The following is a conversation with Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years

and commander of the Strike Fighter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron

of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.

He’s also famously one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO, an

identified flying object in 2004 that is referred to as the Tic Tac and the incident more formally

referred to as the USS Nimitz UFO incident.

His story, corroborated by several other pilots from my perspective as a curious scientist

and an open minded human being, is the most credible sighting of a UFO in history, at

least that I’m aware of.

He’s a humble, fascinating, and fun human being to talk to.

I put out a call for questions on Reddit and many other places and tried to ask as many

of the questions that people posted as I could.

And overall, I really enjoyed this conversation and I’m sure if the world wants us to, and

if there’s more questions to be had, we’ll talk on this podcast again.

Quick summary of the sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp.

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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 in understanding can only happen, I think, if we open our eyes

and allow ourselves to dream, to think from first principles, and remove the constraints

and innovation placed on us by the scientific conventions and assumptions of prior generations.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with 5 Stars on Apple Podcast, follow

on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Freedman.

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I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an 8 hour eating period

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I’ve been even considering doing a 48 or 72 hour fast that some people I look up to

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People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits,

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I certainly experienced this with the 24 hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the

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The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing, the first thing that popped into

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And now, finally, here’s my conversation with David Fravor.

You’re a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School.

Yeah, I am.

Better known as Top Gun.

Yeah.

Let me ask the most ridiculous question, how realistic is the movie Top Gun?

So it’s funny, we used to joke, and a friend of mine who was a Top Gun instructor said

this, there’s two things in the original Top Gun that are true, that are very realistic.

One, there is a place called Top Gun, and number two is they do fly airplanes there.

Other than that, I went through in 97, class 497, and there’s actually a log of every single

person that’s went through, kind of like a SEAL training.

There’s a list.

Because there’s a lot of posers out there, oh, I was a Navy SEAL.

No, you weren’t.

Well, I went to Top Gun.

You can actually go to Top Gun, and matter of fact, just to get a Top Gun patch, the

real patch, you have to have gone there.

So a lot of the patches you see running around are not real.

The real ones are controlled.

The people that make them 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 they’ll sell them to you.

If you are not on the list, you ain’t get no patch.

Because it is, it’s a pretty big deal to go through, but for me, probably one of the best

experiences of flying, because everyone there is extremely competent.

It’s very, very challenging, but it’s what we all signed up to do.

So it’s, it’s just the entire group that is, when you want to be that, you know, that level,

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?

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, then the instructor sides are really,

you know, they’re guys that, you know, they just chose to stay up in Fallon.

And it’s extremely difficult job, because they have, they have a very small tolerance

for not being good.

So they’re briefs, the guys when they give a lecture, so let’s just say there’s a fighter

employment lecture, which is one of the hardest ones.

It takes about two days to give the fighter employment lecture.

The guy who gives the lecture goes through multiple, what they call them murder boards,

where he’s scrutinized by his peers, and he practices, by the time they actually stand

in front of a class, they pretty much have their 250 PowerPoint slides memorized, and

they don’t even turn around, they just click and they know them in order.

And they repeat the same thing over, it’s, and it’s standardized.

So they are extremely, extremely standardized when you go through the school, and there’s

a reason for that, because what they’re doing is they’re training, so when you come out

of Top Gun, you’re called a Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics Instructor, okay?

So you’re SFTI.

When you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapons schools on

the East or West Coast and train the fleet squadrons, and then you visit the squadrons

and train and do upgrade rides and all that.

So there’s a, 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,

just think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a, you know, like an 04 Lieutenant Commander.

The lieutenants, the hierarchy, or at least to be, I don’t know how it is exactly today,

but I imagine it’s the same.

The hierarchy is actually based on seniority at the school, not necessarily rank.

So when the tactical decisions are made, which are based on fact and trying things out in

the Fallon Ranges, they set the top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise,

and I mean time wise, are the ones that actually make the decision.

And when the door, you may not agree, but when the door opens and everyone comes out

from the staff, they all speak the same language.

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, that the instructors demand.

Oh, very much so, and they’re held to it.

So it’s not a, hey, I’m now an instructor, so I can do what I want.

There is a standard and they have to live up to that standard.

They have to, and I mean every moment of every day.

So if they go someplace, if they go from Fallon and they come down and do, they’re called

site visits where they come down and they’ll come to Lemoore, California, which is where

the West Coast Fighter Wing is at for the Navy.

And they go around and start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to kind of pass on

some of that knowledge, that’s that same high level of standard.

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 were a Navy pilot for 18 years.

Yes.

Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?

Yeah.

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.

So it’s always better to be lucky than good.

But I got to go to the Naval Academy and I finished and I’ve had that dream to fly.

So when I got selected,

You’ve always dreamed of flying.

Yeah.

Since 1969, when I watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

I was at that point, I asked my mom, I remember watching it, I was just prior to being five.

And I said, wow, yeah, it’s so cool, mom.

And she said, well, you know, they were all pilots.

And then at that point it was like, I’m going to be a pilot.

And if you knew me growing up, cause I was a little bit of a delinquent, people are just

like, yeah, right.

I used to joke, I’m going to fly, I’m going to fly jets, I’m going to drop bombs.

And if people that knew me as a kid, they’d be like, yeah, and they’d be like, ah, not

a chance.

And then when I did, I actually had a, it’s a funny story and I’ll get to it, I’ll finish

my career.

But I was at my cousin’s wedding and we all grew up in the same neighborhood.

We kind of, they had Italian side of the family.

That’s how we grew up.

So it was my house right down the street.

It was my cousin, Chad.

And then right around the corner is my cousin Ray and my aunts and uncles and stuff.

The guy two doors down from my house, the paper boy in the neighborhood, so they all

knew me.

And I went to my cousin’s wedding and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor.

I go, Mr. Race, how you doing?

He goes, you fly jets, Top Gun and all that.

I go, yes, sir.

He goes, man, I figured you’d be in jail by now.

And it was kind of a, to me, it was a little bit of a badge of honor going on and I kind

of overcame that.

But…

What do you attribute that to?

So you, I’ve heard you before and just now say that it’s better to be lucky than good

and you talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory

maybe in a way of advice, like retrospectively, how’d you pull it off to be 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 can achieve it.

Not in all cases, like if I loved basketball and I really wanted to be in the NBA, there’s

a realism that says I’m five foot eight and I got like a really short vertical leap and

I’m really not that good at basketball, it’s probably not ever 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.

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 and I’m not saying you have to be a genius and super smart

to be a fighter pilot.

Matter of fact, you don’t.

It really comes down to the ability to think very quickly, 80% solution is typically good

enough 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, 80% solution

is good enough.

You have a really strong gut for the 80% solution, just yeah, I’m a big believer in the 80% solution.

I love that.

If you get 80% you can go and then you can always adjust, which is exactly what, 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 BCD and then I know how bad his, his error is and then I capitalize.

So my mind, I don’t have to be perfect, you know, I don’t 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 it 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 dog fight and type stuff.

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 are able to do that, he just had the

dream and didn’t take no for an answer.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you know, part of it is family, you know, my dad was, I used to call him a

fire ready aim guy, you know, he’d smack me and then asked me what I did wrong.

Yeah.

Good parenting.

Um, back then, you know, I, I joke and people look, cause you know, at times it was kind

of tough, you know, cause 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 in 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.

It was a big guy, dead serious.

And you go, there’s someone asked who died the Pope.

Um, uh, so, so a lot of people love them.

So back to, back to my career question, cause I’m getting down at rabbit hole.

Uh, no, I, when I was at the, I was going to, I was going to 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 was fine with me.

Because it comes up a lot.

You mind saying what the Nimitz is, what a ship is, what like, yeah.

So Nimitz is, uh, an aircraft carrier.

So it’s, uh, four and a half acres of sovereign us territory that floats around the us oceans

giant thing.

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.

Um, 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, uh, an F 14 squadron and then a couple of a six squadrons.

And we actually ended up part pairing up and hanging out with some of the a six pilots

and BNs.

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.

Cause there are that, that unit, that whole unit, you know, the Marine Corps is that one

surface has it all.

And, um, so when I graduated and I got to, uh, you know, I, I worked hard through primary

and that’s where, you know, I knew Missy, uh, we were in, actually went through together,

Missy Cummings, uh, we went through primary together and then, uh, I went to Kingsville.

We all selected the same time.

I went to Kingsville.

There was another guy, Scott Weidemeyer, 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, uh, I ended up getting A6s, uh, on the West coast,

which is a side by side, uh, bomber.

So it’s a pilot on the left seat and the Bombardier navigators on the right seat.

It was built in the sixties.

It is all weather, uh, and it flies low at night and 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 fine.

How many fighter jets are side by side like that?

That was, uh, in the Navy, that was the only one, uh, the Air Force, the F111 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 EA6B is just went away a few years ago.

And now the, uh, E18G Growler, um, is the replacement for the A6B.

There was never a replacement for the A6, uh, that I flew.

It really became the F18, which, uh, the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise

by fuel, uh, then the Hornet and, uh, the Hornet is the F18.

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.

Single seat, just one person?

One person, with the exception of, I’ll probably, someone will yell at me, but really with the

exception of the F15E Strike Eagle and the F18F 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?

That was about half and half.

So I started off in A6 was a two seater.

Then I went to single seat F18s and I flew those, uh, 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 E’s and the S, but I deployed when I had command of VFA 41, I had the two seat, they

were F squadron.

So you eventually ended up commanding the, the Strike Fighter Squadron 41.

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, the,

the people that are exos, cause we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number

one guy.

So the XO 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

Weitzel at the time was the XO and he really wanted, because he knew there was a little

bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L’more, L’more had been a single seat,

a fighter community, uh, since the forever.

And now all of a sudden you’ve got the F18F 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.

Um, 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, two seat, one seat, two seat.

Because when you fly two seat, there’s a lot of stuff that the pilot will offload and take

the advantage of the 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.

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, the some level of automation like autopilot

maybe.

That’s correct.

Maybe you can kind of talk about the psychology of like, you said making decisions really

quick, 80%, how do you deal with another brain working with you?

And then also the automation, is there an interesting interplay that you get to learn?

And also as that changed throughout your career, I imagine it got, it gotten better in terms

of the automation or perhaps not?

Well, I can tell you, so let’s, let’s start just, 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, uh, that was built in the sixties.

All right.

And there’s been studies done on the crew coordination, which is the interaction between

the pilot and the bombardier navigator.

So we would fly low at night in the mountains.

So I was stationed up in Whidbey Island, Washington.

So you’ve got the Cascades and incredible amount of time.

And we would get in the simulators because unlike normally people think terrain following

and there’s the radars, the 111, the B1 has a system like this, but it’ll, the radar can

see and it’ll fly.

It basically flies a straight line.

So it goes up and over mountains and back down and up and over mountains where the A6

was really manual.

So you do this low level routes where you’re going to, you’re going to fly in the mountains

at night.

You’re going to be at, you know, 500 to a thousand feet above the ground, ripping through

like fog layers, cause you don’t need to see outside.

You’re literally flying a little TV screen and radar.

What are you looking at most of the time?

So you’re just at 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 FLIR stuff?

Is that, is, no, this thing is totally radar based.

Now the airplane had a FLIR ball as a target recognition and multi sensor was called a

tram.

You’re looking at like basically like dots of hard objects.

No, actually what it is is the, the bomb of your 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 then the backside, it’s just going to be a giant shadow because you can’t see on

the other side.

So the Bombardier 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 backside 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 Bombardier?

Yes.

So you’re, you’re actually just control.

I’m flying the jet.

The throttle’s the stick and I have a, it’s about a, probably a four inch or six inch

wide by maybe four inches, five inches high.

It looks like it’s literally a CRT.

That’s how old it is.

A CRT screen.

And what it would do, what the radar would do is the, 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 cause the radar can see a lot further.

He’s looking at about 12 and a half miles when we’re in the terrain mode where we’re

dodging mountains and stuff.

And what the pilot has is there’s, they’re called range bins and there’s eight of them.

So the very far range bin is the 12 and a half mile, you know, and the closest range

bin, it’s a thing and it’ll be like between like a half a mile and or a quarter mile to

three quarters of a mile.

And the next one might be three quarters of a mile to two miles.

And then it just keeps going out like that.

So if there’s a mountain in front, let’s say we’re on a flat plane and there’s a mountain

out in the distance at 15 miles.

And we were just driving right at it.

So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles where the radar is going

to see it on his scope, my 12th, my range bin for that would pop up and it would show

like a big bump, like a mountain.

And then as I got closer to it, the next range bin would pop up and show it.

And I could see that that bump was moving towards me.

And then if I turned a little bit, you know, to go over here, I’d see the mountain go over

to the right hand side and I could do that, but it wasn’t like a video game.

It’s literally like, if you think of the original Atari’s.

Yeah.

But you build up, I imagine that you start to get a really deep sense of like the actual

3D environment based on that little Atari’s solid display.

You’re exactly right.

And you have to, you have to train.

So there’s been studies, as a matter of fact, a lot of the basis and people probably argue

with me, but it’s true.

There were studies done watching A6 crews in our simulators, we call it the WIST, the

systems trainer, and it was not even a motion, it just kind of sat there and you just, you

could fly these things and they had terrain that they would inject into the system.

But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, who I’ll

name him, his name’s Chris Sato, he works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad, I think

computer engineering, he’s scary smart.

So Chris could really work, as a matter of fact, all the guys I flew with, 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.

We’d spent a lot of time training and Chris was amazing at how he could work the system,

one because he was extremely brilliant and he had that inquisitive mind of, oh, we can

do all these different things and there’s all these degradation modes.

But we spent a lot of time to see how good we could actually get, because, and it’s,

you almost talk in partials.

So as the BN is looking at his radar scope, Chris would say, I’ve got rising terrain,

that’s just what they 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.

So when you first get together, the interaction, it’s almost like you have to rehearse it,

you have to know, and you talk in full sentences.

The more and more we fly together, Chris could go, I’m showing and he’d get like rising out

and before he finished, I’d say, I’ve got it.

So you end up starting to talk in partials because I have to trust him like, I mean,

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’s got a wider scope on the radar, but my screen doesn’t show that.

So he’s telling me, start a left turn, start a hard turn, you know, and we would do that.

So my truck.

And this is all happening quick?

Very quick.

Well, you’re doing, we would typically fly between 420 and 480 knots of ground speed.

How many miles an hour?

Well, 420 is seven miles a minute.

Okay.

Or eight, between seven and eight miles a minute is what you’re flying.

That’s fast.

At night.

I mean, I broke out of clouds.

I mean, I remember him and I flying, we were on, it’s the IR, it’s called an IR route, an

instrument route that’s low, they’re all around the country.

There’s the IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, 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 a thousand feet in the mountains and we’re in the clouds.

You can’t see anything.

And I had to turn off our red lights that flash, you know, they’re called 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 were flying, we’re flying, we’re flying.

We break out of that coastal marine layer and poof, we break out and it’s a decent night.

And this is right by Mount St. Helens.

This is kind of where we’re coming in.

So we’re coming in from the east and we’re just north of Mount St. Helens is where the

route goes.

And you look up, you know, cause you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that’s

right next to you, but you’re flying along.

You’re just like, you know, you got to 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 F18F.

So now we’re into modern technology that was actually built in this century and you’re

flying.

So now, you know, the WIZO 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 WIZO does all the talk

and he’s got actually, he uses his feet.

That’s the weapon systems operator in the back of an F18F.

So he’s going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational

awareness display and it’s linked to all the other airplanes.

Just out of curiosity, what’s the situational awareness display?

Because that term comes up a lot.

Think of it as a God’s eye view.

So if you have the back of the Super Hornet has, well, the Block IIs has about an eight

by 10 display for the WIZOs that they can look at.

The pilot’s is smaller.

It’s down between his, it’s a six by six between his legs and they’re getting ready to redesign

that Boeing is.

But when you looked, it’d be like if you put your airplane and you’re looking down.

So all the stuff, like if your radar seeing bad guys out in front of you, it’d be like

looking down and 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, I can see where

everything’s at.

I can see if one guy’s trying to target another guy, it shows you all this.

It’s an incredible amount of knowledge that comes up for the crews to maintain the overall

picture of what’s going on because it’s happening so fast and this is where that autonomy piece,

this is the third brain.

So we’re all looking at it and the third brain is doing fusion.

It’s pulling stuff together going, oh, this is all this guy.

This is this guy.

It’s sending it out through the link.

So all the airplanes are talking to each other through this digital network that we don’t

even see.

It just says, that airplane says, hey, I’m over here.

And it tells us and we go, oh, he’s right there.

And then we can go, his airplane says, oh, I’m looking at this airplane, this bad guy.

And it shows us, oh, he’s over there and he’s looking at this guy.

I mean, it’s an incredible amount of visual intake because your eye, you can hear a lot,

but when you look down at stuff, it’s, you know, you can sell the picture really quick.

The third brain is doing the sensor fusion, the integration of the different sensors and

gives you a big picture view.

What about the control?

Like, is there, and I apologize as if this is a dumb question, but 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?

The AI piece would be more of a control loop because of the digital flight controls.

So the airplane actually, they had to make the airplane easier to fly.

And when I say easy, it’s relative because people go, I could do it because I did it

on flight sim.

Real life is a lot different.

In flight sim, you have no apparent fear of death.

You’ll do things on a simulator that you would never do in real life.

But 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 cueing system

on that basically maps the magnetic field in the cockpit so it can tell where your head’s

at looking.

So if I turn my head to the right, the radar will actually look to the right.

The targeting 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 phased array radar now, it doesn’t really scan.

There’s all kinds of cool stuff that that technology 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 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 solving this problem in seconds, vice 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 minds that happens when two people are flying, controlling the plane.

But at a high level, this is a really interesting question for people who don’t know what they’re

talking about, like me, which is, what is the difference between a human being and an

AI system?

Like what can, what is the ceiling of a current AI technology for controlling the plane?

Like how much does the human contribute?

Is it possible to have automated flight, for example, like what is the hardest part about

flying that a human does expertly that an AI system cannot in warfare situations in

flying a fighter jet plane?

So I would say AI systems are usually black and white.

When you write the algorithm for an AI system, 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 a line that says I can or I can’t.

And it’s a very finite line, but you can go up to the line where a human, we all have

gray areas where we go, eh, maybe, eh, I’ll try it.

So humans 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 Hornet, it doesn’t matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance

model of the airplane.

So if you know what an EM diagram is, the energy, so it basically says the airplane

can fly as slow as this, it can go as fast as this, it can pull this many Gs, force of

gravity, 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, 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.

Where there are times, and you can go back to World War I, where people intentionally

departed the airplane from controlled flight in order to obtain an advantage, which is,

that’s where the human goes, can I do this?

I know it’s outside of where I would normally go, but I can do that.

So you can do some crazy things now, especially since the flight control logic in modern airplanes

with digital flight controls, they’re extremely forgiving.

So you can literally, I’ve done things in Super Hornets that literally, even as a pilot

inside the airplane, you’re just like, wow, I cannot believe it just did that.

Like it’ll flop ends, which defies most logic, and I guess in a way you could probably program

it, but I still think when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage,

there are things that a human will do that AI won’t.

And I don’t think we’ve got to the point, because how do you map illogical solutions?

Most AI is logical.

It’s based on some type of premise when you write the algorithm to control it.

There’s bounds.

Yeah, there’s this giant mess, like you said, the difference between the simulator and real

life also gets at that somehow.

That there is somehow the fear of death, all of that beautiful mess comes into play.

Is there a comment you can make on commercial flight, like with Sully landing that plane

famously versus the simulator, all of those discussions, is there some?

Well, it’s very similar to what I was talking about earlier with the A6.

So one is when you’re flying with a crew, there’s standardization.

So you got to remember when Sully flew, when his first officer, that’s the co pilot, showed

up the first time they’d met, and this happens all the time in the commercial world.

There’s six, 7,000 pilots at United Airlines, your chance of flying with the same guy all

the time is slim and none.

Where in the Navy, we were crewed.

So I had a primary and a secondary whizzo that flew with me.

For months?

Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment.

Because you want to get to know, trust and all of those things.

It increases the capability of the airplane.

It’s not to say we can’t swap out, but for true effectiveness, especially in very complex

missions like a forward air controller, we’re in the air actually controlling ground assets

and supporting ground troops.

If you’re in a high threat area, which is crazy busy, you have to be melded when you

do that.

You have to have trained to do that job, otherwise you’re going to be ineffective.

So when you get to the commercial world, and I’ve got tons of friends that fly commercial,

there is a standardization.

Like we know that at this point, I’m going to put this switch, you’re going to do that.

And everyone, they know their roles.

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 the two of them talking, you got to 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 in 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, and it got fished out of the Hudson.

What is it about those human decisions you 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?

When you train, and aviation is a self cleaning oven.

So if you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have

died by making bad decisions.

So when you look at what he did or the way we train, because 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, same type, 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 looked, he made a quick assessment.

This is that 80% solution where you go, these are not, it’s like a multiple choice test

when you go, oh my God, I don’t really know the answer, but I know A and D are wrong,

gone.

So the Jersey airport and going back to LaGuardia, gone.

So what’s my next option?

Well, the Hudson River’s there and that’s probably looking pretty good.

Or what is my other one?

Can I get a restart on the motors?

And then if I can get a restart, now can I take it someplace else?

He had to make really, really fast decisions.

And then once they, as they go, that 80% solution, you realize, all right, I’m going into the

Hudson, there’s the 80%, get the book out.

Let’s see if we can get an air start.

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, he says, we’re going in the water.

They changed the plan.

They secure the airplane.

They do exactly what they’re doing.

And he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson.

But you got to remember, it’s every six months for commercial, they go back and they do research

in the airplane in the simulator.

Where they train to the airplane being broken.

You just lost a motor.

You just lost another motor.

So they go through this extensive training and all these, we used to refer to it in the

Navy as the pain cave where you’re going to 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 hydro, and it’s sometimes they’re a problem like, oh, I just lost this

hydraulic system, but I’m having an issue on the other motor.

Well, if I shut down this motor and I’ve got a hydraulics, 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 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’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 cognitive abilities start to shut down, 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 at 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 I, you know, I’m assuming that in his mindset, cause 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 plant it 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, I mean, one, one way we just

offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, as he’s walking up to the ring,

he’s like, he starts out basically in fear and, yeah, worried about how things are going

to go.

And 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 defeat me.

So like, that’s, that’s his experience of overcoming fear.

But do you, 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, the ship’s going up and down because

it will scare the hell out of you.

Can I say that?

You can definitely say that, so it’s about landing and take off that.

That is, if you, even they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know,

guys would go fly missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going

on and people were getting shot down a lot.

The highest, 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, woo, you know,

this is not that bad, but you got to 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, and you can get outside of, you get outside of the city and get up into New

Hampshire, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren’t that

good.

It’s, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth

perception.

What you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving up and down and left to right.

Yeah, oh, and when it’s really bad, you can actually see it move and we have two systems,

you know, there was a, there’s an automatic system that’s actually, it stabilizes with

the inertials on the ship and then there’s the ILS.

Now civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth

and glide slope.

You know, you come down, it’s like a plus.

On the carrier, it’s not, it’s really just a beam that goes out and it’s considered a

non precision approach.

It’s not stabilized at all that, and I’ve been where you can actually watch the needle

and the, and the tack and needle will move.

There’s all kinds of stuff moving cause the base that it’s all sitting on is doing this

and ships don’t just go up and down.

They, they, they do this.

So the bow goes up and down in 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, Sato and, uh, Chris

and I, we were off the USS ranger, which is now decommissioned.

It’s sitting, getting turned into razorblades, um, we’re flying the old a six and we come

in and it was off of San Diego and it was just ugly night cause 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 craziest night I’ve ever seen out of San Diego.

And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you’re shaking.

I mean, you literally can’t stop.

And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we call it the six pack.

So it’s right in front of the Island.

So if you see an aircraft carrier with the Island and the number of the ship on it, we’re

sitting right in front of that and we’re looking at the landing area.

So it’s like you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this EA six B

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 six or an a six actually

points kind of down and it blows and it’s blowing all the standing water on the aircraft.

That’s how hard it’s raining.

And you literally could not see across.

I mean, I could see the front of my airplane, his airplane, and then it was just white 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, 10,000 foot runway looks

really good right now.

And I go, and I’m, I’m shaking my hands like this.

And I said, I’m not even, this is, I’m not faking this too.

I know that’s literally, I cannot stop shaking.

I said, that scared the Evelyn out of me, 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 is we, you know, kind of the quote from Tom Hanks and what’s that?

The girls baseball movie where he goes, there’s no crying in baseball.

Well, that’s our joke.

There’s no crying in Naval aviation.

I said, you can fly around and cry all you want at night, but you know, there’s only

one pilot in those airplanes and you got to land it.

So you cry all you want, wipe the tears away, you know, put on your big kid pants and it’s,

it’s time to, it’s time to, you know, man up and, and land that, land the jet.

Sorry for the romantic question, but going back to the kid that dreamed to fly, what’s

it like to fly an airplane?

What it looks incredible to me as a human, like a descendant of ape.

I sit here on land and look up at you guys.

It seems incredible that human being can do that.

You know what people ask, you know, I’ll be sitting around with my friends and they’re

like, how was it?

I said, it’s the greatest job on the planet.

I said, you know, it’s, it’s an office with a view cause you’re sitting in a glass.

You can do you know, it’s like roller coasters.

You go, Oh, it does all these cool stuff.

So we take people flying every once in a while and it’s like, Oh yeah, I like rollercoaster.

So I go, no, take any rollercoaster coolest rollercoaster you’ve ever been on and multiply

it by a thousand.

And I said, it’s an experience 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 overstresses depends

on fuel weight.

So, I mean, you routinely get up there towards eight G’s to be able to do that to your body.

I mean, it takes a toll.

Like I can’t really turn my head real good anymore and stuff like that, but would I trade

it?

It’s a dream and how many people get to do that?

You know, professional, I want to be an NFL, you know, and you end up to the NFL, which

is a very small percentage with, well, I want to fly jets and to fly, you know, at the time

when I was flying the Super Hornets that we had in our squad and we’re brand new at 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 just, I mean, I’ll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away, 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, when you’re an air wing commander, which is, we call them CAG,

carrier group commander, you’re not flying as much as like the normal pilots, nor should

you be.

I mean, there’s young people that are coming up and it’s training your relief 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, I won’t get his last name, but Joey, who lived down

the street from us, was a Top Gun instructor and I’m like, hey, Joey’s a Top Gun.

You know?

And I’m like, that’s cool because, you know, I 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 grow up in it.

I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he’s colorblind.

So it disqualifies you for being a pilot, being a SEAL because he had 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 of my kids are, well, my daughter is a doctor and my son’s in his

third year.

So.

But there’s a, I suppose, I mean, from my perspective, a bittersweet handover of this

incredible experience of flying to the younger generation.

So you don’t, you told yourself you’re not going to miss it.

You miss it?

There are days I do.

When I hear jets, like if I’m around a base or a jet flies over, but I have all the memory

so I can look at it and go, it can’t go on forever.

You know, Tom Brady can’t play football, but 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 it, you go, I had the opportunity.

And I think as automation moves on, especially with AI that, you know, when will, when will

the last man 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, a trittable 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.

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 a, she ended up going into aircraft maintenance when she couldn’t fly anymore.

One of the girls who everyone knows is incredibly, she’s one of the most gifted people I’ve ever

met in my life.

She is the vice president of Amazon air.

You can see her on TV, her name’s Sarah, uh, incredible.

And then I had a page who ended up taking command.

She got out of fighters and went into other platforms.

Um, and she was a commanding officer.

And then the other one is a, um, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all

four of the women that were direct.

Uh, I’m hoping not forgetting, I don’t think I’m forgetting someone, uh, incredibly, incredibly

talented, uh, and a great addition to the ready room.

So anyone that gets into the, Oh, you know, women can’t do it.

That’s all total horse crap.

Hey, 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 comes down to, uh, stick and throttle the ability to, uh, uh, 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.

And I’m not saying that everyone, if you took, cause we used to track.

So when I ran, we call it the rag, it’s the replacement air group.

It’s where, so the, the super Hornet training squadron, there’s two of them.

There’s one on the East coast at one Oh six.

And there’s one on the West coast, which is VFA one 22, one 22 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 cause Oh, he’s awesome.

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 going to struggle and

there’s a good chance they won’t get out.

And if they do get out, they’re going to 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 Piper Warriors low wing to see, are you adaptable

to this?

And there’s an evaluation that goes through and then if you hit a certain mark, then you’re

good to go and then they put you into primary.

It’s kind of like a, it’s like a precheck, you know, like the preset, the pre SAT to

go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT?

It’s, 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, 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 cause that’s the, everyone knows what

it looks like.

Big tall building.

Um, it’s what, maybe 1800 feet tall.

Even the Burj Al Dubai, which is like what 20 some hundred feet tall.

It’s not that big.

So a Super Hornet to do 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 against 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 a six 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, in aviation sense, when you’re starting to do vertical displacement numbers 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 what you mean.

We think 2d.

So if I’m fighting, how you really get an advantage when you’re fighting another airplane

is to work in the vertical, because most people will do like one move in the vertical and

then they want to start to flatten out because that’s where we’re comfortable.

Yeah.

So they’re 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 of, of fighting that can,

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 Tacs coming up and I’m at about, you know, and I’ve been doing this for at

the time, 16 years.

So I’m looking and I’m going, Hey, I’m here.

He’s there on the other side of the circle.

I’m going to do a vertical displacement.

I’m going to go like this.

I’m going to cut across the 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 had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this?

Because what I did before 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 at what doesn’t

bleed energy.

But I know if I do a real tight, that 2,500 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 2,500 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.

So you’ve got 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.

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.

That’s the most incredible dance of human decision making.

It’s just incredible.

I know a million people want me to talk about Tic Tac and I definitely will, but let me

ask the one last ridiculous, subjective question.

What’s the greatest plane ever made in history?

You don’t get to like…

From Pure Speed, I would say SR71, I think it’s an engineering marvel that was actually

developed in the fifties by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works.

For what that was able to do, and then when you get into history of it, you know how they

actually built…

The CIA actually made like six companies in order to buy the titanium from Russia to bring

it back and build an airplane out of titanium that we would fly over Russia.

To me, that’s an incredible…

Engineering marvel.

I think that like the X15, you know…

By the way, the SR71 still holds the speed record 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.

When I say that, I mean, so if you’re going 3000 miles an hour, a hundred feet above the

ground, you’re going 3000 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, you know, your ground

speed.

So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane.

Well, the air is so thin up there, you may only be showing like 300 knots.

But at 300 knots, you’re really doing 2,500 miles an hour over the ground.

So you know, like we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full the

maintenance check flights on them.

So when you’re doing 200, you know, in some odd knots, it’s actually slow for the airplane.

It’s, you know, you’re getting, you know, it’s kind of like, it’s not, you know, there’s

maneuvering speeds.

You know that if I hit a certain speed in a Super Hornet, that I have the full capability

of the airfoil.

If I’m below that speed, I’m going to stall the airfoil before I get to the maximum G.

Okay?

So when you look at something like that, you go, well, is it really going fast?

When you look at an SR71 that’s flying upwards of, you know, 70 plus thousand feet, the air’s

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 pedostatic system to show that

you’re going 300 knots, you’re screaming.

I mean, the fastest I ever got was, I was with the, well, soon to be Vice Admiral White.

So we had taken a check flight and I got it up to 1.78.

I got a Super Hornet up to Mach 1.78 and it was, and we were just right by Pebble Beach

too.

And then…

What’s that feel like?

Or is it just like…

When you get that fast, it started, to me, it got a little bit weird 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?

Or no?

Okay, maybe not.

You always want to push the limit.

You know, it’s like how fast, I could have got it going faster.

It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but I had, it was fuel limited and

space limited because I’m off the coast of California, Big Sur, and I’m going and I can

see Pebble Beach out in the distance, the whole Monterey Peninsula.

You’re just going fast.

And you’re doing almost 18 miles a minute.

I mean, you’re screaming.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s…

And then you have to turn…

Well, the airplane didn’t have anything on it.

It was a slicked off Super Hornet, so it was basically just the airplane.

No pylons, no pods, no nothing.

And then we had to get it turned around 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.

So it’s just, it’s crazy.

It’s incredible that a human can do this and a human can engineer the system which allows

another human to control that system.

To me, I think it’s a great experience.

Was it sad to see the SR71 go?

I think it was during your career.

I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes?

We would see it flying.

When I was flying Hornets, because West Coast flies and it’s called R2508, which covers

the Navy China Lake area and Edwards.

It’s a huge area.

It’s actually, I think, we had a guy from Switzerland come out because 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 SR71s, 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’d do a loop.

So you’d see them coming back down, they’d descend above 60,000, they’d get contrails,

the white lines behind airplanes, they’d come down and hit the tanker and then they’d go

back up.

So it was cool to be able to see them in my lifetime flying.

But I think with money, age, the advent of satellites, because they’re everywhere now,

I mean, you’ve got commercial companies putting satellites up, how much of that need was really

there?

Because you’ve got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn’t

flying around.

It was the U2 and the SR71 that were out there doing that work.

So at the time it was needed, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat

of aviation for that time.

I mean, literally we have yet to pass that and then 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.

And all the work with automation, all that kind of stuff.

So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in

my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who’s witnessed a UFO

literally an identified flying object.

And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it?

Like chase it, essentially?

Chase it.

So let me just lay out, I think it’s easier than you telling the story.

Maybe me and my dumb simpleton ways trying to explain the stories, I understand it.

And then maybe you can correct me.

So on November 10th, 2004, the USS Princeton, which is one of the carriers.

That’s a cruiser.

It’s a cruiser.

So you can’t land on a.

No, helicopter, it has a helicopter pad on the back.

Gotcha.

And it has weapons on it.

Okay, gotcha.

It shoots the missiles up.

But it has a nice radar.

It has an incredible spy one system phased array, four panels.

So it looks in quadrants.

Perfect.

So they started noticing on November 10th that there is a few objects flying around

at 28,000 feet with speed of what I guess is considered a low speed of 120 miles an

hour.

Don’t know what that’s in knots, but on the coast of California.

And they kept detecting these objects for just about a week.

Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th from the, I guess

it’s from the USS Nimitz.

You flew and witnessed a 40 foot long white Tic Tac shaped object with no wings flying

in ways you’ve never thought possible.

And in some interview somewhere, you said, I think it was not from this world.

So there’s a mysterious aspect to this object, to this entire situation.

There’s videos involved.

The video of a flare forward looking infrared receiver has also the visible lights.

You can switch as a TV mode.

So that gives you visible light and then as an IR mode.

And Chad Underwood recorded that video.

And those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later.

One of the three videos, the two other videos, go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something

14 and 15 on the East coast of the United States that had different kinds of objects,

but they’re weird in the same kind of way in terms of at least the videos and the experiences

that people have described were similar in the degree of weirdness.

But the differences is actually on 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, it’s a quite simple story without much

resolution to the mystery.

And it’s fascinating.

And there’s a lot of opinions.

There’s division of opinions because it’s a mysterious, I mean, it’s truly is a UFO

in the sense that UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.

So can you maybe correct me on any of the things I’ve gotten wrong, elaborate on some

key things and describe that experience in general.

So here’s what I know.

So yeah, we went out on our mission to go train and they canceled the mission and they

sent us down.

There’s all kinds of rumors out here.

There’s all kinds of, after this has come out, so originally it was the four of us.

There’s two jets, two people in each jet, they’re F18Fs, 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 it.

That’s it.

So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing?

Yeah.

So as we’re flying out, we get vectored.

They come up and tell us, hey, we’re going to cancel training.

This is a USS Princeton.

So this is a Aegis Cruiser.

So we’re talking to one controller who is like, hey, sir, first you ask what ordinance

we have on board.

And I laugh because we don’t carry live ordinance in training typically because bad stuff happens.

Usually someone forgets to put a switch on and then the missile comes off and hits a

good airplane and it’s not good.

So we had what’s called a Catam 9, which is really just a blue two with the AIM 9 seeker

on the front of it, which is an IR missile.

So there’s only two ways to get it off.

You can beat it off with a sledgehammer.

You can take this thing and you put a wrench in it and it unlocks the lugs and pulls the

lugs back in that hold it on.

When it really fires the impulse from the engine, actually throws the lugs forward and

breaks that release and it comes off down the rail.

That’s how it works.

So they said, hey, well, we have real world tasking.

So as we’re going out, my wingman, the other pilot, she maneuvers the airplane to the left

hand side of me.

So she’s kind of stepped up like this and I’ll use your mic box to start.

So as we’re going out, they’re calling ranges are called bra calls, bearing range and altitude.

And they’re telling us, hey, it’s at 40 miles or 50 miles and 40 miles and 30 miles.

So they’re saying, hey, two, seven, zero, 30, 20,000, that’s all they say.

So we got our radars and we had to mechanically scan radars at the time, APG 73.

Good piece of gear, APG 79, new one’s way better.

But anyway.

And I apologize if I interrupt the story, hopefully it’s useful, but they’re telling

you a location of a thing that you should look at.

They’re telling us they have a contact on their radar.

They don’t know what it is.

They just have a blip.

They have a little blip.

Well, they’ve been watching these things and what he told me is they had been looking at

these things as we’re driving.

He says, sir, we’ve been tracking these things for about two weeks.

That’s we had been at sea for two weeks.

This is the first time we’ve had planes airborne.

We want you to go see what these are.

Gotcha.

So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out.

That’s exactly it.

So we start driving out there and as we get down to, he’s going, you know, 20 miles, 15

miles, 10 miles.

And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the

resolution cell of the radar because radars don’t see everything there.

So they have a range and they have an azimuth resolution, right?

So and it’s basically think of a little cube so they can, and the whole sky is made of

all these little cubes and they’re looking.

So if you’re inside a cube with something and you’re both inside the same little cube,

then the radar can only see one thing.

Does that make sense?

Yep.

So they call merge plot.

Well, when we say merge plot to us, it means he’s right around, something’s around you,

get your head out.

So we’re not looking at radar scopes anymore and the wizos, the wizos 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 thing is

40 feet off the water, the panel, can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see

around the curve, but let’s just say that it can’t at this time.

So you go, is it, you know, where is it at?

So as we’re looking around, we see, now this is a, it’s a clear day.

There’s no clouds and there’s no whitecaps.

It’s just a calm, it’s actually a perfect day.

If you own a sailboat, it was that five to 10 knots of wind and you just want to kind

of go out there and you’re not going to get beat up and have whitewater coming out.

It was the perfect day to own a sailboat.

How many miles out do you see?

Like seven, like you see just, it’s a clear day.

It’s 50, it’s unrestricted visibility.

You can see literally all the way to the horizon.

It’s just clear.

It’s nothing.

And we’re basically off the coast.

If you look at a map and you go San Diego and then inside of Mexico, we’re kind of in

between that.

And we’re probably about, by the time this all hits, we’re price, I don’t know, 80, 100,

I don’t know, but somewhere out, it’s pretty far off the coast, but 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 know, 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 whitecaps 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 whitecap

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 or 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 burble, but when the air flows across the

flight deck, it drops behind the ship, you know, and then it kicks back up.

So when you’re coming board to land, it’s going to make you go up a little bit and then

you’re going to fall and you got to anticipate that to stay on glideslope.

So we’re pretty conscious of what’s going on out there with the waves and the wind.

So there’s no waves, there’s no wind, there’s no whitecaps, and we look down and we see

whitewater.

So if you put a piece of land, a seamount below the surface, like, you know, even 20

feet below the surface, it’s big enough.

As the waves come in, you know, waves have height and length.

When they come in, that’s what happens on the shore, when a wave comes in, it hits and

then it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up because it can’t go anymore

and then it breaks over the top and that’s where you get the weight.

So what happens is at sea, when you get a seamount, you’ll see stuff come in, the wave

will crash and you’ll get whitewater.

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’ll be whitewater around those rocks.

You’ll be able to tell there’s something underneath the surface.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So that’s what it was.

We don’t see an object because there’s all kinds of, oh, they saw another craft below

the wave.

We didn’t see anything below the water.

We just saw whitewater.

But the whitewater, and I like to shape it, you can say it was a cross.

I say it’s about the size of a 737.

So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water so the wave

is breaking over the top and you’re going to get whitewater where the plane is at, you’d

see this kind of shape.

So it looks like a cross.

So as we’re looking down off the right side, the backseater in the other airplane, Jim,

says this is that talking in partials again.

He says, hey, Skipper, do you?

And that’s about what he gets out of his mouth.

And I go, what the hell is that?

In a nice way.

Do you see that essentially is what he’s saying?

So we see the whitewater and that’s what draws our eyes down there.

Otherwise we’d have never seen it.

So we see this whitewater.

I would have loved 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 it’s abrupt.

It’s very abrupt.

So it’s not 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 and it stops and then it goes back the other way.

This thing’s not, it’s like left, right, left, right with no.

So moving in ways that doesn’t feel intuitive to you of the things you’ve seen in the past.

So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it’s a helicopter, right?

So you go, oh, what is, cause when we see it’s moving, we’re like, oh, helicopter.

So the first thing you look for to see if it’s a helicopter when they’re doing that,

because usually when they get down there towards that 50 feet, you’ll get rotor wash.

You see it in the movies when the helicopter’s by the water, it kicks, the water comes up

the sides cause the downdraft, you know, like a thunderstorm will do that.

It pushes the air down and then it has to come up the sides.

So you see it and you go, well, there’s no, 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 oclock, we’re driving around towards that nine oclock

position and we’re just watching this thing.

And it’s just, it’s still pointing north, south, and it’s going left, right, and it’s

kind of moving around the object.

And if it had, if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.

So if you’ve got the east, west, and then the north, south kind of across, it’s hanging

out on the southern thing that’s hanging out.

It’s just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it’s crossing over it and it’s going

up.

It’s just kind of, so now we’re like, what the hell is that?

So then I go, hey, I’m going to go check it out.

And the other pilot says, I’m going to 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 know, you can hear people say it’s high cover, whatever.

She’s watching me, which is, it’s perfect as the story goes on, because 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 oclock and I’m descending and it’s an easy descent.

I’m doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering

because I have, I have everything available to me at that speed.

So I’m coming down and as I get to 12 oclock, as the Tic Tac’s doing this, it literally,

it’s like, it’s aware of us and it just goes bloop and it kind of points out towards the

West and starts coming up.

So now it’s obviously knows that we’re there.

Whatever this thing is, it knows that we’re there.

So as we drive around, it’s coming up and I’m just coming down.

We’re just, I’m just watching it.

Now, you gotta remember this whole thing is like, this is like five minutes.

This is not like we saw it and it was gone or, 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 oclock position and I’m a little, I’m a couple thousand feet

above it and it’s about, so I’m probably at about 15 K I think it is.

I think that’s my story is about 15.

It’s just estimating.

So you can see it’s just a really easy descent because.

So what’s 15 K?

15,000 feet.

I thought it was 8,000.

No, the other plane ends up about that.

So they’re still at about 20,000 feet.

So they’re driving around and I’m descending.

They’re staying up there.

So I’m kind of doing this as they drive around.

Okay.

So I’m looking at this thing and it’s about the two oclock position.

We’re about the eight oclock position and I’m like, oh, I’ve got, I’ve got enough altitudes.

I’m going to, I’m going to cut across the circle.

I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I’m going to, I’m going to do this.

He’s like, go for it.

Skip.

Cause I was a skipper.

So I cut across the bottom.

So I’m kind of almost coming out coaltitude as this thing’s coming up, I’m going to meet

it.

And I’m driving and I get to probably it’s, I’m probably about a half mile away, which

you think, well, a half mile is pretty far.

Half mile in aviation isn’t, it’s nothing.

It’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 east.

So I’m cutting across cause I’m going to the three oclock position.

It’s at two oclock and I’m going to meet it at three oclock.

So as I do this, it goes, it just accelerates and disappears.

So 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 had 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 real quick.

I go, well, let’s see what’s down here.

And I turn around and we’re looking for the whitewater and we can’t even, the whitewater’s

gone.

There’s nothing.

It’s literally all blue.

So now you go.

And I remember telling the guy in my backseat, 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 overseas.

So we got to get our training done.

So that’s my mindset, especially as a CEO, cause I got to get, I got to get training

out of the flight time because I’m responsible to do that.

So, Hey, let’s go back.

And the, the, the guy who’s going to be the bad guys is the CEO of the Marine squadron.

And so Cheeks is at the, he’s listening to all this happen, you know, cause he’s just

like, cause he, they, when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little

Hornets, the legacy Hornets, the F18Cs don’t have as much gas as the Super Hornets.

So he had launched first and they were going to do him.

And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your cap point

down South, and we’re going to send, we’ll pass this off to the Super Hornets.

What’s a cap point by the way?

That’s where we hold.

So it’s called a combat air patrol point.

So we’re just going to hold at one end.

He’s going to hold at the other end.

It’s kind of like, Hey, you guys are going to get, it’s, it’s, 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 then 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.

Cause they know that we all know the frequencies.

So he’s listening to what’s going on because he’s like, cause they canceled training.

So what else is he going to do?

He’s just going to hang out there and do circles while he’s waiting for him and his wingman.

So they 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.

Cause we’re talking to the kid on the Princeton, the, the, uh, the, uh, they’re called OSs

or operations specialists.

They’re the ones that run the radars and we’re talking to him and he’s like, Hey, sir, you’re

not going to believe this.

He’s like, that thing is at your cap.

It showed back up.

It just popped up.

You know what I mean?

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 going to be, we’re going to, you know, I told him,

I told him, I go, dude, you know, we’re going to catch, we’re going to catch shit for this.

When we get back to the ship, word’s going to get out and we’re just going to catch maximum

shit.

And we did.

We were joking, you know, so the ship plays movies, we have movies on the boat and they

do 12 hours of movies.

So they repeat cause there’s a day check and a night check.

So the same movies in the morning and night play.

So you never get to ever get to watch a whole movie on the boat, which drives my wife crazy

cause I’ll watch stuff on TV that way too.

I’ll be like, Oh, Hey, I’ve seen this and it, 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, uh,

because that’s how we have to do it.

Cause we’re so busy.

Well, the movies became, and I, it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day.

Definitely going to catch some shit, but let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions.

So just take him, cause it’s whatever, 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.

Uh, so first of all, you mentioned, see, you saw at some point X, Y, and then, uh, somebody

in the Princeton said, you’re not going to believe this, 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 of you to no one, you know, you don’t, we don’t tell it, we don’t broadcast

it, we have a waypoint in the system, but I don’t know.

Maybe it knew where we were going.

Cause we use the same one day after day after day, but it, it obviously knew, but you never

saw it there.

Never saw it there.

Chad, when he took off, when he got the video, we landed, we told them, Hey, look, we just,

we just chased this thing.

They’re like, what?

I got to chase it.

And they’re like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video.

And he goes, and so, and that’s how he is.

He’s like, I’m going to go.

And he, he was, he, he was determined that he was going to find this thing.

So when you look at his video, and this is the stuff that isn’t out, that they don’t

see because not all the, all you see is the FLIR tape.

That’s the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver.

I’ll probably overlay the video for people to see.

When he goes out, it’s you know, what he’s looking at on his displays is he has basically

two radar displays up.

He has azimuth and range on the right one, and he has azimuth and elevation on the left

one.

So this is called the Azel 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 taken 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 is 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.

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 and the direction that it’s going.

Okay.

So the radar is smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it’s been messed with,

it will tell you, it’ll give you indications that I’m being jammed.

So that’s all it is, is you send a signal out, something, it manipulates the signal

either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back and the radar was smart

enough to go, that is not a return that I’m expecting.

Something’s messing with me.

I’m being jammed.

And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does

some stuff.

So you can mean, well, it does, it goes full into, it’s being jammed at about every mode

you can possibly see because everything comes up and this aspect gets along, it’s all kinds

of, I don’t want to get into details, but you can tell it’s being jammed.

So and it’s what it does.

As you said on Rogan, by the way, that jamming is an act of war, right?

Active jamming is, when you actively jam another platform, yes, it’s technically an act of

war.

It feels like you should be freaking out at this point, I mean.

So well, he does it and then in the back seat, so they don’t have a stick and throttle, they

have their side stick controllers so they can control all the sensors and they can just

toggle around and do stuff.

So he has the ability to just move one switch real quick and it will go from that azimuth

elevation on the radar to the targeting pod.

Well, as soon as he commanded the radar to look at that target, the targeting pod goes,

oh, what’s over there?

And it’ll stare 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, it’s a switch, it looks like a castle switch, what’s 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 pod’s 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 where those little bars you see in the video where the bars come

up left and right.

There’s doing some vision based tracking.

That’s exactly what it is.

So and then he goes through.

Changes zooms, changes the mode.

He goes through all the modes, so there’s a narrow, medium and wide.

So wide is far away, medium and then narrow.

And then there’s the TV mode and he goes from IR mode to the TV mode.

The cool thing with the TV mode is narrow IR mode is only medium TV mode.

So you can actually get closer with narrow TV mode.

It’s got a better zoom capability when you go into TV mode.

So he goes through all those things and that’s when you see it going from a black background

to a white background.

So you can 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?

So the video has been out, it actually was on YouTube for years before the government

released it.

It was leaked in 2007?

No, the guy that was in my backseat sent me an email and I had retired.

So this is about, nope, because I was working down in San Diego.

So this is about 2008, early 2009, he sends me a link to strangeland.com, which is not

suitable for work.

Oh yeah, it’s top notch.

And he says, I can remember the email, hey Skip, does this look familiar?

And I look at it, I’m like, how the hell did that get on strangeland.com?

So next thing you know, it ends up on YouTube, which was cool because you can send a YouTube

link to someone.

You don’t send strangeland.com to someone because you don’t know what you’re going to

get.

It’s like Googling kittens.

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 go, dude, what’s the coolest thing you ever saw flying?

It’s kind of like you were asking what it’s like.

And I go, oh dude, I chased a UFO and they’re like, get out.

And I’m like, no, serious.

This is literally how it happened.

So I was sitting with my friend Matt.

So Matt and I did our, he was the guy in my right seat of the A6 when I did my very first

night trap.

And we were friends to this day.

Because when you do stuff like people like that, I had to have faith in him, he had to

have faith in me, they become like your brother.

And these are guys that literally, I don’t talk to them on a regular basis, like Chris

who works at Apple.

If Chris called me up tomorrow and said, dude, I need help.

I need this.

I’d be like, all right, let’s figure this out and let’s do it.

Because it’s, they’re like family, you do it.

And most Navy guys, we don’t send letters to each other weekly.

You know, I have friends that I haven’t talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door,

you know, pop a bottle of wine, grab a beer, shoot the shit, take about first 10 minutes

to catch up.

And then it’s like old times and it’s amazing how fast it’s happened.

So I’m out to dinner with Matt and I’m telling him this story and he’s like, get out of here.

So he goes back and he tells our friend Paco, Paco has fightersweep.com, it’s a blog site.

So Paco’s obsessed, like he is way into UFOs.

So Paco calls me up, he says, dude, I was talking to Matty.

That’s what we call him.

He goes, I was talking to Matty.

He goes, dude, you got to tell me this story.

So I’m like, all right.

I’m going to spend a chunk of time and so he calls me one day and I’m like, I got to

get a voicemail.

Hey, give me a call.

So I call him up and he answers the phone, but I could hear people in the background

and I go, hey dude, what’s going on?

He goes, hang on, hang on.

I got to put you on speakerphone.

I go, what are you putting me on speakerphone?

He goes, you got to tell the story.

I’m having a dinner party.

You got to tell the story.

So he’s literally having a dinner party with his cell phone in the middle of the table

as I tell a Tic Tac story.

So he calls me up again.

He says, hey, I got this blog and he just writes about fighter stuff.

Like he wrote about that we call them the shit hot break.

That’s a guy that when you’re laying on a carrier, comes in, turns and gets ready to

land really fast.

Like breaks it off right at the back of the ship and one of the guys, when we were junior

officers on the USS Ranger, one of the department heads in the other squadron is a guy, Nasty.

And Nasty was notorious for coming in in a Tomcat and cranking off the shit hot break.

So he literally wrote a thing about the shit hot break with Nasty and there’s another guy,

Mav, was one of our landing signals officers for the air wing.

It’s a good article on how this was and how it kind of forms you in Naval Aviation, kind

of being part of the club.

So he’s like, I got to write about this thing.

I’m like, what do you guys, I got to write about it.

I go, all right.

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.

My wife didn’t even really know the whole story.

Why?

Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some.

You know, it was just, I’ll tell you what, three days we had the incident for about two

days.

They played the goofy movies.

There’s a comic on the back of the air wing schedule that they would put.

It was like first one was a far side and the second one was me and the guy in my back seat

and it was men in black, but it had our names, you know, protecting protecting the Nimitz

battle group type stuff.

It’s just funny shit like that.

So to me it wasn’t that big of a deal.

It was like, okay, that’s weird.

We’re never going to know what it was.

I want to get out there because this is important because there’s all kinds of rumors.

There’s a group of folks there.

No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.

Nobody looking like me.

No came out on a, no, no one came out of the helicopter.

No one came out on an airplane.

You know, you get, oh, I was told to turn over this classified.

What’s funny is all the COs and several of them are still in the Navy.

There’s one that is a, 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 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.

So there’s a kind of story to that.

And then from what I’ve seen, you said that you believe, just like we were talking about

offline, that jokes spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on

these ships, that it might’ve been a joke that started and.

Well, they did.

So here’s the joke.

So they had come down, right?

We had the tapes and they were Chad’s tapes.

So we use those tapes over and over again.

They’re consumable, but remember, I have a budget as a squadron, so I have a budget.

So I have to buy those tapes, 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.

So we had the tapes.

So the intelligence guys, the intel officers came down from what’s called Civic, CVIC,

which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes.

These guys are gonna come, they’re gonna come and get them.

So we’re like, I’m like, oh, whatever.

So we hand them the tapes and then someone, because I have, you know people, shortly after

they came and got the tapes, someone came to me and said, you know, they’re messing

with you, they’re playing a joke.

So I said, oh, well, let’s see how well that goes because I’m a CO and they’re not.

So I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a Lieutenant or Lieutenant JG, so he’s

way junior to me.

And I said, hey, I want my tapes back and he looks at me and I go, I know you guys are

pulling my leg.

I know there’s no one came out.

And I go, and you have about 30 seconds to get me my tapes before I start tearing this

place apart.

That’s literally what I told him.

And I said, and if your boss has an issue, he can come and see me because it’s not gonna

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 in a safe.

He opened up a filing cabinet and pulled them out and handed them to me.

I said, and I basically said a few things to him, like, don’t ever fuck with me again.

And I left, I had the tapes.

So this, no one came out.

There’s no flying going on when all this is happening.

And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes.

So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want.

So there’s a rumor or two that, oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long and there’s

some, one of these petty officers is saying, I saw it, that’s total crap.

The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long.

What you see on the release video is the entire video.

So you have mentioned, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me, but you

have mentioned that, like on Roguen, I think that you watched it on a bigger screen.

It felt like it was higher definition.

So let me ask the question, is there a higher definition version, do you think, of the FLIR

video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high

number of.

I would doubt it.

Because I don’t know where, the stuff that the government released, I don’t know where

they got it.

Okay.

So the stuff that was on Strangeland and YouTube, someone pulled off of a secret, it looks like

a rack.

There’s tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard

drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube.

No, it’s just like, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there’s

some quality that gets, it degrades.

So this, you don’t know how many times this has been copied.

So we were looking, the videos I’ve seen are right off the original, they’re Hi8 tapes,

it’s basically pulled off the back of the display, so it’s not filmed with cameras,

it’s literally a digital feed that’s pulled off the back and put onto a Hi8 tape.

That’s how the recorders work.

Now it’s actually digital to digital, it’s not even on tapes anymore, it’s a digital

recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly, because originally we had

little cameras here that shine, so if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.

So it’s a pretty good feed, when you put it on, so instead of looking at it on your tiny

little computer monitor or whatever, I’m looking at it on 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.

A nice, huge 19 inch screen.

It’s maybe 20, it was nice.

Wow, that’s huge.

It was gigantic.

I can get for like 50 bucks, you can get like 60 inches.

This is 2005.

So you look at it as this big thing.

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, did you get much more information from

the higher, from the clear?

Little things out of the bottom.

We didn’t see those visuals.

So the bottom information.

I got it.

So when you see it, because he’s coming almost coaltitude with it, you can see the bottom

of it.

It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a Cessna, there’s little antennas

hanging out of the bottom.

Kind of like that.

There was two little things out of the bottom.

There’s nothing on the top.

There was no plume, no IR, no visible propulsions, even heat signature.

You know, it’s all that stuff.

And then the other thing that people didn’t see is they didn’t see the radar display,

which that really raises a classification of it, especially to see what the radar does

when it’s being jammed.

You know, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation in about

2000 and let me think about 2009.

I got a call on my cell phone from a guy who government employee and said, hey, he told

me who he was.

He’s still in the government.

I’m friends with him.

And he said, hey, we’re going to investigate your Tic Tac thing.

This is literally five years later.

Yeah.

Five years later.

And I said, OK, whatever.

And he did a pretty good job.

I caught the unofficial official report because it was really never official.

It wasn’t.

But I’ll give you the history of why I say that and why it never came out in FOIA requests.

So he does the report.

He sent me the report.

And all he said is, hey, I’m going to send you this report.

Please don’t distribute this report.

I said, OK.

The report is now out because Harry Reid got it to George Knapp and they were good enough

to redact it.

But there’s a few versions of it unredacted and I’m very protective of the other people

that were involved in this.

So Jim has talked, but he’s off the grid.

He doesn’t talk to anyone now.

The pilot of his airplane, she has come out 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.

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 knew who the names were because he got the report from Senator Reid.

And then the other crew.

So the pilot of the airplane that took the video that Chad was in, if you talk to that

individual, they really don’t have the recollection.

They were just out flying that day and it wasn’t a big deal.

So it’s 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 are you talk

to everyone.

You know, you’re about the 23rd person that I’ve talked to total.

And that includes, you know, the newspapers and stuff.

And I’ve been selective because there’s so much, I mean, if I turned down like, I turned

down Russian TV.

I can give you her name when we’re done here.

She called, she not only called me, she called my wife, she called my daughter, she called

my son and she called my son in law because they’re persistent.

So I’m pretty protected.

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 and 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.

Cause 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 whole thing, that’s to the stars Academy.

That’s the Tom DeLonge group that got started.

So you go, well, you know, cause I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he’s

actually, when you talk to him, he’s, 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 of 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 undersecretary of defense for intelligence

and he’s part of the Mellon dynasty, you know, from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.

He knows, he, he, he definitely knows how the government works cause he worked there.

And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he’s one of the first people I’ll go to.

When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, month and a half ago, I asked, he texted me,

I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, Hey, cause they were like, you gotta do it.

Cause I turned to, I turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his, 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 to me, there seems to be some stigma.

So I come from the scientific community and I really appreciate you talking to me today.

And I think that people who listen to this include, you know, of 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 properly, you know, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the

best way possible from the scientific perspective.

And I, I just would love to remove stigma from this subject.

Well, I think that’s the first step we have done in this country, an absolutely terrible

job with these things.

So you go, and I joke, you know, go back to Roswell.

So the first reports that came out of Roswell was we have this crash flying saucer.

That’s literally what came out.

And then magically the next day it’s a weather balloon and they’re showing your pieces of

mylar and you go, well, that doesn’t look like what they showed us yesterday.

Then you get into Project Blue Book, you know, so there’s that whole series about Project

Blue Book.

But the bottom line of Project Blue Book is it really did two things.

It investigated sightings and it did everything it could to debunk and disprove to the point

where it actually went to discredit, you know, to make you look.

So there’s always been this, I don’t know if you’d call it an aura around it or a mystique

about UFOs that if you’re talking about them, they’re nuts.

With ours, because I’m not a UFO guy, I’m not a junkie.

If you 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.

The odds are against it.

If you do just do the math, you have to accept, because there only has to be one other planet

that has life on it and then I win and you lose.

And then more and more science is showing that there’s habitable planets out there,

that yeah, everything we’ve learned so far, we know very little, but everything we’ve

learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth like planets, it seems that

it’s very likely that there’s life out there.

Intelligent life is another topic, but life.

Well, we as humans, you know, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us

that says, ha ha, we’re it and you go, not so much.

Maybe we’re not so intelligent.

Because we are, it’s just how we learn.

So our main mode of transportation and what people figured out years ago was the internal

combustion engine, which led us to jet engines and solid rocket fuel.

What if you’re in another planet where you figured out the ability to create a gravity

field or you used, 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’ve proven that.

So you look at that way and you go, well, does that mean that, you know, 70 years ago

Einstein was wrong or 80 years ago Einstein was wrong?

Or do you go, we just didn’t have the ability to look that deep into space to actually find

something that we could, to actually measure.

And you know, and I’ve seen this stuff.

And that’s just a hundred years and the kind of things that can happen in a few centuries.

Look what we’ve done in the last 20 years.

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Let me direct, cause it’s such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science

perspective, you’re, I mean, you’ve spoken, 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, did it impact your career?

Is that why more people haven’t come out?

Like you’ve mentioned Roswell, like how, what advice do you give to people, to the community,

to me as a scientist for ways to go forward about this topic and still have a, you know,

not being put in a bin in society that he’s a loon or she’s a loon or that person.

Mine is to get away from the little green men, just divorce the two little green men.

And you know, and I’ve talked to Lou Elizondo about this, you know, 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, Lou Elizondo, as you mentioned, was a program director.

He ran the ATIP program at the Pentagon.

And ATIP was a program that was tasked with investigating any kind of UFOs, UAPs.

So what’s funny is the unofficial official report that I joke about, the guy who wrote

the unofficial official report was actually an original member of ATIP.

And the original stuff that ATIP did was FOIA exempt.

And people go, how do you know that?

I go, because I stood there with the memo in my hand that said these are, it literally,

I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed.

So he was one.

So that’s why 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 FOIA request and

I didn’t get that.

I go, well, just because you put in a FOIA request and 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 he can’t find it?

I actually got called by the Navy.

I had a commander in the Navy call me about right before the article came out in the New

York Times.

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 situation reports that come

off the ship?

And you know, and you got to 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.

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 Lou, I mean, did you think about

your impact to your career?

Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other thing, other people

like in the 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, cause I’ve been on a couple of shows, when you look

at it, you know, they come to my house and they film me for two hours.

And then what you see on the screen is five minutes.

Well, and the other thing with the press, let me give you my perspective from Autonomous

Vehicles is the clipping happens, yes.

But also the incompetence.

Let me just call out journalists.

They’re not thinking, I mean, so here’s the thing, I have a PhD and I’ve taken painfully

too many classes from like physics, math, and I also have a deep curiosity about the

world.

I read a lot.

That seems to be missing with journalism.

So you’re talking to a person who is not going to push the story forward in an interesting

way, not the story, but the actual investigation of perhaps one of the most amazing things

that humans have witnessed in history.

Like you, it might’ve been nothing, who knows what you witnessed might’ve been from a sort

of debunking perspective, might’ve been some kind of trick of mind.

You and others have hallucinated something that could be some simple explanation, but

possibly it was something not of this world and to not do justice to this story from a

scientific perspective, it seems at best negligence.

And so that’s true for journalists, that’s true for other scientists.

It’s just a human nature.

If we see something that we can’t explain, then sometimes if you just, eh, maybe it’s

just me and you let it go away and you don’t think about it, maybe it’ll just, you ignore

it.

The other side is the inquisitive mind that says, well, what was that?

And I want to dig more into it.

And if you look at it or you’re going against the norm, you can get ostracized.

And if you look at, and Einstein’s the perfect example, I mean, when he started coming up

with some of his theories, some of the top physicists in the world were like, dude, you’re

a nut job.

He’s, he’s literally proving them, but he didn’t have, you know, he proved them in theory,

but he didn’t have the means to actually do the experiment to prove his theory.

There’s a great book that I recommend people read called Proving Einstein Right by Jim

Gates that talks about like the hard work that people try to do years after to try to

experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with, 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 the incident that you’ve experienced.

So let me kind of dig in, let me just ask some questions of maybe to see if there’s,

just to paint more and more of the picture.

One you kind of mentioned, so Tic Tac Shape, let’s break apart two situations.

One is the video.

Let’s look at the actual eye account, the eyewitness account that you saw with your

own eyes.

What’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 some texture to it that, no smooth white Tic Tac, you know, 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, or remember we’re

looking at the original tape, so there’s not, there’s basically no degradation.

But when you saw with your eyes, there’s no kind of appendages.

No, none.

What about, like somebody asked, a lot of people asked you questions.

So I appreciate you spending your time here.

Let me ask some of them.

Did you, I mean, you chased it, so 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.

So 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?

And did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, an air fight against

a sort of like a, I don’t know, 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.

It’s kind of like an animal.

If you’ve ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it

sees you and you’re on the other side of the field, it’ll actually go no threat and it’ll

start eating.

You know, they don’t put their tail up.

As you move closer to the deer, then it goes, oh, it’s there and I’m going to react or I’m

going to move.

So as we were up high and it’s down doing whatever it was doing, you know, which I don’t

know if someone asks, what do you think?

I go, oh, maybe it was communicating with something.

I joked on good morning America.

Maybe it’s like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know, and actually

use that clip.

It was kind of funny, but yeah, we’re a little human centric.

We think like it would, it’d show up to talk to us, but maybe he’s talking to the dolphins.

Yeah.

It was to whatever, you know, cause it was hanging around that whitewater and I don’t

know if it was, there’s something there as a seamount.

We just didn’t find it again.

I don’t know.

But once we started to descend and it actually reoriented its longitudinal axis and it started

mirroring us coming up 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

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.

But 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, especially as long as much time

as I’d spent inside the airplane flying and doing stuff, I felt totally, it was like a

safe zone.

I mean, I felt totally comfortable inside the airplane as most, you can’t, if you’re

in the airplane and you feel scared, it’s not the job for you.

You have to feel that because the airplane is part of you now.

You know, I am inside, I have the stick, I have the throttles, I’ve got my wizzo 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 a hundred knots above

the water.

And for me to, you can’t just start a climb, I’d have to lower the nose, I’d have to accelerate

and then I’d have to start coming up and this thing just like, just did it like it was like

no big deal.

Yeah.

You mentioned that like kind of your reaction to it was, it like, it’s something that you

would love to fly almost.

So this object, just the curiosity you experienced 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 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 op, a physical hard object that could be flyed.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

I think all four of us will tell you the same thing.

It wasn’t, it wasn’t, this was not, cause you go, okay, let’s just go on.

It’s a light projection.

Well, if we were both sitting next to each other and we were looking at it from the exact

same angle and all that, and I go, 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 coast, I mean like when you

get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest, it’s incredible.

You know, you’ve got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean that you got pretty

high contrast.

And for this thing just to disappear, it wasn’t, I’m telling you, I would, I mean, I know we,

we all have the same 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?

It could be.

What?

Like, do you ever think of this?

Big ship comes up.

I mean, that’s why as a person, so I love like swimming out into the ocean by miles

and Olympic swimmers.

Like I love that feeling, but I’m also terrified when I swim because the abyss, it could, anything

could be under there.

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 that was anything underneath

there?

Could be.

I mean, think about it.

If you’re going to hide on this planet, what’s the least explored spot on the planet?

Two thirds of it’s the ocean.

There’s literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the 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 be, you’d find something, they haven’t found anything except

what floated.

So to hide something underwater I think would be easy.

So okay.

Let’s go a little bit in speculation land, but it’s the best, it’s the best we can do,

which is the basic question of what do you think was it?

So if you had to put money on it, is it like advanced human created technology?

Is it alien technology?

Is it an unknown physical phenomena?

You know, like a ball lightning, for example, there’s a lot of fascinating things we probably

humans don’t really understand.

Is it like I said, some perception cognition that led you some kind of hallucination that

made you to misinterpret the things you were seeing?

Let me put those things on the table.

Or is it misinterpretation of some known physical phenomena like an ice cloud or something like

that?

What do you think it was?

Definitely.

I don’t think it’s an ice cloud because ice clouds don’t fly around and react to you.

Do I think it was a light?

I’d say no, because of the aspects and what we looked and watched it do.

I’d say no.

What do you mean by light?

Like a light ball, you know, some type of perception, you know, there’s their experience

like plasma, you can do plasma and you can go, oh, I can see it, but it’s really not,

you know, it’s plasma.

I don’t think so.

So you would see distortions, I think, as it moved.

Maybe not.

I’m not a theoretical physicist and some, you know, I’m not an MIT.

I would say no, I mean, it looked from all my experience and I had quite a bit of it

when this happened, no, I think it was a hard object.

It was aware that we were there.

It reacted exactly like if I was another airplane and I had to come up and do something exactly

what I would do.

You know, it mirrored me.

It wasn’t aggressive.

You know, there’s talk, oh, it flopped behind us.

It was never offensive on us.

It never did that.

It just mirrored us.

So as we’re coming down, it’s just like, you know, you’re kind of, you know, you said you

do martial arts, you know, or wrestling, you know, you see people out on the, when they

get into the ring, especially with collegiate wrestling, cause my roommate in college was

a collegiate wrestler.

So I de facto became a wrestler cause he beat me up every night and we joke.

I talked to him literally probably three, four times a week.

But you know, you see wrestlers when they get out, they kind of, you’re kind of feeling

each other as you walk and 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 then 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.

I could have just watched it.

I mean, my one regret out of the whole thing is we have a camera in our helmet and 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 nauseate you.

So we never turn that on and all, you know, it’s the one thing I didn’t do is reach down

and hit the switch, you know, and then we didn’t go back and cause our tapes didn’t

have anything cause we didn’t get it on radar.

Because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn’t,

it wouldn’t lock.

The radar wouldn’t lock.

And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let’s try to get some

hints at it.

Do you think it’s human, like advanced human created technology that’s simply top secret

that we’re just not aware of?

Or is it not something not of this world?

So 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, you know, and

I don’t speak for the United States government and I never will speak for the United States

government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and

why we classify stuff, you know, 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 going to go to Mars?

Well, if you have something that has the ability to go, because remember, these things were

coming down when the cruiser tractor 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.

You don’t have anything that can come down, hang out and once, you know, and I’m talking

hold out in a spot.

Well, we all know there’s winds.

They’re not drifting like a balloon.

They’re just sitting there and then they would go back up and they tracked up to the, when

I talked to the controller, he’s like, we’ve seen up to 10 of these things.

There’s other guys and it was raining and all this other, let’s just say they tracked

a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up.

So it’s not just propulsion and the way it moves, it’s also fuel.

It’s everything.

So…

The whole of it indicates a kind of technology that’s highly advanced, but you don’t think

in your sense that you actually don’t know, but you know more than a lot of people, in

your sense, the top secret military technology, if you think about skunkworks, if you think

about it like that, cannot be more than 15 years ahead.

I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117.

Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out like it was developed at this time.

It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.

What’s the 117?

That’s the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B2, but the stealth fighter.

So you look at that, you know, yeah, you can, I think you can hide things for a while.

But I think a technology, a leap, I mean, this is not a, hey, we developed this and

we’re kind of pushing the edge of technology.

This is a giant leap in technology.

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 Postgraduate

School is another one.

There’s usually indicators, there’s papers of, hey, this is where we’re going.

I don’t think there’s a whole bunch of papers on developing a gravity based propulsion system

that literally, I’ve got an object, 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?

Also by the way, you mentioned gravity based.

That’s kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of propulsion, like what

kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement.

To me, all the gravity discussion just seems insane from a physics perspective, but of

course it would seem insane until it’s not.

Because remember, we only know what we know, which is very little.

Someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all?

So you’re saying that if you had to bet money, all your money, it would be something that’s

alien technology, so it’s not human created technology.

Well, I don’t like to get into little green men, but I would say that I don’t think we’ve

developed it.

I don’t think we’ve developed it.

Because the other one, someone asked me, they said, what if there wasn’t, maybe it was just

a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from someplace else.

I mean, we’ve got stuff out there flying around.

So I don’t know.

I mean, I’d like to sit around and talk to some of the giant brains that think this stuff

up.

I was supposed to be on a podcast with one of them.

Which topic?

Which you mean for drones?

Just space travel technology.

Because if you look at where we’re going, because everyone talks about Mars, and you’re

okay, and we’re, hey, are we going to be able to colonize?

And I know Elon is big into that.

Yeah, what do you think about Elon, SpaceX, NASA?

We put humans back up there.

My theory, so it’s funny because I know one of the guys that was, he was one of the original

employees at SpaceX.

He’s a friend of mine, and I won’t say his name.

But he knows Elon.

And he actually worked on the entire Falcon 1 project.

He’s one of the lead guys on that.

So he’s got some great, as a matter of fact, there’s a movie, there’s a book coming out

that comes out in about a year on this.

The original, the first years of space, first six years of SpaceX.

And he’s named in the book.

And they’re supposed to make a movie on it.

So I’m like, hey, who’s going to play it?

But what he’s done, to me, it changed the game, and here’s why.

Because I said, I think it was 62 when Eisenhower warned of the industrial defense complex.

Which it has become, everything he warned us of, it has become, and it’s really driven

by, there’s the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing.

Those are the big, those are your biggest, and Raytheon’s kind of right, like a subset

of that.

But Raytheon’s pretty big too.

But in US defense, those are the big guys, right?

That’s actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like

that.

And you look at that, and you go, and the way government contracting is working, and

how we charge, and why things cost so much.

And then you go, you got Elon, who’s got an ego, and he doesn’t like to do things a certain

way.

And I’ve talked to the guy that worked there on, because the government likes to have oversight

of contracts, where he was like, no, just tell me what you want, I’ll build it, and

I’ll give you a bill when it’s done.

And then if I do it for half the price, I make a ton of money, because he’s a money

driven guy, which I like, capitalism at its best.

So now you look at the two things.

So you got the SpaceX, which is the Dragon capsule, 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 Thicol, we’ve reused them on the space shuttle.

But they had to take them all apart and do a bunch of stuff, because they landed in Saltwater,

and then he had to put them all back together.

Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, go, what do they do?

Do they like rehaul, 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 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 the fact that

we were paying huge amounts of money to the Russian government, and oh, by the way, if

you didn’t know, because I have some friends that are astronauts, they all have to learn

Russian.

Right?

And they have to do, it’s what, level five, where the test is a phone call, where they

call you up and they, because they would go, so I went to the pinning, two friends of mine.

The one actually had a mission date, the one got one later.

So it’s cool when you’re watching your friends doing a spacewalk, 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 makers out there floating around doing

his stuff.

And I saw one, he’s in the space station while they’re doing a spacewalk, so it’s kind of

cool when you go, oh yeah, I know that dude, he’s up there in space, floating around.

So when you look at what those, they’re capable of doing, and then you go, what Elon is bringing

to the fact that now it’s back in America, it’s actually, to me, it’s cost effective

for us to be able to do more stuff.

I think it opens the door to, do we go back to the moon?

Is there a reason to go back to the moon?

Personally, I think if they’re really going to go, in years from now, go to Mars, I think

that the moon is the stepping stone to go back, to start proving some of the technology,

to go, hey, we can build this, we can get on the moon, and now we can get back off the

moon.

Because we did this on 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 Wapakonet, Ohio, at the parade after

he walked on the moon, because his parents didn’t live far from my aunt and uncle in

Wapakoneta, and they were out at the parade.

So I’ve been obsessed with this since I was a child.

Do you hope to, do you think, do you hope that you’ll go out to space one day?

Me?

If I had the opportunity, I’d go in a second.

I am not.

Because, I mean, that’s one of the hopes of the commercial space flight, is that, you

know, like people like, I mean, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn’t want to,

in terms of, you’re not kind of a civilian, right, I mean, in a sense that you’re just

a normal person, you’re not a 5G 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’d be, you know, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I’d be all over

it.

I’d be like, okay, but, you know, sometimes you gotta get your kicks while you’re alive.

I’d love to hear that discussion with your wife.

Listen, there’s the pros and cons.

She’s, I mean, I’ve known her since high school, so she, yeah, she knows how I am, you know.

Most people that know me are like, yeah, you’re pretty much the same person you were in high

school.

You know, I was a class clown and I still am that way.

So let me ask you this question.

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 TICTAC, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which

are obviously, just like you said, if there’s something to it, if it can be investigated

somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing

propulsion systems that can get us cheaply out to space.

What should Elon think about this stuff?

What should he do?

What should people like him do?

I think people need to open their aperture up and stay off of, take the next step and

go, you know, we are tied to fuels and either solid rocket or liquid or whatever we do,

but it’s a thrust generated where we rapidly expand gas to create thrust, which is really

in layman’s terms, you know, we can get into what, but that’s what it does.

If you have something that you can contain that is a fuel source that would last a significant

amount of time, you know, those rocket boosters go and when they’re done, they’re done.

There’s enough to get them back down and that’s it.

There’s not a huge, you know, they’re not coming back and go, oh, I still got three

quarters of a tank.

Let’s bolt them on and do it again.

His system’s not doing that.

But you know, the way contracting, especially in the government, the government has tons

of money, but you got to remember the government has to justify how they spend our tax dollars

for the most part.

There are 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, there’s some big money

out there.

I mean, you’re talking, you know, Bezos alone could buy companies like big companies.

Apple’s another one.

These companies 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, 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.

I can’t believe you agreed to this.

But, but when I haven’t killed me yet, you’re here and you’ve been here for a while.

No, no, no.

I’m joking.

I’m an American citizen.

I’m actually pretty much American.

But see, when you do that, so you look at, let’s just look at American universities.

Yes.

There are some brilliant minds and we’ll just use MIT because you worked down there.

There’s some brilliant minds, but there’s a huge chunk of those brilliant minds that

are not American citizens.

So if you 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 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 realize that space was too expensive for one country to do alone.

So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate.

That’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 going to have to replace parts and do stuff.

But if we can pool the money together and come up with something that would literally

change mankind and change travel and allow us to actually do a more effective thing of

engineering, because if you develop that technology, you don’t even have to send a man person.

If you can develop a technology that’s so, and with our automation and where we’re progressing

and our competing power to send something out that’s not just floating around when,

you know, that can react a lot quicker, something that could actually go down to the surface

and come back up.

So right now, everything we get out of Mars, it goes down there and then it just sends

data back.

Get an analyzer.

But if I’ve got a technology that can go up there really quick, I’m not worried about

man.

I don’t have life support systems and all that.

But if it can go down, it can go, it can cruise around, it can hover above, it can take samples

and it can actually take Martian soil and then bring it back.

So we can analyze it here.

That’s a game changer.

It’s a complete game changer because it opens up all the planets.

Exactly.

So in a sense, the Tic Tac is a symbol.

So whatever you think, even from a debunking perspective, there’s a nonzero probability

that it’s alien technology.

In that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the

aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box.

It’s almost a hope to say we can do better propulsion.

We can overcome physics in an order of magnitude better way and it’s worthwhile to try.

I think, and I don’t think the money, if you look at a big picture with the amount of money,

some that’s out there floating around these private companies, 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, what, a hundred and some billion dollars in that work.

So if he said, hey, a hundred million dollars, you drop a hundred million dollars and I go

and I’m going to put a, like the government will send a broad area announcement out that

says, hey, we’re looking for this technology or a DARPA program.

But what if I just said, hey, who’s to stop Bezos and Elon from doing that on their own

to say, hey, I want to go pool universities because they have fewer restrictions because

it’s not tax dollars.

They don’t have the checks inbound.

They can do whatever they want.

So their money, sorry about that, 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 going to give you your salaries and we’re going

to do that or whatever the amount works.

So let’s cut it down to five so we can pay you well, right?

To do the research.

But, oh, by the way, the research is, it’s not classified, but it’s controlled.

So we’re not going to 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 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 mindset.

Because we have a tendency to, we evolve the stuff that we create, but it’s like I was

joking because I know a ton of guys with PhDs and girls.

And I said, but how much, when a person gets a PhD in engineering, how much new math is

really being done?

I said, there’s a handful of people in the world that are really doing, I’m talking Stephen

Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I’m really doing something that’s totally different.

That’s a big dramatic thing now going on in physics that everybody’s converged towards

this local minima or local maxima, whatever you think about it.

And it’s again, same as with the TICTAC, thinking outside the box is not accepted and it probably

should be.

But it’s hard because if you go back, go back to Einstein, back to the original, he was

out of the box.

He did not think the norm.

That’s true genius.

Had he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories, where would

we be?

Okay, we’re jumping around a little bit.

So we’ve talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, but let me jump back to a

few questions that folks had.

I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual facts

of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart

a little bit because people are just talking past each other, but let me kind of bring

it up.

Mick West, I’ve just recently started to pay attention just in preparing to talk to you

about this world.

And Mick West is one of the better known people who kind of makes a career out of trying to

debunk.

Sort of his natural approach to all situations is that of a skeptic.

I think it’s very useful and powerful, especially for me coming from a scientific perspective

to take the approach he does.

It’s valuable.

And I think no matter what, I think there’s, I hope that people, quote unquote, true believers

are a little bit more open minded to the work of Mick West.

I think it’s quite useful and brilliant work.

So let me ask, he has a bunch of videos, a bunch of ideas where he kind of suggests possible

other explanations of the things that were out there.

He has some explanations of the things that you’ve seen in with the Tic Tac, like with

your own eyes.

He says that it’s possible that you miscalculated the size and the distance of the thing and

so on when you were flying around.

I don’t find that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that.

Let me do it right now.

Sure.

So, cause 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 ish, right around there.

So when I look down, I know what a Hornet looks like looking down on them cause 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 cause it’s about Hornet size.

So and as I go around, you know, 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 experiences, you know, professional observers,

which is what we’re actually trained to do.

And having done it for so long, no, it was, and everyone came back with the same thing.

They’re like, yeah, it’s about 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, 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 go back to landing at night.

So your eyes assume that the runway and your brain assumes that

the runway is fixed, but you know that the runway is moving.

So if I try and do stuff visually, 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 we were 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.

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,

I’d be like, I’d argue going, no, I’m not.

Because you know, when I’m flying the airplane, even as I’m looking at the Tic Tac, I’ve got

a heads up display that tells me what my airplane’s doing.

So I’ve got, I know what I’m doing.

I can look outside.

I’ve got a sense of what I’m doing, but I’m also looking inside to cross check of what

I’m seeing is in reality, what I’m doing.

You actually, your brain gotten good at combining almost adding extra sensory information.

You have to, you have like supervision, so you’re combining what you’re seeing and adjusting

what the sensors, what you call an instruments are 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.

You’d be amazed at how good, so here’s a, here’s another example.

So if we go out over the water, so there’s no land in sight and we’re going to fight.

So when we fight, you know, two airplanes, we’re going to 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 call it drawing arrows.

So you have to recreate that stuff.

So you get pretty good at going, you know, like I would take off and say, all right,

we’re starting heading due east and I know where the sun is at because in the short couple

minutes that we’re going to fight, the sun’s really not going to move much.

It’s going to be in a relative zone.

I know that the sun is at, you know, let’s just say 195 degrees, right?

So I’m starting going east and it’s actually be down off my right hand side.

So now I know as I’m fighting, cause in the water you don’t have any reference.

Like I pass land.

I pass land.

No, you don’t.

And you can’t use clouds cause clouds do move.

But you got to come back cause 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 that you can come back

and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened.

And you get really, really good at that.

So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six oclock?

And he went around and he came up here.

I go, because I’m trained to do all that.

And I take all the notes, why I’m flying, you can do it.

But usually it’s, you memorize it all and you get done and then 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 and you go out with a stack of cards

and you stick the new one on your knee board card so you’re ready to go and here’s the

next setup.

It’s kind of, it’s in some way similar to what like at the, 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 in remembering like how the

games evolved.

It’s not like it’s much richer than the actual moves.

It’s like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all

the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved.

It’s more like instinctual from years and years of experience.

So they try to put it into words, but they really can’t.

It’s just.

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.

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 challenge yourself against someone that is better than you, you learn.

So I learned how to fight an airplane with, he’s actually one of my best friends, we’ll

call him Tom.

I won’t give his call sign because I don’t know what his name is.

So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight because Tom had just left Top Gun.

He was the training officer at Top Gun, which so that’s the guy, the training officer is

the main guy at Top Gun.

So Tom was the training officer at Top Gun.

So Tom, when I learned, because I had come out of A6 and we really don’t fight because

it was a bomber.

So I get in F18s 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 F18 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 going to 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 don’t, no one walks out into that world.

I don’t care how gifted of an aviator and go, I am the man or the woman.

I am it.

No, it’s a learning process.

And so over all those years, you’ve gotten good.

So what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac?

Low.

Zero.

Well, I mean, I’m not zero.

So maybe 90.

Yeah, I am ninety nine point nine percent.

So point one percent.

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.

Look up.

Well, I don’t find that particular debunking case that you said, but I’m glad you put it.

You you said those words out loud.

So for me, from my perspective, coming into this world and looking at it, I’m a little

bit more skeptical.

So your eye account, I think, is the most fascinating story.

And that I think that’s inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists

out there on so many levels, just like we said, an engineering level that maybe there’s

propulsion systems we can actually build that can do some crazy, amazing stuff.

So it’s at the very least intriguing and at the best inspiring.

I just want to say that.

But on the video side, it’s like it’s the videos for the Flir 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 this is where I’m coming from.

Maybe you can convince me otherwise.

But so to bring up Mick West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that

one of the most amazing video parts of the Flir video for people haven’t seen it is at

the end of it, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left off the screen.

And what Mick West says is that, you know, Mick West, 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 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 to that debunking aspect?

So it’s funny how people can extrapolate stuff who’ve never operated the system.

No, for sure.

And that’s like me going because I’m a big Formula One fan.

You know, that’s like me going, oh, my God, Lewis, what were you doing?

You could have done this with the car and you’d have won the race.

You know, and Lewis Hamilton right now is, you know, defending world champion two time

ways, four time, four or five time world champion.

But that would be pretty stupid of me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car.

Or a matter of fact, anyone driving a Formula One car.

So I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched.

You got to remember when we looked at this thing, when when Chad came back with the video,

we sat there and watched that.

I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all

right, right.

All right.

Let’s look at this, you know, because you can look and see where the you can see where

the airplane’s going.

You can see if it’s looking left or right.

And if you actually watch all that stuff, it doesn’t do that.

It actually when the vehicle starts to move, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open

up and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod.

The tracking gate will start to open up.

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, the pods looking forward when the pod passes underneath the airplane.

So if I’m looking at you and you pass underneath me as it does this, the ball will actually

flip around to kind of finish off and it’ll it’ll it swaps ends because it has, you know,

it’s a gimbal.

It can’t just it’s not free floating.

But there’s a theory on one of them.

Oh, it’s here and it flipped over.

It doesn’t do that when it’s looking out in front.

It stays like this.

So yet another 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 white object is actually colder than the ocean.

That’s fine.

If they were colder than the ocean, they’d be dead.

So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the

apparent rotation of the object.

That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of.

And Mick West suggests that a flare like reflections or whatever can explain.

Now, 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 and it’s his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends for the

video, the movie and both of them that go fast in the game were shot by the same person.

Yeah.

OK, so and they were in each other’s wedding.

So that’s how well they know each other.

OK, so what you don’t see is.

So the airplanes, airplanes still super hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new

phased array radar that’s made by Raytheon, things incredible, OK?

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 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 thing.

So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, holy shit,

look at that thing.

And it’s in the wind and it’s going against the wind while it’s doing this.

You know, someone goes, oh, it’s an airplane.

No, if an airplane does this, it’s eventually going to start to change aspect because it’s

in a turn.

This thing doesn’t change aspect.

It just rotates.

It’s just rotating.

Right.

The other thing that you see when you talk to them is so they’re on their radar.

There’s an object that they identify is their number one priority or their launch and steering.

So when they designate that, that’s where the targeting pod is going to look.

That’s what you get on the gimbal video.

There’s five other I think it’s five.

They’re kind of in a V, you know, like a geese would fly that are out in front of it and

they’re actually coming.

They’re out in front of it and they actually turn on the radar and go the other way while

they’re filming the gimbal video, which it’s I know Ryan has come out and talked about

it.

But when you see it, you go, you know, if you take it in context 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 VACAPES.

It actually became, I called a buddy of mine who was running the wing at the time, the

fighter wing.

I said, dude, what are you guys doing about this?

He goes, well, we got a NOTAM out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there’s these

objects out there in the warning area.

So anyone, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area.

All the warning area tells you is that there’s high military traffic and training out here.

It’s probably best not to be here, but there’s nothing that prohibits you from going in there.

So these things have the right, wherever they’re from or whatever they are, you know, cause

people are like, oh, they’re balloons.

Well, balloons float.

Balloons don’t sit in 70 knots of wind and stay in the same location.

They 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 the hell is that?

And they almost hit one.

It’s almost hit them.

So that’s another, that’s one of the biggest, another biggest account.

It’s like almost hit a plane, something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere.

What do you make of that?

Again, you know, what, I mean, that that’s, that’s the most dangerous thing.

You’re right.

The biggest frustration is when you do that and you go, okay, so this thing passed between

two airplanes and it was, I think it was more than like a hundred feet or something like

that of the airplane that almost hit it.

So what they do is they come back and go, Hey, I had a near midair, what’d you have

a near midair with?

It’s kind of this floating beach ball with this cube inside of it.

And you go, huh?

And you know, so they send out a NOTAM again and they, they do a, what’s called a hazard

report that says, Hey, there’s these objects out there.

We almost hit one here and that gets sent off to the Naval safety center.

What was done?

I mean, what are you going to do?

Can you catch one, go out with a giant net and try and bag one?

You don’t know because they’ve seen them.

They picked them up like hovering on radar.

And then all of a sudden they’re traveling at really high rates of speed.

So you know, what are you going to do?

Well, and that, let me ask this, cause 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 like a mundane event.

How do you explain that?

Why didn’t the people on the ship, not the higher ups, why wasn’t there a big freakout?

Or as some people suggest, the higher ups knew about it all along and just were not

letting everyone know that there’s some kind of secret military, uh, uh, you know, 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, um, 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 if something goes wrong.

So when they started and we’ll go back to Elon.

So my friend that worked there, they had a rocket go off, they were out in Kwajalein

and when the rocket went up, a fuel line ruptured in the rocket and it ran out of fuel before

it got all the way up and it came falling back down.

Well, when you’re out on an ATOL 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

ATOL and, and, you know, Elon wasn’t happy and threw this guy under the bus.

So that’s a test environment because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

So cause someone said, well, when we chased the Tic Tac, well, it could have been some

secret government thing.

Well, secret government things typically just don’t come out and test to where there’s going

to be.

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 Dr. 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 wind, 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, is it more likely, it’s more likely they’re not

doing that.

Then 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 the positive way, freak out in the negative way.

Like what are the Russians up to again?

Or more like what is this?

Like more turmoil.

So if you would have put a Chinese flag on the side of it or a Russian flag on the side

of it, and 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, 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 when I had just taken over, I had had the squadron for a month, right?

So I’m a brand new CO, I’m the most junior guy on the, as far as a commanding officer

goes, for time in the Navy, and actually at the time I think it was the most junior CO

for O5 Command in the Navy, right?

So you go, okay, so I’m out here, I got my squadron, I’m running it, I see this thing,

we catch shit for it.

I have a squadron to run.

I have the, the TICTAC was over here and although an extraordinary event, I have 17 aircrew

and 300 sailors that I’m responsible for, right?

Their wellbeing, making sure they’re fed, making sure they’re happy, they’re birthing,

you know, and I’m working with my Master Chief and I’m working with my XO, SNAP, and we’re

going through all this stuff.

I don’t have a lot of time to worry about the TICTAC.

But people need to talk to me, so you got to remember, you got the captain of the ship,

you got the air wing commander, and you got the Admiral.

Those are the top three.

And you got the CO of the Princeton, who is a major command guy, and that’s really your

big major command.

And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are O5 Command, and you got

the small boys that are out there, which is O5 Command.

So in the hierarchy, as far as rank and responsibility of what’s going on, I’m pretty much in the

top 20 with all my peers, and then I’ve got, obviously, the captain and the admiral, right?

And then he’s got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with.

So you’re responsible for a lot of things.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Busy schedule.

Yeah.

There’s missions.

You have to do a lot, get the job done, and there’s no time for silly things.

That’s exactly right.

So, and we’re the integration, you know, when a battle group deploys, especially when you

go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the key.

We take our airport with us, we can park it anywhere we want, and we can do what we need

to do.

So we’re kind of key players.

So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed up.

So the captain of the ship never said anything to me, the admiral never saying to me, the

people on his staff that I was friends with never saying to me, the other COs that I talked

to on a daily basis never said anything to me, and no one ever came and talked to me,

and I’m the guy that chased it.

So in all the theories and all the debunkers and all the stories, because I don’t know

if people think they’re going to 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, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because my wife and I got to go because

it was just looked like fun because the whole town gets involved.

And it’s the only time I’ve ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because

it was just, you know, it was fun.

And I got asked and Jeremy and George Knappen went the year before.

So I went with Bob Lazar.

So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife and, 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, nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading Lou Elizondo’s resignation

note from his, he was a program director at the ATIP program.

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 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 it just

didn’t 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 nonchalant peaceful way briefly.

People would be like, that’s, 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, and Europe’s a perfect example.

Why does France speak French?

And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish and then you’d

kind of jump over and Germans are German and the Polish people, everyone speaks a different

language because if you look at the way the train 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, you know, it’s that same type of thing.

So, but anytime we have a tendency to show up, you’re actually, you think about, you’re

an alien.

If I went to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years where, you know,

or a thousand years where travel, we weren’t traveling across oceans at the time.

We were, well, we don’t think we were, but the Vikings probably were 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 a human alien

world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area.

The other, we take what we want.

And that’s what happened.

I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that’s how we are, you know, humans

are, we’re an interesting group.

So you go, now what?

What if something is from someplace else?

Let’s just, let’s just go off the grid and go, let’s say there are little green men.

What are their intentions?

Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo and he said, what do you think

they were here for us?

I said, I don’t know.

He goes, what?

I go, I don’t know.

They were observing.

They’d come down, they’d hang out.

And he goes, well, what if they were prepping the battlefield?

What if they were observing to figure out what we do?

And you go, that’s interesting.

The other theory is maybe there’s a more advanced civilization out here and they just check

in on us because the threat to an advanced civilization is when a civilization that’s

inferior to them actually develops enough and fast enough to become equal or above.

Because now 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, cause they always have a tendency to hang

out around nuclear.

Right?

And you go, well, you know, if this is an advanced civilization, I’m going to go science

fiction kind of comical.

They come down and watch us and go, look at 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, what is it, UFO sightings since,

since the nuclear era, since the nuclear era.

Yeah.

You go, hmm.

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, it was what the, I forget how many thousands

of sightings that there’s a percentage, it’s like 10 or 15% of them, they still can’t explain.

Like our Tic Tac is one of them that, 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 15% that we don’t know, and all of these thousands are

still that 15% makes up a pretty big number.

What are the chances that not one of them crashed somewhere on the globe and was recovered?

And I don’t care if it’s an intact system or you’ve got pieces of it, of a metal that

we can’t explain or some, some biological matter to say the least, it could be intact

or it couldn’t, but the odds of that now are starting to go down that, you know, that could

never happen.

And I’m not talking just the United States, I’m talking the world.

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 a meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed

transport or observation.

Could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does

all that stuff.

And we’ve 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, cause we’ve

had stuff crash into planets.

So if that’s the case, you would think something is out there that we have something that we

can’t explain.

And according to Lou, there’s stuff that we can’t explain, you know, and I would assume

that Lou who ran a tip has, has seen stuff that he can’t openly talk about because, you

know, cause 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, and this is kind of where,

you know, people have issues with Bob.

So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not.

I’ll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy.

Bob Luzaro.

Yeah.

Yes.

There is the other side that says, well, should he have come out and talked, you know, to

those who will 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 ask Bob, why did you say something?

His, his answer was, I understand there’s an oath, but I felt that the technology could

benefit all of mankind and it shouldn’t be locked away.

And I’ll leave it.

If you believe Bob, that’s, 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 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 a

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.

And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life.

So I understand that.

But now you go, there’s reasons stuff is classified.

Okay.

And it has to do with, 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 wellbeing 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 Saxton Protestant, whatever your religion, but you come over

here.

I kind of knew that from the last, 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 a, with a bit of, with a lot

of hard work, I can do quite a, and no one gave it to you.

So, I mean, and I, well, I’m a believer that like that, I mean, we are a community.

So like there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real

thing.

And 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 going to go back to Bob cause I’ve talked to Bob.

So Bob is a propulsion guy, right?

Right.

Bob has a bicycle with a rocket motor.

He built a 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 got to figure it out, right?

So who are you going to 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 works

on it until he gets to the point where he’s stagnated.

He’s at a, he’s at a wall.

You go, I can’t do it.

You know, sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind.

So you go find someone else who’s into propulsion, you bring him in 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 shelf it, you go, Hey, good projects 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

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 you, cause 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 them where it came from.

What about this?

You can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer.

And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology and you shelve it again.

Do you think that’s the right way to do it?

Because it’s heartbreaking.

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, we talked about money, but it’s also

not just money.

It’s like this engine that’s within, we talked about the American dream to say, I’m going

to 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.

And still to this day.

And Germany could have won.

They could have won.

They could have won, but someone was smart enough to not finish the equation when they

knew they had the answer.

It’s literally what it comes down to.

Someone was smart enough to realize if that, that got into the hands of the Nazis, that

that would be the end.

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 end.

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 a, you know, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from

any weapons or anything.

And we’re supposed to, you know, we’ve got the international thing down there.

We’re all going to work together.

If you did it in a, 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 it internationally, but we’re

secretly doing it ourselves to see who can come up with a solution first.

That’s the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is

power.

It would, it would literally change the game of the way the world operates and from not

just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it’s got huge, huge.

Yeah.

I, so beautifully, beautifully presented and there’s, I feel like there’s a tension between

those two places, the scientist view of the world and the national security view of the

world.

Let me, 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, but the, there does seem to be, and I tend

to think of government as unfortunately incompetent, at least the bureaucracy.

It seems that the communication, like the three videos that were released and just the

way of DOD in general talks about the things we’ve been talking about, it’s just confused.

There’s contradictory, it’s not inspiring, it’s, it’s suspicious.

It’s just not even the way they released the videos.

You know, the Tic Tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists.

It’s like at the, you know, us going to the moon and it’s inspiring.

I mean, it’s incredible, you know, and, and the way it was released, it was suspicious.

It was like low resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents.

And I mean, why, what is it?

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?

I don’t know how, especially in this topic, it’s been hidden for so many years.

And I don’t think, cause I don’t buy off on the conspiracy stuff, I just think that, you

know, when it comes in, like I said, you know, the government has the right to classify stuff.

They classify everything cause they don’t know.

You have something, you don’t know what it is, you don’t know.

So we just go, well, it must be, it 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,

it’s in the giant army warehouse.

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, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about the storm area 51.

So 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 to counter it.

And perfect example, the U.S. in the 60s developed a bomber, it was a Mach 3 compression lift

bomber called the XB 70.

Okay.

There was three of them built, three of them ever built.

It was a like 60,000 foot high, you know, Mach 3, it was an incredible airplane when

you see it, and there’s actually the last one remaining is in Dayton, Ohio at the museum.

You know, it would go, the wingtips would fold on, it looks like a Concorde, but it’s

way faster.

When that got out that we were developing it, the Soviet Union developed the MiG 25,

literally a high altitude interceptor to counter that bomber.

And they built an entire fleet of MiG 25s, right?

We built three XB 70s and we scrapped the program, right?

Because now you go, well, the technology is cool, we proved it, but now it becomes obsolete.

So it’s not even worth building a whole fleet of these things.

You know, it’s a chess game.

We do something, they do something, we do something, they do something, and we do something

and then they counter it.

You got to figure out how to defeat it.

So you go, oh, we’ll build something.

So the more we keep quiet, especially from a defense standpoint, the better.

Actually, personally, I think we talk too much.

And I think the military and the DOD is starting to see that we’re too open.

You announce, hey, we’re building this because there’s a budget line and we live in a free

society, but you don’t have to release all the specs and you don’t have to put everything

in open source.

But that’s a problem when we go to the universities.

If we 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.

Where the defense side might go, we don’t really want that published in a paper in Scientific

America.

It’s so heartbreaking.

I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concord’s.

Some of the best, if not the best engineering and science, but engineering really ever is

done in secrecy and it sucks because it’s so inspiring and they can’t talk about it.

It is, but some of it’s due to funding.

The US government has deep pockets.

You know, some of this new technology that you develop for an open source and lesson,

this goes back to the original conversation.

We now, there’s enough money in the private sector that individuals control.

Bezos, I’m not talking Amazon.

I’m talking Jeff Bezos, a single individual 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 his wife and Warren

Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos’s ex wife actually donated a

huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation.

What’s the Gates Foundation worth these days?

These are guys, brilliant, brilliant.

Some of the greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing?

Because they have the ability to, it’s a nonprofit, 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 classification.

You could do what you want.

It’s just like, we classify how to do the whole nuclear, how to create a critical mass.

But there’s really smart high school kids that have figured it out mathematically and

they do their science project.

And then the government comes in and says, hey, we got to classify your government because

we just don’t want this out in the public domain, which I understand.

And they never stopped them from free thought and developing that.

It’s just, hey, we really don’t want this out there.

Okay.

So I understand that.

I totally understand that.

But if 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, I mean, you

think about it.

There’s a significant amount of money that could be available to R&D and I’m not talking

just science like this, I’m talking medical research and all this.

But then you go, well, who gets it?

Because now you’re competing against the companies that actually do it.

You go, is that, well, are they the greatest minds?

I’d say, you know, we have a tendency to go, these are the best that we have.

And I’d say, well, no, that’s the best that we know we have.

But there’s probably people out there that don’t 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 in a sense, like the Elons of the world that Jeff Bezos actually in a certain sense

much better than DOD at finding the brilliant, weird minds out there.

Because they’re not tied to the government.

So when you work a government contract, the government writes, they tell you what they

want and then they work with you on the requirements and they usually have an end in mean.

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?

Well, if the government scientist, if you’re on a government contract says, no, that’s

not the requirements.

We’re not paying for that.

We want you to do this.

You’re 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 around 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, what is it, Blue Origin, isn’t that Amazon?

You know, that they’re doing some cool stuff because they have funny.

And I joke with the guy I know that worked at SpaceX and he was funny because they were

building the first test thing and they were limited.

And Elon found this like 400 acre thing, I think it’s about 400 acres down by Waco, Texas.

And he’s like, I go, how, he goes, dude, I worked, 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, is 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.

I mean, he talks about, he has a great story about this.

I mean, this is Elon, but this is how fast you can do in the private sector vice the

government where there’s the bureaucracy is.

They had a company that was 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 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 them in the boardroom?

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 he said, literally within like an hour or two, Elon has bought

the guy’s company.

That guy is now a senior VP running his company.

And they’re going to 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 witnessed it too with Elon.

I think it’s whatever the forces of capitalism that allow a person like Elon Musk to rise

to the top, because I’ve also worked for DARPA for research in terms of a source of funding.

There’s a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, being funded by DARPA.

And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of anything is possible, cutting across all

the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy,

the rules, the constraints, all of that stuff, just you can cut across immediately.

How much money and time do you waste dealing with your bureaucracy when you could actually

be doing real work?

That’s the difference.

This is why 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 what Boeing, we’re paying Boeing, and you go, oh, well, this

just came out.

And you go, well, then why are we even dealing with this side when we can deal with this

side?

Because you’ve got a fully automated capsule that has a manual mode that they got to fly

around in.

It worked like a champ.

It went up, it hung out, it came back, it splashed down.

It worked perfectly.

We’re going to 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 in mentality.

And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost.

It’s exciting, especially given putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky or it’s

limitless the possibilities we could do with this kind of mechanism.

I think it’s exciting.

Yeah.

I think we live in an exciting time right now.

This is everything that’s messed up in the world right now.

Well, this is a hopeful, like there’s so much conflict going on, so much tension.

That’s to me, space exploration at the moment is a reason to get up in the morning and have

a hope for the future, to look up to the sky and we’re humans.

We can solve so many, we can solve all of this.

I was talking about when I was doing the Tucker thing and I said, this would be great, because

then the government had come out 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, this would be great.

Just come out with this, find the relic of a spaceship, like pull out the Roswell wreckage

if you have it, pull out the Roswell wreckage and do it.

God, it would be so nice to not have to deal with the riots in the cities.

I know it’s an election year and all that, but God, 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, the look on Jeff Bezos’s

face and all the brilliance in years.

It would change the game.

It would change the game completely.

Let me ask the big question, I apologize for the absurd romantic nature of it.

Outside, I mean, one of the things, the fact that you’ve laid your eyes on a UFO probably

opened your eyes to the possibility that some of the other sightings, there could be other

sightings that have legitimacy to them.

What to you is the, outside of your own sighting, is the most interesting sighting or UFO related

event in history?

I think there’s several.

What is it?

Ramassan Forest in England, the US guys that saw stuff and actually got radiation burns.

One guy was medically disabled, but they weren’t going to give him and he had help from John

McCain.

His office helped get the guy’s disability reestablished.

I think that’s a big one.

I think there’s people out there that have seen stuff and I’m talking credible because

there’s, you got to remember, there’s a huge chunk of the sightings that get disproven.

They’re actually explainable.

You had sent me the question, the Phoenix lights, I think there’s…

What’s that?

So I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with some of these.

I’m not either, you want a funny story on that.

So I was at a conference, hopefully he doesn’t watch this and get offended, but we had this,

I call it speed dating.

So there was a table, about eight people at a table and we would go sit at the table and

they could ask us questions and then after 10 minutes we moved to the next table.

So I was speed dating all these people that are really into this.

It was kind of funny, but I had sat down and it’s always funny because some people will

try and dominate it, but you have to kind of push the dominators away so that if you’re

quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too.

So we got into this and the guy starts naming all these, well, what about this?

What about the Phoenix lights?

I’m like, I don’t know about the Phoenix lights.

What about this event?

I don’t know about that.

He goes, he looks at me and he goes, well, you’re not a UFO guy.

I go, no, I’m not, but I chased one.

So I’m an expert.

Have you?

And you could see him get deflated because I’m kind of a smart ass like that.

Yeah, I mean the firsthand 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 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 five minutes of my life, I did a lot

of really cool, I’ve had really kind of neat things I’ve been able to do.

But when you look at it and go, to me it’s not the pinnacle of my life.

To other people that they live in the UFO world and it’s like they, if you talk to people

that are really into it, who’ve never seen one, it kills them that they didn’t see one.

When here we are, and what’s unique with ours, which kind of adds that level is 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, it was an engaged five minute thing.

And there’s other stories from other countries, like there’s a story in the back when the

Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these things and one of them shot at

some, 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, modern terrestrial weapons are probably not very useful.

You can go to Independence Day, they had that force field around, oh, we got to, now you

got a cyber warfare, you got to take the bug down, you got to take the warfare, so now

we can actually inhibit some type of damage.

So there’s, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights, somebody on I think Reddit said, ask

them 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 are your thoughts about the Phoenix lights where many people have seen it?

So 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.

Flares don’t burn that long, they just come out and they detract and they go away.

Although on the other hand, there’s, because clouds can do things, so I lived in Central

California for 18 years and you would get, oh my God, what was that in the sky and it

was really Vandenberg shooting a missile off.

They were doing ICBM tests at one time where they shoot from Vandenberg and they fly across

and they go land in the Atoll at Kwajalein and then they can check the displacement,

the accuracy and all that stuff, it’s stuff that we do because we’re a superpower.

But when you see them go up, especially if you’ve ever watched a rocket really launch

on a clear night, it’ll have the stream, the glow, and you can tell it’s a rocket, but

if you don’t look up until later when it starts to get to the outer edge of the atmosphere

where the plume coming out of the engine is not constrained, and you can watch this on

TV when even the SpaceX ones go up, it’s nice and narrow, narrow, narrow, and then it hits

a point where it really starts to go up and it starts to come to the sides because the

forces aren’t holding that all into one unique thing and it looks really odd and then it’ll

go off because it burns out and then you get stage separation, then you see the next one

go off and then it’s gone.

And people don’t understand that because they didn’t watch it from launch because we used

to sit in our driveway and Vandenberg, it was a three hour drive, but you could sit and

watch it.

You knew they were launching at night, you’d watch, you’d watch and it’s really cool.

If you don’t see anything, what you see is the weird clouds from the exhaust plume, what’s

left, the residue that’s sitting in the atmosphere and the wind starts blowing it so you get

these really kind of weird shapes in the sky.

That’s part, but when you go to Phoenix Lights and you go, hey, when a thousand people see

something, are you going to discredit all a thousand people or are you going to try

and explain it away with something else, you know, it’s a weather balloon, it’s a weather

balloon.

Again, just like the Tic Tac, I think is just inspiring for the limitless nature of the

science.

I think more is going to come out.

I think some of the stuff that the To The Stars folks have done.

So there’s a To The Stars Academy.

What are your thoughts about them?

Are they?

I talk to them quite a bit.

I’m not a part of To The Stars Academy.

But I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.

What’s their mission?

What’s their hope?

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,

workspace 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, 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.

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 it, 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,

you know, I was in it and I told him, you can take it down and you can talk to lawyers

because I’m not supporting you.

So they use it to tell some kind of narrative that’s not connected to reality.

Because 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 make money is probably the biggest thing to put

a TV show out.

And the mission of the To The Stars Academy is to not do that, is to try to get some…

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 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, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property

of their government.

They got a bunch from…

It might have been Argentina gave them all kinds of stuff, like, here’s all our records,

what can you do with it?

To try and now pull from country based to a more global based research, which is what

you were talking about, and then using independent scientists that are not tied to a government.

I mean, any government, but just using independent research agencies to start looking at some

of the metallurgy, 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…

And your hope is the US government will release some more things?

The US government came out a month ago and said, we have material that we cannot explain

the origin.

They have said that.

They just haven’t released the records from the Roswell thing, which I keep joking about.

I’m like, come on, it’s 70 some years old.

I mean, like, let it out.

I think you put it beautifully that in this time, that will be a heck of an inspiring,

hopeful thing to see.

Like people don’t…

Just to distract them.

Right?

Yeah, the division is, I mean, nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps.

Like the idea that there’s life out there.

It would literally change.

I said this a while ago, I think it was 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 ET 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 Day, 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 in any continent.

It becomes a global issue and the only way you can deny it, it’s just like Americans.

We all, you know, we’re divided.

We spend 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 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 all also have very, very short memories.

Yes, we do.

Exactly.

It’s when you look and go, well, we can do this and you go, no, no, if you think that

everyone on the planet is good, you need to stop taking the drugs that you’re taking.

You know, we said this, there were people during the rise of Hitler, no, no, it’s it’s

OK.

And no, no, it’s OK.

We’re not going to do.

We’re not going to stop.

No, no, it’s OK.

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 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 the thing to fight that evil is to be united, to be both.

It’s like this interesting line, like you talked about Joe Rogan, of being both 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.

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 them, they never got in fights because one, even people that

didn’t know them, because they were actually nice guys.

You know, they were just good dudes.

But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he’s a nationally ranked

wrestler.

He went to Naval Academy with me, he’s a very, very good friend of mine.

And he is, when you meet him and he wrestled at 190 pounds and he did not lose a match

his senior year until he went to nationals, he just had a bad day.

He actually lost to a guy he had pummeled the shit out of.

And he would cross.

It was funny, we joke about it even with him, because when you meet him, he’s like the nicest

like local, hey dude, you know, hey, how are you doing?

He’s super nice.

And 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’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 look up and smile and go, hey, hi guys, how you doing?

Like he literally just went and could rip someone’s arms off.

But as soon as he crossed the line, he was a totally different person.

He’s like, and he’s that way today.

He won’t even tell you he’s a wrestler.

That’s kind of a symbol of the best of America.

That’s what America is.

Oh, he’s.

That wrestler.

He’s a.

You cross the line, you can be hard, but once you’re off the mat, you’re just a kind human

being.

Yeah.

I know you’re super humble, saying it’s better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring.

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 and wants to

build the rocket?

Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything?

Yeah.

First, let me start with, and you had a question on, inspirational people.

My grandfather, I had mentioned him earlier, huge funeral, beer delivery guy, was delivering

beer in the 60s riots where the guys in the black neighborhoods where white people didn’t

go.

My grandfather’s Sicilian.

He was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States.

My great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came

over on the boat.

Huge, huge guy and just the nicest, friendliest, would give you the shirt off his back, obviously

proven by his funeral.

I’m talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo,

Ohio.

The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio.

It was literally a mix of who’s who.

He had told me once, because when you’re little, you start looking.

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.

Paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up.

I was talking to my grandfather one day and he said something to me, and this is literally

how I run my life.

He said, it was about money because you’d see back in the day, if you saw someone in

a Mercedes, that was rare.

They weren’t everywhere.

You couldn’t lease a car, you actually bought a car and usually bought a car with cash.

It was a totally different than we are now.

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 them a bad person.

That’s who they chose to be and you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on

someone because there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should

never ever do that.

I kept that close to me.

He was a huge influence, my mom’s dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way

I carried myself.

He was one that would say, you can be anything you want to be.

He grew up dirt poor and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my

grandmother and did stuff like that, to him, that was a success.

To me, it was always trying to better and move on.

He was the one, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that anything

is possible.

When I’m four years and 11 months old in 1969 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.

We had an Air National Guard that at the time was flying F100, so I’m dating myself.

I was just fascinated with flight and I just looked at that going, that’s really what I

want to do.

I never lost sight of that.

There was always, I could do this or do that.

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, 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.

It was that or be an oceanographer because I was fascinated with Jacques Cousteau and

actually that’s my degree.

My undergrad degree is Jacques Cousteau, so influences are Neil Armstrong and Jacques

Cousteau.

I have an oceanography degree.

I got an MBA from University of Houston, go Cougs, got to mention them.

So you look and people go, what are you going to do with that?

And I said, I got an oceanography degree because I got, 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…

So these passions and underneath it is the belief that you can be anything you want to

be.

You can.

I told my kids this, when they were young, it was tough, especially for my son.

So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind.

My wife’s brothers are both colorblind.

It’s really color deprived.

Color blind, 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, 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?

He had a hat on one day.

I go, which one are you going to get?

He had a hat in his hand.

It was green.

He goes, I’m going to get the green one.

I go, oh, this one right here.

He goes, no, the one on my head.

I go, Nate, that one’s brown.

He’s like, leave me alone, dad.

He got the brown hat because to him it looked great.

So he couldn’t fly.

He came to me and said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate?

You’re talking to your kids and what do you want to do?

He goes, I want to be a pilot.

Now I got to tell him because he’s looking at me because I’m a pilot, you can’t be a

pilot.

I go, why can’t I be a pilot, I said, because you got eye issues, so you got to redirect.

The other one was because I stopped flying when I was 42 years old and it was my childhood

dream.

So it’s like a pro athlete.

I know exactly what it feels like when Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you

still can do it.

Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever.

So you do and you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when

you have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.

So I told them, I said, look, I was talking to both of my kids and I said, you know, find

something that you 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 a 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 as, you know, people go, oh, you got two doctors.

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, money, money.

That’s what makes the world go round.

But what you realize, and I’ll go back to my grandfather who didn’t have a lot of money

and he was probably one of the most happy people on life.

And unfortunately he died at, he died at 65.

He had a massive heart attack because he didn’t tell that he, he kind of knew it was happening

and he just made the choice to do it and it was devastating to the entire family.

But he didn’t, he didn’t have a lot of money.

But I’ll tell you what, I know a lot of rich people who have funerals and there’s nobody

at them.

Yeah.

And my grandfather, who’s a beer delivery guy had, I, I, it literally, it was like three

miles long.

The Pope.

It was crazy.

Yeah.

Who died?

The Pope.

That was because there was like, Hey, he’s a Catholic.

He’s just, you know, Italian.

He goes, you know, who died?

The Pope.

And I go, no, that was my grandfather.

And then the next funeral I went to was my aunt, his sister.

And it 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’s, 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.

Just look at 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 big, ridiculous question.

So you’ve lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.

So let me ask kind of several different ways, the same kind of question.

One, do you, have you pondered your mortality, the finiteness of it?

And the bigger question to ask, even in the context of your, 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.

Very often.

And I don’t get into my religious beliefs or what I am, but I will tell you that I do

believe in God.

I’ve just seen too many things in the world that I can’t explain.

And some people will explain it by subconscious, so I’ll give you a story and this kind of

puts in the thing of, do I fear death?

So I had a good friend of mine that I used to fly with, we were stationed in Japan together

and Japan had this incinerator that put all kinds of dioxins, so there’s a real high cancer

rate for those that served on the base in Atsugi, Japan.

Him and his wife had one son, um, and their son passed away just before his 18th birthday

of cancer.

And I was hanging out with, I’ll call him John, and I was hanging out with John, we

were in oil and gas, he had come to the same company and we were doing an event together

and he was opening up to me because we were actually the demo pilots.

We do the demonstration for air shows and stuff and him and I were sitting there talking

and he was giving me the whole story and how it really changed his look on life that we’re

only here for a finite time and that we’re all going to die.

Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had

moved to a location that would fit their, you know, close to the water where they could

do stuff and I won’t say where, and he was doing what he loved to do and he got diagnosed

with throat cancer.

And I was talking to him, uh, it was probably about maybe two months before he died, um,

and I said, dude, hey, you’re sad, I mean, this is your friend and I’m kind of really

bummed out and this is the guy, this is a guy that’s dying of cancer and here’s what

he tells me.

He says, Dave, dude, we’re all 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.

And he goes, with the exception of not being with my wife, who he loved dearly, he goes,

I’m okay with dying.

I’ve had a really good life and, um, about, uh, cause actually the original announcement

when he, when he finally passed away, a buddy of mine called me cause I don’t do Facebook

and his wife had put it on Facebook that he had passed and about the day before he died,

for some reason I was thinking about him and I had a dream or I think it was a dream or

an altered reality.

You can get into whatever, 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, cause he was a Navy and we were just talking and he looked

at me and he said, and this isn’t my dream.

He’s like, Dave, it’s all going to be okay.

And this is, this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have.

There’s people are gonna think I’m weird about this, but, um, but I, you know, I know what

my dream was and you know, maybe it’s my subconscious creating the dream, but 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 going to 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, and 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, one 28 and you’re sitting in traffic and we’re stopped, which doesn’t

happen right now because of COVID, but normally it’s stopped.

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 S five 50 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, cause when it’s all said and done, you could be, you know, you can be with the exception

of the presidents of the United States.

I mean, name the vice presidents.

Most people can’t and eventually they’re going to die or eventually you’re going to see a

statue of a guy from the 17 hundreds 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 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, we, I just joke, who are your

true friends?

It’s the person.

Well, there’s, there’s a once 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 oclock in the morning, who you going

to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you.

And that’s life.

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.

Oh, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t mean you don’t be nice.

I mean, I have, there’s acquaintance friends that I’ll do anything for and they can come

to my house and stuff, but then there’s the people that, you know, 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 a, it wasn’t an issue if I’m coming home.

Because I’m booking the ticket and I don’t give a shit what it costs because I will be

there to be there with you.

And then those two guys and my college roommate is another one that I’m very, very close with,

you know, 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 got to do it.

And now she knows, and it’s the same thing with her.

I mean, she knows that there are certain people in her life that if they really need her and

she has to go, she would go and I would let her go.

So given all that, I’m honored that you would come here and talk to me and take the time.

Dave was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had.

Thank you so much.

It’s a pretty long one.

It’s probably sets the record for the longest one.

So I, I mean, I’m, I’m a loss of words.

One of my favorite conversations.

Thank you so much for talking to me, Dave.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with David Fravor.

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And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere, something incredible

is waiting to be known.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.