Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
commander david fravor
who was a navy pilot for 18 years and
commander of the strike fighter squadron
also known as the black aces a squadron
of 12 airplanes consisting of several
hundred people
he's also famously one of the people who
with his own eyes
saw and chased a ufo
an identified flying object in 2004
that is referred to as the tic tac and
the incident
more formally referred to as the uss
nimitz ufo incident
his story corroborated by several other
pilots
from my perspective as a curious
scientist and an open-minded human being
is the most credible sighting of a ufo
in history
at least that i'm aware of he's a humble
fascinating and fun human being to talk
to
i put out a call for questions on reddit
and many other places and
tried to ask as many of the questions
that people posted as i could
and overall i really enjoyed this
conversation and i'm sure
if the world wants us to and if there's
more questions to be had
we'll talk on this podcast again quick
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to support this podcast as a side note
let me say that the world of ufos and
uaps unidentified aerial phenomena and
aliens in general
is foreign to me because of the high
ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists
to actual hard evidence i'm a scientist
first and foremost but
an open-minded one often looking and
thinking outside the box
i'm often disheartened by the
closed-mindedness of the scientific
community
and in equal part i'm disheartened by
the lack of rigor and basic scientific
inquiry and study on the part of the
conspiracy theorists
i believe there's a line somewhere
between the two extremes that
more inquisitive minds should walk
i think we humans know very little about
our world
what's up there among the stars and the
nature of reality
and the nature of our very own minds
the path to understanding can only be
walked humbly
the very idea that there is a
possibility that david witnessed a piece
of technology
whether human made or alien made that
moved in the way it did
should be inspiring to every scientist
and engineer on this earth
there may be propulsion and energy
systems yet to be discovered that
once understood and mastered will put
distant galaxies
within reach of us human beings paradigm
shifts in science and
leaps and understanding can only happen
i think if we open our eyes
and allow ourselves to dream to think
from first principles
and remove the constraints and
innovation placed on us by the
scientific conventions and assumptions
of
prior generations if you enjoy this
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i fast often sometimes intermittent
fasting of 16 hours and then
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sometimes 24 hours
that's one dinner to the next i've been
even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour
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not eating somehow is a reminder that
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that every day is precious i certainly
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whatever you think of it i love the
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the answer is complicated but let me
pick one thing the first thing
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also called clrs for the first letters
of the last name of its four authors
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and now finally here's my conversation
with david fraver you're a graduate of
the
navy fighter weapons school yeah i am
better known as top gun so yeah let me
let me ask the most ridiculous question
how realistic is the movie top gun
so it's funny we used to joke and a
friend of mine who was a top cut
instructor
uh said this there's two things in the
in the original top gun that are true
that are very realistic one there is a
place called top gun
and number two is they do fly airplanes
there
other than that uh you know i went
through in 97
uh class 497 and there's actually a log
of every single person that's went
through kind of like
seal training you know there's a list so
people because there's a lot of posers
out there i was a navy seal no you
weren't well i went to top gun you could
actually go to top gun and matter of
fact
just to get a top gun patch the real
patch
uh you have to have gone there so a lot
of the patches you see
running around are not real there's the
real ones are controlled
the people that make them uh honor that
and when you go in they look up your
name
if you want to get one they look up your
name you just tell them they go okay
here and i'll sell them to you if you
are not on the list
you ain't get no patch because it is
it's it's it's a pretty big deal
to go through but it's for me uh
probably the best experiences of flying
uh because everyone there is extremely
competent it's it's
very very challenging but it's what we
all signed up to do
so it's uh it's just the entire group
that is when you want to be that you
know that level
uh you know where you go everyone really
cares and everyone really wants to be
good
is it competitive like what was it in
the movie or no
it's when you go through it's you know
it's
if anything it's more of the students
you know and then there's the instructor
side
and the instructor sides are really you
know they're guys that you know
they just chose to stay up and fallon
and it's extremely
uh difficult job uh because they have
they have a very small tolerance for um
not being good so they're briefs the
guys when they give a lecture so
let's just say there's a fighter
employment lecture which is one of the
hardest ones it takes about two days to
give the fighter employment lecture
um the guy who gives the lecture goes
through multiple what they call a murder
boards where he's scrutinized by his
peers and he practices
by the time they actually stand in front
of a class
they pretty much have their 250
powerpoint slides memorized
and they don't even turn around they
just click and they know them in order
and they repeat the same thing over it's
and it's standardized
so they are extremely extremely
standardized when you go through school
and there's a reason for that
because what they're doing is they're
training so when you come out a top gun
you're called a strike fighter weapons
and tactics instructor
okay so your sfti when you come out of
that
your job is to go usually to one of the
weapons schools on the east or west
coast and train the fleet squadrons and
then you
visit the squadrons and train and do
upgrade rides and all that so
there's a there's a reason that they are
extremely
particular when you go through the
course it's it is literally one of the
best things and it's not it's not a rank
based thing because think oh navy
you can come in as a you know like a an
o4 lieutenant commander
the lieutenants the hierarchy or at
least to be i don't know how it is
exactly today but i imagine it's the
same
the hierarchy is actually based on
seniority at the school not necessarily
ranked so when the
the tactical decisions are made which
are based on fact and
and trying things out in the fallon
ranges
uh they set this the top x number of
folks that have been there seniority
wise
is and i mean time wise uh are the ones
that actually make the decision and when
the door
you may not agree but when the door
opens and everyone comes out
from the staff they all speak the same
language
it's and it has to be that way which is
why the school has been so effective
since it was founded
so it's just a it's an incredible group
of individuals so
there's a bar of excellence that uh
that the instructors demand well very
much so and they're held to it
so it's not a hey i'm now an instructor
so i can do what i want
there is a standard and they have to
live up to that standard
they have to and i mean every moment of
every day
uh so if they go someplace if they go
from fallon and they come down and do
they're called site visits where they
come down and they'll come to la moore
california which is where the west coast
fighter wing is at for the navy
and they go around and start flying
sorties with the fleet squadrons
to kind of pass on some of that
knowledge that's that same high level of
standard it's they can't just drop your
guard
because you wear the top gun patch and
people know that and they wear light
blue shirts so it's pretty easy to
identify them when they're out there
and you know and then everyone else
who's been through the school including
them have the patch on their sleeve
so there's a standard that's expected
when you come out of there
so you're a navy pilot for 18 years yes
can you briefly tell the story of your
career
as a pilot yeah um so
you know first i was in i was enlisted i
was a marine
and then the marines actually sent me
recommended me to go to the naval
academy uh so it's always better to be
lucky than good but i got to go to naval
academy and i
finished and i've had that dream to fly
so when i got selected
they've always dreamed of flying yeah
since
1969 when i watched neil armstrong walk
on the moon
um i was at that point i asked my mom i
remember watching it i was
i was just prior to being five and i
said
wow yeah it's so cool mom and she said
well you know they were all pilots
and uh then at that point it was like
i'm gonna be a pilot and
if you knew me growing up because i was
a little bit of a delinquent um
people are just like yeah right i used
to joke i'm gonna fly
i'm gonna fly jets and i'm gonna drop
bombs then and if
people that knew me was a kid they'd be
like yeah and they'd be like not a
chance and then
when i did i actually had a funny story
and i'll get to it and i'll finish my
career but
i was at my cousin's wedding and uh we
all grew up in the same neighborhood
uh we kind of that italian side
of the family that's how we grew up so
it was my house right down the street is
my cousin chad and right around the
corner with my cousin ray and my aunts
and uncles and stuff
the guy two doors down from my and i was
a paper boy in the neighborhoods they
all knew me
and uh i went to my cousin's wedding and
he and mr race looks at me and he says
david fravor i go mr race how are you
doing you guys
you fly jets top gun and all that i go
yes sir
i guess i figured he'd be in jail by now
um
it was kind of a to me it was a little
bit of a badge of honor going on you
know i kind of overcame that but
uh what do you attribute that to so you
i've heard you before and just now i'll
say that uh it's better be
it's better to be lucky than good and
you you talk modestly about
uh about just being lucky
but if you were to describe your
trajectory
maybe in a way of advice like
retrospectively
uh how did you pull it off to be like
to be truly a special person the easiest
way is one
never never take no don't let anyone put
you down and say you can't do it or
those i mean i knew
i knew what i was capable of inside you
know and if i
really believe if you want something and
you want to do something then you
you can achieve it not in all cases like
if i loved basketball and i really
wanted to be in the nba
there's a realism that says i'm five
foot eight and i got like a really short
vertical leap but i'm really not that
good at basketball it's probably not
ever going to happen no matter how hard
i try and practice
it's just the way it is or for me to be
in the nfl
i'm not fast you know i'm not that big
it's just physically i'm incapable of
doing that
um but there's things that don't really
tie to
a true physical ability as far as size
and strength but
it's it's mental uh and i'm not saying
you have to be a genius and super smart
to be a fighter pilot matter of fact you
don't
it really comes down to the ability to
think very quickly
uh 80 solution is typically good enough
because if you overthink it
you're you're behind and then in an
air-to-air fight that's what happens
people try and overthink it
and before you know it because it's
happening so fast you don't have
you can't get to the nth degree you know
six decimal places
eighty percent solution is good enough
you build up a really strong gut for the
solution just yeah i'm a big believer in
80 percent solution i love that if you
get 80 percent
you can go and then you can always
adjust which is exactly what like if
you're fighting in bfm
the 80 solution is it's like a chess
game but it's a really really fast chess
game where you go
i'm doing this and then i know that if i
do a maneuver
if he's going to counter it correctly he
should do a
if he doesn't do a he does some degree
less like b
c d and then i know how bad his his
error is
and then i capitalize so my might i
don't have to be perfect you know i have
to go i need to go to 47 degrees nose
high
if i just kind of get above 40 then i'm
good and i can watch how he reacts and
then i can adjust for that and you
and you continually work that problem
and you chip away because if you start
neutral
you're just basically chipping away and
gaining advantage advantage advantage
till eventually
you know and if you're really you know
fighting you know just guns only rear
quarter where you got to get behind the
guy
kind of world war ii dogfighting type
stuff um
then it's it's literally it's a it's a
very very fast
chess game that happens at you know 400
knots 300 knots depends
so to get to be one of the rare
individuals that uh
are able to do that he just had the
dream
and didn't take no for an answer well
you know
you know part of it is family you know
uh
my dad was uh i used to call him a fire
ready aim guy
you know he'd smack me and then ask me
what i did wrong yeah
good parenting um back then you know i i
joke and and people look because you
know at times it was kind of tough you
know because
he can be pretty demanding but on the
other side you know i probably needed to
be
reined in a little bit at times uh but
then everyone else my family you know my
mom was really awesome when i was a kid
uh my uh my grandfather who is a big
big part of it my mom's dad uh
who he taught me a lot and you have a
question there that we'll talk about
uh about him but uh huge huge influence
very very positive
and a lot of the stuff that i do today
and decisions are based on things that
he taught me
um and uh you know and i figured
you know it was the first funeral i ever
went to and it was uh
it was about three miles long and church
was overfilling and people were out he
was a beer delivery guy
dead serious and you go there someone
asked who died the pope
um so a lot of people love them so back
to
back to my career yeah the first
question because i'm getting down on
rabbit hole uh
no i when i was at the i was gonna i was
gonna stay in the marines i really
wanted to go
man i love the core i think it's uh of
all services it's that one everything is
in a ball and they're very very
professional and it was a great great
organization to join
uh but i went out to the nimitz on my uh
freshman cruise after your freshman year
at the naval academy you go out on a
ship
and you you're an enlisted person you
get to experience that half when i
already was enlisted so it's fine with
me
because it comes up a lot would you mind
saying what the nimitz is what a ship is
like yeah so nimitz is uh an aircraft
carrier so it's
uh four and a half acres of sovereign
u.s territory that floats around the u.s
oceans does it have weapons on it
uh the air wing is really the weapons it
does have defensive weapons but for the
most part it's a giant
moving airport is what it is so i was
out there watching the airplanes land
and take off
and i'm like oh and the squadrons that
were out there one of the squadrons was
a vf-41 and a 14 squadron
vf-84 an f-14 squadron and then a couple
of a6 squadrons
and we actually ended up part pairing up
and hanging out with some of the a6
pilots and bn's so it was really a neat
experience and i said
i want to do that and the way to do it
was to not to
to go in the navy because there are
marine squadrons that go out to the
aircraft carriers but
most of them are land-based you know to
support the marines because they're
that that unit that whole unit you know
the marine corps is that one service has
it all
and so when i graduated and i got to
uh you know i worked hard through
primary and that's where
you know i knew missy uh we were
actually went through together missy
cummings
uh we went through primary together and
then uh i went to kings we all selected
the same time i went to kingsville there
was another guy scott wiedemeyer
uh the three of us so i went to
kingsville
scott went to beeville and missy went to
meridian
so the three of us that we had all went
through we got we selected out of
primary together we all ended up going
jets
and that's that's how besides from
school i knew her at school too
the long story i got done uh got winged
it took me two years to the day from the
time i graduated the naval academy until
i got my wings
and uh through some luck i ended up
getting asics's
on the west coast which is a
side-by-side bomber so it's a pilot on
the left seat and the bombardier
navigators on the right seat it was
built in the 60s
it is all weather and it flies low at
night it's got a terrain mapping radar
how many i guess is that a good term to
use fighter jets as a broad category for
for the public yeah that's probably how
many fighter jets are side by side like
that
that was uh in the navy that was the
only one the
air force the f-111 was a side-by-side
but the navy it was the a6 and then
there's the ea6b which is a derivative
of
that and now that those are all gone the
a6b's just went away a few years ago and
now the
e18g growler is the replacement for the
a6b
there was never a replacement for the a6
that i flew
it really became the f-18 which the a6
could
go quite a bit further distance wise by
fuel
than the hornet and uh the horn is the
f-18 yeah is there usually two people
in the plane but they're usually like in
front and behind
in a the modern two-seaters yes uh but
most of the tactical airplanes in the
world today are single seat
so you can see just one person one
person with the exception of
i'll probably someone will yell at me
but really with the exception of the
f-15e strike eagle
and the f-18f super hornet which is the
f is a two-seater
and the g is also a two-seater but it's
more of an electronic attack by say
full-up fighter bomber so most of the
time that you've flown
in your like i said 18-year career
is was it two-seater i was about half
and half so i started off an a6 was a
two-seater
then i went to single-seat f-18s and i
flew those
all the way up until 2000 and
let me think 2001 to the end of 2001
and then i shifted over and started
flying the super hornets and i've flown
both of those the ease and the s but i
deployed when i had command of vfa41
i had the two seat they were f squadron
so you
eventually ended up commanding
the the strike fighter squadron
i love the the name the black aces what
uh
is there some parts of that
journey that are amazing parts of it
that are tough that kind of stand out
to me it was one it was a huge honor uh
and i got to serve with uh you know i
got pulled up because the the guy who
the the people that are exos because we
fleet up you go from the number two guy
to the number one guy
so the exo becomes the ceo so the
executive officer becomes the commanding
officer
so i had worked with uh now
soon to be vice admiral weitzel uh was
the
he was commander whitefield at the time
was the exo and he
really wanted because he knew there was
a little bit of a problem when the super
hornets came into lamore
lamore had been a single seat fighter
community
since the forever and now all of a
sudden you've got the f-18f coming in
which has the weapon systems operators
in the back
that are not pilots they're weapon
systems operators and there's a
difference
and kenny is a weapon systems operator
and uh
kenny knew because of my a6 background
that i have a switch that i can go one
seat 2c1 c2c because when you fly 2c
there's a lot of stuff that the pilot
will offload and
take the advantage of the weapon systems
operator and it's not that one plus one
equals two in that environment because
it really
there's a huge amount of capabilities
that the single seat has and the
autonomy that
comes for the ability to make decisions
quickly and how well the airplane flies
but it does it does equal more than one
and i would say
that one plus one with two people as
well as a minimum of 1.5
because you've got an extra head you've
got extra eyes you've got someone that
can monitor systems the airplanes can do
two things at once i mean there's an
incredible amount of capability that we
add when we do that
can we just pause on that just for me
from like a human factors perspective
and also an
ai perspective what's
how difficult uh so there's like when
there's two people
there's also a third person that's the
ai part there's some level of automation
like autopilot maybe
that's correct maybe you can kind of
talk about the psychology of like
you said making decisions really quick
how do you deal with another brain
working with you
and then also the automation is there
interesting
interplay that you get to learn and also
as that change throughout your career i
imagine it got
gotten better in terms of the automation
or perhaps not
well i can tell you so that let's say
there's a bunch of stars this is no this
is this is good this is good
and this is i'm enjoying this because
now we actually get to talk about
something other than a tic tac so
um so let's start with the a6 the a6 was
really an
analog airplane that was built in the
60s
all right and there's been studies done
on the crew coordination which is the
interaction between the pilot and the
bombardier navigator
so we would fly low at night in the
mountains so
i was stationed up in whidbey island
washington so you've got the cascades
and
incredible uh amount of time and we
would get in the simulators because
unlike
normally people think terrain following
and there's the radars the 111 the b1
has a system like this but it'll
the radar can see and it'll fly it
basically flies a straight line so it
goes up and over mountains and back down
and up and over mountains where the a6
was really manual so you do this
low-level routes where you're gonna
you're gonna fly in the mountains at
night you're gonna be at
you know 500 to 1000 feet above the
ground ripping through
like fog layers because you don't need
to see outside you're
you're literally flying a little tv
screen and a radar what are you looking
at most of the time so you just as a
screen it's this really
primitive if you look at it now what we
did you'd think wow that was crazy
but it was really fun so is it similar
to like the flair stuff
is that is no are you is it this thing
is totally radar based now the airplane
had a flear ball
it's a target recognition and
multi-sensor it's called a tram
um you're looking at like basically like
dots of hard objects no actually what it
is is the
the bombardier navigator had a radar and
he was getting raw feed off of a pulse
radar in front
okay so it's just basically mapping the
mountain so if you look at a mountain on
a radar and you're coming up on it
the front side is going to be it's going
to give you a really bright return and
on the back side it's just going to be a
giant shadow
because you can't see on the other side
so the bomb of your navigators would do
that and we they would have charts and
they could
shade their charts knowing that hey if
we turn a little bit left here we can
get in this valley we can sneak up this
valley and then go around the back side
of the mountain
which is what the airplane would do and
so and sorry to interrupt
i'm going to just keep asking dumb
questions i apologize but
the pilot can you can you at a high
level say
what the pilot does versus the bomb
bombardier uh
so you're you're actually just control
i'm flying the jet i have the throttles
the stick and i have a
uh it's about a probably a
four inch or six inch wide by maybe
four inches five inches high it looks
like it's literally a crt
that's how old it is a crt screen and
what it would do what the radar would do
is
the the the bombardier navigator is
looking at his radar and he's looking
out about 12 and a half miles in front
of the airplane
so he has the range really scoped down
because the radar can see a lot further
he's looking at about 12 and a half
miles when we're in the terrain mode
where we're dodging mountains and stuff
and what the pilot has is there's
they're called range bins and there's
eight of them
so the very far range bin is the 12 and
a half mile
you know and the closest range been it's
a thing and it'll be like between like a
half a mile
and or a quarter mile to three quarters
of a mile the next one might be three
quarters of a mile to two miles
and then it just keeps going out like
that so if there's a mountain for let's
say we're on a flat plain
and there's a mountain out in the
distance at 15 miles and we we're just
driving right at it
so when we get to the point where it
hits 12 and a half miles where the radar
is going to see it on his scope
my 12th my range bin for that would pop
up and it would show like a big bump
like a mountain
and then as i got closer to it the next
arrangement would pop up and show it
and i could see that that bump was
moving towards me and then if i turned a
little bit
you know to go over here i'd see the
mountain go over to the right hand side
and i could do that but it wasn't like a
video game it was it's literally like
if you think of the original ataris yeah
but you build up i imagine
that you start to get uh a really deep
sense
of like the actual three 3d environment
based on that little atari's it's solid
you're exactly right and you have to
you have to train so there's been
studies a matter of fact a lot of the
basis
and people probably argue with me but
it's true there were studies done
watching asics crews in our simulators
we called it the wist
the weapon systems trainer and it was
not even a motion it just kind of sat
there and
you just you could fly these things they
had terrain that they would inject into
the system
uh but the crew coordination so you get
so my first
uh my first fleet bombardier navigator
who who
i'll name him his name's crusado uh he's
uh
works at apple uh pretty high up bro mit
grad
i think computer engineering he's scary
smart
so chris could really work and matter of
fact all the guys that flew us so
there's another guy matt who also worked
at apple who's now at sap we did our
first night traps together
the bond between us i mean it's one of
those things that you just you're never
going to forget but chris and i when we
started flying together we were actually
the most junior crew
in the squadron uh we'd spent a lot of
time
training and and and chris was amazing
at how he could work the system
uh one because he was extremely
brilliant and he was
had that inquisitive mind of oh we could
do all these different things and
there's all these
degradation modes but we spent a lot of
time
to see how good we could actually get
because and it's
you almost talk in partial so as the bn
is looking at his radar scope
chris would say i've got rising terrain
that's just what they say
showing rising terrain at 12 miles and
i'd see the little bump and i'd say
got it this is going to go to your
question on the autonomy and how you
work with two heads
yes so when you first get together the
interaction it's
it's it's almost like you have to
rehearse it you have to know
and you talk in full senses the more and
more
we fly together chris could go
i'm showing and he'd get like rising out
and before he finished i'd say i've got
it
so you end up starting to talk in
partials because
i have to trust him like
i mean there can be no i can have no
doubt that he knows how to do his job
because i'm literally looking at this
little scope that's not giving me this
continuous picture of that mountain
moving remember the mountain's here
and then it's going to pop up here and
then it's going to pop up here because
there's gaps in the coverage on how the
system was set up remember it's an
analog system
to where he is telling me like i can't
see all the way to the left and he
he's got a wider scope on the radar but
my screen doesn't show that
so he's telling me start a left turn how
to avoid a hard turn
you know and we would do that so my
channel this is all happening quick
very quick well you're doing we we would
typically fly between 420 and 480 knots
of ground 70 miles an hour uh well 427
miles a minute
okay or eight months between seven and
eight miles a minute is what you're
flying as fast
at night i mean i broke out of clouds i
mean i remember him and i flying
we're on it's the ir it's called an ir
route uh an
instrument route that's low they're all
around the country there's ir344 that we
used to fly which would coast in off of
or you'd fly from the land you go out
over the ocean turn around and then you
could practice actually coming in on a
coastline
and we were flying and we ended up in
the clouds
keep in mind we're between 500 and 1000
feet in the mountains and we're in the
clouds like
you can't see anything and it had to
turn off our red lights that flash you
know they're called the anti-collision
lights
because it was reflecting off the clouds
and it starts to bother you just gets
annoying
so i turned it off and we we're flying
we're flying we're flying we break out
of that coastal marine layer
and poof we break out and it's it's a
decent night and this is right by mount
st
helens this is kind of where we're
coming in so we're coming in from the
east and we're just north of mount st
helens is where the route goes
and you look up you know because you can
kind of see the silhouette of this
mountain that's right next to you but
you're flying along you're just like you
know you gotta trust
and you can see houses you can see the
lights they're above you we're literally
below people's houses flying down these
valleys and stuff so just
incredible experience so when you take
that and then you move into
an f-18f so now we're into modern
technology that was actually built in
this century
uh uh and you're flying so now you know
the wizzo is behind us and we're not
doing those night low levels but that
same type of crew coordination
that has to happen because what you're
doing is
you're sharing the load so most of the
communications that go out of the
airplane the wizzo does all the talk and
he's got actually he uses
the feet that's the weapon systems
operator in the back of an f-18f
so he's going to run well the radar kind
of runs itself now
but we have a situational awareness
display and it's it's linked to all the
other errors just like curiosity what's
the situational awareness display
because that term comes up a lot think
of it as uh think of it as a god's eye
view
so if you have a the back of the super
hornet has well the block twos has about
an eight by ten display for the wizzos
um that they can look at the pilots is
smaller it's down between us it's a six
by six between his legs and they're
they're getting ready to redesign that
boeing is but
when you look it'd be like if you put
your airplane and you're looking down so
all the stuff like if your radar seeing
bad guys out in front of you be like
looking down going oh i'm right here and
now there's bad guys out here
and my wingman is over here and it shows
everything it's just like
it gives you you can look at that
display and go oh okay
i can see where everything's at i can
see if one guy's trying to target
another guy
it shows you all this it's an incredible
amount of knowledge that comes up
for the crews to maintain uh
the the overall picture of what's going
on big picture sense of what's going on
because it's happening so fast
and this is with that autonomy piece
this is the third brain so we're all
looking at it and the third brain is
doing fusion
it's pulling stuff together going oh
this is all this guy this is this guy
this this guy it's sending it out
through the link so all the airplanes
are talking to each other through this
digital network
you know that we don't even see it just
says that airplane says hey i'm over
here and it tells us and we go oh he's
right there
and then we can go he's his airplane
says oh i'm looking at this airplane
this bad guy and it shows us oh he's
he's over there and he's looking at this
guy i mean it's an incredible
amount of uh visual intake because your
eye
you can hear a lot but when you look
down at stuff it's uh you know you can
solve the picture
really quick the third brain is doing
the
sensor fusion uh the integration of the
different sensors and gives you a big
picture view
what about the control like is there and
i apologize
as if this is a dumb question but you
know people use the high level term
of autopilot how much is there
let's use a loose term of ai how much
automation is there how much ai is there
in
helping you control there um the ai
piece would be more of a control loop
because the digital flight controls so
the airplane actually
they had to make the airplane easier to
fly and when i say easy it's relative
because people go i could do it because
i did it on flight sim
it's real life is a lot different in
flight sim you have no apparent fear of
death
you'll do things in simulator that you
would never do in real life but
uh the the autonomy in the airplane to
allow you to manage
i mean because you think about it you've
got a radar that's feeding you data
you've got a targeting pod that's
feeding you data all that stuff is
hooked to your head
because you've got a joint helmet
mounted queuing system on that basically
maps the magnetic field in the cockpit
so it can tell where your heads at
looking
so if i turn my head to the right the
radar will actually look to the right
the targeting flare will look to the
right
and oh by the way the backseater has a
helmet on too so he can look to the left
and he can do things so depending on
what sensor he's controlling
so if he's got control of the targeting
pod and he looks left the targeting pod
looks
left but if i have something where i
want to lock a guy up that i don't see
that maybe the radar didn't see but i
can get over and now point the radar you
know get the
because it's a it's a phase array radar
now it doesn't really scan
uh there's there's all kinds of cool
stuff that uh
that technology uh brings because if you
just if you went back 30 years and said
hey
or 40 years ago and said hey we're gonna
have this helmet and you're gonna be
able to slew everything to your head
and i don't mean a mechanical setup but
i mean literally you're just gonna map
magnetic resonance and go oh look and
then i can i can literally slew my
sensors this fast
and then mash a button and transfer you
know
high quality coordinates from a system
into a joint
you know a jdam which is a joint direct
attack munition that is the gps bombs
that you see all the time
and then let that thing fly and i'm i'm
solving this problem
in seconds by minutes or hey i got it
we're gonna have to menstruate
coordinates and
you know you bring back the data and
then they do all the targeting for it
and then they send another group out to
get it
instead of all that now it's that fast
so there's a
okay i mean we probably don't have
enough time to talk about the beautiful
fusion of mines that happens when two
people are flying
controlling the plane but at a high
level this is a really
interesting question for people who
don't know what they're talking about
like me
which is what is the difference between
a human being
and an ai system like
what can what is the ceiling of a
current
ai technology for controlling the plane
like how much
does the human contribute uh is it
possible to have
automated flight for example like what
is
the hardest part about flying
that a human does expertly that an ai
system cannot
in warfare situations in in
flying a fighter jet lane so i would say
systems are usually black and white when
you write the algorithm for an ai system
it's it's it's it's really it's
basically you're taking
thought and turning it into a giant math
problem is really what you're doing
right so you've got this logical math
problem math problems are
there's there's there's a line it says i
can or i can't and it's a it's a very
finite line
you know but you can go up to the line
where a human
we all have gray areas where we go
maybe yeah i'll try it um so he just can
operate within that gray so if you took
if you take an airplane and say and i'll
just take a hornet for a while a super
horn it doesn't matter any airplane
and you go here is the flight
performance model of the airplane so
if you know an uh an em diagram is the
energy so it basically says
the airplane can fly as slow as this it
can go as fast as this it can pull this
many
g's force of gravity you know so one two
three four five six seven
and then based on the airfoil design and
everything else and how it can pull
here's how it's going to fly you know
because it's really physics based
well if you depending on how you write
the ai but typically ai you don't want
the airplane to leave controlled flight
right you want to maintain it so that it
is flying in a controlled envelope
or there are times and you can go back
to world war one
where people intentionally departed the
airplane from controlled flight
in order to obtain an advantage which is
that's where the human
goes can i do this i know it's outside
of where i would normally go
but i can do that so you can do some
crazy things now especially since the
flight control logic
in modern airplanes with digital flight
controls
they're extremely forgiving so you can
literally i've done things in super
hornets that
literally even as a pilot inside the
airplane you're just like wow i cannot
believe it just did that
like it'll flop ends which defies most
logic and i guess
you know in a way you could probably
program it but i still think that when
you get to the edges
that may or may not give you an
advantage um
there are things that a human can will
do
that ai won't and i don't think we've
got to the point because
how do you how do you map illogical
solutions
you know most ai is logical it's based
on some type of premise when you write
the algorithm to control it
um there's bounds yeah there's this
giant mess like you said the difference
between the
simulator and real life also gets at
that somehow that there is uh
somehow the the fear of death all of
that
beautiful mess comes into play like is
there
a comment you can make on commercial
flight
like with sully landing
uh that plane famously uh versus the
simulator all of those discussions is
there some
well it's it's very it's very similar
what i was talking about earlier with
the a6 so
one is when you're flying with a crew uh
their standardization
so you gotta remember when sully flew
when his first officer that's the
co-pilot
showed up you know first time they met
and this happens all the time in the
commercial world you know there's
six seven thousand pilots at united
airlines you know your chance of flying
with the same guy all the time is slim
and none we're in the navy
we were crude so i had a primary and a
secondary wizzo that flew with me
for a while for months oh hell yeah for
like all of the deployment
so because you want to use you have to
trust
all of those things it increases the
capability airplane it's not to say we
can't swap
out but for true effectiveness
especially in very complex missions like
a
forward air controller we're in the air
actually controlling ground assets and
supporting ground troops
if you're in a high threat area which is
crazy busy
you have to you have to be melded when
you do that you have to have trained to
do that job otherwise you're going to be
ineffective
so when you get to the commercial world
and i've got
tons of friends at fly commercial there
is a standardization
like we know that at this point i'm
going to put this switch you're going to
do that and everyone
they know their rules captain's going to
do this first officer's going to do this
and they know that when the emergency
breaks out so in sully's case
when they take the birds and they know
they've got a problem and if you've
listened to the cockpit recordings of
him the two of them talking
you know you gotta remember they're
talking to each other when you hear the
full tapes but they're also talking to
the air traffic controllers in the new
york area
and it's like we got a bird strike and
the first officer already knows hey
silence the alarm they silence the alarm
the first officer is pulling out the
book he's going through the procedures
while sully's actually flying the
airplane knowing that they've lost their
motors and you got to think his decision
process like they're trying to get him
to go into an airport into new jersey
and he realizes not happening we're
going to put this thing and he made a
decision soon enough
so that he could prepare everyone on the
airplane that he was going to put this
thing in the hudson river
and he did it flawlessly i mean every
single person walked away from that
wreck the only thing that didn't survive
was the airplane you know and it got
fished out of the hudson but
um what is it about those human
decisions he had to make
is that something you put into words or
is that just
deep down some instinct that you develop
as a pilot over time it's when we
when you train uh you know an aviation
is a self-cleaning oven so if you make
bad decisions
you're you know and the list is long and
distinguished of those who have died by
making bad decisions
oh man um so when you look at what he
did or the way we train because the the
commercial industry and
the navy and the air force for all that
we have what's called we have emergency
procedures
that we have to know like engines on
fire the first three steps you just have
to know what they are
right so they know the airline uh same
type you know they go hey i know this is
they pull the book out because the
airplanes are designed they're built to
have some time
but there's a point where you have to
make a decision and you can't
second-guess it so when he decided i'm
putting this in the hudson river
he couldn't all of a sudden halfway
through it go well maybe i can get over
to that airport
he he looked he made a quick assessment
this is that 80
solution where you go these are not i'm
you know it's
like a multiple choice test when you go
oh my god i don't really know the answer
but i know a and d
are wrong yeah gone so the jersey
airport and going back to laguardia gone
yeah so what's my next option well the
hudson river's there and that's probably
looking pretty good or what is my other
one
can i get a restart on the the motors
and then if i can get a restart now can
i take it someplace else
he had to make really really fast
decisions and then once they as they
they go that 80 solution you realize all
right i'm going into the hudson
there's the 80 percent get the book out
let's see if we can get an error star
because if you listen to the tapes
they're trying to get it air started
the closer he gets to the water the more
he's going i'm ditching the airplane
so the original decision to this is my
best option right now
this is where i'm going and you start
eliminating anything that could possibly
change
the events which they tried to do and
then he gets to that last minute says
we're going in the water
they change the plan they secure the
airplane they do exactly what they're
doing and he does that basically
flawless landing on the
on the hudson but you got to remember
every s it's every six months for
commercial they go back and they do
research in the airplane in the
simulator where they train to
the airplane being broken you just lost
a motor you just lost another motor
so they go through this extensive
training you know
and all these and it's you know you know
we used to refer to it in the navy as
the pain cave where you're gonna get in
because you know
that when you get in for your check ride
in a simulator that the airplane is
going to break
you're going to lose hydra and it's
sometimes there a problem like oh i just
lost this hydraulic system but i'm
having an issue on the other motor well
if i shut down this motor
and i've got a hydraulics you know
because there's two hydraulic systems
one on each motor
well if i've got an issue with the left
motor hydraulic system and my right
motor is starting to give me indications
do i want to shut the right motor down
because that's going to kill my
hydraulic system that's good
and now i'm flying on a good motor with
a bad hydraulic system and without
hydraulics the airplane won't fly so
they
it's a really they're challenging
problems that you have to think through
in real time and of course the weather's
never good it's always dark
it's always crappy you're going to break
out it i mean it's just all this stuff
gets compiled on top of you
and it's intended to increase the level
of stress
because when things happen like in
sully's case we like to joke it's going
to stem power
you know where the functional part of
your brain shuts down and you are
literally on instinct like an animal
well if you've trained so much that that
is the instinctive reaction that you're
going to have
when the main part of your your your
cognitive abilities start to shut down
your you're running that instinct is
ingrained so much into you that you know
exactly what to do
and that's literally how it happens so
there's no
how do i put it fear of death like in
sully's case
do you think he was at all ever thinking
about the fact if his decision is wrong
a lot of people are going to die
you know i can't speak for him but i
would say there was so much going on in
the cockpit in that time
his his mindset was probably
i can do this i'm trained i'm going to
do the procedures i've practiced this
before
i've done these things and you know i'm
assuming that in his mindset because i
never thought about when things were
really bad you know if you're having
problems with the airplane that
you know that i was going to mort you
know and and planted into the ground it
was always
you know maybe it's an ego thing where
you think i can do this i mean
so you never have you experienced fear
during flight like um
i mean one one way who just offline
mentioning mike tyson
he talked about like uh as he's uh
walking up to the ring he's like
he starts out basically in fear
and uh yeah worried about how things are
going to go i mean it's
purely to put in towards his fear but as
he gets closer and closer to the ring is
the confidence grows and grows until the
ego basically takes over to where you
think there's no way
anybody could uh defeat me
so like that's that's his experience of
overcoming fear but
do you uh did you experience any kind of
thing like that or is that
or do you just go to the part of the
brain that goes to the training
and then you just go to the instinctual
80 solution
i wouldn't say i was never afraid i
think that would be
i can't i couldn't tell you that anyone
i know that wasn't afraid at one time
and
for most of us especially navy carrier
pilots it's just
it's it's usually especially when you're
new and you got to go out and it's
nighttime
and there's no moon and the weather
sucks and the deck's moving
you know the ship's going up and down
because it will scare lover living shit
out of you
can i say that you can definitely say
that so it's about landing or take
off that that is if you even they used
to wire people up they did it during
vietnam
you know guys that go flying missions
you know when they were flying low and
crazy stuff was going on and
people were getting shot down a lot uh
the highest
the highest anxiety and heart rates were
coming back to land on board an aircraft
carrier how hard is it to land on that
it seems impossible like for
for a civilian i guess like me it just
seems
crazy that a human can do that the
problem with night
is and there's different degrees of
night just like day i mean there's the
clear full moon night
you know where it's like oh yeah you
know this is not that bad
but you gotta remember at night i think
everyone can associate with
you're driving in your car and it's just
a it's it's an
overcast dark night and you're on a
country road with no side lights
most people have a tendency to slow down
just by nature of oh my god because you
what you'll do is you'll out drive your
headlights because it is so
dark you know you can get outside you
get outside the city and get up into new
hampshire
especially when the roads are curving
you know and the lines probably aren't
that good
it's you know now take that and multiply
it by like a million
because you have no depth perception uh
what you think is fixed the runway
is actually moving up and down and left
to right
yeah oh and when it's really bad you can
actually see it move
and uh we have two systems uh you know
there was a there's an automatic system
that's actually uh it stabilizes with
the inertials on the ship
and then there's the ils now civilian
pilots will tell you that ils is a
precision approach which gives you
azimuth and glide slope you know you
come down it's like a plus
on the carrier it's not it's really just
a beam that goes out and it's considered
a non-precision approach it's
it's not stabilized at all that and i've
been where you can actually watch the
needle and the and the
attack hand needle will move there's all
kinds of stuff moving because the base
that it's all sitting on
is doing this and ships don't just go up
and down they
they do this so the bow goes up and down
and the tail like you normally see a
ship
and then there's so that's pitch and
then it has roll
so it's doing this and then it has heave
so the whole boat is going up and down
while it's pitching and rolling
and you're gonna land on that um so
and it's i mean i remember landing as i
was with chris
uh sado and uh chris and i we're off the
uss ranger which is now decommissioned
it's
sitting getting turned into razor blades
um we're flying the old a6 and we come
in and it was off of san diego and it
was just an ugly night because
san diego always has a marine layer that
is about 1200 feet was lower than that
that night
and it was pouring down rain it was an
el nino year and there's thunderstorms
all around it was just the craziest
night i've ever seen out of san diego
and i remember landing and your
adrenaline is so high that you're
shaking i mean you literally can't stop
and we had spun around out of the
landing area and we parked we caught the
six-pack so it's right in front of the
island so if you see an aircraft
carrier of the island and the number of
the ship on it we're sitting right in
front of that and we're looking at the
landing area so it's like
you get front row seats to the concert
and
and this this this ea 6b comes in
you know ugly pass he ends up catching a
one wire which is the first one you
never want to catch the first one which
means you were
not really high above the back of the
ship when you landed
and it comes in and the exhaust on an ea
6 or an a6 actually points kind of down
and it blows and it's blowing all the
standing water on the aircraft that's
how hard it's raining and you literally
could not see a cross i mean i could see
the front of my airplane his airplane
and then it was just white because of
the water being blown off the deck
and i'm shaking and i i i'll never
forget i looked over at chris and i said
oh my god i go hey dude man
ten thousand foot runway looks really
good right now and i go and i'm shaking
my hands like this and i said
i'm not even this is i'm not faking this
dude i know that's literally i cannot
stop shaking
i said that scared the evil out of me
yeah um
but you but it scares you afterwards
you don't during it you're not i'm not
you don't have time to think about that
you're doing it you got to do
this you know kind of the quote from tom
hanks and uh
what's that the girls baseball movie
where he goes there's no crying in
baseball
oh yeah that's our joke there's no
crying in naval aviation i said
you can fly around and cry all you want
at night but you know there's only one
pilot in those airplanes and you got to
land it so
you try all you want wipe the tears away
you know putting on your big kid pants
and it's it's time to
it's time to you know man up and land
atlanta jet
sorry for the romantic question but
going back to the the kid that dreamed
to fly
what's it like to fly an airplane
what it looks incredible
like as a human like a descendant of
vape i sit here on land and
look up at you guys it seems incredible
that a human being can do that
you know people ask you know i'll be
sitting around with my friends and
they're like how was i said
the greatest job on the planet i said
you know
you it's it's an office with a view
because you're sitting in a glass
um you you can do uh
you know it's like roller coasters you
go oh it does all these cool stuff so
we take people flying every once awhile
and it's like oh yeah i like roller
coasters like you know take any roller
coaster the coolest roller coaster
you've ever been on
and multiply it by a thousand i said
it's an experience
uh you know to put your body under you
know
you know the jets rated at seven and a
half but it'll pull up to 8.1 before it
over stresses depends on fuel weight
so i mean you routinely get up there
towards eight g's
um to be able to do that to your body i
mean it takes a toll like i can't really
turn my head real good anymore and and
stuff like that but
uh would i trade it i mean it was a
childhood dream and how many people get
to do that
you know professional i want to be a nfl
you know and you end up to the nfl which
is a very small percentage but
well i want to fly jets and and to fly
you know at the time when i was flying
the super hornets that we had on our
squadron were brand new
like literally right out of the factory
i'd come off our first super hornet
cruise
we had went to the boeing factory in st
louis where they were building my new
jets that i was going to get and i
actually signed the inside of one of the
wings
while they were putting it together so
i'm meeting the people that are putting
the jet together that's going to get
delivered to me in a couple of months
that i'm going to fly
so uh just i mean the whole of it
is it's incredible i i it's i'll tell
you what when i left
when i decided to walk away uh yeah did
i miss it
i told myself i wouldn't i promised
myself
that you know once you get through your
o5 command your flying really starts to
tag
to come down you know even if you and
you're an airwing commander which is
we call them cag carrier group commander
you're not flying as much as like the
normal pilots nor should you be i mean
there's
young people that are coming up and it's
training your relief because that's the
next generation so
like currently i have friends of mine
that we serve together
their kids are flying super hornets
right so
to me that's really neat because i
watched them when they were little
and now you know one of them who was
good friends uh
is i won't get his last name but joey
who
lived down the street from us is a top
was a top gun instructor and i'm like
hey joey's joe's a top gun
you know and i'm like that's cool
because you know i went there and i knew
him he would come down to my house and
now to see these kids that are
because typically military breeds
military you know because the kids grew
up in it i mean
and i the only reason that my son is not
doing it is he's colorblind
so it it disqualifies you for being a
pilot being a seal
because he he talked about doing that
because he's an incredible swimmer and
he likes doing that stuff and water polo
player
but he's you know both my kids are well
my daughter is a doctor and
my son's in his third year so but
there's a
i suppose i mean from my perspective a
bittersweet
handover of this incredible experience
of flying
to the younger generation so you don't
you told yourself you're not going to
miss it
you miss it uh there are days i do when
i hear
jets like if i'm around a base or a jet
flies over
but i have all the memories so i can
look at it and go
it can't go on forever you know
tom brady can't play football there's
going to come a time where he has to
stop
he seems to have done it for a long time
but you know typically
when you look at ego i had the
opportunity
and i think as automation moves on
especially with ai
that you know when will when will the
last manned fighter be built
you know and that's that big question
you know we just did f-35 it's
over budget it's seven years late
there's all kinds of issues when we try
and do it
and then you look at some of the new
stuff that's coming out that the air
force is working on with smaller
cheaper uh attributable platforms that
you can go oh
we can because if you don't put a man in
the box or a person because there's a
lot of
incredibly talented women that do this
too
um so i'll just say that as person yeah
so we say man
and he we mean both men and women
because offline you've told me about a
lot of incredible women that flown so
i had i had three three female
actually four one of them didn't fly
anymore she actually lives right around
here
she she's uh she ended up going into
aircraft maintenance when she couldn't
fly anymore uh
one of the girls who everyone knows is
incredibly
she's one of the most gifted people i've
ever met in my life she is the vice
president of amazon air you can see her
on tv her name is sarah
incredible and then i had uh paige who
ended up taking command
uh she got out of fighters and went into
other platforms
and she was a commanding officer and
then the other one is a
teacher's leadership and she is all
three of them
actually all four of the women that were
direct uh
i'm not forgetting i don't think i'm
forgetting someone uh
incredibly incredibly talented uh and a
great addition to the reading room so
anyone who gets into the oh you know
women can't do it that's all total horse
crap
you know we can talk about the original
integration and stuff which was not done
well by the military nor the navy
so women can fly as good as the guys
yeah
you can't tell if you pass another
airplane you can't tell if there's a man
or woman in it
it really comes down to uh stick and
throttle
the ability to
extrapolate where the vehicle is going
to be where the airplane would be if
you're fighting another one
you have to be able to think fast anyone
has those characteristics uh can do it
and then
i think most important besides that
there has to be a desire
yeah and i'm not saying that everyone if
you took because we used to track so
when i ran
we call it the rag it's the replacement
air group it's where so the
the super hornet training squadron
there's two of them there's one on the
east coast
106 and there's one on the west coast
which is vfa 122.
122 is the first one so i ended up going
there and i ended up being the
operations officer and training officer
okay so we tracked the last hundred
students
right so everyone goes ah it's funny to
hear students talk because oh
he's awesome he's super if you took the
hundred
there's three at the top of the list
that are just naturally gifted aviators
they're well well well above average
it's like the person in a math class
that sits down in complex math
and they just get it you know at the
bottom
there's the three at the bottom that are
gonna struggle and there's a good chance
they won't get out and if they do get
out
they're gonna have to work really hard
to just maintain kind of average
sometimes it's just the way your mind
works not everyone is good at everything
if you took the 94 of them in the middle
they're within one mean deviation
of you know it's there they're all you
know it's a
the bell curve doesn't look real good
it's just a big hump and it comes back
down and everyone's right there within
one
mean deviation and then you have the
outliers
usually not on the high side because
they're going to get through but the
outliers on the low side that don't make
it through
so for the most part the navy does a
really good job as does the air force
of screening so now what they do when i
went you just showed up and you started
now what you do is you actually go fly
uh piper warriors
low wing to see can you are you
adaptable to this
and there's an evaluation that goes
through and then if you hit a certain
mark then you're good to go and then
they put you into primary
it's kind of like a it's like a
pre-check you know like the
preset the pre-sat to go hey how am i
going to do on the sat it's
it's very similar to that but it's more
of a hand skill
can you adapt because although we live
in three dimensions like this table is
not
you know we this is you know this is all
has depth with all that
uh where it's really relative to
aviation we are two-dimensional
very two-dimensional can you explain
that so our perception is actually more
limited than the
than that of an aviator very much and
here's why yeah so we look at
uh let's look at a tall building let's
look at one world trade center in new
york because that's
everyone knows what it looks like big
tall building um
it's what maybe 1800 feet tall even the
burjal dubai which is like what 20
700 feet tall it's not that big so a
super hornet to do a what a split s is
which is
i'm flying i'm just going to roll the
airplane upside down and then i'm going
to do basically
a c the letter c i'm going to go in the
top and out the bottom
so and i'm just basically a vertical
displacement of the airplane so i'm
going from high to low
it's very very tight and it doesn't in
about roughly about 2 500 feet
give or take a little so you go that is
that is a really tight vertical turn
yeah for example the a6 in order to do
that was about 9 000 feet
and we look at a building that's 2000
feet high and think that is
tall right all right so in an aviation
sense when you're starting to do
vertical displacement maneuvers going
from 35 000 feet down to 20 000 feet in
a matter of seconds
and maneuvering the airplane because the
human brain thinks we
really are we like to be flat i see we
think 2d so
if i'm fighting how you really get an
advantage when you're
fighting another airplane is to work in
the vertical
because most people will do like one
move in the vertical and then they want
to start to flatten out because that's
where we're comfortable
yeah it's very profound do you still
think in like stacks of 2d layers or no
or do you do you truly start to think in
that third dimension like
the rich 3d world of uh
like a fighting like do you start to
actually be able to
really experience the 3d nature
you do because you have to project where
you're going to be so you have to know
the performance of the airplane knowing
that hey if i do this maneuver that i am
going to go
it's it's kind of like when i when i
talk about when we were chasing the tic
tac
so the tic tac's coming up and i'm in
about you know and i've been doing this
for
at the time 16 years so i'm looking and
i'm going hey i'm here
he's there on the other side of the
circle i'm going to do a vertical
displacement i'm going to go like this
i'm going to cut across a circle and i'm
not going to him i'm going out in front
of him i'm going over here
because i know that by the time i get
through this maneuver that's where he's
going to be and i'm trying to you know
basically join up on him
but i also i also had to look at it to
go do i have enough
altitude to do this because what i
didn't if we're here and i do this i'm
going to end up over here and he's going
to be above me and then
you know i have to get that energy back
to get up to him and when you're doing a
max performance
it's a trade so you have this is this is
really important when you're when you're
fighting airplanes and you're really
max performing so when you go to an air
show and you see the air demo
he's literally playing with it he's got
a finite amount of energy
right he can add some with the motors
and stuff but you're what you're really
doing is it's a trade-off and you can
trade off
kinetic energy speed for altitude which
gives you potential energy
the other piece is is i can trade some
of that kinetic energy for performance
because i know if i do a nice easy turn
the airplane will make it
what doesn't bleed energy but i know if
i do a real tight that 2500 foot split s
that it's going to cost me energy so if
i enter the split s at 200 knots and i
do it right i'm going to come out at the
bottom at probably 200 knots although i
lost 2500 feet of potential energy
i converted that to that to kinetic and
that kinetic was transitioned and bled
off the wings
in order for me to get that high
performance turn and you have to
constantly
evaluate where you're at and it's your
overall energy package
so you can have a guy that's behind you
that looks like he's going to kill you
but if this jet is at 400 knots and this
jet is at 110 knots
this jet's just going to pull away drive
around and kill him in about 30 seconds
right it's it's overall energy package
and that's that
you've got to be constantly evaluating
where you're at and this is that 80
solution can i afford to do this or not
yes no and you have literally a split
second to make the decision the most
incredible
dance of human decision making
is just incredible i know a million
people want me to talk about tic tac and
i i
definitely will but let me ask the one
last uh ridiculous
uh uh subjective question
what's the greatest plane ever made in
you don't history to like from pure
speed i would say sr-71 i think it's an
engineering marvel that was actually
developed in the 50s by kelly johnson
you know skunk works for what that was
able to do and when you get into history
of it you know how they actually
built uh the cia actually made like
six companies in order to buy the
titanium from russia
to bring it back and build an airplane
out of titanium that we would fly over
russia
to me that's it's an incredible
engineering marvel i think
that like the x-15 you know by the way
this sr sorry to interrupt sr-71
still holds the the speed record for
of any plane as far as i can understand
yeah what's funny when you get into it
is it's
remember fast is relative and when i say
that i mean
so if you're going 3 000 miles an hour
100 feet above the ground you're going 3
000 miles an hour
through you know that's how fast you're
going when you get up to altitude
there's an indicated airspeed and
there's a
you know your ground speed so your
indicated airspeed is really
how fast the air is going past your
airplane well the air is so thin up
there
you may only be showing like 300 knots
but at 300 knots you're really doing
2500 miles an hour over the ground so
you know like we would take the
airplanes up to 50 000 feet when we had
to do
full the maintenance check flights on
them so when you're doing 200
you know and you know some mod notch
it's actually slow for the airplane it's
you know you're getting you know it's
kind of like it's not you know there's
maneuvering speeds
you know that if i hit a certain speed
and a super hornet that i have the full
capability of the airfoil
if i'm below that speed i'm going to
stall the airfoil before i get to the
maximum g
okay so when you look at something like
that you go
is it really going fast and when you
look at an sr 71 that's flying upwards
of you know
70 plus thousand feet the air so thin
you know just like the x15 you can get
to a much higher
speed but the relative speed of the air
going over you is actually relatively
low
so the stresses on the airframe are not
like they would be if you were down low
but because you're going fast to get
enough air over your ketostatic system
to show that you're going 300 knots
you're you're screaming
i mean the fastest i ever got was i was
with the
uh well soon to be vice admiral white so
we had taken a check flight and uh
and i got it up to 1.78 i got a super
horn up to mach 1.78 and it was
and we were started by pebble beach too
and then it what's that feel like or is
it
when you get that fast it start to me it
got a little bit weird because you
realize
in your brain and i did that there's no
out
if something happens i can't eject the
ejection would kill me
isn't that kind of liberating in a way
um or no that
okay maybe not i always want to push the
limit you know it's like how fast i
could have got it going faster
it was it was literally still
accelerating when i stopped but i had it
was fuel limited
and space limited because i you know i'm
off the coast of california
big sur and i'm going and i can see
pebble beach out in the distance uh you
know the whole monterey peninsula just
going
and you're doing almost 18 miles a
minute i mean you're screaming
yeah i mean that's and then you have to
turn well the airplane didn't have
anything on it it was a slicked-off
super hornet so it was basically just
the airplane no pylons no pods no
nothing
and then we had to get it turned around
because we got to go to the exit point
for the area and i'm trying to get it
down below
to subsonic and there's a bunch of
things that are disabled like the speed
brakes that normally we pop out when
you're going that fast they don't
because the super hornet really doesn't
have speed brakes it
deforms the flight controls they don't
function so you really
you're trying to maneuver and when
you're going that fast you can't turn
because a 7g
turn at 1.5 mach is a pretty big turn
um so it's just it's crazy it's
incredible that a human can do this
yes uh human can engineer that the
system which allows another human to
control that system
it's to me it's it's uh i think it's
just it's one it's a great experience
was it sad to see the sr-71 go
i think it was during your career i mean
do you do you guys romanticize the
different planes
um we would see it flying when i was
flying hornets because we i
the west coast flies in it's called
r2508 which is covers the
navy china lake area and edwards it's a
huge area it's
it's actually i think the we had a guy
from switzerland come out because they
were they had hornets and he's like this
is bigger than our whole country
because it's a pretty big area in
california that you fly
but you would see the sr-71s they had a
loop because nasa was flying them
out of palmdale and they would take off
and they'd go up towards washington
state
and montana and they do a loop and so
you'd see them coming back down they'd
descend out of you know above 60 000
you'd see them you they get contrails
you know the white
lines behind airplanes they'd come down
and hit the tanker and they'd go back up
so
it was cool to be able to see them in my
lifetime flying uh
but uh you know i think with money
age um the advent of satellites
you know because they're everywhere now
i mean you've got commercial companies
putting satellites up
uh how much of that need was really
there because you gotta remember when
those things started in the 50s sputnik
wasn't flying around
you know it was it was the u2 and the
sr-71 that were out there doing that
work
um so at the time it was needed it was
at the if you think about it really it
was an incredible feat of aviation for
that time
yeah i mean literally we have yet to
pass that and you also ask well is there
a need to pass that i go i don't know we
got
stuff in space so do we need to make an
airplane that goes that fast
i think the next one is you get into the
hypersonics where you don't have to put
a person in it does all kinds of crazy
stuff you know the work with automation
all that kind of stuff
yeah so one of the reasons i wanted to
talk to you
is you happen to be one of at least in
my view one of the most credible
witnesses
in history of somebody who's
uh witnessed a ufo literally an
identified flying object and
not only witnessed but got to how do you
put it like chase it essentially
chased it so let me just lay out
i think it's easier than you telling the
story maybe
me and my dumb simpleton waste trying to
explain the stories i understand it and
then maybe you can correct me
so on uh november
10 2004 the
uss princeton which is one of the the
carriers that's cruiser it's a
it's a cruiser it's a cruiser so you
can't land on the uh no helicopter has a
helicopter pad on the back
gotcha and it has weapons on it okay
gotcha it shoots the missiles up
but it has a nice radar just that
incredible spy one system
phased array four panels so looks in
quadrants
perfect so they they started noticing on
november 10th
that there is a few objects flying
around at 28 000
feet with speed of uh with what's i
guess is considered a low speed of 120
miles an hour i don't know what that
in knots but uh out on the coast of
california
so and they kept detecting these objects
for just about a week
then comes in like your part of the
story which is on november 14th
from the i guess it's from the uss
nimitz
i you flew and witnessed a
40 foot long white tic-tac-shaped object
with no wings flying in ways you've
never thought possible
and in some interview somewhere you said
i think it was not from this world
so there's a mysterious aspect to this
object
this entire situation uh there's videos
involved
the video of a flare
forward looking infrared
receiver receiver there's also a visible
light so you can switch
yeah i mean tv mode as a tv mode so that
gives you visible light and then it has
ir mode and uh chad underwood recorded
that video
so and those are the videos that were
released by the pentagon later
one of the three videos the two other
videos
uh go fast and gimbal
were recorded in 2000 something 14-15
uh on the east coast of the united
states
they had different kinds of objects but
they were
weird in the same kind of way in terms
of at least the videos
and the experiences that
people have described were similar in in
the degree of weirdness
but uh the differences is
actually on the the east coast of 2014
case
very few people have spoken about it and
even in your situation
very few people have spoken about it so
there's a mystery to it
but it's in some sense this is a quite
simple story
without much resolution to the mystery
and it's fascinating and there's
a lot of opinions there's division of
opinions
because uh it's a mysterious i mean it
truly is a ufo
in the sense that uh uap
uh what is it i i unidentified
aerial phenomena so can you
maybe correct me on any of the things
i've gotten wrong elaborate on some key
things
and describe that experience in general
so here's what i know so yeah
we went out uh on our mission to go
train uh and they canceled the mission
and they set us down there's all kinds
of rumors out here there's all kinds of
after this has come out so originally it
was the four of us
there's two jets two people in each jet
their f-18s
okay there is no video from
our event it was all four sets of
eyeballs staring at this thing and then
when we came back and told it
when chad and his pilot took off that's
when chad got the video of it
and we're like that's it that's exactly
that's it and um
so when you say eyeballs you mean
literally your eyes are seeing a thing
yeah so so as we're flying out we get we
get vectored they come up and tell us
hey we're gonna cancel training this is
the uss princeton so this is the siege's
cruiser
so we're talking to one controller um
who is like hey sir first you ask what
ordinance we have on board and i laugh
because we don't carry live ordinance in
training typically because batch
stuff happens usually someone forgets to
put a switch on and then the missile
comes off and hits a good airplane and
it's not good so we had what's called a
catom9 which is really just a blue tube
with the
aim 9 seeker on the front of it which is
an ir missile
so there's only two ways to get it off
you can beat it off with a sledgehammer
you can take this thing and so
you put a wrench in and it unlocks the
lugs and pulls the lugs back in that
hold it on
when it really fires the impulse from
the engine actually throws the lugs
forward and breaks that release and it
comes off down the rail
that's how it works so they said hey
well
we have real world tasking so as we're
going out
my wingmen the other pilot she maneuvers
the airplane to the left-hand side
of me so she's kind of stepped up like
this and i'll use your mic box
to start since we're going out they're
calling ranges they're called bra calls
bearing range in altitude and they're
telling us hey
it's at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40
miles and 30 miles so they're saying
hey 270 30 20 000. that's all i say
so we got our radars we had we had
mechanically scanned radars at the time
apg-73 good piece of gear
apg-79 new one's way better but anyway
and i apologize if i interrupt the story
uh hopefully it's useful but they're
telling you a location of a thing that
you should look at
yep they're telling us they have a
contact on their radar they don't know
what it is they just have a blip
they have a little blip well they've
been watching these things and what he
told me is
they had been looking at these things as
we're driving i said sir we've been
tracking these things for about two
weeks that's we had been at sea for two
weeks
because this is the first time we've had
planes airborne we want you to go see
what these are
gotcha so they kind of interrupt the
mission to say
check it out so we start driving out
there
and uh as we get down to he's going you
know
20 miles 15 miles 10 miles and then you
get to a point where they call merge
plot which means we are
inside of the resolution cell of the
radar because radars don't see
everything they're so they have a range
and they have an azimuth resolution
right so and it's basically think of a
little cube so they can
and the whole sky is made of all these
little cubes and they're looking so if
you're inside a cube with something and
you're both inside the same little cube
then the radar can only see one thing
does that make sense yeah yeah
so they call merge plot when we say
merge plot to us
it means he's right around something's
around you get your head out so we're
not looking at radar scopes anymore and
the wizards the wizards can look but
everyone it's heads out
when they say merge plot you're done
looking at your displays inside you're
doing this
and you're trying to find it so as we
look out to the right and you look high
and low because he could be anywhere
from the surface all the way up now keep
in mind the ship is like probably 60
miles away so it can't see
the surface and you can do your standard
radar horizon calculation and go hey
it's the
the thing is 40 feet off the water the
panel can he really see
you know there are radars that can see
around the curve but let's just say that
it can't
at this time so you go is it you know
where's it at
so as we're looking around we see now
this is a
it's a clear day there's no clouds
and there's no white caps it's just a
calm
it's actually a perfect day if you owned
a sailboat it was that five to ten knots
of wind and you just want to kind of go
out there and you're not going to get
beat up and have white water coming
it was the perfect date on a sailboat
how many miles out do you see like seven
like you see just it's a clear day
it's 50 it's unrestricted visibility you
can see literally all the way to horizon
it's just
clear it's nothing and we're basically
off the coast if you look at a map and
you go
san diego and then inside of mexico
we're kind of in between that
and we're probably about by the time
this all hits we're price
i don't know eighty hundred i don't know
but somewhere out it's pretty far off
the coast perfect
from 20 000 feet you'd be amazed you can
do the calculation you can see stuff
you know you'll see land 50 miles away
you can see you know and when you're
looking at
a continent it's really easy to see
you're not looking at an island i mean
you're looking at mexico
and you can see on the white gaps in the
water if there is any oh yeah they're
easy
yeah for us we look at it because we
know if it's natural wind or
so if it's a really white cap windy day
then the ships just kind of barely be
moving when we land on it it makes it
actually easier
if the ship has to move where it's got a
big weight because it has to make its
own wind when we land which is the day
that it was this day
you go oh okay and it creates what's
called we call the verbal but when the
air flows across the flight deck it
drops behind the ship you know
and then it kicks back up so when you're
coming board to land it's going to make
you go up a little bit and then you're
going to fall and you've got to con
you've got to anticipate that to stand
glideslope so we're pretty
we're pretty conscious of what's going
on out there with the waves and the wind
so we look there's no waves there's no
wind there's no white caps
and we look down and we see white water
so if you put if you put a piece of land
a sea mount below the surface
like you know even 20 feet below the
surface that's big enough
as the waves come in you know waves have
height and length
when they come in that's what happens on
the shore when a wave comes in it hits
and then it starts to collapse and it
pushes the wave height up because
it can't go anymore and then it breaks
the top and yeah and that's where you
get the white
so what happens is at sea when you get a
sea mount you'll see stuff come in the
wave will crash and you'll get white
water
you can go out when it's high tide in
any one of the coasts you can go out
here off of boston and go hey at low
tide i can see those rocks and at high
tide i can't see the rocks are covered
but there will be white water around
those rocks you'll be able to tell
there's something underneath the surface
does that make sense
yep so that's what it was we see we
don't see an object because there's
all kinds of oh they saw this they saw
another craft below the way we didn't
see anything below the water
we just saw white water but the white
water and i like to shape it you can say
it was across i say it's about the size
of a 737 so it looks like if you took a
put it about 15 20 feet below the water
so the waves breaking over the top and
you're going to get white water where
the plane is at you'd see
this this kind of shape so it looks like
a cross
so as we're looking down off the right
side the back seater in the other
airplane jim
says this is that talking in parcels
again he says hey skipper do you and
that's about what he gets out of his
mouth and i go
what the hell is that in a nice do you
see that essentially
so we see the white water and that's
what draws our eyes down or otherwise
we'd have never seen it
so we see this i would love to see the
look on your face when you see that
and then we see this little white tic
tac because we're about 20 000 feet
above it and it's doing
it's going basically north south and
then east west north and so it's abrupt
it's very abrupt so it's not
uh like a helicopter if a helicopter is
going sideways
and it goes once it's going sideways
left and it goes right what it'll do is
it'll go it's got a speed
it slows down because there's inertia
yeah and it stops and then it goes back
the other way this thing's not it's like
left right left right with no so moving
in ways that doesn't
doesn't feel intuitive to you at all of
the things you've seen in the past
so as a pilot the first thing you think
is it's a helicopter
right right so you go oh what is because
when we see it's moving we're like oh
helicopter
so the first thing you look for to see
if it's a helicopter when they're doing
that because
usually when they get down there towards
that 50 feet you'll get rotor wash
you see it in the movies when the
helicopter's by the water it kicks the
water comes up besides because the
downdraft
you know like a thunderstorm will do
that it pushes the air down and then it
has to come out the sides
so you see it and you go well there's no
there's no rotor wash what is that thing
so by this time we're driving around so
as we're if we were at the six o'clock
we're driving around towards that nine
o'clock position and we're just watching
this thing and it's just it's still
pointing north-south and it's going
left-right and it's kind of moving
around the object and if it had if i had
to say it biased itself
it was biased towards the bottom half so
if you've got the east-west and then the
north-south kind of across
it's hanging out on the southern thing
that's hanging out it's just kind of
moving around up down left and it's
crossing over it it's going up just kind
of
so now we're like what the hell is that
so then i go
hey i'm gonna go check it out and the
other pilot says
i'm gonna stay up here and i said yeah
stay up high because now we get we get a
different perspective
so she's up here and i'm down here as
i'm descending
she can watch because right now all i'm
watching is the tic tac
she can watch me and the tic tac so she
gets a god's eye view of everything
that's going on which is really
important you can you'll hear people say
it's high cover whatever
she's watching me which is it's perfect
as the story goes on because it it gives
us two perspectives
you know of a perspective that's about 8
000 feet above us
when that thing disappears and they
don't you know because if it's just like
oh i lost it
and they go no it's over to the right we
can still see it we all lost it at the
same time
so as we come down we get to about 12
o'clock and i'm descending it's an easy
descent i'm doing about 300 knots
which is a really good air speed for the
airplane for maneuvering because i
have i have everything available to me
at that speed
so i'm coming down and as i get to 12
o'clock as the tic takes doing this it
literally it's like
it's aware of us and it just goes blue
and it kind of points
out towards the west and starts coming
up so now it's obviously knows that
we're there
whatever this thing is and knows over
there so as we drive around it's coming
up and i'm just coming down we're just
i'm just watching it now you remember
this whole thing is like this is like
five minutes this is not like
we saw it it was gone or oh i saw lights
in the sky and they were gone
we watched this thing on a crystal clear
day
with four trained observers watch this
thing fly around so we're like
okay so i get over to the eight o'clock
position and i'm a little i'm a couple
thousand feet above it and it's about so
i'm probably at about 15k i think it is
i think that's my story's about 15. it's
just estimating
so you can see it's just really easy to
set because
so what's 15k 15 000 feet i thought it
was 8 000
uh the the other airplane ends up about
yeah
okay so they're still about twenty
thousand feet so they're all right
slowly and i'm descending they're
staying up there so i'm kind of doing
this
okay as they drive around okay so i'm
looking at this thing and it's about the
two o'clock position we're about the
eight o'clock position and i'm like oh
i've got
i've got enough altitudes i'm gonna i'm
gonna cut across the circle and i tell
the guy in my back seat
dude i'm gonna i'm gonna do this he's
like go for it skip because i was a
skipper
so i cut across the bottom so i'm kind
of
almost coming out co-altitude as this
thing's coming i'm gonna meet it
and i'm driving and uh i get to probably
it's i'm probably about a half mile away
which you think well a half miles pretty
far a half mile in aviation isn't
it's nothing that's i mean you can tell
there's a pilot in an airplane you can
see all kinds of stuff at a half mile
you can see pretty good detail so i'm
like right there and it's coming across
my nose so now i'm basically pointing
back towards the east so i'm cutting
across
because i'm going to the three o'clock
position it's at two o'clock and i'm
gonna meet it at three o'clock
so as i do this it goes it just
accelerates and disappears so it's this
happens at around
estimating about 12 000 feet so they're
at 20. so they've got about 8 000 foot
of altitude above us when this happens
and it just as it crosses our nose it
just it accelerates and
literally in less than you know probably
less than a half second it just goes and
it's gone
and so we're like and i the first thing
is dude
did you guys see it the other airplane's
like it's gone we don't we
have no idea where it's at so we kind of
spin around rook i go let's see what's
down here and i turn around we're
looking for the white water
we can't the white water's gone there's
nothing it's literally all blue so now
you go
and i remember telling the guy in my
back seat like a dude i'm
i don't know about you but i'm pretty
weirded out because this is i mean
you know i had at the time like 30 some
hundred hours of flying i'd been doing
it for 18 years it's nothing like
anything you've seen no
no so as we turn we go well let's just
go back you know because
now i got to put on my real hat which we
have to train because we're getting
ready to deploy
to you know overseas so we got to get
our training done so
that's my mindset especially as a ceo
because i got to get i got it training
out of the flight time because i'm
responsible to do that so
hey let's go back and the the the guy
who's going to be the bad guys is the
ceo of the marine squadron
and uh so cheeks is at the end he's
listening to all this happen you know
because he's just like
because he they when he first went out
they were gonna do him but the little
hornets the legacy hornets f-18cs
don't have as much gas as the super
hornets so he had
launched first and they were going to do
him and then when they knew we were off
the deck they just told him hey go to
your cat point down south
and we're going to send we'll pass this
off to
the supermarkets what's the cap point uh
that's where we hold so it's called a
combat air patrol
point so we're just going to hold at one
end he's going to hold at the other end
it's kind of like hey you guys are going
to each think if it's a football field
we're going to sit on one goal line he's
going to sit on the other goal line and
when they say go we're going to run at
each other and
try and do something in the middle of
the field and then go back to our set
reset points okay
so you're talking to him he's he's he's
listening to the he's just listening we
don't talk to him at all he's just
listening he just dials up because they
know that we all know the frequency so
he's listening to what's going on
because he's like because they cancel
training so what else is he gonna do
he's just gonna hang out there and do
circles while he's waiting him and his
wingmen
so they're just they're listening to all
this go on and then at this point you
move on
yeah we come back up to train we go back
as we're flying back
the controller because we're talking to
the the kid on the princeton
the uh the uh they're called os's
they're operation specialists they're
the ones that run the radars
and we're talking to him and he's like
hey sir you're not gonna believe this
but that thing is at your cap
it showed back up it just popped up you
know this is like 60 miles away it just
reappears we're like oh
okay so we got the radars out we're
looking for it
uh we get out there we never see it we
never see it again
uh we do what we need to do we come back
to the ship of course now we're like oh
this is gonna be
we're you know i told i told him i go
dude you know we're gonna catch we're
gonna catch shit for this
when we get back to the ship word's
gonna get out and we're just gonna catch
maximum shit and we did
yeah and it's kind of that joking you
know so the ship plays movies we have
movies on the boat
and they do 12 hours of movies so they
repeat because there's a day check and a
night check so the same movies in the
morning
and night play so you never get to ever
get to watch a whole movie on the boat
which drives my wife crazy because i'll
watch stuff on tv that way too i'll be
like oh hey i've seen this and
i'll jump into a movie in the middle and
then i'll pick it up later and i'll see
the beginning and i'll put it all
together
because that's how we have to do it
because we're so busy well the movies
became
and i it was men in black aliens uh
independence day definitely gonna catch
some shit
oh
let me just ask some dumb questions so
just take him because it's
whatev whatever the heck you saw
whatever the heck happened
it's you know one of the most
fascinating things um
events in recent history so
whatever it was it's interesting to talk
about it different kinds of angles
there's no good answers but it's
interesting to ask some dumb questions
here
so first of all you mentioned see you
saw at some point
xy and then uh somebody in the princeton
said
you're not going to believe the sir it's
at your cap point that that's a
different place how the heck did it know
what your cap point is
that's a good question and that's the
one if you don't no one you know you
don't we don't
tell it it's we don't broadcast it we
have a waypoint in the system
but i don't know maybe it knew where we
were going because we used the same one
day after day after day
but it it obviously knew but you never
saw it there never saw their chad when
he took off when he got the video we
landed we told them hey look we just
we just chased this thing they're like
when i go chased it and they're like why
go
dude and i told him i said dude get
video and he goes
so and that's how he is he's like i'm
gonna go and he he was he he was
determined he was gonna find this thing
so
when you look at his video and this is
the stuff that isn't out that they don't
see because
not all the all you see is the flare
tape that's the targeting pod the
forward-looking infrared receiver
um i'll probably overlay the video when
he goes out
it's uh you know what he's looking at on
his displays is he has basically two
radar displays up
he has azimuth and range on the right
one and he has the azimuth and elevation
on the left one so this is called the as
l display and this is called
this is basically the ppi which is the
you're at the bottom of it
you're at the bottom of the square it's
really taken this it's taking a cone
because a radar really looks left and
right from a point and it squares it out
so the entire bottom of the scope that
we look at is us
because they do this they square it off
so so he goes out and when he first sees
it he gets a radar return on it because
when he's not trying to lock it so the
radar's just throwing energy out and
getting it you know it's a doppler radar
so when it's in search mode that's all
it's doing it's going oh i can see you
i can see and it's looking for return so
he gets a return so he wants to see what
it is because all you get is a little
green square unless it builds a track
file on it
but a little green square is just
sitting there it's not moving because
it's it's sitting in one spot
in space he locks it up when he goes to
lock it up now he's putting a bunch of
energy on it
but he's telling the radar stare down
that line of sight and whatever's there
i want you to grab it
and build a track file on it which will
tell us how high it is how fast it is in
the direction
that it's going okay the radar smart
enough that when the signal comes back
if it's been messed with
it will tell you it'll give you
indications that i'm being jammed
so that's all it is is you send the
signal out something it manipulates the
signal either in range and velocity or
whatever and it sends it back
and the radar was smart enough to go
that is not a return that i'm expecting
something's messing with me i'm being
jammed and it shows you and it puts
strobes up it gives these lines on the
radar and it does some
stuff so you can immediately well it
does it goes full into
it it's being jammed in about every mode
you can possibly see because everything
comes up and the
the this aspect gets long it's all kinds
i don't want to get into details but you
can tell it's being jammed
so and as you said on rogan by the way
that jamming is an act of war active
jamming isn't
when you actively jam another platform
yes it's technically an active work
feels like you should be freaking out at
this point
i mean so well he does it and then in
the back seat so they don't have a stick
and throttle they have
their side stick controller so they can
control all the sensors and they can
just toggle around and do stuff so
he can he has the ability to just move
one switch real quick and it will go
from that azimuth elevation on the radar
to the targeting pod
well as soon as he commanded the radar
to look at that target
the targeting pod goes oh what's over
there and it'll stare because it goes
down the line of sight because all the
systems are hooked together
you can decouple them but they're going
to automatically couple up
so when he castles over he it's a switch
looks like a castle switch was a castle
so
when he moves that thing to the left and
he swaps the displays out and he says
instead of looking at the radar i want
to look at the targeting pod
he sees it on the targeting pod because
the targeting pods already looking there
and now he's on a passive track because
he's not literally sending any energy
out he's just receiving ir energy from
the tic tac and then the system itself
will track
the pixels and the contrast differences
it depends on what mode you're in
so it says oh and that's what those
little bars you see in the video where
the bars come up let's
do some v vision based tracking that's
exactly what it is
um so that's the video he goes through
changes zooms changes the momentum he
goes through all the modes so there's a
narrow
medium and wide so wide is far away
medium and then narrow and then
there's the tv mode and he goes from ir
mode to the tv mode
the cool thing with the tv mode is
narrow ir mode is only medium tv mode so
you can actually get
closer with narrow tv mode it's got a
better zoom capability when you go into
tv mode
um so he goes through all those things
that's when you see it going from a
black background to a white background
he's trying to figure out what the heck
is this
well yeah and he wants to get as much
data as he can on it based on the
different modes instead of just staring
at it going what is that thing
um green so that the video has been out
for it it actually was on youtube for
years
and before the government released it it
was leaked at 2007.
about no i got a the guy that was in my
backseat
sent me an email and i had retired so
this is about
nope because i was working i was working
down in san diego so this is about
2008 early 2009
he sends me a link to strangeland.com
which is not suitable for work oh yeah
it's top notch yeah um
and he says hey i can remember the email
hey skip does this look familiar
and i look at i'm like how the hell did
that get on
strangeland.com so the next thing you
know it ends up on
youtube which was cool because you can
send a youtube link to someone
you don't send strangeland.com to
someone because you don't know what
you're going to get
it's like googling kittens yeah um so
it ends up there somehow so it gets on
youtube which was cool because
i would go out with my friends and we'd
be drinking and they they go dude what's
the coolest thing you ever saw flying
you know it's kind of like you were
asking what it's like and i go
oh dude i chased the ufo and they're
like get out and i'm like no serious so
this is literally how it happened
so i was sitting with my friend matt so
matt and i did our my
he was the guy in my right seat of the
a6 when i did my very first night trap
right and we were friends to this day
right because
when you do stuff like people like that
you know you had to have faith in him he
had to have faith in me
you know they're they become like your
brother yeah
um and these are guys that literally you
know i don't talk to him on a regular
basis like chris
who works at apple if if chris called me
up tomorrow and said dude i need help i
need this
i'd be like all right let's figure this
out and let's do it because it's they're
like family
you do it and most navy guys we don't
we're not we don't send letters to each
other weekly
you know i have friends that could i
haven't talked to in 10 years that they
showed up on my door
you know pop a bottle of wine grab a
beer shoot the shit
take about first 10 minutes to catch up
and then it's it's like old times and
it's it's amazing how fast this happens
so incredible
so i'm out to dinner with matt um and
i'm telling him this story and he's like
get out of here so he goes back and he
tells our friend paco
paco has fightersweep.com it's a blog
site
so paco's obsessed like he is way into
ufos yeah
so paco calls me up he says dude i was
talking to maddie that's what we call
him he goes i was talking to maddie
he goes dude you got to tell me this
story
so i'm like all right so i spend a chunk
of time and so
he calls me one day and i'm like i get a
voicemail
hey give me a call so i call him up and
he answers the phone but i can hear
people in the background and i go hey
dude what's going on i go hang on hang
on i gotta put you on speakerphone i go
what do you put me on speakers you got
to tell the story i'm having a dinner
party
you got to tell the story so he's
literally having a dinner party with his
cell phone in the middle of the table as
i tell a tic tac store
so he calls me up again he says hey i
got this blog
and he just writes about fighter stuff
like he wrote about that we call him the
shit hot break that's a guy that when
you're land on a carrier comes
and turns and gets ready to land really
fast like breaks it off right at the
back of the ship
and uh one of the guys when we were
junior officers on the uss ranger one of
the apartments the other squadrons guy
nasty and nasty was notorious for coming
in in the tomcat and cranking off the
shit hot break
right so he he he literally wrote a
thing about the shit hot break with
nasty and there's another guy or mav was
our uh
one of our landing signals officers for
the air wing
it just it was it's just it's a good
article on how this was and how
you know it it kind of forms you in
naval aviation's kind of being kind of a
part of the club so he's like i gotta
write about this thing i'm like what are
you guys i gotta write about i go all
right
i go because at first i would say no i'm
like dude i don't want this out there
just
so you haven't really before then talked
about it much
because my wife didn't even really know
the whole story what just as a comment
is it just because you caught some
no uh it was just i'll tell you what
three days we we had the incident
for about two days they played the goofy
movies there there's a comic on the back
of the air wing schedule
that they would put it was like first
one was a far side and the second one
was
me and the guy in my back seat and it
was men in black but it had our names
you know protecting the world
protecting the nimitz battlegroup type
stuff it's just funny shit like that
yeah
um so that was just to me it wasn't that
big of a deal it was like okay that's
weird we're never gonna know what it was
i want to get out because this is
important because there's all kinds of
rumors there's a group of folks
no one ever came out in suits
to talk to us nobody looking like me
no came out on a uh no no one came out
of the helicopter no one came out on an
airplane
you know you get oh i i was told to turn
over this classified what's funny is
all the cos and several are still in the
navy
uh there's one that is a he i think he
just finished up he was a captain of an
aircraft carrier
you know so he'll end up making admiral
and all that stuff
those guys are all my friends i talk to
them daily just just to clarify
so just for people who don't know
there's a story
that both on the nimitz and the
princeton
folks in a helicopter landed
they showed up they took the data
quote-unquote so
all the sort of recordings associated
with this
incident and they took it and presumably
deleted it
there's a kind of story to that and then
uh from what i've seen you said that you
believe
just like we were talking about offline
that jokes spread faster than uh
or just rumors spread faster than
anything on on these ships
uh that it might have been a joke that
started
and uh well they did so here's here's
the joke yeah so they had come down
right we had the tapes um and they were
chad's tapes
so we use those tapes over and over
again you know they're they're
consumable but remember i have a budget
as a squadron so i have a budget so i
have to buy those tapes i have to
all that stuff that we use i'm
accountable for and the tapes are
actually classified secret because of
the data that's on them
okay so we had the tapes so the the
secure the intelligence guys
the intel officers came down from what's
called civic it's cvic which is carrier
intel center
came down and said hey we need the tapes
these guys are going to come
they're going to come and get them this
is so we're like i'm like oh whatever
you know
so we hand them the tapes and then
someone because i have you know you know
people
shortly after they came and got the
tapes someone came to me and said you
know they're they're messing with you
they're playing a joke
so i said oh let's see how well that
goes because you know
i'm i'm a ceo and they're not and uh so
i went down to civic
and uh it was probably he was a
lieutenant or a lieutenant jg so he's
way junior to me
and i said hey uh i want my tapes back
and he looks at me and i go i know you
guys are pulling my leg i know you
there's no one came out
and i go and you have about 30 seconds
to get me my tapes before i start
tearing this place apart
that's literally what i told him and i
said and if your boss has an issue
he can come and see me because it's not
going to go well
i said because this is bullshit and i
need those tapes then he literally
walked right over to a filing cabinet
opened it up they weren't a safe he
opened up a filing cabinet and pull them
out and hand them to me
i said and i basically said a few things
to him like don't ever fuck with me
again
and i left i had the tapes so this no
one came out
there's no flying going on when all this
is happening and i took the tapes back
and then i copied the tapes so i took
two brand new eight mil tapes
and i copied the sections that i want so
there's a rumor too that
oh the original flair video is 10
minutes long and there's some one of
these petty officers saying i saw it
that's total crap the original video is
about a minute 30 seconds long what you
see
on the release video is the entire video
so you have mentioned
uh i apologize if i say stupid things
please correct me but
you you have mentioned that like on
rogan i think
that you watched it on you know on a
bigger screen it felt like it was higher
definition
so let me ask the the question
is there a higher definition version do
you think of the
flair video that would give us more
pixels and more information
presumably because of the um
because i don't know where the stuff
that the government released i don't
know where they got
okay so the stuff that was on
strangeland and youtube you know someone
pulled off of a secret
it looks like a rack you know there's
tape machines in there and it gets
converted to digital and stored on a
hard drive and they pulled it off that
hard drive and they put it on youtube
um no it's it's just like you know
anytime
even a digital media the more you copy
digital media there's some quality that
gets it degrades
so this you don't know how many times
this has been copied so we were looking
the videos i've seen are right off the
original they're high eight tapes that's
basically pulled off the back of the
display so it's not filmed with cameras
it's literally a digital feed it's
pulled off the back
and put onto a high eight tape that's
how the recorders work now it's actually
digital to digital it's not even on
tapes anymore it's it's a digital
recording system but we were still in
that process of slowing up because
originally we had little cameras here
that shine so if the light hit it would
wash out the displays so this it's a
pretty good feed
um when you put it on so we're instead
of looking at it on your tiny little
computer monitor whatever
i'm looking at it on a like a 19-inch
because it was still normal tvs back
there we had just put flat screens in
the ready room that i had bought
so we could watch movies so because a
nice huge 19-inch screen
it says maybe 20. it's nice wow that's
huge
gigantic um hey i can get for like
50 bucks you can get like 60 engines
this is 2005. yeah
um so so you look at this big thing and
but you could see so when you get to the
tv mode when i say there's little things
coming out of the bottom of it you could
see those
it was very clear but in terms of the
actual
visual on the tic tac was it did you get
much more information from the higher
from the clear little things out of the
bottom
to the bottom information so when you
see it because he's coming almost
co-altitude with it you can see the
bottom of it it looks like little
you know like if you look at a cessna
there's a little antennas hanging on the
bottom kind of like that there's two
little things on the bottom
there's nothing on the top there was no
plume no ir no
no visible propulsions even heat
signature
you know it's all that stuff and then
the other thing that people didn't see
is they didn't see the the radar display
uh which that that really raises the
classification level especially to see
what the radar does when it's being
jammed
um you know matter of fact when they did
the unofficial official investigation in
about 2
000 and let me think about 2009
um i had gotten a call on my cell phone
from a guy who
government employee and said hey
told me who he was he's still in the
government um i'm friends with him and
he said hey
we're going to investigate your tic tac
thing this is literally
five years later yeah five years later
and i said
okay whatever and he did a pretty good
job i caught the unofficial official
report because
um it was really never official
it wasn't but i'll give you the history
of why i say that and why it never came
out in foia requests
so he does the report he sent me the
report and all he said is hey i'm going
to send you this report
please don't distribute this report i
said okay
the report is now out because harry reid
got it to george knapp
and they were good enough to redact
there's a few versions of it unredacted
and i'm very protective of the other
people that were
involved in this so jim has talked but
he's off the grid he doesn't talk to
anyone now
the pilot of his airplane she has come
out on unidentified but
they don't release her name although
people are starting to do it and she's
had weird
shit happen around her house she's got
kids you know so i'm very protective of
her
um and i've told people like jeremy and
george if i know that the names ever
came from you i will never talk to you
again about this and jeremy's been
really good about it and so is george
and then but george george knew the
names were because he had he got the
report from senator reid
um and then the other crew so the pilot
of the airplane that took
the video that chad was in if you talk
to
that individual they really don't have
the recollection they were just out
flying that day and it wasn't a big deal
um so it's it's you you need to protect
because not everyone wants people
knocking i don't want people knocking on
my door
and you know and there's rumors oh you
talk to everyone i think you're about
the 23rd person that i've talked to
total yeah and that includes uh you know
the
the newspapers and stuff and i've been
selective because there's so much i mean
if
i turn down like i turned down russian
tv
uh i can give you her name when we're
done here she called she not only called
me she called my wife she called my
daughter she called my son and she
called my son-in-law
because they're persistent so i'm i'm
pretty protect
i'm very particular i mean the reason
i'm talking to you is because i knew we
would have a conversation that wasn't
based just on the tic tac in the
incident but we can actually talk about
some of the science and some of the
theoretical to get into to get more
people involved to go
because i think there's you know and
when you talk to you know lou elizondo
or chris mellon you know the group at
ttsa
you know that that whole thing was
that's to the stars
uh academy okay that's the tom delonge
group that got started so
and you go well uh you know because i
think tom has caught a lot of crap for
this but he's actually
when you talk to him he's he's he's very
smart and i asked him how'd you get into
this and he goes oh
when i was traveling around with blink
182 he goes you read a lot of books when
you're laying in a van as you're driving
to your next gig
before you make it big and he goes and
he read he was reading books and he read
one of them on ufos i'm trying to think
the title that's one of the big ones
that's out there
real popular and so he started just he
started asking more and through his fame
with blink 182
in the band he got more and more
connected you know if you talk to chris
mellon who is an
under secretary of defense for
intelligence and he's part of the
melon you know dynasty you know from
carnegie mellon type
very very smart he knows he he he
definitely knows how the government
works because he worked there
and so when i went down to dc to talk to
people
he's one of the first people i'll go to
when i did uh
tucker carlson about a month ago month
and a half ago
i asked i i he texts me i i texted him
tom lu to go hey because they were like
you got to do it because i turned to i
turned tucker down a couple times before
and his uh his producer had called me
and i'm like
all right i'll do it because those guys
like you gotta you gotta do this for us
so from my perspective just to give you
some context
so um to me there seems to be some
stigma so i come from the scientific
community and i really appreciate you
talking to me today
and i think the people who listen to
this include
you know uh faculty fellow faculty
at mit and major universities and it
feels like there's some stigma
to the subject from from the scientific
community
a lot of people especially when they
hear your story are like wow this is
really interesting
but you you don't even know you one
you're afraid to talk about it and two
you don't know what the next steps are
like how can we seriously
try to think about what you saw
how to think about how we further look
for things like it
how we develop systems and plans
for how in the future we can
immediately collect a lot more data and
try to react
uh properly you know to try to
communicate try to
uh interpret this in in the best way
possible
from a scientific perspective and i i
just would love to
remove stigma from this subject
uh well i think that's the first step we
have done
in this country an absolutely terrible
job with these things so you go
and i joke you know go back to roswell
so the first reports that came out of
roswell was we have this crash flying
saucer
that's literally what came out and then
magically the next day
it's a weather balloon and they're
showing you pieces of mylar and you go
well that doesn't look like what they
showed us yesterday
then you get into project blue book you
know so there's that whole series about
project blue book but the bottom line of
project blue book is it really did two
things it investigated sightings
and it did everything it could to debunk
and disprove to the point where it
actually went to discredit
you know to make you look so there's
always been this
this i don't know if you'd call it an
aura around it or a mystique about ufos
that if you're talking about them
they're nuts
with ours because i'm not a i'm not a
you i'm not a ufo guy i'm not a
junkie if you ask me do i believe that
there's life outside of
earth i would say you probably have a
better chance of winning the mega ball
lottery
than we're the only planet that has life
on it in the universe it's just
the odds are against it if you do just
do the math
you have to accept because it if there
only has to be one other planet that has
life on it
and then i win and you lose and then
more and more science has shown that
there's habitable planets out there
that yeah everything we've learned so
far and we know very little but
everything we've learned so far
about the planets out there exoplanets
earth-like planets it seems that it's
very
likely that there's life out there
intelligent life is another topic
but uh life well we we as humans you
know
and even more as americans we have this
hubris about us that says
are it and you go not so much
we're not so intelligent um because we
are it's just how we learn so
you know our main mode of transportation
and what people figured out you know
years ago was the internal combustion
engine which led us to jet engines and
solid rocket fuel what if you're in
another planet where you didn't you
figured out
uh the ability to create a gravity field
or you used you know because
electromagnetics are becoming bigger and
bigger and bigger you know catapults
on ships were steam powered and the new
gerald ford is electromagnetic
roller coasters used to use a chain to
get you to the top of the hill now they
shoot you with electromagnetics and
you're going
so there's a whole new realm of
propulsion that you know sometimes it's
our ability to develop the technology to
support
theory you know we are just now proving
you know recently theories that einstein
had where people actually joked about
them and now we actually have the
technology to prove that gravity can
bend light
you know we have proven that so you look
at that when you go well does that mean
that
you know 70 years ago einstein was wrong
or eight years ago einstein was wrong or
do you go
we just didn't have the ability to look
that deep into space to actually find
something that we could
to actually measure and you know and
i've seen and that's just a hundred
years and and the kind of things that
can happen if you say
look what we've done in the last 20
years yeah it's crazy all right let me
direct
because it's such an interesting topic
from a career perspective from a science
perspective
you're i mean you've spoke you've been
brave
in you know telling your story not some
dramatic thing but just telling the
things you've seen
did it encounter uh did it impact your
career
is that why more people haven't come out
like uh
you've mentioned uh roswell like how
what advice do you give to people to the
community to me as a scientist
for ways to go forward about this topic
and
still have a uh you know not being
put in a bin in society that he's a loon
or she's a loon or that person mine is
to get away from the little green men
just
divorce the two little green men and you
know and i've talked to lou elizano
about this
you know and and the group that they're
working with which is incredible i mean
they've got steve justice who used to
run skunk works where they
built you know projects now louis and
she mentioned was a program director
he ran the a-tip program at the pentagon
and a-tip was a program that was tasked
with investigating
any kind of uh on ufo's uap
so what's funny is the unofficial
official report that i joke about
the guy who wrote the unofficial
official report was actually an original
member of atip
and the original stuff that atip did was
foia exempt
and people how do you know that i go
because i stood there with the memo in
my hand that said these are
did literally i watched the dod memo
that said it and it was signed
so he was one so that's why the that's
why i call it the unofficial official
report it was never
it was never releasable because people
go oh i put in a foil request and i
didn't get that i go well just because
you put an effort requesting get it i go
because
how much how much time do you think that
guy is going to spend to get you the
information that you requested if you
can't find it
i actually got called by the navy i had
a
commander in a navy call me about uh
right before the article came out in the
new york times it was this was starting
to come back
and she had called me because there's
been there was a foia request for stuff
about the nimitz incident and i said
do you know of anything she called me
she goes do you know of anything else
besides the
the situation reports that come off the
ship you know and you gotta remember
when the situation report comes off the
ship that's like
third hand so we tell someone they tell
someone that person has to write it up
so there's all kinds of inaccuracies in
it
but then there's the unofficial official
report that's actually pretty well
written there's some errors in it but it
was you know i didn't help write it i
just
did it and he did a really good job of
researching it and figuring out who's
who in the zoo and the players
um so she called me and said is there
anything out there and i said
officially out there she said yes i said
i don't know anything i knew of the
unofficial official report
which is that one but i'm not you know
if you don't know about it i'm not going
to tell you because it's not my job
and nor did i care i mean did
in that whole situation you mentioned
lube i mean did you
think about your impact your career like
just to get back to the question did do
you think
others other pilots
other thing other people like in
roosevelt
are thinking about this kind of thing
why aren't they talking about this why
are people afraid to talk about this
well honestly the military and the press
there's a distrust i'll just tell you
that right now
we typically don't like talking to the
press because if i talk to you
you know especially when i do even the
tv shows you know because i've been on a
couple shows
when you look at it you know they come
to my house and they film me for two
hours
yeah and then what you see on the screen
is five minutes
well and yeah and the other thing with
the press let me give you my perspective
from autonomous vehicles
is the clipping happens
yes but also the incompetence
let me just call out journals
they're not thinking i mean so so here's
the thing
i've i have a phd and i've taken
painfully too many classes from like
physics and math and i also have a deep
curiosity about the world
i read a lot that seems to be missing
with journalism so you're talking to a
person who's not gonna
push the story forward in an interesting
way not the story but the
actual investigation of uh
perhaps one of the most amazing things
that humans have witnessed in history
like you it might have been nothing who
knows
what you witnessed might have been from
a sort of debunking perspective might
have been some kind of trick of mine
if you and others have hallucinated
something
it could be some simple explanation
but possibly it was
uh something not of this world and
to not do justice to this story
from a scientific perspective it seems
at best negligence and so yeah that's
true for
journalists it's true for others we it's
just
it's human nature yeah if we if we can't
if we see something that we can't
explain
then sometimes if you just yeah maybe
it's just me and you let it go away
and you don't think about it you know
maybe it'll just you know it's
it's you ignore it um the other side is
the inquisitive mind that says well what
was that and i wanna i wanna dig more
into it
you know and if you you you look at it
or you're going against the norm
um you can get ostracized you know and
if you look at you know
einstein's the perfect example i mean he
started coming up with some of his
theories
some of the top physicists in the world
were like dude you're
you're a nut job and he's he's literally
proving them
but he didn't have you know he proved
him in theory
but he didn't have the means to actually
do the experiment to prove
his theory there's a great book that i
recommend people read called proving
einstein right
by jim gates that talks about like
the hard work that people try to do
years after
to try to experimentally validate
the predictions that einstein made with
uh with his theories
it's fascinating but yes at the time
it's kind of crazy
what he's saying yeah if you look at it
back at the time don't we we look at it
now and go well the guy was a walking
genius and he was
but if you go back in time when he was
doing it it was like what are you
talking about
you know but one of the challenges is
your eyewitness one of the challenges is
you're
essentially an eyewitness account like
we don't have good data
we have very limited data of um of the
incident that you've experienced
so let me kind of dig in let me just ask
some questions
of uh maybe to see if there's
just to paint more and more of the
picture one you kind of mentioned so tic
tac
shape let's break apart two situations
one is the video
let's look at the actual eye account the
the eyewitness account that you saw with
your own eyes
what's the what can you say about the
shape of the thing is there interesting
aspects outside of the tic tac
like is there any appendages is there um
some texture to it that no
smooth white tic tac
no we don't you don't see there's no no
wings
no visible propulsion no windows
no probes that we could see we don't
notice like i said we don't see the
little things on the bottom of it until
we see the video
in the tv mode when it's zoomed in
right before it's shortly you kind of
see them zoom in you don't see it
typically on the youtube stuff that's
out there
um but remember we're looking at the
original tape so there's not there's
basically no degradation but when you
saw your eyes there's no kind of
appendages no
no what about like somebody asked a lot
of people asked you questions so
i appreciate you spending your time here
let me ask some of them
uh did you i mean you chased it so we
flew close to it relatively speaking was
there did you
feel any wake
like any did you feel it in any way
in terms of your interaction like
aerodynamically no
nothing nothing so uh
another aspect of it there's an
interesting thing you've developed a
feel
for for objects in the air did you
feel like it was surprised by your
arrival or did it let me ask a few
questions around it so
did you did it feel like the thing was
surprised
did it feel like it wanted to be seen
almost to show off its capability did
uh and did it what did it feel like
relative to if you were doing a
um an air fight against uh sort of
like a i don't know a a foreign
jet so one i think it
i think it knew we were there when we
showed up it's just it's
me uh it's kind of like an animal if
you've ever been around deer in a field
you know the deer will look up and if it
sees you and you're on the other side of
the field
it'll actually go no threat and it'll
start eating you know they don't put
their tail up because you move closer to
the deer then it goes oh it's there and
i'm going to react or i'm going to move
so as we were up high and it's down
doing whatever it was doing
um you know which i don't know someone
asked what do you think oh maybe it was
communicating with something i joked on
good morning america maybe it's like
talking to the whales kind of like star
trek you know
and i actually used that clip it was
kind of funny but yeah we're a little
human-centric
we think like it would it show up to
talk to us but maybe he's talking to the
dolphins maybe
it was whatever you know because it was
hanging around that white water and i
don't know if
was there something there was a seamoth
we just didn't find it again i don't
know
but once we started the descent and it
actually reoriented
its longitudinal axis and it started
mirroring us coming up and it was
obviously where we were there and it was
really coming up just you know you
figure i'm at 20 and it's
coming up and it ends up getting up to
12. uh
where i cut across the circle i think it
was very aware that we were there
because it interacted we call it a
two-circle fight when you're fighting
another airplane
um but uh you know
was it was were we afraid i don't think
so
i mean and to me it was more curious you
know the curiosity overcomes any fear
that you would have and i always felt to
be honest
if i was inside the airplane uh
especially as long as much times i'd
spent inside the airplane flying and
doing stuff
i felt totally it was like a safe zone
i mean i i felt totally comfortable
inside the airplane as most part you
can't
if you're in the airplane and you feel
scared it's not the job for you you have
to feel that
because the airplane is part of you now
yes you know i am inside i have the
stick i have the throttles i've got my
wizard in the back seat he's running all
the displays
we are a team we're in the
state-of-the-art
airplane you know brand new you feel
pretty good
and then you get something that you know
can climb from the surface up and then
accelerate like it did like it was like
no big deal
you know for an airplane if you just put
me from a standstill let's just say slow
flight just get me at 100 knots
above the water and for me to you can't
just start a climb i'd have to lower the
nose i'd have to accelerate and then i'd
have to start coming up and
this thing just like just did it like it
was like no big deal yeah you mentioned
that
like you kind of your reaction to it was
uh it
like it's something that you would love
to fly almost
uh so this object just the curiosity you
experience is like
like what it almost like what the heck
is that piece of technology and i want
to fly it
like what made you feel
like it's something that you could fly
do you think it's something that a human
could fly
like in terms of interpreting what you
saw as a piece of technology
because another perspective on it is it
was
uh not that the thing under the water
was the key thing and what you were
seeing
is some kind of projection or something
that like
i don't think it was a projection i
think it was a real object it was an a
physical hard object
that would could be flied oh yeah yeah i
think
all four of us will say the same thing
it wasn't it wasn't this was not because
you go
okay let's just go on it's a light
projection
well if we were both sitting next to
each other we were looking at it from
the exact same angle and all that and i
go oh okay there's a
in theory you could have that but with
an 8 000 foot altitude difference flying
you know and they're you know she's
probably not directly above me she's
kind of hanging out watching this whole
thing happen
you know you're getting two different
perspectives from two different
altitudes over a clear blue
you know if you've ever been at sea and
i don't mean like coastal i mean like
when you get out at sea the ocean is the
bluest it's incredible
um you know you got a bright white
object
over a deep blue ocean you got pretty
high contrast
and for this thing just to disappear uh
it's it's was i'm telling you i would
i mean i know we we all have the same
uh recollection of what happened you
know there's some details because it's
so long ago but
for the most part we know what we saw
and we all came back and looked at each
other like what the hell was that
what if i mean do you think about the
thing under the water that's not often
talked about
if there's something under the water
couldn't have been something gigantic
like it could be what like do you ever
see this
big ship that's why as a person so i
love like swimming out into the ocean my
mom's an
olympic swimmer so like i love that
feeling but i'm also terrified when i
swim
because the abyss anything could be
under there i
like there's not enough focus on that
perhaps because there's no visibility
but is it
is there anything interesting to say
about the possibility there was
anything underneath there it could be i
mean think about if you're going to hide
on this planet where's
what's the least explored spot on the
planet two-thirds of it's the ocean
you there's there's there's literally i
mean come on
the the the malaysia airplane the the
triple seven it was a triple seven that
crashed you know they turned they didn't
go where they're supposed to and they
just disappeared and they've been
searching for it and they found pieces
of it
but you would think there's large
objects that you know when that thing
hit the water
depending on how it broke up there's big
pieces that would you'd find something
they haven't found anything except what
floated
um so to hide something underwater i
think would be easy
so okay let's go a little bit in
speculation land but
it's the best it's the best we can do
which is
the basic question of what do you think
was it so if you had to put money on it
is it uh like advanced human created
technology
is it alien technology is it an unknown
physical phenomena
you know like a ball lightning for
example there's a lot of fascinating
things that
humans don't really understand is it uh
like i said some perception cognition
that led you
uh some kind of hallucination that made
you to misinterpret the things you were
seeing
let me put those things on the table or
is it misinterpretation of some known
physical phenomena like uh like an ice
cloud or something like that
what do you think it was well it's
definitely i don't think it's an ice
cloud because ice clouds don't fly
around
yep and react to you do i think it was a
light
i'd say no because of the aspects and
what we looked and watched it do
i'd say no what do you mean by light
like a light ball
you know some type of perception you
know there's uh
their experience like plasma you can do
plasma and you go
i can see it but it's really not you
know it's plasma i don't think so
um so you would see distortions i think
is it moved
maybe not i mean i'm not the theoretical
physicist in some
you know you know i'm not in mit uh
i would say no i mean it looked for from
all my experience and
and i had quite a bit of it when this
happened
no i i think it was a it was a hard
object it be it was aware that we were
there
it reacted exactly like if i was another
airplane
and i had to come up and do something
exactly what i would do
you know it mirrored me it wasn't
aggressive you know there was taco it
fought behind us and never it was never
offensive on us
it never did that it just mirrored us so
as we're coming out it's just like you
know
you're you're kind of you know you said
you do martial arts you know or
wrestling
you know you see people out on the the
uh when they get into the ring
especially with collegiate wrestling
because my roommate in college was a
collegiate wrestler so i
de facto became a wrestler because he he
beat me up every night yeah
we joke i talk to him literally probably
three four times a week
um but you know you see wrestlers when
they get out they kind of you're kind of
feeling each other as you walk
boxers do the same thing it was doing
that same thing it's like what's going
on as it comes around as it comes around
and then it was like hey we're going to
get here and when i got too close to it
you know it decided i'm out of here and
then it did something that we've never
seen
the other question is what if i didn't
cut across the circle what if i just
kept going around a circle
we just keep going but i could have just
watched it i mean my one regret out of
the whole thing is
uh we have a camera in our helmet in the
joint helmet there's a little camera but
we never use it because it's nauseating
to watch because you've ever put a gopro
on someone's head where they're looking
around like this all the time it'll
it'll nauseate you so we never turn that
on and all you know it's the one thing i
didn't do is reach down and hit the
switch
yeah you know and then we didn't go back
and because our tapes didn't have
anything because we didn't get it on
radar
um because i tried to lock it up because
i can move the radar with my head but i
couldn't
it wouldn't lock the radar would lock
and so
so then the question is and this is
unanswerable but let's try
did you get some hints at it do you
think it's human
like advanced human created technology
that's
simply top secret that we're just not
aware of or is it not something not of
this world
so you if you'd asked me in 2004
i just said i don't know if you ask me
now
so we're coming up on 16 years ago
for a technology like that you know and
let's assume that it didn't have a
conventional propulsion system in it
because i don't think it did
i would like to think that if we had a
technology that would advance mankind
leaps and bounds from what we normally
do
then it would start coming out but to
hide something like that for 16 years
you know and i understand uh you know
and i don't speak for the united states
government i
never will speak for the united states
government but i understand how some of
that stuff works for classification
levels and why we classify stuff you
know is it
is it detrimental to national defense
but there's a point where you have to
look and go
if we had a technology like this that
could literally change the way
mankind travels how we get things into
space
our ability to do things you know you
talk about you know are we gonna go to
mars well if you have something that has
the ability to go
because remember these things were
coming down when the cruiser tracked
them from above 80 000 feet which is
space and they would come down and they
would come straight down they'd hang out
at like 20 000 feet and then
three or four hours later they'd go back
up we don't have anything that can come
down hang out in once
you know and i'm talking hold out in a
spot well we all know there's winds
they're not drifting like a balloon
they're just sitting there
and then they would go back up and they
tracked up to the
when i talked to the controller he's
like we've seen up to 10 of these things
there's other guys and it was raining
and all this other let's just say they
tracked a
groups of these things coming down
hanging out and going up
so it's not just propulsion and the way
it moves it's also
fuel it's everything so the whole the
whole of it indicates
of a kind of technology that's uh
highly advanced but you don't think in
your sense
that you actually don't know but you
know more than
a lot of people in your sense the
top secret military technology if you
think about skunk works if you think
about like that
cannot be more than 15 years ahead
i would say for a leap like that and and
a perfect example in modern times is the
117.
because now a lot of the data on the 117
is out like it was developed at this
time
it flew for this long before it was
actually acknowledged by the united
states government what's the 117. that's
the stealth fighter
the original stealth fighter not the b-2
but the stealth fighter so
you look at that you know yeah you can i
think you can hide things for a while
um but i think a technology a leap i
mean this is not
this is not a hey we developed this and
we're
kind of pushing the edge of technology
this is a giant leap in technology
you know and the other one is do we have
the basis to do that you know
because usually when you have a
technology like that universities
especially the one you're working at mit
a lot of the leading edge stuff is
coming out of the top tier universities
you know so you've got mit you've got
caltech you've got
stanford georgia tech virginia tech
carnegie mellon i'm just naming schools
naval post graduate school is another
one
there's usually indicators there's
papers of hey this is where we're going
i don't think there's a whole bunch of
papers on developing a
gravity-based propulsion system that
literally
i've got an object because how do you
how much power would it
cost to create a gravity field of your
own
that could actually be strong enough to
counter the giant orb that we live on
so by the way you mentioned
gravity-based that's kind of like the
hypothesizing that people do in terms of
uh
propulsion like what kind of propulsion
would have to uh
would have to be involved in order to
result in that kind of movement
to me all the gravity discussions just
seems insane uh from a physics
perspective but of course
uh it would seem insane uh until
it's not but because remember we only
know what we know
yeah and and which is very little and
someone has relatively
think out of the box to go
is this possible at all yeah well okay
so this
so you're you're saying that if you had
to bet money all your money
it would be something that's
alien technology so it's not
human-created technology well i don't
like to get into little green men but i
would say that i don't
i don't think people development right i
don't think we've developed it
i just you know because the other one
someone had asked me they said what if
there wasn't
maybe it was just a drone maybe it was a
uav
that got sent here from someplace else
i mean we've got stuff out there flying
around um
so i don't i don't know i mean i'd like
to sit around and talk to some of the
giant brains that think this stuff up i
was supposed to be on a podcast with one
of them
uh but such topic which uh you mean look
for drones for
just uh just space travel technology
because if you look at where we're going
you know because everyone talks about
mars
you okay and you know we're hey are we
gonna be able to colonize you know and i
know elon is big into that you know yeah
what do you think about
what do you think about elon spacex nasa
we put humans
back up uh back up there my theory
so it's funny because i i know one of
the guys that was
he was he was one of the original
employees at spacex he's a friend of
mine
and i won't say his name but he knows
elon yeah he knows elon and uh
yeah and he actually worked on the
entire falcon one project he's one of
the lead guys on that so he's got some
great
matter of fact he's there's a movie
there's a book coming out that comes out
in about a year on this
the original the first years of space
for six years of spacex
you know and he's named in the book you
know and they're supposed to make a
movie on it so i'm like hey who's gonna
play it
um but uh what he's done to me it
changed the game and here's why
because i said you know in i think it
was 62 and eisenhower warned of the
industrial defense complex you know
which
it has become everything he warned us of
you know
it has become and it's really driven by
there's the big three in defense which
is really you know northrop
lockheed and boeing those are the big
those are your
biggest raytheon's kind of write like a
subset of that but they're
raytheon's pretty big too big in u.s
defense those are the big guys
right that's actually where a lot of
military guys go when they retire they
go to stuff like that so
um when you look at that and you go and
the way government contracting is
working and how we charge and
you know why things cost so much and
then you go you got
elon who's got an ego you know and he
doesn't like to do things certain way
and i've talked to the guy that worked
there
on you know because the government likes
to have oversight of contracts where he
was like no
just tell me what you want i'll build it
i'll give you a bill when it's done and
then
if i do it for half the price i make a
ton of money because he's money-driven
guy
which i like capitalism at its best
so now you look at the two things so you
got the the spacex which is the dragon
capsule
right and then you've got boeing so elon
did what boeing is contracted to do in
less time for half the money
and oh by the way because he can reuse
the boosters because they come back and
land and you don't have to like morton
thigh call we reused them on the space
shuttle
but they had to take them all apart and
do a bunch of stuff because they landed
in salt water and then you had to put
them all back together
where elon gets them down because i was
joking with this guy go what do they do
they like
re rehaul you know overhaul because no
actually they clean them up and they can
use them again they're reusable
systems incredible leap in technology
that no one thought of but here's a
private company so being able to put
people on in the capsule and the
spacesuits i mean it's literally like
sci-fi when you watch
when they went up so i'm a huge fan of
what he
and his company have been able to do
because you know the fact that we were
paying huge amounts of money
to the russian government you know and
oh by the way if you didn't know because
i have some friends that are astronauts
uh they all have to learn russian right
they have to and they have to do it's
what level five where the test is a
phone call
yeah where they call you up and they you
know because they would go
so i went to the pinning two two friends
of mine the one actually had a mission
date the one got one later so it's cool
when you're watching your friends doing
a space walk
you know because i would pull up because
if i knew what was going on i'd pull up
the nasa thing i was in a meeting one
day and i've got nasa on
and and makers out there floating around
you know doing his stuff and i saw one
he's in the space station while they're
doing a spacewalk so it's kind of cool
when you go oh yeah i know that dude
he's up there in space floating around
um so when you when you look at what
those they're capable of doing and then
you go
what elon is bringing to the fact that
now
it's back in america it's actually
to me it's it's cost effective for us to
be able to do more stuff
i think it opens the door to do we go
back to the moon is there a reason to go
back to the moon personally i think if
we're gonna if they're really gonna go
you know in years from now go to mars i
think that the moon is the stepping
stone to go back
to start proving some of the technology
to go hey we can build this we can get
on the moon
and now we can get back off the moon uh
because we did this on a less than a
compact computer in the 60s which is the
whole reason that i flew because i'm
obsessed matter of fact i have the giant
lego
apollo at home and the lander and i have
one that my dad built me in 1969
right after that and neil armstrong's an
ohio boy and so am i
matter of fact i have a picture of him
in a car in wapicanet ohio at the parade
after he walked on the moon because his
parents didn't live far from my aunt
uncle in wapa kineta and they were out
at the parade
so i've been obsessed with this since i
was a child
do you hope to uh do you think do you
hope that you'll go out
to the space one day
me if i had the opportunity i'd go in a
second you know
i am not i mean that's one of the hopes
of the commercial space flight is that
you know uh like people like i mean it
would be to us
tourism but you certainly wouldn't want
to in terms of you're now
kind of a civilian right i mean in a
sense that you're just a normal person
you're not a fighter pilot
currently but it seems like if we send a
civilian up there would be somebody like
you
in the next like 20 years i i'd be
you know if elon wants to throw me one
of those things i'd be all over i don't
know what my wife would say but you know
sometimes you gotta
you gotta get your kicks while you're
alive i'd love to hear that discussion
with your wife listen there's the pros
and cons
uh she's she's i mean i've known she's
on board high school so she
yeah she knows how i am you know most
people that know me are like yeah you're
pretty much the same person you were in
high school
you know i was a class clown and i still
am that way
um so let me ask you this question about
so i'm talking to elon again soon
i'm curious to get your perspective on
it
if i wanted to talk to him about tic tac
about
these weird out there propulsion
ideas which are obviously just like you
said if there's something to it
if it can be investigated somehow it
would be extremely useful
for us to understand in the effort of
developing
propulsion systems that can get us
cheaply to out to space
what what should elon think about this
stuff what should he do
what should people like him i think
people need to open their aperture up
and stay off of uh take the next step
and go
you know we are tied to fuels and either
solid rocket or liquid
you know whatever we do but it's it's a
thrust generated where we rapidly expand
gas to create thrust
which is really in layman's terms you
know we can get into what but
that's what it does um if you have
something that
you can contain that is a as a fuel
source that would last
a significant amount of time you know
those rocket boosters go and when
they're done they're done there's enough
to get them back down and that's it
there's not a huge
you know not coming back and go well i
still got three quarters of a tank let's
hold him on and do it again
his system's not doing that um
but you know the way the way contracting
especially in the government the
government has tons of money but you got
to remember
the government has to justify how they
spend our tax dollars for the most part
there's times where they can
hide money in the budget to get stuff
done but then when you look at and i'm
just going to throw a few out there but
if you look at
what amazon you know does with bezos and
you've got
elon um there's some there's some big
money out there
yeah i mean you're talking you know
bezos alone could buy
companies like big companies apple is
another one
these companies had huge huge amounts of
money
and then just go over to the gates
foundation and they've got
gazillions and gazillions of dollars
we've got universities there's so much
money out there if we
really wanted to do it aside from what
the government wants to do because we do
live in a free society
i think there's enough to go how do we
do this and
because when you work outside of what
the government would want to do
let's so let's let's we're not working
on this necessarily for the united
states although
i am a huge giant i will be american
i would never yeah i am an american
you're talking to somebody born in the
soviet union
i can't believe you agreed to this um
but
but when i you know haven't killed me
yet
yeah well you're here yeah and you've
been here for a while
no no i'm joking i'm i'm an american
citizen i'm actually pretty much
american too when you do that so you
look at let's just look at american
universities
yes so there's some brilliant minds and
we'll just use mit because you work down
there
there's some brilliant minds but there's
a huge chunk of those brilliant minds
that are not american citizens so if you
want to get into
government stuff and you are not an
american citizen it gets really really
really hard
but if i take money like bezos money
elon money
and they let's just say they want to
work together they can split it up 50 50
the two of them when the technology gets
developed
but now i'm not constrained by who has
to do the work i just want to make sure
that i try and keep it in the united
states because
technology is technology and if it gets
developed and gets over to where
you know a country gets a hold of it and
then just basically uses it for their
own because you save them all the
research time
you don't want to do that but if we can
get to the point where we can we do it
on the international space station we
realized that space was too expensive
for one country to do alone so we made
the international space station and we
have
a conglomerate it's the one thing that
the russians and the u.s
actually work together on think about it
that's it we work together on space
because we realize it's way too
expensive for us to do alone
and effective so we've got this thing
that's been out there floating around
for god now what is it like 20 years
that thing's been up there floating
around
so it's getting old we're gonna have to
replace parts and do stuff but
if we can pull the money together and
come up with a something that would
literally change mankind and change
travel and allow us to actually do a
more effective thing of exploring
because if you develop that technology
i'm not you don't even have to send a
man person if you can develop a
technology that's
so and with our automation and we're
progressing in our
our computing power to send something
out that's not just floating around when
you know that
it can react a lot quicker something
that could actually go down to the
surface and come back up so right now
everything we get out of mars it goes
down there and then it just sends data
back
it analyzes it but i've got a technology
that can go up there really quick i'm
not worried about man i don't have life
support systems and all that but it can
go down it can go it can cruise around
it can hover above it can take samples
and it can actually take martian soil
and then bring it
back yeah so we can analyze it here
that's a game changer
it's a complete game changer because it
opens up all the planets
exactly so in the sense the the the tic
tac
is a symbol so uh whatever you think
even from a debunking perspective
there's a non-zero probability that it's
alien technology
and in that sense it serves as a
beacon of hope and a reason
to like you said widen the aperture and
to invest
big amounts of money into thinking
outside the box like
it's almost uh a hope
to say we can do better propulsion
we can overcome physics in an order of
magnitude better way
and it's worthwhile to try i think and i
don't think the money
if you look at the big picture with the
amount of money some that's out there
floating around these private companies
you know i think if you said hey i've
got let's just say a hundred million
dollars which really a hundred million
dollars relative to
bezos has got 100 and some billion
dollars in the network so if he said hey
100 100 million dollars you drop 100
million dollars and i go
and i'm gonna put a you know like the
government will send a
broad area announcement out that says
hey we're looking for this technology or
a darpa program
but what if i just said hey who's to
stop bezos and elon from doing that on
their own to say hey
i want to go pool universities because
they have fewer restrictions because
it's not tax dollars they don't have the
checks and bound they can do whatever
they want it's their money
oh sorry about that um to go hey i'm
going to put this out and i'm going to
get the best
physicists that are working at cern that
are at mit that are at caltech at the
schools i mentioned and
oh by the way a few of these guys are
propulsion experts and i'm going to
basically
i'm going to fund you guys for 10 years
so you get 10 million a year and i'm
gonna give your salaries and we're gonna
do that or whatever the amount works so
let's cut it down to five so we can pay
well
right to do the research but oh by the
way the research is
it's not classified but it's controlled
so we're not gonna publicly just put
this out in journals but if we make a
leap
that we think would advance because
although those let's say there's 10 of
them
those 10 scientists come up with
something and they put out a paper
there might be another a number 11 at
another university that reads that paper
and says hey
i kind of had this idea and now you can
get a thought pool that pushes us in
and gets us out of the the mindset
because we have a tendency to
we evolve the stuff that we create but
yeah it's like i was joking because you
know i
i know a ton of guys with phds and girls
and i said but you know how much when a
person gets a phd in like engineering
how much
new math is really being done i said
there's a handful of people in the world
that are really doing i'm talking
i'm talking stephen hawkins type
brilliance that is going
i'm really doing something that's yeah
that's totally
different that's a big dramatic thing
now going on in physics that everyone
is just everybody's conversed towards
this local minima or
local maximum whatever you think about
it and it's it's again
same as with the tic tac thinking
outside the box is not
is uh not accepted and it probably
should be
but it's hard because if you go back go
back to einstein
back to the original he was the he was
out of the box
yeah he did not think that the true
jesus had he not
thought out of the box and came up with
some of his theories where would we be
okay we're jumping around a little bit
so we talked a little bit about elon
and mars and space but let's uh
let me jump back to a few questions that
folks had
i have to kind of bring up some
debunking stuff because i think
not the actual idea not the actual facts
of the debunking
but the nature of the true believers
versus the debunkers
hurts my heart a little bit because
people are just talking past each other
but let me kind of bring it up uh mick
west i've just recently started to pay
attention
just in preparing to talk to you about
this world and mick west is one of the
better known people who kind of makes a
a career out of trying to debunk sort of
he's a
his natural approach to all situations
is
that of a skeptic i think it's it's very
useful and powerful especially for me
coming from a scientific perspective
to take the approach he does it's
valuable and
i think no matter what i think there's i
hope that people
quote unquote true believers are a
little bit more open
minded to the work of mick west i think
it's quite useful
and brilliant work so let me ask uh
here's a bunch of videos a bunch of
ideas where he kind of suggests possible
other explanations of the things that
were out there
he has some explanations of the things
that you've seen
in it with the tic tac like with your
own eyes like
he says that uh it's possible that you
miscalculated
the size and the distance of the thing
and so on when you were flying around
i don't fight that as uh i mean maybe
you can comment on that person let me do
it right now sure
so because that comes up like how how
did you know it was about 40 feet long i
go
okay so 16 years flying against other
airplanes
know what stuff looks like you know i've
looked down on things so if i know i
know here's the known things i know when
we saw the tic tac i was at
20 000 feet pish right around there so
when i look down
i know what a hornet looks like looking
down on him because i've done it for
all those years i mean i got a good idea
so that's that's why i said 40 feet
because it's about hornet size
so and as i go around you you get to the
point where you have to be able to judge
distance when we fly out of experience
and you can tell if something
small or big you know so i would argue
the fact of
you know peer experience there's you
know
professional observers which is what
we're actually trained to do
um and having done it for so long
no it was and everyone came back with
the same thing they're like yeah i was
about size of hornet
from a human factors perspective how
often
in your experience of those 16 years
do you find that eyes what you see
is the incorrect state of things so like
how often do you make mistakes
with vision you actually you make vision
issues a lot because you're and the sad
part is your brain believes what your
eyes see
we are actually trained to do the
opposite of that especially when you
instrument fly because
your brain and eyes can tell you one
thing but you got to trust your
instruments let's
let's go back to landing at night so
your
you're right i eyes that the runway and
your brain
assumes that the runway is fixed but you
know
that the runway is moving so if i try
and do stuff visually i would you die
every time
not every time but you die close to
every time trying to land on a boat
so we actually use instruments which are
counter to your brain so
and there's actually all kinds of things
that we go through in training
they have this thing i think they still
use it it's called the msdd
multi-spatial disorientation device
or the spin and puke it looks like a
giant
carousel and you're in these little
modules and when you get out you think
the thing goes really fast and they can
you can make yourself think that i'm
descending or climbing but you're
actually only going around in circles at
a very slow rate as fast as a human can
talk but as they spin you around in a
little sub thing
and slow it down and speed it up your
body does this and you you know and then
by
visuals of showing you like they can
spin it sideways to the outside wall
but they can show like lines that are
they can make the line stand still
because they're moving the same velocity
they can move the other way and you'll
think you're screaming
you see it in amusement parks all the
time um
you you do all that because it gives you
a sense of the a
but you're really not doing you're
sitting there so we get trained on all
that stuff so if you
if you want to look at it and go well
you're you're disoriented or this side
bill i'd argue going no i'm not because
you know when i'm flying the airplane
even as i'm looking at the tic tac i've
got a heads-up display that tells me
what my airplane's doing
so i've got i know what i'm doing i can
look outside i've got a sense of what
i'm doing but i'm also looking inside to
cross
check of what i'm seeing is in reality
what i'm doing you actually your brain
gotten good at combining
almost adding extra sensory information
you have to
you have like supervision so you're
combining what you're seeing
and adjusting what the sensors what
you're calling the instruments you're
giving you
and that that in turn is a loop that
adjusts
the perception system that like that
that adjusts your brain's interpretation
of what you're saying yeah you'd be
amazed at how good so here's
here's another example so if we go out
over the water so there's no land in
sight
and we're gonna fight so when we fight
you know two airplanes we're gonna
dog fight as an instructor
and i was for all most of my time you
have to come back and you have to
recreate it so we we call it drawing
arrows
so um you have to recreate that stuff
so you get pretty good at going you know
like i would take off and say all right
we're starting heading
due east uh and i know where the sun is
at
because in the short couple minutes
we're going to fight the sun's really
not going to move much it's going to be
an irrelevance so now i know that the
sun
is at you know let's just say 195
degrees
right so i'm starting going east and
it's actually be down off my right hand
side
so now i know as i'm fighting because in
the water you don't have any reference
like oh i passed land i passed like no
you don't and you can't use clouds
because clouds do move
but you got to come back because you go
here's where i started and then you when
as soon as you end you go all right i
ended heading
355. and then you recreate the turns and
the amount of turns and use the sun
relative so you can create this entire
battle that went on with arrows so you
can come back and debrief the guy that
you were teaching
on exactly what happened and you get
really really good at that so when you
come up and go well dave how do you know
you were at six o'clock and he went
around and he came up here i go
because i'm trained to do all that and i
take all the notes
while i'm flying you can do it and but
usually it's you memorize it all
and you get done and then you re you as
soon as you're done you knock it off you
look at the other airplane you get set
and you start writing all your notes
down
yeah and you're writing it really fast
on your card you go out the stack of
cards and you stick a new one on your
knee board card so you're ready to go
and here's the next setup
um it's kind of it's in some way
similar to what uh like at the at the
highest level chess players do
i mean you're i mean
they they they recap the games but the
the richness of the representation that
they use
and remembering like how the games
evolved
it's not like it's much richer than the
actual moves
it's like these a bunch of patterns that
are hard to put into words like
like all the richness of thinking
they have about the way the game evolved
it's more like
instinctual from years and years of
experience
so they try to put it into words but
they really can't it's
it's just not i understand that it's
because for us
if we don't come back with anything then
there's no learning to be had right
because the whole thing is
the debrief when we get back and we talk
about that's really where the learning
is
um and it's the same thing if you want
to go back to chess you know when you
start off
you try and learn because you're
remembering what you're doing if you
play against someone i'm always a big
place
play with someone better than you that's
how you learn if you're constantly
beating people you're not learning
anything you're just learning that
they're not good and you're better
when you when you challenge yourself
against someone that is going to
is better than you you learn so i
learned how to fight an airplane
with he's actually one of my best
friends
uh we'll call him tom i won't give his
call sign because i don't know he wasn't
so tom took me out and taught me how to
fight uh because
tom had just left hopkins he was the the
training officer top gun which so
that's the guy yeah the training officer
is the main guy at top gun
so tom was a training officer top gun so
tom when i learned because i come out of
a6 and we really don't fight because it
was a bomber
so i get in f-18s and i want to learn
how to fight because it's a whole other
side of the mission it's the f and f
fighter attack the f a-18 is fighter
attack so i
had to learn how to fight so now i got
one of the best fighter pilots in the
world
who's going to teach me how to do it and
he did and i would
do something and then he would go i'd
get to a situation where i had never
been and then i would go well i'm gonna
do this and then he would destroy me and
he would come back and go here's why you
don't do that and then i would take that
knowledge and i would put it in my
little basket of tricks
and over time because you know no one
walks out into that world i don't care
how gifted of an aviator and go i
i am the man yeah or the woman i'm it
yeah
no it's a learning process and so over
all those years you've gotten good so
i mean so
what are the chances that your eyes
betrayed you
when you saw the tic-tac
low zero well i mean i'm not zero so
okay yeah i am 99.9
so 0.1 my eyes deceive me but remember
if it deceived me it had to deceive the
other four people so the percentage is
even lower
yeah okay well i i don't find that that
particular debunking case that you saw
but i'm glad you put it
you um you said those words out loud
so for me from my perspective uh coming
into this world and looking at it
i'm a little bit more skeptical uh so
your eye account
i think is the most fascinating story
and that uh
i think uh that's inspiring to me and
should be inspiring to a lot of
scientists out there
on so many levels just like we said on
the engineering level that maybe there's
propulsion systems
we can actually build that can do some
crazy
amazing stuff so it's a at the very
least intriguing
and at the best inspiring i just want to
say that but
on the video side it's like
it's uh the videos
for the fleur video the go fast
and the gimbal video they are only
interesting to me to me
in the context of your story like
without that they're kind of low
resolution
it's like it it's easier to build a
debunking
story to be skeptical so it's just where
i'm coming from maybe you can convince
me otherwise
but so to bring up mick west one more
time
he looks at the flair video and he says
that
one of the most amazing video parts of
the flare video for people who haven't
seen it
is at the end of it uh the
the the tic-tac flies
or appears to fly very quickly to the
left
off the screen off the screen and what
midwest says
is uh that it you know midwest probably
others
that the way to explain that
is the tracking system like we said this
vision based tracking
simply loses the like the object
the tracking loses it and so
it simply allows the object to uh
float off screen because it's no longer
tracking it so
i find that at least a plausible
explanation
of that video looking at your face
you do not so can you maybe comment to
that
uh to that debunking uh sure
so um it's funny how people can
extrapolate stuff who've never operated
the system no
for sure and that's like me going
because i'm a big formula one fan
you know that's like me going oh my god
louis what were you doing you could have
done this with the car and you need to
won the race right you know and lewis
hamilton right now is
you know defending world champion two
time he's four-time four-five-time world
champion but
um that would be pretty stupid to me to
try and tell lewis hamilton how to drive
a car
yeah um or a matter of fact
anyone driving a formula one car so i i
can't tell you how many times i've
watched you gotta remember when we
looked at this thing
when when chad came back with the video
we sat there and watched it i mean i
can't tell you how many times i've
watched it off the original tapes going
all right right all right let's look at
this
um you know because you can look and see
where the you can see where the airplane
is going you can see if it's looking
left or right and if you actually watch
all that stuff it doesn't do that it
actually
when the vehicle starts to move the bars
the tracking gate starts to open up and
the people at raytheon could probably
add to this because they built the pod
the tracking gate will start to open up
and and but the thing
when it leaves so fast off the screen
the pod can't move fast enough it has
gimbal rates on how fast that thing can
move around because there's another
theory that
oh with the pods looking forward when
the pod passes underneath the airplane
so if i'm looking at you and you pass
underneath me as
does this the ball will actually flip
around to kind of finish off
and it'll it'll it swaps ends because it
has you know it's a gimbal
it can't just it's not free-floating um
but there's a theory on one of them oh
it's here and it flipped over it doesn't
do that when it's looking out in front
it stays like this
so that yet another another debunker who
doesn't know this so
you know and mick has had several
theories on other of some of the other
videos like one of them the go fast as a
bird
and jeremy corbell actually did a nice
job of saying no it's not because
he's on he's on black hot so the the
white object is actually colder than the
ocean
that's flying well birds aren't colder
than the ocean they'd be dead
so the gimbal video to comment on
the amazing aspect of that video is the
rotation the apparent rotation of the
object that
is something that is not
possible to do with systems that we know
of
and make west suggests that uh
flare like reflections
or whatever can explain no because what
mick west doesn't see is so
when they take because i've talked to
the one of them
actually i work with so i know him i
know i talk to him all the time
so uh and it's his best friend actually
shot the video
one of his best friends for the giveaway
video the game both of them
the go fast and the gimbal were shot by
the same person okay
so uh and they were in each other's
wedding so that's how well they know
each other
okay so what you don't see is
so the airplanes that are flying still
super hornets but they have the apg-79
which is the new
phased array radar that's made by
raytheon things incredible okay
it doesn't usually if it's if it's out
there and it sees it it's real
so at first they thought they were ghost
tracks when they started seeing stuff
and then they actually threw one of the
targeting pods out there
well the targeting pod there's a heat
signature and you go hey dot heat
signature something's there
it's real it's not you're not picking up
some extraneous things so
what you see in the gimbal video of the
thing and it rotates and you go holy
shit look at that thing it's just
sitting there and it's in the wind and
it's going against the wind
why it's doing this you know someone
goes oh it's an airplane now if an
airplane does this it's eventually going
to start to change aspect because it's
in a turn
this thing doesn't change aspect it just
rotates right
the other thing that you see when you
talk to them is so they're on their
radar
there's an object that they identify
as their number one priority or their
launch and steering
so when they designate that that's where
the targeting pod is going to look
that's what you get in the gimbal video
there's five other i think it's five
they're kind of in a v you know like a
geese would fly
that are out in front of it and they're
actually coming they're out in front of
it and they actually turn
on the radar and go the other way while
they're filming the gimbal video
which it's i know uh ryan has come out
and talked about it
but when you see it you go you know if
you take it in context because you go oh
it's just the video
well if you take the video with the
radar going no there's actually other
things out there because
there's at least 60 people that have
seen these things on radar
off the vacates it was it actually
became
i called a buddy mike who was running
the wing at the time the fighter wing
i said what are you guys doing about
this he goes well we got to know tam out
which is a notice to airmen which means
there's these objects out there
in the warning area so anyone can you
can fly a cessna through the warning
area it's all the warning area tells you
that there's
high military traffic and training out
here it's probably best not to be here
but there's nothing that prohibits you
from going in there
so these things have the right wherever
they're from or whatever they are
you know because people are like oh
they're balloons well balloons float
balloons don't sit in in in 70 knots of
wind and stay in the same location they
don't say
they had an airplane because there was
two there's the gimbal thing that's a
pretty big object
there's also they talk about it looks
like a cube that's inside of a sphere a
translucent sphere what's that
transparent
how is that and so i've heard they
almost hit one it's almost hit
hit them so that's another that's one of
the biggest
another biggest account it's like almost
hit a plane
uh uh something that appeared to be a
cube in a translucent sphere what do you
make of that
again you know what i mean that
that's that's the most dangerous you're
right the biggest frustration is when
you do that you go okay
so this thing passed between two
airplanes and it was i think it was in
like 100 feet or
something like that of the airplane that
almost hit it so they do is they come
back and go hey i had a near midair
what do you have in your mid-air with
this floating beach ball with this cube
inside of it and you go huh
you know so they send out a no tam again
and they they do a what's called a
hazard report that says hey there's
these objects out there we almost hit
one
you know and that gets sent off to the
naval safety center um
[Music]
what was done i mean what are you going
to do you can you know catch one go out
with a giant net and try and bag one
you don't know because they've seen them
they've picked them up like hovering on
radar and then all of a sudden they're
traveling at really high rates of speed
so
you know what i'm gonna do what yeah
what are you gonna do well and that let
me ask this because this is what people
kind of
think about after
you witnessed tic tac and after this
these incidents as far as we know
uh with the gimbal and the go fast
it seems like people in the military did
not
did not react like what like did not
freak out
it almost like was a like a mundane
event
how do you explain that why didn't the
people on the ship not
the higher-ups why did wasn't there a
big freak out or
as some people suggest the higher-ups
knew about it
all along and just we're not letting
everyone know that there's some kind of
secret military
uh uh you know it's like
like tests yeah so let's talk about so
let's say you've got this cool new toy
which you call it a cool new toy you
typically don't take your cool new toy
out into an area where the cool new toy
could get damaged or
what if the airplane would have actually
hit your cool new toy and you got two
people that are ejecting or dead and you
got a
you know 80 million airplane that's now
in the bottom of the atlantic
you know tests are normally done in
controlled environments just it's like
any test a
lab test or whatever when you take
things out into the real world
you know you're still going to test it
in an area where something goes wrong so
when they started and we'll go back to
elon so my friend that worked there
they had a rocket go off they were out
in kwajalein and when the rocket went up
a fuel line ruptured in the rocket and
it ran out of fuel before it got all the
way up and it came falling back down
well when you're out on an atoll in the
pacific if it's going up above you
the worst case is going to land on you
so you're worried about where else is it
going to land and it actually crashed
next to the atoll and and
you know elon wasn't happy and threw
this guy under the bus
so um that's a test environment because
you don't know what's going to happen so
because someone said well when we chased
the tic tac well it could have been some
secret government thing well secret
government things typically just don't
come out and test
to where unknowing pilots you can't
control
a lot of things you're exactly right so
you go you know
it's you know it's not the doctor evil
scientist that's going to throw shit out
there
to get there's control and there's
reasons that we do it
because a lot of stuff especially when
you get to there's there's
you build something in theory you model
it
you go hey this is it looks like it's
going to work you get funding you build
it
you test it some more you bench test it
you know you
like an airplane with digital flight
controls before it even leaves the
ground
they've got things over the pedostatic
system that are changing the
what the airplane thinks is the airspeed
talking to it and it's probably up on
jack so the gear up
so it doesn't it thinks it's flying it
doesn't know it's sitting on
jack stands and they're just changing
the pressure on the pedostatic system so
they can actually make the flight
controls move and they can get all the
data back to go
hey it looks like it's going to work and
then there's when there's a bunch of
stuff that they do
that's a control environment which you
can do the testing yeah throwing shit
out in the middle of
where people are doing exercises is
the most preposterous thing that i've
heard
is it possible yes is it more
really is it is it is it more likely
it's more likely
they're not doing that yeah and the
other the other side of that
question is why do you think people on
the nimitz
and in the us government in general not
freak out more
at the incredible thing that you've seen
freak out in a positive way freak out in
the negative way
like what are the russians up to again
or or more
like what is this like so more turmoil
so if you to put a chinese flag on the
side of it or a russian flag on the side
of it i said yeah it had a big russian
flag on the side of it dude
then it would have got a lot of
attention it would have went high order
yeah right if it was
you don't have to say russia or china
just say if there was another country's
emblem on the side of this thing that we
saw
and said oh it belonged to them then
it's a big deal
so here's what's going on so we're
literally in the middle of workups and
it was a joint workup normally they we
go out for a month go come back do stuff
go out for a month this was a two month
at sea period
where we actually had to beg for them to
let us when the ship pulled in at
thanksgiving so we could run home up to
the central valley have thanksgiving
with our family and then run back down
and do this okay
so you know and i had just taken over i
had the squadron for a month
right so i'm a a brand new ceo i'm the
most junior guy
on the as as far as the commanding
officer goes
for time in the navy and actually at the
time i think it was the most junior ceo
for o5 command in the navy right so
you go okay so i'm out here i got my
squadron i'm running it i see this thing
you know we catch shit for it i have a
squadron to run i have the
the the tic tac was over here and
although an extraordinary event
i have 17 air crew and 300 sailors that
i'm responsible for
right their well-being making sure
they're fed making sure they're happy
they're birthing you know and i'm
working with my master chief and i'm
working with my exo
snap and and we're going through all
this stuff
i don't have a lot of time to worry
about the tic tac
yeah if people need to talk to me so you
got to remember
you got the captain of the ship you got
the airwing commander
and you got the admiral those are the
top three and you got the ceo of the
the princeton who is a major command guy
and that's really your big major command
and then everything else is you got all
the squadrons with your o5 command and
you got the small boys that are out
there which is 05 commands so
in the hierarchy as far as rank and
responsibility of what's going on
i'm pretty much in the top 20 with all
my peers and then i've got obviously
the captain uh and the admiral right and
then he's got some
post-command guys on his staff that we
were friends with i thought you were
responsible for a lot of things
yes oh yeah this schedule yeah there's
missions
you have to do a lot get the job done
and there's
no time for silly things that's exactly
right so and we're the
we're the integration you know when when
a battle group deploys especially when
you go to the middle east for what we
were doing
the air power is the key it's we take
our
airport with us we can park it anywhere
we want and we can do what we need to do
so we're kind of key players so when you
get the theory that oh all these men in
suits showed up so
the captain of the ship never said
anything to me the admiral never saying
to and the people on his staff that i
was friends with never saying to me the
other ceos that i talk to on a daily
basis never said anything to me and no
one ever came and talked to me and i'm
the guy that chased it so
in all the theories and all the
debunkers and all the stories because i
don't know if people think they're gonna
get rich on this because i made a big
donut on this
i can tell you what i got paid for i got
paid to go out and spend 21 hours of my
day going to la and do a five-minute
talk for someone and i'm like
and it wasn't for the talk because i'll
talk for free because you're not paying
me
i said i said and then i got paid to go
to the mcminnville fest because they
my wife and i got to go because it was
just look like fun because the whole
town gets involved yeah
and it's the only time i've ever spoken
publicly in front of a large audience
about this because it was just
you know it was fun and i got asked and
jeremy and george napping went the year
before so i went with with bob lazar
so i got to hang out with bob and his
wife and his wife and my wife and
you know we all hung out kind of you
know talking not about ufo stuff but
just getting to know each other as
people
because you know bob's like me the stuff
that he talks about is not the center of
his life if anything it ruined his life
you know he's just a really really smart
guy
that's just like the rest of us trying
to get through life yeah that's
nevertheless i mean that was one of the
sad things reading
um uh louis lozando's resignation
note from his uh uh he was the program
director at the
uh atip program like alright yeah
one of the sad things is that he's
mentioned that you know people
in government just don't take this
seriously as a threat
like ufos as a threat like you said if
it doesn't have a russian label on it
it's a it's a sad thing to think about
that
that we have such a busy schedule that
the
anomaly it doesn't
is a distraction that we don't want to
deal with and it kind of just
fades into history like literally
it's kind of sad to think that if aliens
showed up
like and uh it just didn't it because
they're not
like when aliens show up they're not
going to
be a thing that's on the schedule and if
they
don't start killing people they just
kind of show up in some very
uh nonchalant peaceful way
briefly people would be like
that's that that's uh i don't have time
for this
that's so sad it's like anywhere in the
world so
you know go back let's go back way back
way back in the time machine you know
there were people kind of scattered
around the globe
you know in europe's a perfect example
why does france speak french
and then right next to them spanish you
know spain speaks spanish
and then you kind of jump over and
germans or german and
the polish people everyone speaks a
different language because if you look
at the way the terrain kind of subdivide
the original
people that were there you know
thousands of years ago
they speak differently right you'd be
like the us but see the us is different
we all speak english because what
happened we came over and we started on
the east coast
and we migrated west we won't get into
the you know what happened and
you know because the native americans
all spoke different languages yeah
you know it's that same type of thing so
but anytime we have a tendency to show
up
you're you're actually you think about
you're an alien if i go to a different
area if i just
you know go back 500 years where you
know or a thousand years where travel we
weren't traveling across oceans at the
time we were well we don't think we were
the vikings probably were
um because we had limited you know we
had to have supplies and the boats
weren't as big we had to build them by
hand we didn't have power tools and all
that stuff so you know
if you show up someplace like when the
conquistadors from spain came over into
south america and you've got
you know the natives you're actually an
alien
you know and then you look at what
typically happens when aliens show up
in in a human alien world you know and
when i say alien i mean you are not from
that area
the other we
we take what we want and that's what
happened i mean we literally
defuncted civilizations because that's
how we are
you know humans are we're an interesting
group
so you go now what what if something is
from someplace else just let's just
let's just go off the grid and go ah
let's say there are little green men
yeah what are their intentions lou asked
me this when we were
talking to lou alezando and he said what
do you think they were here for us i
don't know
he goes what i go hello they were
observing they'd come down they'd hang
out he goes
what if they were prepping the
battlefield what if they were observing
to figure out what we do
and you go that's interesting the other
theory is maybe there's a more advanced
civilization out here and they just
check in on us
because the threat to an advanced
civilization is when a civilization
that's inferior to them
actually develops enough and fast enough
to become equal or above
because now these they become the
threatened type so you watch us grow
until we start getting too much
you know it's kind of like you go well
because they always have a tendency to
hang out around nuclear
right and you go well you know they're
if this is an advanced civilization i'm
gonna go science fiction kind of comical
they come down and watch us and go look
at the
the the crazy upright monkeys now have
developed the atom bomb let's hope they
don't destroy themselves yeah if i was
an alien civilization i would start
paying attention with the atom bomb
that's why the
i mean there's certainly an uptick of uh
what is it ufo sightings since
since the nuclear since the nuclear era
yeah
that's you go um
let me ask a little bit out there
question maybe it's a speculation but
maybe touching on roswell
do you think it's possible that there is
out of this world aircraft
or beings that are in the possession of
one of the governments on this earth
like the us government
is it possible so the one perspective of
that
if it's possible is it possible to keep
a secret like that
i would say this i think it's very it's
highly possible
because if you go if you just look at
all the sightings and let's go
just look at project blue book oh it was
what forget how many thousands of
sightings and there's a percentage it's
like 10 or 15 percent
they still can't explain like our tic
tac is one of them you know they
basically the government has come out
and said we don't know what that was
okay so so if you go okay of that
fifteen percent that we don't know and
of these thousands they're still
that 15 makes up a pretty big number
what are the chances that not one of
them crashed somewhere on the globe
and was recovered and i don't care if
it's a intact system
or you got pieces of it of a metal that
we can't explain
or some some um biological
matter to say the least it could be
intact or it couldn't but
the the odds of that now are starting to
go down that
you know that could never happen and i'm
not talking just the united states i'm
talking
the world globally so is there a chance
that a foreign government actually
possesses or our government
or someone in the in the world on the
globe of the seven plus billion people
has something that is not from this
world and i'm not talking to meteor but
something that was
manufactured in some way that allowed
transport
or observation it could be a drone could
be a foreign drone you know like voyager
flies around and does all that stuff and
we got stuff that just went past pluto
that's out in the kuiper belt
you know there's there's stuff out there
floating around and what about ours it's
going to crash into jupiter eventually
or whatever
because we've had stuff crashing the
planets so if that's the case
you would think something is out there
that we have something that we can't
explain and according to
lou there's stuff that we can't explain
you know and i would assume that lou
who ran atip has has seen stuff that he
can't openly talk about
because you know because i had a
clearance when you have a clearance
you were you sign your name you're bound
to that and to me that's an important
oath
that you hold to you know this is kind
of where uh
you know people have issues with bob so
if
you know and i leave it to you to
determine if you believe bob or not i'll
tell you bob is a straightforward
very sane normal super smart guy bob
sorry yeah yes there is the other side
that says well
should he have come out and talked you
know to those who owe clearance who
you know are true to the government you
would say he should have never spoke he
he was under an oath to not say anything
but he did
if you asked bob why did you say
something his the
his answer was i understand there's an
oath but
i felt that the technology could benefit
all of mankind and it shouldn't be
locked away
and i'll leave if you believe bob that's
that's kind of what bob says
and that that's such a interesting key
point
if there is aircraft a technology that's
in the possession of the
say the us government should they make
that publicly known
this is the snowden question this is the
question of like
do we release stuff that can potentially
change
the nature of human civilization like
the
the way we the way we think about our
place in the world
also the if that technology is
potentially
useful for military applications
the nature of military conflict should
we release that information or not
if you were the government so here well
here's exactly how so
for for classified information the
government is the people that classify
it
so i can't go i can't look at something
and go oh my god
this avion bottle is now top secret i
can't i don't have the authority the
ability or anyone to do that that's the
guard that's up to the government i
agree with that because
i worked for the government for 24 years
of my life so
um i understand that but now you go
there's reason stuff is classified okay
and it has to do with
uh sometimes information is classified
by how it was obtained
it's just like the mob if i have a spy
and i'm a mobster and you're the counter
mobster but i have a guy on the inside
that's feeding me information
i can't do it and a perfect example is
if you've ever seen the uh
it's the tom cruise movie what is it air
america or whatever but he
he plays the guy in louisiana who was
hauling drugs for pablo escobar
and he ended up getting a cargo plane
and the government the cia was kind of
funding him to do stuff
that's how he got hooked up with pablo
but they put cameras on his airplane and
when reagan had come out and said here's
pictures we have proof that they're
running these drugs
it didn't take pablo long to figure out
those pictures were taken from inside of
the plane of this guy he had been
working with and that guy ends up dead
does that make sense so you classify to
protect the source
you classify to protect the technology
because if the technology would get out
it could be
grave damage or there's levels depending
on if it's a secret or top secret
there are levels of damage that can be
done to the u.s government and our
well-being as a country
and we owe it to this because we're all
americans you know to me
no matter what some people will say even
in this country this is the greatest
country on the planet
this is the only country that you have
the ability to do what you want to do
it's just don't be lazy
and i have stories of people that came
over here and started with nothing
and they're they're living the american
dream and they'll tell you
and they didn't get it because of you
know like you
you came over here from russia you get
no
minority status or anything else you get
you're a white anglo-saxon protestant
whatever
you're religious you're over you but you
come over here i kind of knew that from
the last time but
um but you come over here you basically
have made yourself
you're educated you're working at
literally the top research
university in the world to be honest
um i can do whatever the hell i can
create and
with a bit of with a lot of hard work i
can do quite a
and no one gave it to you yeah so i mean
i'm a believer that like i mean
we are uh a community so like
there is a social aspect to it but the
freedom
and the american dream is a real thing
and that this is this i
you know i joke about being russian but
i i'm an american and this is
i do believe the greatest country on
earth so there's a reason
the nationalist pride uh the pride in
your nation is a powerful thing and
around that this secrecy
holds value but to me alien technology
is bigger than that i mean it's
it's not so much a threat as a
you're holding back something that could
inspire the world
like human knowledge so let's talk in
theory so
i'm gonna go back to bob because i've
talked about
so bob is a propulsion guy
right right bob has a bicycle with a
rocket motor he built the rocket car
you know so he did that so if you are
trying to figure out a propulsion system
let's just say this is i'm just talking
this is dave's theory
i am i own i have i have custody of this
thing from a technology that i don't
understand
and i know it's a propulsion system so
now i gotta figure it out
right so who are you gonna go to right
you go find someone so you go wait
here's a guy who at the time was working
at los alamos which they have proven
who is big into propulsion he designs
all this he builds a shit in his garage
hey he's super smart why don't we bring
him in
so you hire him on a contract and you go
hey we're going to brief you into a
program and he goes and works on
wherever he says he worked you know
that's not important but you get access
to the technology to try and figure it
out
and then you go well you know bob comes
out and says you know like
we're figuring out these things but
there's a part where our technology
isn't advanced enough for us to figure
the whole thing out
so then you know and let's just say bob
doesn't come out and tell anyone
he he works on it until he gets to the
point where he's stagnated
he he said he's in a wall you go i can't
do it so sometimes the best thing is to
bring in a fresh mind so you go find
someone else who's in a propulsion you
bring them and they work
they can't figure it out or they get to
the point where kind of back to the
einstein theory where hey i've got all
these theories on how it works but we
don't have the technology we haven't
advanced enough to
actually do what we need to do we still
have to advance technology more
so then what do you do you shelve it you
go hey good
project's over and the contract you
shelf it and you wait another 10 years
and you wait another 10 years until
technology and our abilities and our
our research advances more and then you
go find new people to bring in that are
experts in that field and go hey we want
you to work on this thing
and here's what we know about it so far
or you don't tell them
anything because because remember if you
if you reveal someone else's research
you can taint their beliefs they'll
start to sway in that direction so you
go
i'm not going to tell you anything i'm
going to give you this thing and now you
tell me what you think and as they
progress if they get stuck
on a problem that maybe bob and someone
else solved earlier you can go hey what
about this you don't have to tell where
it came from
what about this and now they can
leapfrog and they get another two steps
closer to the final answer
and then we get stuck by our evolution
of technology do you shelve it again
do you think that's the right way to do
it because it's heartbreaking
i don't listen i love government but
we just had this discussion about elon
and so on
the the alternative approach is to
release this to the world and say
there's a mystery here
and then the elons of the world the jeff
bezos who talked about money but it's
also not just money it's like
this engine that's within we talked
about the american dream to say
i'm gonna be the one that cracks this
mystery open
and like that's within a lot of us and
like money aside
people in their garage just will but
you're thinking like a scientist
now let me now let's shift to let me
think like a country so we have country
a b and c
and you can look at the nuclear arms
race so we know that germany was really
close
we know that russia was getting pretty
close we just won
the race and we were the first ones with
it yeah and still to the state germany
could have won
they could have won they could have won
but someone was smart enough to not
finish the equation when they knew they
had the answer
it's literally what it comes down to
someone was smart enough to realize that
that
that got into the hands of the nazis
that it would be the end
and and that's that's a tough call to do
that
knowing that you have the answer and you
can't solve the problem because it will
go into the wrong hand and that's kind
of the fear when you look at this you go
okay so if we do this if we put it out
there we've got this technology
if we don't work on it kind of
international space station like we're
all going to work on it together
in uh you know like antarctica is really
supposed to be
treaty free from any weapons or anything
we're supposed to we got the
international thing down there we're all
going to work together
if you did it in the confines of that
and you could control the flow in and
out
because what you don't want is the
someone stealing information and getting
it back
to where and countries are notorious to
do this hey we're doing internationally
but we're secretly doing it ourselves to
see who can come up with a solution
first
that's the problem because we have this
inherent thing of power and technology
like that is power
it would literally change the game of
the way the world operates and from
not just a transportation or mankind but
from a military aspect
it's got huge huge uh
yeah yeah i guess so beautifully
beautifully presented
and there's i feel like there's a
tension between those two places the
scientists view the world
and the national security view of the
world
let me let me get to this kind of
interesting point which is
a lot of conspiracy theorists kind of
paint a picture of government as an
exceptionally
as a hierarchical system that's
exceptionally competent
and good at hiding secrets and then
i mean i tend to not subscribe to almost
any conspiracy theory
to the degree at least that the
conspiracy theorists do uh i agree with
you
but the there does seem to be and i tend
to think of government as
unfortunately uh uh incompetent at least
the bureaucracy
it seems that the communication like the
three videos that were released
and just the way of dod in general
talks about the things we've been
talking about
it's just confused it's contradictory
it's not inspiring
it's it's uh suspicious it's just not
even the way they release the videos you
know the tic tac
if presented correctly could just
inspire generation of scientists
it's like at the you know us going to
the moon
and it's inspiring i mean it's
incredible like you know and and the way
it was released was suspicious it was
like
low resolution video on a crappy website
like with some crappy documents and uh
i mean why what i don't know how to ask
this question but
can government do better why are they
doing it this way in terms of
communicating the things they do know to
the public because i don't think they
know how
especially in this topic it's been
hidden for so many years
and i don't think uh because i don't buy
off on the conspiracy stuff
i just think that you know when it comes
in like i said you know the government
has a right to classify stuff
they they classify everything because
they don't know you have something you
don't know what it is you don't know so
we just go well it must be
must be top secret and let's put it in a
vault you know it's kind of like the
indiana jones where they take the
ark and they put it in the it's in the
giant army warehouse
um you know we don't even know what we
have
so but i also believe that you know and
i'll say this openly i don't think that
the american people
need to know everything i think there's
a reason that stuff is classified for
the protection of this country
and i totally believe in that so you
know
and i was joking with joe when he was
talking about storm area 51 stuff
i'm like yeah that's probably the worst
idea you could possibly have is to just
storm a military installation
it's just stupid there are reasons there
are reasons that we have things that we
don't just let out to the public because
if we do as soon as you do let someone
know that you have something
they immediately try and encounter it a
perfect example
the u.s and the 60s developed a bomber
it was a mach 3 compression lift bomber
called the xb70
okay there was three of them built three
of them ever built
it was a like 60 000 foot high you know
mach
3 it was an incredible airplane when you
see it there's actually the last one
remaining is in dayton ohio at the
museum
you know it would go that wingtips would
fall down it looks like a concord but
it's way faster
when that got out that we were
developing it the soviet union developed
the mig-25
literally a high-altitude interceptor to
counter that bomber
and they built an entire fleet of
mig-25s
right we built three xb70s and we
scrapped the program
right because now you go well it's the
technology is cool we proved it but now
it becomes obsolete so it's not even
worth building a whole fleet of these
things
you know it's constant it's a chess game
we do something they do something we do
something they do something and it's
we do something and then they counter it
they got a fee it's you got to figure
out how to defeat it
so you go oh we'll build something so
the more we keep
uh quiet especially from a defense
standpoint
the better we actually at person i think
we talk too much and i think the the
military and the dod is starting to see
that
you know we're too open you know you
know you announce hey we're building
this because there's a budget line and
we live in a free society
um but you don't have to release all the
specs
and you don't have to put everything in
open source but that's a problem when we
go to
the universities if we want to go do
work with mit and you want to partner
with mit and you're a defense company
and you want to partner
you know you guys have a rule that if
you create it then it can be open source
because the university owns it and we
are
an institution of learning yeah where
the defense side might go
we don't we don't really want that
published in a paper in scientific
america or
i call it a break i talked to the cto of
lockheed kaoko jackson
and just just conquers the
some of the best if not the best
engineering and science but engineering
really
ever is done in secrecy
and it sucks because it's so inspiring
and they can't talk about it
it is due to funding the us government
has deep pockets
you know some of this new technology
that you develop for an open source
unless
this goes back to the original
conversation we now there's enough money
in the private sector that individuals
control
yeah bezos i'm not talking amazon
i'm talking jeff bezos a single
individual worth over a hundred billion
dollars
he has the ability to do stuff i'll tell
you what the gates foundation with
between bill gates and
and and his his wife and warren buffett
and some of the other money because i
think uh
bezos's ex-wife actually donated a huge
chunk of her half
into the gates foundation so i mean
what's the gates foundation worth these
days
you know if and these are guys you know
brilliant
brilliant i mean some of the greatest
minds that we have to go you know what
are they doing because they have the
ability
it's a non-profit they can go hey i want
to fund this i want to fund this
research
they can look beyond the conflict
between nations you can look beyond the
conflict of having to have
you know classification you can do what
you want you know
it's just like you know we we classify
how to do
uh you know the whole nuclear you know
how to create
critical mass right but there's really
smart high school kids that have figured
out mathematically and they do their
science project and then the government
comes in and says hey we got to classify
your government because we just don't
want this out in the public domain
which i understand but they never stop
them from free thought and developing
that it's just
we really don't want this out there okay
so i understand that i totally
understand that but
if they you know if if bill and melinda
want to do this and go hey we want to do
this and they're going to work with
bezos and they're going to work with
elon and we're going to
be think about it there's a significant
amount of money that could be available
to r d and i'm not talking just science
like this i'm talking
medical research and all this but then
you go who gets it because now you're
competing against
the companies that actually do it you go
is that well are they the
greatest minds i'd say you know that
we have a tendency to go these are the
best that we have and i'd say well no
that's the best that we know we have
but there's probably people out there
that don't want to work there's
brilliant minds that don't want to do
anything with defense
because they just disagree with what it
does so they go to another path
they can do something else and that in a
sense like
the elon's of the world that jeff bezos
actually
in a certain sense much better than uh
dod
at finding the brilliant weird minds out
there
because they're not tied to the
government so when you work a government
contract
the government writes they tell you what
they want and then they work with you on
the requirements and they usually have a
an
end in mean you know they have an idea
that this is what i want it to be
where if you go to like spacex
where you know they come up with why
don't we just
land these things on a pad and reuse
them yeah well if the government
scientists if you're on a government
contract says no that's not the
requirements we're not paying for that
we want you to do this you're kind of
controlled
or when elon does it his company they
can do whatever the hell they want to do
because they have no bounds
the only bounds they have is the
liability if it doesn't work and it
lands on something so what do you do you
go out to kwajalein and you test it and
if it crashes and it lands in the ocean
hey we clean it up no big deal we lost
some money
but we'll move on it's you know money
makes the world go round
contrary to what everyone thinks but you
know there's a lot of money that's
sitting around that you can do a lot of
really cool stuff with and i don't know
i mean i'll guarantee that uh what is it
blue origin
isn't that amazon yeah you know that
they're doing some cool stuff because
they have
funny and i joke with the guy i know
that worked at spacex and
he was funny because they were building
the first test thing
and they they were limited and elon
found this like 400 acre thing i think
it's about 400 acres down by waco texas
and he's like i go how he goes he goes
dude i worked he goes i worked with
he goes because he's done government
contract he goes there's government
contract and then there's
working at spacex with elon money and
that's what he refers to it as his elon
money where it was like
don't i'll throw them and he would throw
the money at it and make it happen and
it's
i'm talking this fast yeah i mean he
talks about he has a great story about
this i mean this is elon
this is how fast you can do in the
private sector vice the government where
there's the bureaucracy is
they had a company that was a basically
a tool-and-die machine shop that did a
lot of their high-precision
parts for the rockets they had went to
the guy but he had contracts with other
companies and when the economy was down
the guy was actually looking at going
out of business so the guy i know
he's telling me the story he he was
talking to the guy he had to go over
there and get something and he's like
holy shit he goes hang on so he calls up
on the phone
spacex he says hey is elon there can you
get him in the board room we'll be there
in 20 minutes
so he grabs this guy who's literally
going to fold his company
they go over to spacex and i may be
getting some of this wrong if people are
going to fact check me but this is
pretty close
they go in the boardroom and and he said
literally
within like you know an hour or two
elon has bought the guy's company that
guy is now a senior vp
running the his company and they're
gonna pull all the stuff
into the spacex thing so they can
actually build the parts and they can
still contract out to make the money
outside
and it happened like that fast it's not
just money
it's because i've seen i witnessed it
too with elon i think it's uh
whatever the whatever the forces of
capitalism that that uh
allow a person like elon musk to rise to
the top
but like because i've also worked for
darpa like for research for
in terms of a source of funding i i
there's a weight of bureaucracy
when i was working like being funded by
darpa
and with elon like i was literally in
the presence of like
anything is possible cutting across all
the bullshit
of paperwork of the way things were done
in the past
of the bureaucracy the rules the
constraints the
all of that stuff just you can cut
across immediately how much money and
time do you waste dealing with your
bureaucracy when you could actually be
doing real work
that's the difference this is why i
honestly when i went back to the
industrial defense complex that we were
warned about
when you look at it and go spacex can do
something for half the price ahead of
schedule
that would boeing were paying boeing and
you go oh
well this just came out you go well then
why are we even dealing with this side
when we can deal with this side yeah
because you've got a fully automated
capsule that has a manual mode that they
got to fly around in
it worked like a champ it went up it
hung out it came back it splashed down
it worked perfectly you know we're gonna
dust it off
and oh by the way unlike the apollo
capsules that were used and then
put to museums they're going to reuse
that dragon capsule it came down they're
going to dust it off put a new coat of
paint on it slap it on top of another
rocket and away it goes
holy cow it's amazing it's a shift it's
a complete shift and mentality and for
us as taxpayers we can explore at half
the cost
yeah it's exciting especially given
putting the tic tac in context
like then the sky or
but it's limitless the possibilities we
could do with this kind of mechanism i
think it's exciting yeah i think we live
in an exciting time right now besides
everything that's
messed up in the world right now well
this is a this is a hopeful like there's
so much conflict going on so much
tension
uh that's to me space exploration at the
moment
is a reason to uh get up in the morning
and
have a hope for the future to look up to
the sky and
we're humans we can like solve so many
we can solve all of this i was talking
about when i was doing the tucker thing
and i said uh
this would be great you know because
when the government had come out you
know a month ago and said hey
this does exist we're doing this and
we're going to release more stuff
and i was texting like lou and chris
mellon and those guys
before i went on because they had called
me up to be on tucker's show and i'm
like hey i go
you know this would be great you know
just come out with this
find the the relic of a spaceship like
pull out the roswell wreckage if you
have it
pull out the roswell wreckage and do it
god it would be so nice to not have to
deal with
the the riots in the cities and i mean i
know it's an election year and all that
but
god it would be something it would be
refreshing to not have to turn on my tv
and see everything that is just
depressing in the world to begin holy
cow we actually do have this and we're
working on this technology
imagine if there is a roswell aircraft
and they pull it out
imagine the innovation that happens in
the next 10 to 20 years
without any more information than that
just
the innovation that happens the look on
elon musk's face look on jeff bezos's
face
and all the brilliant engineers we
changed the game it would change it
would change the game completely let me
ask the big question i
apologize for the absurd romantic nature
of it uh
outside i mean one of the things the
fact that you've
laid your eyes on a ufo
probably opened your eyes to the
possibility that some of the other
sightings
there there could be other sightings
that have legitimacy to them
what to use the outside of your own
sighting
is the most interesting citing or
ufo related event in history
i think there's several what is it
ramishine forest
in england uh the u.s guys that saw
stuff and actually got
radiation burns one guy was medically
disabled but
they weren't going to give it and he had
help from jim carr john mccain
his office helped get the guys uh
disability reestablished
i think that's a big one uh i think
there's people out there that have seen
stuff
and i'm talking credible uh because
there's you gotta remember
there's a huge chunk of these sightings
that get disproven they're they're
actually explainable
yeah uh you know you had sent me the
question
the the phoenix lights i think there's
what's that so i'm sorry i'm not
familiar with some of these the the
uh i'm not either it's i want a funny
story on that so i was at a i was at a
conference and
hopefully he doesn't watch us to get
offended but we had this uh
this it was i call it speed dating so
there's a table there's about eight
people at a table
and we would go sit at the table and
they could ask us questions and then
after 10 minutes we moved to the next
table
so i was speed dating all these people
that are really into this yeah
it was kind of funny but i'd sat down
and it's always funny because some
people will try and dominate it but
you know you have to kind of push the
dominators away so that you know if
you're
quiet and introverted you can ask your
question too so we got into this and the
guy starts naming all these well what
about this what about the phoenix lights
i'm like i don't know about the phoenix
lights what about this event i don't
know about that he goes
he looks at me and he goes well you're
not a ufo guy i go
no i'm not but i chase one so i'm an
expert have you
and you could see him get deflated
because i'm kind of a smart ass like
that
yeah i mean the first hand experience
from a credible
in some sense these sightings have to do
both with the evidence
and the human well i think part of that
is to us
that's a credibility piece because the
four of us that actually saw it plus
you know the other two that were in the
airplane that shot the video
none of us are ufo obsessed people so
when we come out and say because to me
it's just it's five minutes of my life
i mean i did a lot of really cool i've
had really
kind of neat things i've been able to do
um
but when you look at it and go uh
we don't it to me it wasn't it's not the
pinnacle of my life
you know to other people that they live
in the ufo world and
it's like they you know if you talk to
people they'll go that are really into
it who've never seen one
it kills them that they didn't see one
when here we are because and what's
unique with ours which kind of adds that
level is it wasn't we just didn't see it
it wasn't like oh look something in the
sky and it was weird we actually engaged
with it
you know it was yeah that was an engaged
five-minute thing and there's other
stories from other countries like
there's a story of in the
back in when the soviet union existed
that they actually
would chase these things and one of them
shot at some you know it shot it
because they said shoot at it and it
shot it and then it got shot down
and then they said don't ever shoot at
them again and don't chase them just you
can observe them but don't go after them
because obviously they have firepower
that we can't control because if you can
make something float around and jam
radars at will and do whatever you want
you know modern terrestrial weapons are
probably
not very useful you know you can go to
independence day they add that force
field around oh we gotta we gotta now
you gotta cyber warfare you gotta take
the bug down you gotta take the warfare
so now we can actually
inhibit some type of damage so there's a
i mean you mentioned the phoenix slices
somebody on i think read it said uh
ask him any thoughts on mass ufo
sightings like the phoenix lights so
the interesting thing like you said with
the tic tac is that multiple people
laid their eyes on this what what are
your thoughts about the phoenix lights
or
many people have seen here's the deal
with massive sightings
so the phoenix lights is unexplainable
although i know the air force had said
something about it was an a10 drop in
flares
no i don't think so yeah oh flares don't
burn that long they just come out and
they
you know they detract when they go away
although on the other hand there's you
know because clouds can do things so
so i lived in central california for 18
years
and you would get oh my god what was
that in the sky and it was really
vandenberg shooting a missile off you
know they were doing icbm tests at one
time where they shoot from vandenberg
and they fly across and they go land in
the atoll at kwajalein
you know and then they can check the
displacement the accuracy and all that
stuff you know it's stuff that we do
because we're a
power but when you see them go up you
know especially if you've ever watched a
rocket really launch on a clear night
it'll have the stream the glow and you
can tell it's a rocket but
if you don't look up until later when it
starts to get to the outer edge of the
atmosphere where
the plume coming out of the engine is
not constrained but
you can watch this on tv when leaving
the spacex ones go it's nice and narrow
narrow narrow and then it hits a point
where it really starts to go up and it
starts to come to the sides because
there's
the forces aren't holding that all into
one unique thing
and it looks really odd and then it'll
go off
because it burns out and then you get
stage separation then you see the next
one go off and then it's gone
um and people don't understand that
because they didn't watch it from launch
because we used to sit in our driveway
and you know vandenberg is it was a
three hour drive but you could sit and
watch it go you knew they're launching
at night you'd watch
you watch thing it's really cool if you
don't see anything what you see is the
weird clouds from the exhaust plume
you know what's left the residue that's
sitting in the atmosphere and
the wind starts blowing it so you get
these really kind of weird shapes in the
sky
you know that's part but when you go to
phoenix lights and you go hey you know
when when a thousand people see
something
you're gonna discredit all a thousand
people are you gonna try and explain it
away with something else
you know you know the big it's a weather
balloon
you know it's a weather balloon again
just like the tic tac i think is
just inspiring uh for
the limitless nature of the science i
think you're
i think more is going to come out i
think some of the stuff that the the to
the stars folks have done
uh so there's a stars academy yeah what
are your thoughts about them
are they um i talk to them quite a bit
um i am not a part of to the stars
academy i
you know but you know like i talked to
lou i just was texting him
before this yeah so he they're what's
their mission what's their hope what's
their what's there when they started
their mission was to try and
don't look at this as little green men
but let's look at this as a technology
and let's try and almost reverse
engineer and figure out how these things
operate and
how can we explain this from using our
knowledge you know physics based
knowledge to go how would something like
this operate
that's really their bottom line was to
try and use and then
couple that with because they've got the
series unidentified
um couple that with television
to get the word out so you're actually
putting something instead of
because everyone has a theory you know
ancient aliens covers all kinds of
theories
you know it's kind of off of oh my god
and i've seen the stuff and i've seen
stuff that i've said taken out of
context on shows that i did not talk to
uh so there's all that because you can
take a clip and go oh it's this
it's that you know and if i know about
stuff like you can't technically use my
likeness unless i tell you you can
so if i haven't signed something you
can't do there was a guy who put
something out and i was in it i told him
you can take it down and you talk to
lawyers because i'm not
i'm not supporting you so they use it to
tell some kind of narrative that this is
not connected to let's face it if you're
making tv shows there's two reasons to
do it one you want to get word out
or two you want to make money or three
both and so usually it's
i would say the the make money is
probably the biggest thing to put a tv
show out
and the the mission of the to the stars
academy is to not do that
this is is to try to get some
when i when they started and i talked to
them because i've talked to tom and i've
talked to
lou and those are the two main players
it was to
basically demystify the fact and get rid
of the
the stigma that's tied to ufos and let's
look at it from a science base and then
use tv to get the word out on the
progress
and they've done some pretty cool things
i mean you know they've the the italian
government gave them all kinds of files
that
had been you know property their
government they got a bunch from
it might have been argentina gave them
all kinds of stuff like here's all our
records what can you do with it to try
and now pull
from country based to a more global
based research which is what you were
talking about
and then using independent scientists
that are not tied to a government i mean
any government but just using
independent research agencies to start
looking at some of the metallurgy
because you go oh i found this we had
this piece of metal what is it and some
of the stuff has been explained they've
got some
objects artifacts that have not been
explained and that's slowly coming out
you know and i think uh and your hope is
the us government will release
well the government is the government
the us government came out a month ago
and said you know we have
we have uh we have material that we
cannot explain the origin
they have said that they just haven't
released the wreckage from the roswell
thing which i keep joking about i'm like
come on it's 70 some years old
i mean let it out i i think he put it
beautifully that
in this time that would be a heck of an
inspiring hopeful thing to see
like people don't just to distract them
yeah the division is
i mean nothing will unite us humans
descendants of chimps uh
like uh the idea that there's life out
there oh
it would literally change i said this a
while ago i forget i think as the london
sun times had called me and i said you
know personally i think this is a global
issue it's not
if there is stuff coming down which
we're pretty sure there is there's
enough stuff that we can't explain
if there is stuff coming down then this
is not a country based thing and it's
not about technology and it's not about
who's going to win the next war
because you don't know what they're
doing so you got really
a couple of theories one you've got e.t
or close encounters and the other
extreme is you've got independence day
are you going to prepare and bet on et
and close encounters
or do you actually try and do stuff in
case it is independence that you
actually have a game plan
and when you get into independence day
that scenario
you know and i don't like going too much
into sci-fi but
let's just say in theory that that
becomes a reality it's not a us
russia china england france spain
name any country and any continent it
becomes a global issue
and the only way you can deny it's just
like americans we all
you know we're divided it it's been that
way forever so if you think we won't get
through this we'll get through it
because we've had times just like this
before
until nazi germany pops up but in nazi
germany pops up or someone flies two
airplanes into the world trade center
and then all of a sudden we're all like
united we also have
very very short memories yes we do
exactly it's when you look and go uh
well
we can do this and you go no no if if
you think
that everyone on the planet is good
you need to stop taking the drugs that
you're taking you know we said this
there were people during
the rise of hitler no no it's it's okay
no no it's okay we're not gonna do we're
not gonna stop no no it's okay no no
it's okay
and you gotta think the only thing that
stopped hitler
was his ego by going into russia
if he just stuck with the pact with
stalin and not went to the east
and had to fight and it was really the
russian winner that crushed him
and he would have put all his high
troops to the other side
there would have been a totally
different outcome the man in the iron
the man in the high tower whatever it's
a netflix show where
nazi actually wins it and you look you
know we didn't know
everything that was going on especially
the atrocities with the concentration
camps and what he was doing to
to the jews i mean it's you look at that
going
if you really want to see evil and then
there's the whole side of what stalin
did because he actually exterminated
more people than hitler did
but that never gets the press and the
thing is
we forget this we forget this history
in our conflicts today we forget that
there is the nature of evil
we forget that there's real evil in the
world and um
the thing to fight that evil is to be
united to be
uh both it's like this interesting line
like you talked about joe rogan of being
both
like kind to each other compassionate
empathetic but also being like
strong and a bad motherfucker when you
need to
to make sure that you that like there's
a balance between
kindness and force that is you you
use force when force is necessary but
you don't have to walk around like billy
badass all the time i mean some of the
toughest people that i grew up with
that literally could kick the shit out
of whoever came near him
they never got in fights because one
even people that didn't know them
because they were actually
nice guys you know they were they're
just good dudes
but you know if you cross them like i
had a friend of mine uh
he was he's a nationally ranked wrestler
he went to went to naval academy with me
he's a very very good friend of mine
um and uh he is when you meet him
and he wrestled at 190 pounds and he did
not lose a match his senior year until
he went to nationals he just had a bad
day he actually lost to a guy he had
pummeled the shit out of
and he would cross it was funny we we
joke about it even with him because when
you meet him he's like the nicest like
lo
go hey hey dude you know hey how you
doing he's super nice
he would cross that ring on a wrestling
mat as soon as he crossed that ring
it was like a totally different person
and he would go out there and just
destroy people
i mean physically destroy like put a
hurt on
and he would get done and he's like
super humble and they'd raise his hand
and he would he he'd have this blank
expression they'd raise his hand and
he'd walk off and as soon as he crossed
the line he'd
he'd look up and smug hey hi guys how
you doing like he literally just went
could rip someone's arms off but as soon
as he crossed line he's a totally
different person he's like
and he's that way today yeah he wouldn't
even tell you he's a wrestler yeah
that's kind of a symbol of the best of
america
that's what america is oh he's that
wrestler he's across the line
you're you're uh you could be hard but
when
once you're off the mat you're just a
kind human being
yeah i know you're super humble
uh saying it's better to be lucky than
good but
your story is inspiring that
the entire trajectory of having a dream
of accomplishing that dream
of having one hell of a career what
advice
would you give to a young person to a
young version of yourself
today that listens to this and is
inspired that wants to fly
or wants to go to space who wants to
build the rocket is there advice
you could give them about life about
career
about anything yeah yeah um
first let me start with uh and you had a
question on
inspirational people so my grandfather i
had mentioned him earlier a huge funeral
a beer delivery guy um was delivering
beer and the 60s riots were
the the guys the black in the black
neighborhoods where you know white
people didn't go
and my grandfather's sicilian he was one
of the first ones in his family born in
the united states so
my great grandmother and i had aunts and
uncles that i knew growing up that
actually came over on the boat
um huge huge guy and just the nicest
friendliest would give you the shirt off
his back obviously proven by his funeral
and i'm talking at his funeral
the head of the black panthers was at
his funeral in in toledo ohio
the mafia guys were at his funeral in
toledo ohio uh i mean it was literally a
mix of
of of who's who and he had told me once
you know because when you're little you
start looking and i grew up basically
i was probably middle class lower middle
class my dad was a fireman you're not
rich he's working for the city it was a
paycheck to paycheck living is how i
grew up
and i was talking my grandfather one day
and he said something to me and this is
this is literally how i run my
life he said it was about money because
you'd see you know back in the day if
you saw someone in a mercedes that was
rare
you know they weren't everywhere and you
know people didn't you couldn't lease a
car you actually bought a car and
usually bought a car with cash
um so it's a totally different than we
are now and he said
he goes you know david he goes they're
no better than you and you're no better
than anyone else
he goes you got to remember that he goes
everyone's different he goes treat
everyone with the respect and dignity
that they deserve
he goes and if they're poor if they're
homeless he goes it doesn't make him a
bad person
it just that's that's who they chose to
be and you make
choices in your life but never ever look
down on someone because
you know there will always be someone
that will look down on you and you
should never ever do that
and i kept that close to me he was a
huge influence was my mom's dad
um just a big big influence in my life
and the way i carried myself um and he
was one that would say
you know you can be anything you want to
be you know he grew up dirt poor
you know and the fact that he had bought
a house and took good care of my
grandmother and did stuff like that
you know to him that was a success and
to me it was always you know trying to
better and move on
and he was the one you know my parents
were a big part of this too
was instilling that anything is possible
so when i'm
four years and 11 months old in 1969
you know and i'm watching neil armstrong
walk on the moon and i'm asking my mom
and she says well they were all military
pilots and you know we had an
international guard that at the time was
flying f-100 so i'm dating myself
um and i was just fascinated with flight
and i just looked at that going that's
really what i want to do and i never
lost sight of that there was always i
could do this or do that and
when i was going to go to college before
i enlisted in the marine corps i was
accepted into natural resources at ohio
state and i'm like ah
if i can't fly i'll go be a forest
ranger because i wanted to hang out in
one of those towers in colorado and look
for fires because that's just
i like that stuff you know it was that
or be an oceanographer because i was
fascinated with jacques cousteau and i
actually that's my degree
my undergrad degree is jacques cousteau
so influences are neil armstrong and
jack cousteau i have an oceanography
degree
i got an mba from university of houston
goku's got to mention them and then uh
and so you're looking people go what are
you what are you going to do
with that and i said you know i got an
oceanography degree because i go well
i'm going to sail on the ocean so at
least if the ship sinks i'll know where
i'm at
and that was a kind of a running joke
and then and then there's so
these passions and underneath it is the
is the belief that you can be anything
you want to you can you know i told my
kids this you know
when they were young you know it was
tough especially for my son so when nate
was about
five six years we knew nate was
colorblind you know my
my wife's brothers are both colorblind
it's really color deprived cleared
applying you see black and white
he can't tell he has issues with greens
reds browns it's funny if you're ever
around someone like that
because he'll go i'll go what are you
looking at he goes right over there by
the red thing i'm like what are you
looking at
i go this i like he had a hat on one
dagger which one are you gonna eat he
had a hat in his hand it was green he
goes i'm gonna get the green one i go oh
this one right here he goes no the one
in my head i go nate that one's brown
he's like
leave me alone dad he got the brown hat
because to him it looked great
yeah so he couldn't fly he came he said
i go what do you want to do nate you
know you're talking to your kids and
what do you want to use i want to be a
pilot no now i got to tell him because
he's looking at me because i'm a pilot
do you can't be a pilot he's like why
can't i be a pilot i said because
you you got eye issues you know so you
got to redirect
and the other one was because i had i
stopped flying i was 42 years old
and i was like and it was my childhood
dream so it's like a pro athlete i know
exactly what it feels like
when you know brett favre has to walk
away from the nfl when you still can do
it
good choice of quarterback by the way
the greatest of all time but whatever
so you you do when you look at it and
you go
i understand what those guys feel like
when you have to walk away from
something that you love and you think
you can still do it
um so i told them i said look
i was talking to both my kids and i said
you know find something that you
want to do that you love to do and that
you can do your whole life
and you should be able to do good things
for other people
you want to be able to help other people
that's what i said
so both of my kids and there's no one in
my family both of my children one of
them is
my daughter is a doctor doing residency
in internal medicine right now
and my son is in his third year and
they're both going to be doctors
and until i look at it is you know
people go oh you got two dogs i don't
care i told my kids if you want to be a
garbage man or you want to dig ditches i
don't care just be
be the best ditch digger that you can be
i said and be happy doing it because
what you also find is that
we are in this big pursuit of money
money money money money might be that's
what makes the world go around but
what you realize and i'll go back to my
grandfather who didn't have a lot of
money
and he was probably one of the most
happy people on life and unfortunately
he died
he died at 65 he had a massive heart
attack because he didn't
tell that he he kind of knew what was
happening and he just made the choice to
to do and it was devastating to the
entire family
but he didn't he didn't have a lot of
money but i'll tell you what
i know a lot of rich people who have
funerals and there's nobody adam
yeah and my grandfather who's a beer
delivery guy had i i i
it literally it was like three miles
long the pope it was crazy yeah who died
that was because it was like he's a
catholic he's just you know italian he
goes
you know who died the pope and i go now
that's my grandfather and then the next
funeral i went to was my aunt his sister
and there was like you know 30 people
and i looked at my mother and i said
where's everybody at
she goes oh no this is normal
this is what a normal funeral looks like
so it's
you know for young kids bottom line one
be nice kindness will get you i'm a big
believer in karma
kindness will get you a long way in the
world you know it's easy
it's it it's easy to be nice it doesn't
cost you anything
i said you know and get rid of the hate
and number two is
follow your dreams because everyone is
capable of everything and there's a
there's a self realism like
you know if you really have trouble with
math getting a phd in applied math is
probably not something you're going to
be able to do but understand yourself
what your own capabilities are and you
know inside your heart don't let anyone
ever tell you what you can and can't do
you have to determine that yourself
and go for it and and and you can do
anything
it's just it's it's a great the world's
incredible
it really is let me ask the last yeah
big ridiculous question uh so you've
lived
much of your life your career is kind of
at the edge of life and death
so let me ask kind of uh
several different ways the same kind of
question one
d do you have you pondered your
mortality the finiteness of it
and the bigger question to ask even in
the context of
your uh tic tac encounter
is uh what do you think is the meaning
of this uh thing we got going on here
the meaning of life
human life in this sense
so let me start with have i pondered my
own mortality yes
quite often um and i don't get into my
religious beliefs or what i am
but i will tell you that i do believe in
god i've just seen too many things in
the world that i can't explain
and some people will explain it by
subconscious so i'll give you a story
and this kind of puts in the thing of
do i fear death so i had a good friend
of mine that i used to fly with we were
stationed in japan together
and japan had this incinerator that put
all kinds of dioxins so there's a real
high cancer rate for those that served
on the base
in atsugi japan
him and his wife had one son and their
son passed away just before his 18th
birthday of cancer
and i was hanging out with i'll call him
john
and i was hanging out with john we were
in oil and gas he'd come to the same
company and
we were doing an event together and he
was opening up to me
because we were actually the demo pilots
we do the demonstration for air shows
and stuff
and uh him and i were sitting there
talking and uh
he was giving me the whole story and and
how he really changed his look on life
that we're only here for a finite time
and that we're all going to die
well unfortunately after all that when
it was really going him and his wife had
moved to
a location that fit their you know close
to the water where they could do stuff
and i won't say where
um and he was doing what he loved to do
and he got diagnosed with throat cancer
and i was talking to him uh it was
probably about
maybe two months before he died um
and i said dude hey you're sad you mean
this is your friend
and i'm kind of really bummed out and
this is the guy
this is a guy that's dying of cancer and
here's what he tells me he says
dave dude we're all going to die
he goes but i have to look at it i have
to make the best of the time that i have
and i said i understand that he goes
with the exception
of not being with my wife who he loved
dearly
he goes i'm okay with dying
i've had a really good life and
um about
because actually the original
announcement when he when he finally
passed away a buddy of mine called me
because i don't do facebook and
his wife had put it on facebook that he
had passed
and about the day before he died for
some reason i was thinking about him
and i had a dream or i think it was a
dream
or an altered reality you can get into
whatever uh
but he was there it was just him and i
and i was really sad in the dream i was
actually crying
and he was there and he was actually in
his uniform he was in his whites and
uh because he's a navy and we were just
talking and he looked at me and he said
and this is in my dream he's like dave
it's all gonna be okay and this is this
is like and this is a vivid conversation
i have this people are don't think i'm
weird about this but
um but you know i know what my dream was
and
you know maybe it's my subconscious
creating the dream but in in reality to
me this was real that it was put there
for a reason
he's and he basically explained
everything he's it's okay
i'm gonna be fine my wife is fine he
goes this is this is what's meant to be
you know but you know and the bottom
line was make use of every day that you
have
because you don't know and literally two
days later i find out that he passed
um so but ultimately
he accepted the finiteness of it he did
well you have to
and it's like i talk about you know
money and job position and this and that
i said you can get in any you know you
can go to a company just remember when
you want to be a vp of a company you
sell your soul to the company
you have to i said if you look i joke
with people at work and i said
i said you know when you ever think that
you're important or this guy has that i
said when you're sitting on 93 or 95 128
and you're sitting in traffic and we're
stopped which doesn't happen right now
because of covet but normally it's stop
it's bumper to bumper and you're sitting
here
like i was coming down here by the gas
tank um
when you're sitting there look left and
look right you know and there can be a
lamborghini or an s550 mercedes and on
the other side there could be some piece
of crap car
we're all sitting on the same freeway at
the same time trying to do the same
thing which is just
get home so we can be with our family
because the most important thing that we
have
it ain't money it ain't our job it's not
our position i go because when it's all
said and done
you could be you know you can be with
the exception of the presidents of the
united states i mean
name the vice presidents most people
can't
and eventually they're going to die or
eventually you're going to see a statue
of a guy from the 1700s in the boston
area and you're going to go i don't even
know who that guy was
did he impact my life he probably did
but eventually people forget
yeah you you realize what's important
now and the one thing that you have
is your family and your close friends
and that's that's
it you can take all the money or
everything else if you're down on your
luck
you know who is going to be a we is joke
who are your true friends
it's the person while there's there's
ones that i won't say but you know hey
you're broke down on a road in the
middle of nowhere and it's three o'clock
in the morning who you gonna call is
gonna get in their car without
complaining and come and get you
and that's life those that is life the
people you love
it's it's it's the people you truly care
about and contrary to i have you know oh
my god i got
6 000 facebook friends you got about
that many real friends
that you can count on and that's it
everything else doesn't matter
no it doesn't matter it doesn't mean you
might be nice i mean i have there's
acquaintance friends that i'll do
anything for and then come to my house
and stuff but then there's the people
that you know
you know like my cousins who are like my
brothers that you know
at a moment's notice you know when
when my uncle passed away at a young age
you know who lived literally right down
the street from me
and my cousin chad and i got two boys
there's 14 of us but there's only two
boys there's three of us together and we
all grew up in the same neighborhood
same schools play football together all
that
i said if one of those if rare chad ever
needs me if something happens like when
my uncle died it wasn't it wasn't an
issue if i'm coming home
it's i'm booking the ticket and i don't
give a shit what it costs because i will
be there to
to be here with you and and then those
two guys and my college roommate is
another one that
i'm very very close with you know
you know if there's there's i have a
handful of people that you know i will
drop
literally everything even if my wife
would be pissed at me at times she's
like seriously i gotta do it
yeah and now she knows and it's the same
thing with her i mean she knows that
there are certain people in her life
that if they really need her and she has
to go she would go and i would
let her go so given all that
i'm honored that you would uh come here
and talk to me
and take the time dave is one of the
best conversations i've ever had
thank you so much it's a pretty long one
it probably sets the record for the
longest one so
i i i mean i i'm a loss awards one of my
favorite conversations thank you so much
for talking to you dave you're welcome
thanks for listening to this
conversation with david fraver and thank
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with some words
from carl sagan somewhere
something incredible is waiting to be
known
thank you for listening hope to see you
next time