locked out his leg they'll lock out the leg that's closest to the aircraft they're flying against and push on the rudder subconsciously because their whole body's trying to get away from the aircraft because they're so uncomfortable getting close to it and so i'll tell them i can i can fix their form with just a couple words they'll say wiggle your toes and they'll wiggle their toes and they'll reel out and they'll loosen all the muscles in their legs they've been locked up and their formation flying will get a lot better uh and so you know there's a lot of stress associated with that there's some interesting psychological or visual issues such as um vertigo as you're flying so if you're flying with him and then you fly right into a cloud right that's when it's very stressful because you have to be very close in order to maintain visual you might be on thunderstorm right and so you have to be very tight you might start raining and then he's turning but you might not even know that you might not even be able to see that turn and so all of a sudden you might look while you're in a turn thinking you were straight level and you look just maybe back at your instruments very quick and you realize you're like in a 30 degree turn and your whole concept of where you are in the world starts getting very confused and you immediately get this this sense of it it's weird like i look at the hud and it it feels all my sensor telling me it's spinning but it's not you know and so i have to trust my instruments even though it feels like it's spinning and the same thing can happen when you're flying formation off of someone and it it can be very um very dangerous and um disorientating but the point is to try to regain awareness by trusting the instruments like like distrust all your human senses and just use the instruments to rebuild situational awareness not in this particular case because our situational awareness is based it's predicated off of our flight lead so in a sense i'm just trusting his movements and so he's my gyroscope but you're absolutely right if i was by myself i would trust my instruments but i can't just stop flying form and trust my instruments because now i'm going to hit him oh yeah you have to pay attention so he's my reference so the instruments are not helping you significantly with his positioning not it's all completely manual so i is there a future where some of that is autonomous yeah and i've thought about automating that flight um regime but when i started thinking about it i you know realized that all the formation keeping that we do uh is designed to enhance the aviator's ability to maintain sight right so we fly very tight formation so that we can go in weather and to reduce groups of traffic coming into the boat we fly in one particular position so that all of all of the flight crew can look down the line and see the flight lead so everything is based everything has to do with the two air crew visually maintaining sight of each other and defending each other right in a combat spread i might be looking i may be three miles away from him flying formation directly beam and looking around to make sure nothing's there so as i'm looking into automating this process i thought well you know sure it's easy to get a bunch of aircraft to fly in formation off each other right it's it's trivial but why you know what is the best formation why are they doing that and that opened up a much more interesting regime of operations and flight mechanics and that's when we get back to that kind of stochastic mindset where we can bring in aircraft close to do some type of normal flying or reduce congestion around airports but when we consider flying in a formation and tactical environment we can be much more effective with non-traditional formation keeping or perhaps no formation keeping perhaps so autonomy used for formation keeping not for convenience but for the introduction of randomness that's hard too real-time mission planner yeah and then that's where you also have some human modifications so it's like man unmanned teaming enters that picture so you use some of the human intuition and adjustment of this formation the formation itself has some uncertainty it's such an interesting dance i think that is the most fascinating application of artificial intelligence is when it's human ai collaboration that that semi-autonomous dance that you see in these semi-autonomous vehicle systems in terms of cars being driving but also in the safety critical situation of a airplane of a fighter jet especially when you're flying fast it's i mean in a split second you have to make all these kinds of decisions and it feels like an ai system can do as much harm as it can help and so to get that right is a really fascinating challenge one of the challenges too isn't just the the algorithms of the autonomy itself but how it senses the environment that of course is going to what be what all these decisions are based off of and that's a challenge in this type of environment well i gotta ask so uh f18 what's it like to fly a fighter jet as best i mean what to you is beautiful powerful what do you love about the experience of flying for me you know and i think i'm an outlier a bit it wasn't necessarily the flying itself right it wasn't necessarily the the soaring over the clouds and you know looking down at the earth from upside down you know i i came to love that and but it wasn't necessarily the passion that drove me there i just had no exposure to that the only exp the exposure i had was was reading and going in the woods and and science fiction and and all that and so you know what seemed to kind of drive me towards that was just a desire to really be operating as close to what i thought was the edge of technology or science and that's the path that i chose to try to get close to that i thought that being in a in a fighter jet uh and you know all the tools and the technology and the knowledge and the challenges and the you know failures and victories that would come with that just seemed like something that i wanted to be a part of uh and it wasn't necessarily about the flying but it was about the challenge and like i said as a person from a small town you know small high school being able to get my hands you know or even just near something of such technological significance was kind of empowering for me and that's kind of what bore the love of flight from there you know becoming you know having some level of mastery in that aircraft it really feels like an extension of your body and once i got there then then the kind of the level flying kind of followed so you sort of one is the man mastery over the machine and second is the machine is like the greatest thing that humans have ever created arguably the the like things that lockheed martin and others have built i mean the engineering in that yeah it's um however you feel about war which is one of the sad things about human civilization is um war inspires the engineering of tools that are incredible and it's like maybe without war if we look at human history we would not build some of the incredible things we built so in order to win wars to stop wars we build these incredible systems that perhaps propagate war and that's a that's another discussion i'll ask you about but this do you this is like um this is a chance to experience the greatest engineering humans have ever been able to do like similar i suppose that astronauts feel like when they're flying i wanted to be an astronaut i wanted to take that route uh i was gonna apply to test pilot school um it just didn't work out for me uh i ended up having a broken foot during my window but long story short i ended up after uh my time in my fleet squadron and we can get back to the rest of the timeline if you want but i went to be an instructor pilot um instead right and then you know i i was talking about this with a squadron mate earlier today about how you know i certainly wouldn't be talking with lex today if i ended up going to test pilot school you know i never would have i never would have had the i wouldn't maybe recklessness i don't know but the the willingness to have a conversation about uap while i was you know i that led me to the decision to get out once i went there and it it kind of enabled me to talk about uap more publicly and if i stayed in the navy then i don't think that would have happened i wouldn't have been able to if i went that route well as a small tangent do you hope to travel to mars one day do you think you'll step foot on mars one day if you ask me that five years ago i would have said yes i want to in fact i would like to die on myers um now today now i have some hesitations and i have some hesitations because i'm hopeful and optimistic and i think that you know i think that we are truly like on the brink of a very wide technological revolution that's going to kind of move us how we used to move information and data in in this last century we're going to be manipulating and managing matter in that next century and so i think that i think our reach as human as humans are going to get a lot wider a lot faster than people may realize or at least wait are you getting like super ambitious beyond mars is that what you're saying well i mean like mars seems kind of boring i want to go beyond that is that we do do you mean the reach of humanity across all kinds of technologies or do you mean literally across space across space you know so you know we're going to be i think that as artificial intelligence and machine learning starts broaching further into the topic of science or the area of science and we start working through new physics we start working through or i should say pass the einsteinian frameworks as we kind of get a better idea of what space time is or isn't we may have we may find you know answers that we didn't know that we were looking for and we may have more opportunity and i'm not saying this is something i'm you know betting the farm on of course but um maybe maybe that's a road i want to explore on earth instead of uh on mars maybe there's technology that can be brought to bear with new science and harder engineering that is a road that doesn't go past mars to get outside the solar system so there are different ways to explore the universe than the the traditional rocket systems uh if we can continue sort of your journey um you said that that you were attracted to the the incredibly advanced technologies of the f-20 uh of the f-18s and just the the fighter jets in general um let me ask another question which seems incredibly difficult to do which is landing on a carrier or taking off from a carrier and landing on a carrier so what's that like what are the challenges of that taking off is pretty easy it's procedurally somewhat complex where there's a lot of moving parts almost like a clock you know you're almost in a pocket watch some sense and you're a part of the machinery and so long as you press the right buttons and do the right things and you're shooting off the front so there's like a checklist to fall and there's several people involved in that checklist and you just got to follow the checklist correctly essentially yep lots of ways to screw it up but you'll know how to screw it up but landing on the back of the boat is a whole different animal there's a lot more variables um there's essentially one or two people responsible for the success of that the landing signal officer who actually represents a team of specially trained aviators who are responsible for helping that aviator land on the boat and uh the pilot himself and it it is a hard task to actually fly precisely enough to be good at it so to fly quote unquote the perfect pass you essentially have to fly your head through a one foot by one foot box that's essentially the target you're shooting for um plus or minus probably about five knots on air speed although we don't really judge it by air speed it's something called angle of attack but generally you know pretty tight parameters there um and you can do everything perfect and still fail right so when we go to touchdown we immediately bring the power up and we rotate as if we were doing uh as if we were bouncing off the deck and if we catch it then we slow down and then someone tells us to bring the power back which we do we don't do it on our own because it's such a violent experience you can think you're trapped or not or something breaks and you you bring your throttle back that's a very serious thing it happened the best of us you know i'll admit i've done it once when i first got to the squadron um it's called ease guns land uh and so you know i came in the boat and i brought the power i cracked the power back a little bit before i've been told to or that my aircraft had finished settling in and that was a big faux pas right so especially as a new guy so um it's it's a very serious business there's a lot of eyes on you and there's a lot of ways to screw it up but the physical you know rush of like having a great pass and then like there's just the like the crash of into the boat and all that the physical sensation from it you know when everything's going great you know it's top of the world it's a great feeling how much of it is feel how much of it is um instruments how much is other people just doing the work for you catching you as long as you do everything right there's a few systems we use one is called the ball and that ball is external to our aircraft and it's b-a-l-l correct well it's a it's a i floss landing system which stands for something very long convoluted but essentially it's a mirror with lights on it and you see the light at a different cell based on your position relative to an ideal glide slope yeah so if you're right on it you're right in the middle and if you're below you're low and as i add power and maneuver the aircraft that ball you know i see that ball rise you see the ball low it's a lagging indicator though right and your jet is a a lagging engine too right it takes time to pull up the engine so that adds to the complexity you have to think ahead a bit you know so you don't want to um you can't just bring the power up and leave it there you have to bring the power up touch it bring it back and oh by the way your landing area is moving not just away from you but also on an angle right because we have an angled deck and so you're constantly doing one of these to correct yourself as you go and even every time you do one of those yeah maybe it's a 30 degree angle bank right i'm losing lift right yeah and so i have to compensate with power each time i do that so i'm doing another one because you have to maintain um the same level you're always lowering like it's a constant rate of descent that's increasing from about 200 feet per minute to about 650 and every time you do this that's messing with that okay so you have to compensate doing that manually do it manually all right and then of course as you come down that glide slope uh it becomes more and more narrow and you have to of course um modulate your inputs such that they're smaller and smaller because they have a bigger and bigger effect as you get closer in and what happens too when you're getting close is that right before you cross over if this is the boat right here your table right before you kind of get your wings over the boat itself this big wind from the the main tower of the boat is where it dips down so the wind actually goes down it's called the burble it'll actually pull the aircraft down increase your rate of descent so at that particular point you need to you know increase your power and try to compensate against that and so that's kind of a third variable that's trying to screw you up on your way down what's the most difficult conditions in which you have to land or you've seen somebody have to land because i think you were also a signal officer as well i was yeah that was the headlining signal officer for for my squadron so you you've probably seen some tough landings i have i've seen a a ramp strike which is when a part of the aircraft hits before um the landing area which is basically the round out of the boat that is before the landing area so they basically struck the back of the boat coming in yeah it was just their hook so it wasn't the aircraft and they were fine that one was kind of ugly um but it like rips that part of the aircraft absolutely and then you land on your bellies that kind of thing in this particular case it hit and then it it gave and essentially dragged the hook on the on the surface after that and so he was able to grab a wire at that point when does that kind of thing happen just a miscalculation by the pilot or is it uh weather conditions i wouldn't even call it miscalculation i mean i'm gonna put the blame on the pilot because he's the only one in the cockpit but then the day he's reacting to the situations he's dealing with and so it may be errors or he may be doing the best with you know the conditions that he's been given on that particular one you just got two high rated signs very common and that's when you see it with new pilots you see it with older pilots right new ones and complacent ones what you see is they'll um try to make the ball go right where they want it in close they think they can beat the game a little bit and they try to and so we have sayings we teach we teach pilots you know as a landing signal officer we tell them like don't re-center the high ball in close it's one of the rules to live by and so when the ball is up high don't try to bring it back in close to like the center point when you're when you're in close because what you're doing you bring the power off and you're gonna crash right down and that's what happens right because you got the burble pulling you down you might be correcting which is decreasing your lift uh and then you have that type of maneuver so how are you supposed to do all this in harsh weather conditions and so that's the one i wanted to tell you about that's the hardest one and what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi lights on that's a really shitty day 99 taxi lights on what's that mean so everyone put your taxi lights on because you're about to land on the boat and you don't see the boat weather is so bad that the landing still officer on the boat can't see you either and you can't see the boat and you won't be able to see it when you touch down so we call that a zero zero landing and you turn on the taxi light so that the lso who has a radio in his hand that looks like a phone from 1980 is talking directly to the pilot and he's looking at that little light in the rain and he's telling him you're high you're low power things like that come right back to left and literally talking him down to land on the boat right there and the pilot usually it comes as a surprise to the pilot delaney because he's just listening to the voice you can't see the ball can't see the boat and all of a sudden you just hit the boat you crash crash we're going about 1600 feet per minute descent at that point so you're still you're going super fast it's all this is happening fast you don't know you don't know what at the moment it's gonna hit so you're just going into the darkness and just waiting for it to hit it's not dark though a lot of times it's white into the light you're going into into the light and then there's a voice from an 80s phone i got it this this is terrible um but so that you still uh you still have to so this kind of thing happens you still have to land sometimes you just don't have a place to divert but you know in a sense we're trained for that because we do the night landings as well and i think you'll find this interesting but i always found that the night landings where in these particular cases you're usually lined up behind the boat maybe 10 15 miles whereas the other ones it's like a tight circle the landing pattern and so we can potentially see the boat way out there um if the lights were on which they're not but we can maybe see like the string of aircraft in front of us but what's what's interesting is that it can take a while i can t you might be 15 miles out and your lights are turned down as dim as possible you have a cloud deck maybe at six or seven thousand feet so that the starlight there's no moon but let's say the star light's blocked out right because just the star light alone no moon you can see the boat you can see the water but when that goes away it's like closing your eyes right you can't tell anything it could be upside down you could be in any position and for me it was almost a meditative process that i had to snap myself back out of when i was on like a long straightaway and then i would see the light pop up in the sea of darkness right no lights anywhere can't even see the horizon and i just see a light out there my instruments are telling me and they're turned down as far as they can go right so i can barely see them so my eyes can adjust and i'm just staring at this light in the distance and it's just very meditative and it's the hum behind you and and then like four miles you know it's almost like oh the light is a little bit bigger and you almost kind of have to snap back to it and be like i need to like kind of like look around a little bit and engage my brain like back to my body and like yeah do this cause you're gonna have to actually land well is there just you said you don't necessarily feel the romantic notion of the whole thing but is there some aspects of flying where you look up and maybe you see the star the stars or um yeah that kind of thing that you just like holy crap how did humans accomplish all of this like am i actually flying right now i used to have those moments on the boat when i was catching planes land i would i would they would trap and it'd be nighttime and it's just all this chaos in the middle of the ocean and nothing and i would have these moments like how the hell did i end up here you know there's one moment in time next to an aircraft landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean you know where did my life you know how did my life go to end up here how interesting but what i did start to enjoy was the night vision goggles and putting those on and looking up at the stars flying around especially over the ocean what do they look like and there's so many there's just so many stars that you know you normally can't see they're shooting stars all the time almost every flight you'd see them with the goggles on so it was a great pleasure to take advantage of the lack of light pollution in some cases especially on deployment to go grab some goggles at night and go out some quiet spot in the ship that no one can see me and just kind of look around you know yeah it's humbling quick break bathroom break that wasn't my quick quick stretch of legs you got a few cool patches i do so this is a vfa 11 red rippers patch uh typically uh going actually on our arm uh so this is actually what we call the boar's head or arnold so this is actually the the boar's head from the gordon's gin bottle so yeah in 1918 we were in the we were in london or the uk somewhere and we apparently partied with the owner and founder of cornish gin we had a great time and there's a signed letter in our writing room that says we can use the logo in perpetuity oh man uh yeah so would like to give you that patch i drank quite a bit of gourd so this is good and then i'd like to give you that coin uh from from our squadron the red rippers that's a badass name thank you brother you're welcome so let's jump around a little bit but let me ask you about this one set of experiences that you had and people in your squadron had so you and a few people in the squadron either detected ufos on your instruments or saw them directly tell me the full story of these ufo sightings and uh to the smallest technical details because i love those i'll do my best so we returned from and when i say we i mean my not my squadron but vfa11 the red rippers uh i was a a somewhat junior pilot at the time i joined them on deployment 2012 where they had been already out there for about six months or so um operating in the vicinity of afghanistan uh i joined them and then we we flew back and still as a relatively new guy we came back and we entered uh what's considered a maintenance phase where we slow down the tactical flying a bit uh kind of recuperate do some maintenance on the aircraft and our particular model of the f-18 the lot the lot number uh was plumbed for the particular things that were needed to upgrade the radar from what's known as the abg-73 to the apg-79 and the abg-73 is a mechanically uh scanned array radar uh it's a you know perfectly fine radar but the acer radar is kind of a you know magnitude jumping capability kind of a an analog digital kind of mindset so got it so it's a leap to digital uh avg 73 i mean are these things on a carrier like what are we talking about here this is how big is a radar yeah so this is actually the radar it's in the f-18 itself okay so when you say that we're chosen this is to test uh the upgrade to the new the 79 abg 79. less of an uh test and more of just hey it's your turn to get the upgrade like we're all going to these better radars they were building ones off the off the line with the new radar but we were this weird transitionary squadron in the middle that transitioned from the older ones to the new ones but it's not particularly rare to fly with different types of radar because in the and we call the fleet replacement squadron essentially the training ground for the f-18 you have all sorts of f-18s with different radars so you are used to having multiple ones but in the actual deployable combat squadron um we upgraded and when we upgraded we saw that there were objects on the radar that we were seeing the next day in in this with this new radar that weren't there with the old radar and these were sometimes you know the same day you might go on two flights the one in the morning might be with all the radar the one the evening with the new radar and you and you'd see the objects with the with the new radar and that's not overly surprising in some sense uh they are more sensitive uh perhaps they're not filtering out everything they should be yet or perhaps there's some other type of error maybe it needs to be calibrated whatever it was relatively new and we were somewhat used to there being software problems with these types of things occasionally just like anything else and so okay maybe this is a radar software malfunction we're getting some false tracks as we call them um what were you seeing and so what we would see are representations of the object so this is off of our radar we're not seeing a visual image here this is kind of like a what's being displayed to us almost like in a gaming fashion right like our the icon right so the icon is showing us hey something is there and here's the parameters i can understand about it so this is in the cockpit there's a display that's showing um some visualization with the radar is detecting correct and there's two different ways to do that the first one is like the actual data like the radar where um i am it's showing me the data kind of as if it's in front of me and i'm selecting those contacts and there's another screen called the situational awareness page and that's kind of a god's eye view that brings all that data into one spot and so i'm going to talk about this from the essay page from the situational awareness page versus the individual radar ones because it's easier but okay so sorry to linger on that so the individual displays are like first person and then the essay is when you say god's eye view is like from the top integration of all that information as if it's looking down onto the earth yes is that a good way to summarize it it is but for the aviator it's slightly different because those two radar displays i talked about are at the bottom of that display is kind of representative of where i am and so i see what's in front of me got it whereas the situational awareness page uh the aircraft is located in the center of that and then i all around me you know based off of the data link and wherever i'm getting information from i can see that whole where page i can see all the situation so i'm going to kind of talk about this from the situational awareness page which is a top-down view just to kind of frame our minds instead of jumping around and so what we would see out there is we'd see these indications that something would be there and they would have a track file that track file that thing that represents the object has a line coming out of it and that represents what's called the target aspect indicator um and there's some tracking from the radar correct so it's showing you where the object's going this is all pretty cool that the radar can do all this so radar locks in on the different objects and it tracks them over time correct that's coming from the radar that's like built-in feature mm-hmm okay cool out there we're seeing it so we don't have to necessarily like pull things into our our tracker in some sense right like it's all out there and then we can kind of choose the highlight on stuff or to kind of focus in on it more so but the information should all be out there and so we'd see that target aspect indicator that that line on a typical aircraft you know it would kind of look like this it'd be coming out and it would go steady and if they turn you you know it'll be like when you see them turn right like it's not magic but this object they would the target aspect would kind of be like all over the place like kind of randomly in the 360 degrees you know from that top-down view that line would be in a place so kind of you know is it unable to determine the target aspect is it stationary you know and that's just how it puts it out and it's not used to seeing it so i'm not saying that's necessarily super weird but it was different than what we were used to seeing because we weren't used to seeing stationary objects out there very much and what was also interesting is that these weren't just stationary on a zero wind day right these are stationary at twenty thousand feet fifteen thousand feet five hundred feet you know with with the wind blowing you know and so much like the sea you know when we're up there fighting it affects everything we consider the wind when we're you know shooting missiles when we're flying or fuel considerations it's like operating you know in that volume of air like the ocean everything's going with the current and so anything that doesn't go with the current you know is immediately kind of identifiable and strange and that's why these were initially strangers because they would be stationary against the wind so if you had something like a good drone in the windy conditions what would that look like would it would it not come off as stationary would it sort of float about kind of thing no i think with the drone technology we have today they could stay within a pretty tight location well i meant like dji drone not like cons i'm saying like generically speaking i would not i'm not a military drone no i just i have a dji drone myself even and you know maybe not 100 knots but if that thing's in 30 or 40 not wins you know the amount of distance it's going to be kind of doing one of these like that change is not something i'm going to detect from maybe many miles away interesting so it could look very stationary but that wasn't necessarily you know and what's interesting about this story is that there's not like the one smoking gun right you have to kind of look at everything and that's what i know i don't like about the department of defense and just generally people's take on this is that everything is kind of based around a single image you know or that that one case but a lot of interestingness comes from the duration or the time it's been out there how they're interacting relative to other objects out there and you don't get that information when you just look at a frame for a second you know everyone kind of bites off on the shiny object but so you yourself from your particular slice of things you've experienced and seen directly or indirectly you've kind of built up an intuition about what are the things that were being seen i want to go that far i've just been able to you know eliminate some some variables because of how long i've observed it so like you said yes can a drone stay in a particular position against the wind like that certainly but i don't think it can do that and then go point eight mach for four hours after that you know and so when you when you look at it outside of that once that moment in time then it eliminates a lot of the potential things it could be at least from my perspective so what kind of stuff did you see yeah in the instruments we'd see them flying um in patterns uh kind of racetrack patterns or circular patterns or just going kind of straight east i occasionally see them supersonic 1.1 1.2 mach but typically 0.6 to 0.8 mach just for extremely extended periods of time you know essentially all the time and this is airspace where there's not supposed to be anything else at all and it's pretty far out there it starts 10 miles off the coast goes like 300 miles can you say the location that we're talking about off the coast of virginia beach got it and so nobody is supposed to be out there it's possible for people to be there it's not necessarily restricted but it's well monitored and we're out there every day all day and so you know people know to stay clear if a cessna goes bumbling in there everyone's going to know about it fa is going to you know call him out he's going to tell us about it so concursions happen not a big deal but um they're pretty rare honestly because everyone knows area and we've been operating there for decades and what are the trajectories at 0.6 to 0.8 mach that these objects were taking typically they would be in some type of circular pattern or kind of racetrack pattern when they were at those speeds or i just see them kind of it wasn't always like a mechanical flight description and when i say that i mean like an autopilot is going to be just very precise right it's going to be locked on straight and whereas i could see an airplane i could tell if the pilot's flying it right because it's not going to be perfect the computer's not controlling it and these seemed more like that not that they were imprecise but that they were even much more erratic than that so like it wasn't like a straight line in a turn it was just kind of like a you know weird drift like that in that direction you know so it wasn't controlled by a down computer or uh no no disrespect to computers so it wasn't controlled by autopilot kind of technology that's not the sense that i got so how many people have seen them in the squadron uh sort of how many times were they seen how many um were there times when there's multiple objects once we started seeing on the radar enough and we would get close enough we'd actually see them on our fleer as well so our advanced targeting uh pod uh it's essentially a infrared camera that we use for targeting mostly in the air to surface environment we don't use it in the air arena it's just not that good of a tool frankly but we would see ir energy emitting from that location where the radar was dropping us off so you know the radar we'd lock onto the object and our sensors would all look there and so then we could see that it's looking at that right piece of sky but uh there's energy actually coming from there so now we start thinking that okay maybe not radar malfunctions maybe more maybe something is physically here of course and then people started to try to fly by and see it and at this point you know i would say maybe 80 to 90 percent of our squadron have probably seen one of these on the radar at this point everyone was aware of it there was small communication i think between squadrons of the same area that had the same radar so i knew it wasn't just our squadron for whatever strange reason um because they would be other squadrons would be out there and we would talk to them like hey like careful there's an object are you aware of that you know so like they would be aware of it and then of course people would want to go see what they look like right so people would try to fly by i try to fly by him i like how that's in of course of course of course you don't want to fly by it so you know there's an uh there's a argument against that kind of perspective that maybe the thing is dangerous so maybe we don't but perhaps that's part of the reason you want to fly by is to understand better what it is if it's a threat we have a lot of contact now that we did it back then you know and so it was still a hey is this a balloon is this a drone you know at a certain point and we're also aware of you know potential intelligence gathering operations that could be going on we're up there flying our tactics we're emitting uh we're practicing our ew you know we're turning at particular times like there's stuff that can be learned it's not a secret and you know countries keep different fishing vessels and whatnot in international waters off there so it's not exactly a secret that uh we're being observed out there so to think that a foreign hospital or a foreign nation would want to you know somehow intercept information whether that's our radar signals or jamming capabilities to try to break that down or understand it better or be ready for that next fight i mean that's what that's what scares me about this scenario because we didn't jump right to aliens or ufos we thought you know this is a radar malfunction we need to be aware of it's a safety issue and then you know this could be a tactical problem right here because everything we do is based off a crypto and and locate you know locations everything is classified we do out there right and so over time if you gather enough data about those fights and just monitor them forever just like uh some nations uh do with other uh piece of technology or software um they could probably learn a line so we have to be cognitive effect and defend against it so what can you say about the other characteristics of these objects like shape size texture luminosity how else do you describe object is there something that could be said so you said like this detect down radar step one now you have clear images that can give you a sense that it's actually a physical object what else can be said about those physical objects so eventually someone did see one with their own eyeballs multiple people and it and they saw it in a somewhat interesting way the object presented itself at the exact altitude and geographic location of the entry points into our working areas so we enter at a very specific point at a certain altitude and people leave the areas at the same point at a lower altitude probably one of the busiest pieces of sky on the eastern seaboard so two jets from my squadron went out and they went flying and they entered the area and when these objects went right between the aircraft so they're flying in formation and the object went between the aircraft they went between the object i think i don't think that the object was moving i don't think it aggressively went at them i think it was located still there and then they flew through it but they didn't have it on their radar um and that would i think the radar might have been malfunctioning i don't know that for sure i would like to look into it but my supposition is that if their radar was malfunctioning it would make sense that they wouldn't avoid the object that was there because they knew these were physical at that point um and we we would go up to these objects all the time time and try to see them we couldn't see them and we didn't know what it was um was it that were they just not there or being fooled was something happening were they were they moving dropping out to the last minute you know we're going by pretty quick so it's difficult to tell but perhaps if his radar wasn't working he wasn't receiving energy from the jet and the jet of course didn't know that it was there and so whatever the case was they flew right by and they described it just as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere and the kind of the apex of the cube were touching the inside of that sphere that's an image that's haunting so what do they think it is what did they think at that moment uh that they is it just this kind of cloud of uncertainty that that they're just describing a geometric object it's not on radar so it's unclear what it is um yeah what was uh the any kind of other description they've had of it in terms of the intuition from a pilot's perspective you know you have to kind of identify what a thing is to answer the first part they they actually canceled the flight and came back because they were you know it's like if there's one of these out here we're almost hitting them and it's right there then um you know perhaps we need to get a different jet with better radar but so they came back and they're in their gear and they're they're talking to the front desk and talking to skipper and like hey we almost hit one of those damn things out there and this kind of was one of those kind of slight watershed moments where we all were kind of like all right like this is a serious deal now yeah you know maybe it was a maybe we thought they were balloons or drones or malfunctions or maybe we thought it was fine but the end of the day if we're to hit one of these things then we need to you know we need to take care of the situation and that's actually when we start submitting hazard reports or hazard reps to the naval through the naval aviation safety kind of communication networks and it's you know it's not like a big proactive thing where people can go investigate it's more of a data collection mechanism so that you can kind of share that aggregate data and make sure things are uh progressing um so it wasn't a mechanism that would result in action being taken but we were hoping to at least get the message out to whomever was maybe running a classified program that we were not aware of or something like that that hey like you could kill somebody here like you've you've grown too big for your britches here take a step back so that was that was our concern at that point that's kind of where we were thinking this was going what's the protocol for shooting at a thing was was uh was there a concern that it's a direct threat not just surveillance but a thing that could be yeah a threat at least from my perspective like that never really crossed into my mind i thought it was potentially an intelligence um you know failure that could be being watched and information gathered but i didn't think that it was something that would proactively engage me in a hostile manner it wouldn't really make sense either too it would be shocking to like have one of these objects take out an f-18 but there's no real tactical advantage other than fear perhaps psychological yeah i've learned a lot about the psychological warfare in ukraine this is a big part of the war in terms of when you talk about siege warfare about war wars that last for many years for many months and then perhaps could extend to years but yes it didn't seem it didn't fit your conception of a threatening entity correct so looking back now from the all the pieces of data you've integrated you've personally added what what do you think it could be i don't know i don't know what it could be i think we've been able to categorize it successfully into a few buckets we've been able to say that you know this could be u.s technology that someone put in the wrong piece of sky or you know perhaps was developed and tested an inappropriate spot by someone that uh wasn't paying best practices is there uh sorry to interrupt is there a sort of uh modularity to the way the the military operates to where it's possible for one branch not to know about the tests of another yeah i think it's perfectly reasonable to think that that could occur right and so if we just make that assumption we can integrate that into our analysis here and just say okay but at the point we're at now you know we have to assume that that's not the case right with everything that's been going on and the statements have been made and the hearings i think that if it was a a non-communication issue um we're in big trouble at this point what about it being an object from another nation from china from russia or even one of our allies perhaps right maybe you know i don't think it's um controversial to say that our allies could be gathering information about us or anything of that nature but that would be an extreme case but i think it's just important to say right to not just say russia or china and just call them the bad guys and assume that if they don't have it no one can do it um and so from my perspective you know anyone else anyone else it doesn't necessarily need to be a foreign power it could be a non-government entity perhaps although i think that's very unlikely but again these are these are things you must consider if you kind of throw everything everything other than the us under under scrutiny but you know from what has been reported and the behaviors that have been seen it would be i would expect to see remnants of that technology elsewhere in the economy there seems to be too many things that require advanced technology that would be beneficial commercially as well as in other military applications for it to be completely locked away by one of our competitors now i could see us perhaps locking something away if we're already in the lead and having it to pull out as needed but for someone that's perhaps in a power struggle and they're in second place they might be more aggressive with the development of different types of technology willing to accept bigger risks do you think it could be natural phenomena that we don't yet understand i think that there are a number of things that this is going to be right i don't think there's one thing at the end of the day but i certainly think that that is part of what some of this could be i don't think it's what we were seeing on the east coast and i don't think it is related to the roosevelt incident or i'll even go out and say the nimitz incident but what's the roosevelt incident the roosevelt incident typically referred to as the gimbal and or the go fast video and then the nimitz is from uh with the david fravor has uh witnessed directly and spoken about we'll talk about that as well i'd just love to get your um your sort of uh interpretation of those incidents but yeah so in this particular case natural phenomena could be a part of the picture but you're saying not the whole picture yes yes and we can't discount it oh the other thing is what about the failure of pilot eyesight like sort of some deep mixture of actual direct vision human vision system failure and like psychology like um seeing something weird and then filling in the gaps because in order to make sense of the weird i've tried to expose myself to a scenarios like that that i don't necessarily think are right but i've explored them to see if they could have some truth and one example is let's imagine a scenario where if we're seeing these objects every day off the east coast i can imagine a technology or an operation where you had some type of traditional propulsion system operating drones in order to gather data like we had discussed and i could i could envision a clever enough adversary that could perhaps destroy or somehow remove these objects and replace them with new objects essentially when we're not looking right and that accounts for the large uh airborne time and so i i explore options like that and i try to see you know what what evidence and assumptions need to be made in order to prove or disprove that and you know you would need so much infrastructure you know you need some you need so many assets and so i try to explore some of those fallacies and some of those concerns and as aviators we're trained into many uh like actual physical like eyesight and kind of illusion training so like at night time flying there's so many things that can happen flying with false horizons and so we receive hours of of training on that type of of stuff but this just falls outside the category from my perspective what was the visibility conditions when in the times when people were able to see it and then are we we just earlier discussed complete nighttime darkness um in this case was was it during the day it was a perfectly clear day that that particular incident yep in a world that's full of mystery i have to ask what do you think is the possibility that it's not of this earth origin like the term non-human intelligence in a sense because again there's so much there's a lot of assumptions in there that may cause us to go down the wrong roads it could you know these could be something that our weather phenomena of earth right or something else that is just something we don't understand or can't imagine right now that's still of this earth um if we consider extraterrestrials or something that came from a physical place far away in space time you know that leads us to some detection assumptions that we would need to make and so i just try to not categorize it under anything and just say hey is this demonstrating intelligence and start from there as a single object what can we learn about it kinematically how it's performing what does that mean for its energy source what does that mean for the g-forces inside and then step it out a level and say okay how are these interacting with our fighters if they are how are they interacting with the weather and their environment how are they interacting with each other so can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm especially off the east coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects right and so we might be able to determine some things about their maybe you know center capabilities are the areas of focus you know if we can determine uh how they're working in conjunction with each other but you know seeing one little flash of an object uh doesn't provide that type of insight um but we have the systems four but and it's kind of made on irony but it's it's a fact of life the reality that many of these well-deployed highly capable systems are held under the military umbrella which makes it difficult to provide that data for scientific analysis so there's probably a lot more data on these objects that's not being that's not made available probably even within the military for analysis i think so yeah i think there's a lot of data that could be made available and you know that's one of the reasons why you know i've been engaged with the american institute of aeronautics and astronautics to build you know a large resources of cross-domain expertise so that if or when that data is available or that there's additional analysis needed you know we can spin up those teams and make that analysis so there was a recently a house intelligence subcommittee hearing on ufos that you were a part of what was the goal of that hearing and can you maybe summarize what you heard the hearings from my perspective uh seemed a bit disingenuous uh kind of top level uh i think um who was the run by i decided to interrupt like who were the people involved and what was the goal this day to go congressman andre carson uh did chair of the committee and he he was i think ultimately responsible for bringing it all together you know i think the intent from congress was to try to bring light to what has been happening with the navy and to help show the american people that um congress is taking this serious because something serious is happening but you know the sense i got seemed a bit disingenuous they talked around it a lot they you know advertised their um their love of science fiction um but they you know they didn't treat this i would say in the manner it deserved as a potential tactical threat if it's coming from a foreign power and i get it though at the same day they have very specific objectives within the dod right they have a very important job their job isn't necessarily to do exploratory science for no reason so i i applaud and i encourage their efforts on the intelligence side to help understand this but my concern is that they play a role they're not well suited for which is is doing science and the pentagon has opened a new office to investigate ufos called all domain anomaly resolution office what do you think about this office do you think it can help alleviate the in the way which this hearing perhaps has failed to improve more the scientific rigor and the seriousness of investigating ufos i think that remains to be seen i think it's a step in the right direction but it's a step that was taken because the previous step didn't happen right so the aoi msg was the progeny essentially of the aaro or aero and you know the name was changed because nothing was happening and it was essentially just a confusing mess of words that were created to make this topic unpalatable that airborne object identification synchronization management group quite the mouthful uh i practiced that uh but the new all domain anomaly resolution office you know from my perspective at least at least the perspective that they're putting out they they seem to want to be open they put out a twitter handle they're out they're going out on twitter and communicating saying they want to keep this open um but you know that's going to run into a classification wall well so uh dr sean kirkpatrick seems like an interesting guy he does yes so he he's got a um evan looked into deeply but he he seems to have sort of he's coming from like a science research perspective like uh uh background so he he might be at least in the right mindset the right background to kind of lead a serious investigation i think so i'll just say generally um you know the office has been receptive to aila reaching out in order to collaborate uh which has been a positive sign um also pass the same kudos to um dr spurgle and nasa's uh effort as well i i see these organizations that are standing up i do see them as as good faith efforts that are coming about through a lot of difficulty and negotiation most likely right and i see these as as a small door opening that if we can take advantage of can lead to a much more productive relationship between these organizations how do you put pressure on this kind of thing does it come from the civilian leadership does it come from sort of congress and presidents does it come from the public does the public have any power to put pressure on this or is the the giant wall of bureaucracy going to protect it against any public pressure what do you think i think we've been in in that latter state for a while but you know society seems to be a bit different nowadays you know we have the ability to communicate and to group and to to form relationships in a way that haven't been able to be present in the past we've been able to do research for better or worse on our own you know in a way that hasn't been able to happen before and so i sense that people are a bit less willing to kind of buy the bottom line statement from those in power as they used to be back when they didn't have access to those tools and so i do think there is a massive role for the general society general populist to play to show that they are interested in this because it's not that i don't think the politicians or the leaders in the in the pentagon it's not that they don't like this topic necessarily or think it's toxic per se but they exist in a culture where this has been toxic and they don't feel comfortable talking about it and these are people that have spent their entire careers you know working towards a goal and getting to very high positions within government and so this is very against their nature to take a stance on a topic like this and so the fact that these are standing up even if they do have a small budget or if they struggled a bit at first i still think it's a massive change you know and it's a big step away from that stigma that has been pervading this topic for so long and you're actually part of alleviating the stigma for some somebody that's as credible as intelligent as like varied in background able to speak about these things that's a big risk that you took but it's extremely valuable because it's alleviating the stigma i thank you for saying that but it didn't feel like much of a risk for me you know i didn't come out about aliens right or whatever i i had a safety problem that i started asking questions about and you know i went down a road as a navy trained aviation safety officer right that sent me to school for six weeks in pensacola would be a safety officer you know we're almost hitting these objects and it's not something that happened in the past and we want to understand it it's happening right now like these these occurrences are still happening aviators are flying right now are still flying by these things in fact i mentioned i was a instructor pilot i had a student call me about eight months ago or so and he's like hey sir you know i made it to the fleet finally you know i had trained him how to fly and then he goes to f18 he goes another year of training and then he gets out to his squadron on the east coast and he's flying with the senior member of uh the base nes oceana where the fighters fly out of um senior five row six and it was kind of a bad weather day and so they said hey you know if the weather's not good enough for us to do this dog fighting set we'll we'll go out and do a uap hunt you know see if we can't find anything or take a look at them you know i don't know if it was ingest or not but you know this they i actually would say it's not just because there were there were notices that were being briefed about this being a safety hazard at this point and so i now that i i think about it it likely wasn't just long story short they went flying the weather was too bad they did go into ufo and they physically saw one you know and he called me up and said hey sir i saw a cuban sphere they're still out here you know years later and so it's almost like a generational issue you know for these fighter pilots at least on east coast but that's great that they can talk about it right exactly exactly they feel at least comfortable they have a reporting mechanism and so that was one of the problems that i noticed that we have a lot of reporting mechanisms to take care of safety issues and and even tactical issues when the time is right in order to keep track of what's going on but there's no way to communicate about this sure we could submit a hazard report but nothing's actually being investigated and if this is a tactical vulnerability or something more it deserves attention if i could ask your sort of uh take your opinion of the different ufo sightings that the dod has released videos on so what do you think about the tic tac ufo that david fraver and others have cited that's such you know truly anomalous experience i can't i can't do like mental models in my head to find potential solutions to discredit that right like as much as i try right just as a logical process as a practice i can't i can't pick it apart in in the way that we were just talking a moment ago about you know thousands of drones being like sent up in very tricky manners right i can't really bring myself to a clever solution that you know other than just saying the pilots are lying or is there you know and i believe you know i i know dave fravor you know i consider him a friend we talk a lot i have zero zero reason to disbelieve anything he says yeah i agree with you uh but in terms of the actual ufo is there something anomalous and interesting to you about that particular case maybe one interesting aspect there is how much do i understand about the water surface and underwater aspects of these ufos it seems like a lot of the discussions about is about the movement of this particular thing that seems to be weird anomalous seems to defy physics but what about stuff that's happening underwater that's interesting to me if i had advanced technology i would certainly like to operate in part underwater because you can hide a lot of stuff there you think it would be somewhat as easy as traveling through interstellar space at least right yeah you know i wish i had a great answer for that but as an aviator that's a kind of a black box for us you know we don't have great what i would call cross domain tracking right i can't see something go underwater and then follow it under water so it's literally not your domain like underwater like leave that for somebody else yeah and you know i i use that terminology because it's it's kind of important right um cross-domain tracking uh is something that we haven't had to necessarily worry about right because airplanes operated in the air and submarines operated underwater and space planes operating space right but you know there's going to be you know that's going to blur i think as as we move along here especially in the air and space regime and being able to perhaps transition my radar contact at 40 000 feet to another radar system that can track it up to 200 000 feet you know that might be a value and so we seem to be missing that right now so what about the go fast and the gimbal videos that you mentioned earlier well there was a like what's interesting there to you so the gimbal i'll talk about that one first i was airborne for that one um the person that recorded it was a good friend of mine uh but i mean both their crew i knew both of them but the the wizard himself uh very close friends went through a lot of her training together i went to the same fleet squadron he ended up transitioning to be a pilot and then came to where i was instructing so i got to struck him a bit on his transition um and you know the way that was was was we went out on a air-to-air training mission so uh simulating a air fight against our own guys they're acting like the bad guys and kind of go head-to-head against each other and when we fly on those missions we all fly out together more or less we set up and then we kind of a trite from the fight as we either you know run out of gas or something happens and so people usually go back onesies or twosies and so the aircrew that recorded the gimbal they were going back to the boat and we were on what's called a workup training event and so this is like a month on the boat where we're essentially conducting more time operations more or less to stress ourselves out and to kind of do the last training block before we go on deployment essentially so it's pretty high stress uh they actually do send aircraft from like land bases to kind of try to penetrate and we're expected to go intercept them and so we're kind of practicing like we play and so he saw these objects on the radar the gimbal and a fleet of other aircraft or vehicles and they initially thought it was part of the training exercise that they were sending something in to try to penetrate the airspace and so they you know they flew over to it and as they got close enough to get on the flear uh you know i think everyone has heard their reaction um and they realize that it wasn't something they were expecting to see can you actually describe what's in the video what's the reaction in case they haven't seen it yeah a lot of swearing uh but so what you see on the flear footage is a black or white depending on when you look at it object that's somewhat shaped like a gimbal it appears almost as if someone put two plates together and then there seems to be almost like a small funnel of ir energy that's at the top of the bottom of those plates in a sense so almost as if you know there's a stick going in between two plates but not that pronounced right so there's an energy field that kind of went to a funnel on the top and the bottom at least that's how i was being portrayed on the fleer there's a lot of conversation about that being glare things that nature but it was actually a very tight ir image it just was non-descript shape which was interesting typically we would see the skin of the aircraft we can see the flames coming out of the exhaust especially at those ranges um but and there was no flames or there's no exhaust here there was no exhaust there was no you know there was no outgassing of repellent in any manner right it was just an object that had nothing emitting from it that was stationary in the sky we're not stationary but it was it was um moving along a path right it wasn't falling out of the sky and it continued along if we were to consider it from a god's eye view again on the sa page it continued along in a path and from the perspective that top-down view it just went another direction so no um just an instantaneous direction change from that perspective you also hear them you know very excitedly talking on the tapes about um you know whatever the heck this thing is and look at the essay there's a whole formation of them and so the essay is a situational awareness page and again it's a large display that gives that god's eye view of all the radar contacts so the video is actually showing just one and then they're speaking about many of them correct on the unless the essay display correct and what they essentially saw was if we were to consider above the object north so kind of offset to the north of the object there was a formation of about somewhere between four and six of these objects in a rough wedge formation you know so kind of side by side like this and again not in a like autopilot type manner where it was very stiff it was very kind of non-mechanical the flight mechanics again and these objects were in that formation and they were going along and then they turned pretty sharply but they still had a radius of turn and then went back in the opposite direction and during that turn it was they were kind of like all over the place like it wasn't tight they weren't even like super i they weren't flying in a way i would expect them to be flying in relation to a flight lead they were flying as if they were flying close to each other but not in formation which was kind of strange right um and then when they rolled out they kind of tightened backed up like so when they basically they started that turn and then 180 degrees out essentially they started flowing in the opposite direction and kind of got back in that formation and while that was happening the gimbal object was proceeding we'll say left to right and as as those uh the formation kind of turned up to the north and was just passing back it the gimbal just kind of went back in the opposite direction so to follow it back in that direction and in the in the flare itself you know you see the object uh changes orientation quite a bit so you see it um more or less level maybe candid about 45 degrees and then you see it kind of moving around like this almost as if it was a gimbal i've come to learn after some you know having seen some research online and people really looking into this that it seemed that the object actually climbed during that maneuver and so the reason it looked like it turned immediately is because it turned like this it turned uh in a vertical fashion like that which was pretty interesting that's kind of like another example of a flight mechanics that we don't normally operate because we don't change our directions by maneuvering in the vertical if we can help it it's you're just killing the fuel you know and so if you're like a surveillance platform looking to spend as much time around something you're not gonna you know climb 500 feet every time you make a turn unless you're tom cruise unless your tom cruise naturally okay so is that one of the more impressive flight mechanics you've seen in in the vid in video forms or not the direct eyesight reports but like in terms of video evidence that we have i think so we we were seeing a lot of these but we weren't just going on recording them all day we we just kind of put them in that safety bucket be like all right there's objects over there we're just not going to go near it you know and so we weren't putting our sensors on them that much so we were gathering the data kind of secondarily but we weren't primarily focusing on it to see all the details so that's so fascinating because you have a busy day you have a lot to do all right well there's some weird stuff going on there we're just not gonna go there and that says something about sort of the um about human nature about the the way that bureaucracies function the way the military functions it fills up your day with busy important things and you don't get to um i mean that is something that i'm in a sort of absurd way worried about which is like we fill our days with so much busyness then when truly beautiful things happen whatever they are truly anomalous things we just won't pay attention because they don't fit our busy schedule beautiful i think that's right on the nose and it's on my nose because you know i didn't give this topic the attention it deserved until i left right until i left and i went to be an instructor pilot where i had more time you know i had more downtime to kind of process and think and get out of exactly what you just described and that's kind of what broke me out of it and got me thinking more about it why do you think the dod released these videos it's a great question did the dod release it or they kind of get out on their own in some sense so i i don't know they answer that question but my understanding of the situation is that the dod talked about them so much because they're already out there in a sense and so you know they could they had a choice where they could have just straight up lied and said it wasn't theirs or it was fake but uh again i think our culture now is too open and their information moves too freely to to do things like that and it kind of left them in a pickle that they had to respond to so what was the role of pentagon's advanced aerospace threat intelligence program atip from your perspective from what you know maybe your intuition is a tip a real thing that existed i was in a position as an aviator that never would have exposed me to anything like that but i was curious about what people knew and i i think in my mind maybe hoped or you know hope someone was looking into this in some sense but on the day that gimbal was recorded i heard that they caught something extra interesting on the flea and i went to the intel deep brief space to go see the the film and you know everyone's gathered around watching it very interesting and i heard the admiral was coming down and so i was like i'm going to hang out back you know quietly my own business and see i just want to see his reaction try to read it to see if this is brand new or if it is something that they've been dealing with you know and you know he came in and he watched a video for like five or six seconds and went and like turned around and walked out and you know i was like he's definitely seen these before there's no way that you only watch that for a few seconds and don't have more interest it was you know too bizarre so kind of going back does the office exist well you know i've heard that though the admiral essentially reported back to the pentagon about that that case real time essentially after he left right so he basically went back and i was totally reported that to either atep directly or to other you know somehow the information got there so from my perspective and from what i've experienced it seems like yes it was a thing but you know as an aviator i wouldn't know either way right that's just my experience from what happened but it seems like there's somewhere to report to at the time it seemed like there was at least some place to complain to it's not report to let me ask you about sort of um people that are taking a serious look at at the videos and just the different ufo sighting reports uh so there's a there's a person named west who uh is a skeptic and tries to take a skeptical view on every single piece of evidence on these ufo sightings uh what do you think about his analysis he tries to analyze in a way that debunks some of these videos and assign probabilities to their explanations sort of leaning towards things that uh give a very low probability to um alien extraterrestrial type of explanations for these ufos what do you think about his approach to these uh analysis well two parts to his approach one uh i commend him for all the good work and effort he put into it um i've seen him build some models and things of that nature and so i think that's something that's absolutely needed in this environment no one's asking anyone to believe anyone here right uh trust but verify should certainly be the mantra but where i have uh you know a disagreement with his approach is that he's approaching from you know from a skeptic or from a debunker standpoint and you know from my perspective not not speaking for everyone but um when i hear that that tells me that you're driving towards a particular conclusion um which has been a very safe process for the past x years right it's been it's been like a very safe business to be in to tell people that they haven't seen aliens but uh times have changed a little bit and the tactics i've seen to try to retain that view on reality um has included things such as completely dismissing what the air crew are saying um and i think that is a fallacy to think that we have to take the human outside of that analysis so those are the two things i disagree with when you uh put the night vision on and you look at the stars and you look out there and in the vast cosmos only a small fraction of which we can see um how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there do you think about this kind of stuff i do you know i'm i'm of the theory that we are not the only people out there i think it's it's it would be a statistically silly comment to assume we are although i get that we are the only data point that we currently have although i'm willing to jump over that fence and say that yes there most likely is intelligent life elsewhere uh although i'll concede that it is a possibility we are early or it could be limited or it could be in a manner that we don't recognize or can really understand i i spend so much time thinking about how we anthropomorphize things on this ufo topic and we've done it to ourselves with media in a sense right we've trained ourselves what to think about uh what we think is true or what this would be like and by doing so i think we're closing ourselves off to a lot of what the possibilities could be and the things that we could miss you beautifully put that the thing that drew you to fighter jets is the technology so if you were to think to imagine from an alien perspective what kind of technologies would we first encounter as human beings if we were to meet another alien civilization in the next few centuries what kind of thing would we see so you're now at the cutting edge and you see the quick progress that's happening that was happening throughout the 20th century that's happening now with greater degrees of autonomy with robots and that kind of stuff what do you think we will encounter i think we're gonna see uh the ability to manipulate matter like we used to manipulate information like i think that's what um whether that means being able to pop something on the table that didn't exist or to influence a chemical reaction somewhere but being able to manipulate and treat matter as if it was information and so being able to design specific materials being able to move past a lot of the barriers that seem to limit our progress with things such as miniaturized fusion or even just fusion in general is you know a lot of it is is matter based as material based and our ability to not manipulate we can only discover materials in a sense and so i think that a complete mastery of the physical reality would be one of the key traits of a very intelligent species well you're actually working on some maybe you can correct me but sort of quantum mechanical simulation to understand materials so is that do you see sort of the the early steps that we're doing on quantum computing side to start to simulate to deeper understand materials but maybe to engineer to mess with materials at the at the very low level that aliens would be able to do and hopefully humans would be able to do soon yeah i think that's you know so if we think about how what materials are made of it's just a collection of atoms but each one of those atoms has a lot of data associated with it so if we want to kind of calculate how they interact with each other it requires a massive amount of computational resources so much so that it can't be done in a lot of cases with classical computers and that's where quantum computers come in although we don't have a perfectly functioning quantum computer at this point one of the things that we're working at at quantum general materials is to essentially bridge that gap between what a classical computer can do as far as simulating materials and of course what a fully functioning quantum computer would mean for being able to design materials and so you know having the ability to study matter at a very fundamental level and unleashing artificial intelligence and machine learning on that problem i think is you know in a sense you know alien in a way that we're able to advance our science using you know a process that we may not fully understand with a perhaps a non-human based intelligence in some sense and so we may find patterns in the the processes right how does our machine learning output you know can we we match behaviors with um what we're observing with what maybe a machine learning element with output right can we try to classify the intelligence in that manner perhaps um and so you know at gen mads we're looking at these materials we're considering what these algorithms could have used for later on um could we perhaps reverse the process and determine what a unique or anomalous material what type of properties it potentially could have and you said gen matt right what's uh what is jen matt gemnet is a quantum gender of material so uh it's the company i work for we essentially are working on a couple of verticals one of them is our quantum chemistry work we're essentially we're bridging the gap between essentially physics and chemistry uh we're working uh on those problems and and again implementing artificial intelligence machine learning into that process so that we can design those materials from the ground up additionally we are what we consider a vertically integrated material science company which means we can generate our our own data and so um within the next quarter coming up we we are launching a satellite in the space they'll have a fairly advanced hyperspectral sensor in there which is intended to be the first launch uh that will help us detect different types of materials uh using our advanced knowledge of uh quantum chemistry right we're gonna be leveraging that experience in order to better analyze that data oh interesting so uh materials that are strange or novel out there in space not necessarily but we'll be looking back at earth to be able to detect deposits on earth god i got it getting the greater perspective for mountain space to do analysis of different materials correct interesting yeah i was really impressed by the deep mine i got to hang out deep deepmind recently and they really impressed me the the possibility of the application as you're saying of machine learning in the context of quantum mechanical simulation for materials so to understand materials it's uh it's really really really interesting um so manipulate matter huh i would say the next thing is horses right or maybe fields so um you know manipulating or managing gravity um can we you know um maneuver within fields in some manner that allows us to um perhaps move propellantless or in other manners right and so i think essentially having a deeper understanding of um you know different fields and being able to interact with them i think would be you know a potential avenue for you know travel or advanced travel right um propel let's travel um can we can we quantum entangle gravity fields together and propel our ship via you know the gravity field of a planet the massive planet and a drive on a ship you know there's all sorts of interesting things but um yeah people look back at people like you and say wow they used to fly like with this kind of propellant it seems like to be a very antiquated way of flying and they were very impressed with themselves these humans that they could fly like birds uh it's like so much energy is used to fly such short distances from their perspective we can only throw so many rocks at the back yeah there needs to be a better way exactly it just seems dumb like these it's like flintstones or something like that good at it but yeah there's a limit right like we need something good i mean that that's an interesting sort of uh trade-off how much do you invest in getting really good at it i tend to believe the reason why it would be very important and very powerful to put a human on mars is not necessarily for the exploration facet but in all the different technologies that come from that so the in putting our there's something about putting humans in extreme conditions where we figure out how to make it less extreme more comfortable and uh for that we invent things like the dod sort of helping invent the internet and all the different technologies we've invented it's almost like an indirect consequence of solving difficult problems whether that problem means winning wars or colonizing other planets and so i don't think mars will help us figure out propulsion systems or to crack open physics to where you can travel close to the speed of light or fasten the speed of light but it will help us figure out how to build some cool technology here on earth i think um so it's i'm a big proponent of doing really difficult things really difficult engineering things to um to see what kind of technologies emerge from that but let me ask you this do you think u.s government is hiding some technology like alien spacecraft technology i have no information either way and if you did you probably wouldn't tell me but my assumptions you know how like what did my heart tell me my heart tells me something's going on but i have no evidence for that maybe that's me wanting something to go on maybe that's a human feeling to want to know that my government's in control of what some strange unknown thing is um [Music] what's your sense if such a thing happened would uh with this kind of information leak with this kind of information be released by the government i mean that's the worry that you have is because when you don't understand a thing and it's novel you you want to hide it so that uh some kind of enemy doesn't get access to it and use it against you i wonder if that is the underlying assumption i it's a it's the one people always jump to that it's for to you know to maintain secrecy of technology and i assume that's part of it i wonder if there's any other reasons that we would want to not talk about it i imagine that in such information would have a shock to these you know social economic system of any country if not the world and so i wonder if perhaps that was part of the concern as well you know how society can react to it maybe we're anti-fragile enough now with everything that's going on and with our communication networks that um you know why not now i don't know but it's uh that's something i think about as well yeah the effect on the the mass psyche uh of of something like this that uh that there's another intelligence out there we had trouble enough to deal with the pandemic to have something of this scale basically having just an inkling of a phenomena that we have no understanding of and could lead to complete destruction of human civilization or a flourishing of it and what do you do what does the bureaucracy of government do with that yeah especially when they're the ones holding the range of power and such a communication would relinquish that power essentially to some degree since you think there's aliens out there and you're somebody that's thought about war quite a bit do you think alien civilizations when we meet them would want war would would they be a danger to us would they be a friend to us what's your intuition about intelligences out there my intuition tells me that when two people like yourself and myself or anyone get together often the output is greater than individuals and when we work together we can typically do things that are more impressive and better than if a single person works alone and now i know that war has driven technology technological progress but perhaps there's other mechanisms that can do so but regardless i wonder you know if we truly think about an advanced society that has been perhaps thousands or millions of years ahead of us i would imagine that same same truth to be there that people working together creatures working together is a good thing for society or its society as a whole and if we consider that as we imagine a society growing and expanding in a sense the ultimate output of a planet could only be achieved in some senses if everyone was working towards the same goal and there might be you know wonders and secrets and things that we can't imagine just simply because of time frames that we we live under and we think in but if a planet has a single unit and it almost as an entity itself at a certain level right if everything's working towards the same output you know i could almost imagine an intelligent species that approached us planted the planet instead of person to person because that's how they've evolved and they've assumed any intelligent species would understand that working together is better than not and so you know my heart tells me that at a certain point um you know love and caring and desire to work together is much more powerful than you know the technological progress that war would bring i hope so as well well let me jump to the ai topic that you've done so you've done research and development efforts focused on multi-agent intelligence for collaborative autonomy machine learning ai stuff that we've been talking about for combat for air-to-air combat man unmanned teaming technologies all that kind of stuff what's some interesting ideas in this space that um fascinate you randomness you know being able to to not predict what the enemy is doing almost no matter what because there's a level of randomness that's within the tactical envelope um even a utility of randomness the utility of randomness in a an increase sounds like a book you should write and it would be a good title name my band name of your band yeah uh so yeah can you elaborate that so like trying to deeper understand how you can integrate randomness uh through ai in the context of combat in order to make yourself in order to take away the enemy's ability to try to predict what you're gonna do to disrupt their technological progress cycles uh so that they don't have a clear target to aim at and if you don't have a clear target to aim at it's hard to hit it additionally more distribution of assets and capability so imagine being able to digitally model your your weapon or your system or your entire tactical engagement or scenario or allow machine learning to help you better understand the technology that you need to build in order to defeat a particular scenario right and i'm talking hardware now not just the tactic itself and you know being able to use large amounts of simulation and machine learning to build individual assets that are small boutique using advanced manual factoring techniques for a mission or for a particular battle right instead of just having these large things against an enemy you're building systems and technology for individual cases what about manned and unmanned teaming so uh man and machine working together is there interesting ideas there i approach it from the um position that the human should be commanding from the highest level possible right so mission objective based targeting and so if just for example if there's a building here and i want that building to go away that's the message i want to communicate i don't want to tell certain vehicles to be in a certain spot i don't want to know how much fuel i have i don't even want to know what capabilities they have necessarily i just want to know that i have the ability to select from a cloud of capabilities and the right assets are going to arrive such that they deal with the contingencies around the target such as protection systems or ew and then can prosecute the target to the higher enough probability of satisfaction that's needed by the mission command and that's the power of the the human mind is it's able to do some of these strategic calculations but also ethical calculations all that kind of stuff exactly that's what humans are good at does it worry you a future will have increasingly higher autonomy in our weapon systems in our war so you said building what about uh telling a set of fully autonomous drones to get rid of all the terrorists in this city so these multiple buildings region that kind of it's a greater and greater um autonomy so that that's a fear right um you're viewing it from a we can cover more perspective which is um fair and a lot of we i don't approach it from that topic at least i don't think of it that way at least morally um i think that with the advancement of warfare assuming we have a justin and moral leadership um if that's the case then i am an advocate for increased autonomy and technology because i see it as an ability to be more precise and if we trust the moral leadership of our government then we would want to be as precise as possible in order to mitigate effects that we don't want so i know that's not a satisfying answer and it leaves us well no bad feelings but no because having experienced sort of um directly seeing what it looks like when deliberately or carelessly war leads to the death of a large number of civilians it doesn't currently in ukraine the the value of precision given ethical leadership becomes apparent so there's something distinctly unethical about the the murder of civilians in a time of war and i think technology helps lessen that of course all death is is terrible but there's there's something about um schools hospitals being destroyed with everybody inside being killed um yeah it's particularly terrible it is and you know you approached it from the angle of more autonomy enables a wider you know swath of destruction and that's where we get back into you know who who's making the decisions based off of this and you know my hope again would be that we would have the leadership that would use these things when needed in the precise way as possible to minimize that and i've seen that firsthand you know i've seen that in country i've seen not not blue forces but you know i've seen truck bombs go off on school buses you know driving around afghanistan uh while escorting convoys and you know it wasn't easy then and i'm sure it's not any easier now especially after what you've just seen do you have thoughts about the current war in ukraine maybe from a military perspective maybe from the air force perspective so i can just mention a few things there's the uh baraktar drones that are being used uh they're unmanned i think they have capability to be autonomous but they're usually remotely controlled they're used for reconnaissance but they're also used by the ukraine side for reconnaissance and i think um also to destroy different technology tanks and so on different targets like this uh so there's also on the on the russian side the the orlan 10 there's the the fighter jets uh mig-29 the ukraine side and the su-25 and the russian side is there anything kind of stands out to you about this particular aspect of what this war looks like that's unique to what you've experienced maybe not unique but it's just been absolutely incredible to see the footage you know i mean we're watching war on twitter you know essentially and to see you know these aircraft flying down low spitting flares out getting shot down it's you know it's incredible to see this happening you know live for everyone to see um so that's just kind of a quick meta comment but as far as the actual you know i think these small form factor uavs where they're just like strapping weapon to it and flying over and trying to drop it at the right time or any of this these type of commercial applications of technology into this ad hoc warfare area is incredibly interesting because it shows you know how useful that technology can be outside of the military right like these like especially like dji right like there's obviously a lot of technology in there is being leveraged for other capabilities within you know plc military uh or at least we would assume um what happens if that is more widespread right like what if we were creating our own drones and they were being used against us would we want to have some type of kill switch or something like that right so what i think governments are going to have to consider like all these tools that are going to be easily available to just any person could be turned into a tool of war how do we stop that from being turned against us you know especially as we look at you know 10 years from now when we have a large number of autonomous uavs delivering packages and doing everything else over our country and any one of those could be potentially a weapon if we don't have the proper security well there's we're now in texas and texas values its guns and sees guns as among other things a protector of individual freedom and you can see a future perhaps where and i've certainly have experienced this in the empowering nature of this in ukraine where you can put the fight for independence into your own hands by literally strapping explosives to ggi drones that you purchase on your own salary i mean that one of the interesting things about the voluntary army in ukraine is that they're basically using their own salary to buy the ammunition to fight for their independence this is the very kind of ideal that sort of uh people speak about when they speak about the second amendment in this country that it's interesting to see the advanced technology version of that especially in ukraine sort of using uh computer vision technology for uh surveillance and reconnaissance to try to um and integrate that information to to discover the targets and all that kind of stuff um to put that in the hands of civilians it's fascinating to see to sort of fight for their independence you could say that to fight against um authoritarian regime of your own government all that kind of stuff it shows you how complicated the worst space in the future is going to be you know invading a land like that where people have you know that many different types of resources can absolutely change warfare i mean hopefully that creates a disincentive to start war to go to war with a yeah sort of it changes the nature of guerrilla warfare yeah you know i don't think putin was expecting to be in that engagement quite as long as he has of course but it can show you how you can get caught up you know if if land wars turn into an inescapable quagmire each time due to the complications around the the society's ability to access interesting tools you know that it could be you know it could be a huge demotivator for aggression well let me ask you about this do you think there will always be war in the world is this just a part of human nature i think so i think i think it is uh until we until we move past resource limitation there's always going to be at least that one particular cause of conflict and then we can also consider all our psychological lizard brain emotions that cause us to act out although you know we're hopefully we have enough things in place to stop that from rising to the level of war but you know we have our own biology our own psychology and evolution to combat um and then but there are pragmatic reasons to exert violence sometimes unfortunately and that one of those cases could be resource limitations and so while your question was do i think there'll always be war in this world i my unfortunate answer is perhaps yes but once there's more than one world then we're less resource constrained then perhaps it'll be a valve of sorts for that i talked to joko on this podcast i i i told him about a song called brothers in arms by dire straits and uh the question i asked them i'd like to ask you the same question is like the song goes do you think we're fools to wage war and our brothers in arms and jacob said our enemy is not our brothers and arms they're the enemy and so this kind of notion that we're all human that's a notion that's a luxury you can have but there is good and bad in this world according to jocko i hear that anger and hate when i was in ukraine among some people were there was a sense where you could be brothers and sisters you can have family you can have love for from ukraine to russia um but now that everything changed and generational hate for some people have taken over so i guess the question is um when you think about the enemy is there hate there to acknowledge that they're human i'd never had any hate or discontent you know when i was doing my job i'll say but i was also never in a true life for death situation where they were gonna kill me if i didn't kill them um but you know i think that environment isn't one born out of hate you know being in that type of scenario you know a sense how to be alive right i mean that's the our natural state is be fighting for our survival in a sense and so i think there's there's great power and strength and clarity perhaps in that and it's not always borne out of of hate but out of necessity and we can't always control that and i think as we focus on ourselves so much we only dance on that pinhead when we find ourselves fighting for things that we need and we're always taking from someone else at this point and so as someone that's been in combat and very high above it i'll say right where i didn't feel like i was in particular danger um i i rationalized it and i made my wife do it knowing that there were people on the other side that were going to die that were on our side than not so it was always a very human thing it was never um a reaction emotional reaction of any sense so you do you were able to see the basic uh it's human versus human there's some aspect of war that is basically um one people fighting each other yes at the end of the day you know especially i would say in aviation tactical aviation there's almost a kinship with your your enemies in a sense because you know that you know them in a sense right you know what they've been through you know what training they've been through you know where they've failed and you know what type of person they are because it's a very unique person that does that job and usually can spot them i guess it's the kind of respect you have for the craftsmanship of the job that's taken on certainly and that person didn't come out in his 100 million dollar jet because i pissed him off you know it's it's not an emotional response we're both there maybe because we chose to be in some sense but at the behest of of someone else and outside of our control and power and so in a sense for me it's almost a challenge that we've engaged upon agreeably but that's such a romantic version that i have the luxury to have being high in my castle in the jet up there not on the ground so i understand that it's a bit more romantic than perhaps you know someone on the ground experiencing all the horrors down there because everything looks very small from above and that's another aspect of war with greater autonomy when you're controlling the mission versus uh you know have a genghis khan type of intimacy in terms of the actual experience of war where you directly have you murder with a sword versus a gun versus a remotely controlled drone versus a strategic mission assignment to an autonomous drone that executes abstracted away until it's just a small decision and my worry is the people without a voice are are completely forgotten and silenced in all these calculations i spoke to a lot of people poor people that feel like they've never really had a voice and um and they're too easily forgotten even within the country of ukraine it's the uh the um big city versus the rural divide you know it's easy to forget the people that don't have a twitter account and don't um that their basic existence is just trying to survive trying to put food on the table they don't have anything else um anything else and they are the ones that truly feel the pain of war of uh the supply chain going down or the food supplies going down of of a cold winter without power um you're still young but you've seen some things so uh let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and uh give advice to young people whether they're fascinated by technology or fascinated by fighter jets whether they're fascinated by sort of engineering or the way the stars look at night what advice would you give them how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of i'd suggest that they don't fear looking foolish i spent a large portion of my life uh considering the laughter or the the comments up my statements as uh indication that i shouldn't pursue that and so you know i didn't i kind of woke up to that fact a bit later but i would encourage you know i would advise that that people you know trust in themselves and trust in the things that they care about it doesn't matter if they're good at it all that matters is that they find something that they can apply love and care to and they will grow better at it and they'll most likely make the world better because of it and don't be afraid to look stupid don't be afraid to look stupid uh yeah that's one of the things that i think as you get older you're expected to be to have it all figured out and so you are afraid to take on new things uh but i think as long as you're always okay looking stupid and having a beginner's mind you can you can get really really far even later on in life so this isn't just advice for young people this is really advice for for everybody maybe a dark question but um has there been a difficult time in your life a really dark place you've gone in your mind that stands out they had to really overcome i would suggest that i've been a pretty firm ground for most of my life i haven't had too many personal tragedies i'll say that have really defined me um certainly none that i would think are outside the norm so there was no truly low point actually i have one and it's tough for me because i you know i've spent most of my life beating motions and and you know uh high high emotional responses out of my system right because that's what flying is right it's keeping a steady line and and doing what you need to do in fact there's been studies that have shown reduced uh um adrenaline production inviter pilots for a number of years after they get out but getting out of the navy was difficult for me you know it and i wasn't expecting it to be a lot of bravado and machoism of course in the military especially the fighter community and we all have our plans made up to get out and none of it really accounts for any type of mental health or anything like that it's all very much where am i going to get my paycheck from where am i going to move to and you know whether it's navy or just individuals truly understanding the difference that makes when i got out it was it was difficult for me i you know i think a lot of guys in that job when they get out they almost at least i i had anxiety when i got out because it was i was so used to being highly involved in something that um that you know just was i was involved with that when i got out i didn't know how to fill that space essentially you know um and while i wouldn't say it was an overly traumatic experience i think it's one that's not accounted for enough that people that are getting out you know so i would encourage them to take it serious and actually think about it and respect the change because it is a big one well if i may say you found a place in nature currently a home is there uh can you speak to that being a source of happiness for you absolutely an escape from the world certainly it very much is was it deliberate that you found it there that's home for me so you know i moved back up to the the boston area and my wife and i had an idea after moving about eight or nine times in the navy of kind of what we what we wanted just generally and it was all really about the land and not about the house you know we just wanted privacy and to be nearby and so we end up finding a lot of land there you know a parcel of land we put a house on it and it provides me with a sense of peace that i think i can only get when i'm in nature a sense of clarity that helps me think helps me relax maybe so relaxing that helps me think i don't know but being surrounded by nature and birds and animals for me has always allowed me to i don't feel most in touch with with my own thoughts in a sense it just provides clarity and so this little sanctuary you could say i've built allows me to to you know interface via fiber line at my house but also feel like i'm a million miles away sometimes which is the best of both worlds hey you can just walk outside to escape it all yes to experience life as as hundreds of generations of human species have experienced it maybe it's a dichotomy my desire for the fastness of technology and experience compared with the most basic baseline that we have isn't that strange how do you how do you square that i don't know your draw how drawn you are to the cutting edge and still the calm you find in nature i think it makes sense nature is vastly superior to almost all of our technology it's a way it's being surrounded by perfection in a lot of senses in the military and in general have you contemplated your mortality have you been afraid of death what was what's your relationship like with death i was willing to accept an oversized amount of risk i'll say when i was younger as an aviator yeah not not in the jet but just that was my life you know i felt like i was going to live forever um and going out in the war you know strangely didn't really change that because you know as an aviator again we're riding up high on our horse up there so there were times when i was in situations that could have resulted in death from from flying or from emergency in the aircraft but i'll be honest i never really kind of sat down to think about the morale the mortality of it afterwards i feel like i kind of signed a check at the beginning and it was my job to perform as well as i could and if something happened in that then i better damn well be sure i would do my best at the time then um so you know i i maybe didn't personally reflect on it as much as of it i one would think you know because once you get in that machine it doesn't give you a lot of time to sit back and philosophize on on your current situation and that same just like we weren't seeing these off or when we seen these objects off the coast we weren't necessarily you know examining them every day right we'd put him into that bucket because it wasn't something that was going to kill us right away and thinking about death when you're so close to it all the time would be debilitating it would probably make you worse at your job it would well maybe you can think about death when you look out when you go out into nature and think like the the the fact that this whole ride ends this is such a weird thing and the the old makes way to new and that's all throughout nature and if you just look at the the cruelty of nature or the beauty of nature however you think about it the the fact that the the big thing eats the little thing over and over um and that's just how it progresses and that's how adaptation happens death is a requirement for uh evolution and you know whether evolution allows us to see objective reality or not it still gives you some interesting thoughts about perspectives of death and especially concerning it's a biological necessity as far as evolution is concerned yeah it's weird it's weird that uh there's been like a hundred billion people that lived before us and that you and i will be forgotten this whole thing we're doing right now is meaningless in that sense but at the same time it feels deeply meaningful somehow um i guess that that's the question i want to ask when you go out to nature family what do you think is the meaning of it all what's the meaning of life or maybe when you put on the night goggles the the night vision goggles and look up at the stars why we're here i can't speak for everyone but at least the way i interpret it you know or at least i i feel like i interpret my way here my job is i feel like my role is just to be curious about the environment in a manner that allows us to understand as much as possible i think that the human mind whether it's just the mass inside our skull or you know whether there's some type of quantum interactions going on her mind is an incredible has incredible ability to output new information in in a universe that you know somewhat stale of information right um our our minds are and some somewhat unique in that we can imagine and perceive things that could never ever have possibly naturally occurred and yet we can make it happen we can substantiate that with enough belief that it's true and it can happen and so for me i feel like i just need to encourage that to encourage you know interaction with reality such that it leads us to newer and grander you know interactions with this universe and all that starts with a little bit of curiosity exactly right you're an incredible person uh you've done so many things and there's so much still still ahead of you thank you for being brave enough to talk about ufos um and doing it so seriously and thank you for pushing forward on all these fronts in terms of technology so from um just the fighter jets the the engineering of that to the aiml applications in the combat setting that's super interesting and then now quantum i can't wait to see to see what you do next thank you so much for sitting down and talking today it was an honor it was my pleasure thank you lex thanks for listening to this conversation with lieutenant ryan graves to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from buzz aldrin bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you