Beyond the Stigma; a UAP (UFO) Call to Action - with David Fravor | Merged Podcast EP 11
In 1989, if you just said UFO, UAP, whatever in Washington, DC, you'd have been laughed out of your seat in Congress. Well, now you've got active Congressmen and women that are pushing policy who are literally diametrically opposed politically. But on this topic, it's bipartisan. There is no Republican or Democrat. It's like, what are we trying to do? And all people want to do is, this is not about little green men and what it is.
If it leads to something like that, because we have stuff, so be it. To me, it's not important. What's important is, from our incident onward, is how do we figure out what these are? How do they work? Can we use that technology? Because if anything, our incident did. It happened 13 years after the fact when the New York Times article came out, because the New York Times article basically immediately removed the stigma.
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Coyas.Institute. That's C-O-E-U-S.Institute. Welcome to MURGE. I'm Ryan Graves. Today, we're joined by my friend David Fraver, former commanding officer of VFA 41, an F18 pilot who tactically engaged the TIC-TAC UAP object.
And now, David Fraver. So David, your background, you are a long time Navy guy. You started in the Marines as an enlisted guy. I don't want to steal your story, but eventually you ended up as a commanding officer of an F18 squadron. And before I joined the Navy, I actually saw the carrier video, or what do you want to call it, film that you were part of. So I actually, you know, I'd seen your face.
I'd seen some other guys that were in your squadron. And it was interesting because I recognized them after I joined the Navy. So in some way, you know, that film, and you almost motivated me to go to the Navy. At one point, I was thinking about the Air Force, but you guys were just such cool dudes on the aircraft carrier. I just couldn't help myself.
What were you thinking? Yeah, what was I thinking? You, you, you got, I mean, you really grabbed the Navy by the horns and had a pretty incredible career. One of the things that you got to do that I did not do is go to Top Gun. So maybe we can start there a little bit. Sure.
And maybe you can tell me what the difference is between the training we do in the fleet and what training happens at Top Gun. So this is, this is obviously a while ago because I'm old, but I don't think the, I don't think the mentality of the school has changed. I think the way they teach now because of 4th and 5th gen. But for me, it was a, you know, when I first started flying, I thought, well, I'll just go, I'll be a test pilot. And then when I started getting in, once I left the A6, which is just a, it's an attack airplane and I got to go to the normal F-18s and I started flying. And luckily my neighbor is, had just left Top Gun.
He was a training officer at Top Gun and we actually transitioned. So he had come out of F-14s and Top Gun and I'd come out of A6s and we were in the exact same class. So Tom and I, I'll just use first name so it's harder to identify if anyone knows, we all know who it is. Tom and I went through together and because he hadn't really dropped bombs, I hadn't really done any air to air. And for an A6 guy, air to air is completely dynamic.
And I was fortunate enough to train with people like him. He took me under his wing, taught me literally how to fight the airplane. And then I had a great cast, you know, with Spark and Dude and guys like that, that kind of took me and didn't push me away because I was an A6 guy. And once I get into the tactical employment in air to air, I was just, I was hooked.
So I decided I want to go to Top Gun and I asked and they had just shifted from the six week power projection course, which is like the original Top Gun movie where they actually come out of the fleet and they go to Top Gun. That's what used to happen. They pulled you right out of your squadron. You went, you trained for six weeks and you become a training officer and they're teaching you how to teach. And then you come back and you teach those tactics.
They had just started up the SFTI program or SFWT, Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics program in the Navy to standardize the way we did things. And it went from a six week to a 10 week course. And I kept asking and they had told me, you know, because I was pretty senior, I was finishing up a shore tour as an instructor.
And they said, no, because we really want to guys go to the weapons school, as you know. And then I was fortunate enough, the Commodore went, do you really want to go? My CO had told him, you have to have to send him. And when he did it, he was there. He had just had brain surgery. He had a brain tumor. And when his boss walked in, he said, you know, you need to send Dave to Top Gun.
So, you know, thanks to thanks to the captain and the captain that I was able to do that. And when you go through, here's what you need with Top Gun. One, everybody wants to be there. So the instructors are extremely professional. They're very standardized. There is no my opinion.
This is the way we're going to teach. So even if there's an instructor that may not agree with the path that they're going, they are all in lockstep when they promote what the tactics for the United States Navy Fighter Committee is going to be. Do you hear a technique only very much in those briefs? Is that what you're saying? So they're really rigid to, you know, the new rules that they may be writing at the moment or are they still substituting in some of the hey, this is kind of technique? Well, there's areas, but they're small areas for technique.
And normally that almost turns into Stan because you'll figure out the best technique becomes the Stan on how to do things like resetting the radar at the time that we had to do, you know, obviously different now with APG 79, but for some of the close in acquisition modes. So where, so Top Gun where technique becomes book essentially. Very much. Yeah. Very much.
And, but when you go out and fly, like when you're in the fleet and you know this, you know, when you, when you're flying in your normal squadron and you go out and you have a four ship, you know, you have the person in charge, the division lead could be, it's probably either a senior lieutenant or above. And then you have a dash two, which is probably a very junior person. Then you have a dash three, that's just maybe just a section lead. So a mid grade lieutenant. And then you have another probably junior person.
When you go to Top Gun, everyone in your flight is a full up division lead, probably towards the top of their game when you go through. So it's not like in the fleet where you go, Hey, I need you to go do this. And you, you target, you know, to tell three and four to go do something, or you're tasking them to do something else. You know, it's going to get done in the fleet. You don't know, you have to, you have to actually have to watch and shepherd them because they're new and it's, that's the training mode, which is why I think the US is so good because we're not centralized where it's always going to be me in charge.
We shuffle that around and, and push that experience because the better I can bring up the lower half closer to the upper half. Basically I'm raising the lower bar of the span. And that's, that's why it's so good.
So Top Gun trained you to do that, but they also teach you the instructional techniques. And when you leave there, you're up to date on everything current. I mean, you're basically talking the message of Top Gunner, as we would call it the burning bush. And, and that, that obviously in since time, you know, so I went through Top Gun in 97. So that was class four, 97, probably one of the greatest classes in history of Top Gun, not because of me, but some of the guys in it. But you know, now you have Havoc, which is the, the Prowler Growler weapon school.
We used to joke it was top dome for the U2. But now you're getting that mentality. And I was talking to, he just left, he was in charge of Nautic, which is Naval Weapons Development Center in Fallon, which we used to call Enzoch.
It was strikes, it's had like 10 different names, but I was talking to him and you know, now they're starting to bring in the OSs, the specialists, the operation specialists on the ship that are the controllers that run the radars, bringing them in more because there is controllers that go through Top Gun. But now when they do air wing, because this is all part of this giant training facility, and the whole air wings come in to train, they'll actually bring some of the ship controllers in to run the scope. So now you're, you're doing air wing foul and strikes in the complex using the shipboard guys. So when you go back and you go to see those guys that are on the cruisers and the destroyers actually trained with you, because that's their key piece. I mean, they're the ones that control the airplanes.
You get all the different players there in one place, you can have a better learning experience. It's, and I think it's a little bit different and no knock on the, you know, the surface communities, but I think the aviation community is far out in front of, from a training aspect. Like we did this, I was fortunate enough when I went to Japan, you know, I was told to go be a strike ops, which is the air wing commander's person that writes all the schedule and does all that work. I said no, I had to trade some orders, but I ended up going to Japan to a squadron. And then ironically, I ended up, the CAG pulled me up and I ended up being a strike ops. Funny how that works.
They gave me no, yeah, yeah, that was my boss who sent me the top gun. He was laughing because he kept telling me to do that. The irony with it all is I was fortunate enough because of the leadership that I didn't have any restrictions. I was pretty much, I always said I was the most powerful lieutenant in the Navy because I controlled everything that went off and I control who got to control the intercepts and the training. And I took a cello who was my E2 patch wearer. He went through top gun as a controller.
I sent him to the small boys and he went over and gave the lecture on combrevity and everything and how we do intercept control to the OSS. So they were all standardized. It was mandatory that they read that chapter out of the top gun manual. And we trained that way for the nine months that I was in that position. And it's amazing how good when you have a mentality and you're going to hold people to it, like you will be at the debrief, you will write this stuff. So you could come back from a flight, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
The controller from whatever ship was out there with us, you'd come back and on our classified internet, which is called Cipronet, you would have like the initial picture and what he saw and all that. So when you're getting ready to debrief, you have what the controller's like. Normally you don't have that. You just come back and you have to recreate stuff on your own. So it was vital for us and then we could actually write feedback back to the controllers like, hey, make sure you get this, your com was off because you know how, you know, you say one wrong thing, you can suck the situational awareness out of the entire flight. So let me ask you, you know, as you, as you took these experiences of Top Gun and then became a commanding officer, you know, there's all this competition between different squadrons and various performance metrics.
How are you, were you kind of implementing some of what you learned at Top Gun to your squadron overall, as far as, you know, center of excellence, how'd you guys perform in relation? You know, I learned it in the Marines when I was 18 years old that you lead from the front. And I like to think that I did that, you know, people still talk to me, which is always a good point. You know, when you're not in command and people that work for you still talk to you, that's always a good sign that you didn't, you didn't screw it up that bad.
No, like my friend Tom that I was talking about who basically taught me how to fight the airplane. You know, we used to joke, he had this speech, you know, it's called stop sucking. And that's really it's really the standard that you set. The unique part, especially when I was a CO is the SFWT program had proliferated very strongly. I mean, it was like, when it first came out, there was resistance from CEOs, because now you're telling them how did they have to do training to where it became it's the norm, so that everyone had come up that way. So you could take someone out of any squadron and fly with them.
And you knew exactly how they should perform based on their level of training. And the fact that we had SFTIs all around, so you know, several of my counterparts had went through either the power projection course, or the SFWT course, I'm what the two other CEOs were power projection. And then I had department heads in VFA 94. One of them went on to be the wing the Commodore, you know, he is, he was a he was a top gun instructor in SFWT.
So we had a lot of people in all the squadrons. So it wasn't necessarily a, you know, I wasn't a, you know, VFA 41 had to be the best, I just expected a standard. And we ended up we did a lot, you know, part of it is the nature of, you know, one, I had brand new jets, which the F 18 squadrons, including the marine squadron did not.
So my maintenance efforts and VFA 14 maintenance efforts were lower because the jets didn't break. I had twice as many people because I had F squadrons. So I had the backseaters. So I had, you know, I think I had 40 some officers, I think it was 47 officers in the squadron, which normally are down in the 20s. So it allowed me a lot of flexibility to do things and allows my air crew to focus more on some things.
But at the same time, if one squadron is good, and the other squadrons bad, then we're not getting to where we need to go as a composite air wing. And we all train together. So we never went out like all four jets were VFA 41. It was, you know, a VFA 41 jet and we got paired a lot with the Marines with 223. So like when we were doing the stuff in Iraq, you know, I'd go out with a brand new, you know, captain and the Marine Corps would be flying on my wing. So it was all about training those and then as you know, the most important thing is, you know, while you're doing the flight, there's the execution.
But most of the stuff we do is training. So where you really get the benefit is when you come back and you talk about it and you talk about everything. And it's not an aggressive like, you know, you were terrible today.
We take that out. So it's always the fighter and the bandit and what was the fighter thinking at this time? Yeah, it takes out the who it's not a name, it's we're not pointing fingers. But just like what were we thinking and here's a better option.
And so that the next time they have that in the back of their head of, you know, this is something this worked really well for me. This is something that didn't work well. And you know, everyone has their day. It's just like a professional athlete. You know, you know, take, you know, any other, you know, Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, probably the best example.
They have they've had bad games. They all go out and just have a bad game. It's what do you do after the bad game? Do you blame someone else? You just go, that was me. We need to fix this and move on. And that was kind of it. And for me and Dell, who was my exo and for Kenny, who was CEO when I was exo, because we move up, you know, when Kenny moved out, I became the CEO, Dell became the exo and I left Dell became the CEO.
We were, for the most part, you know, we were probably 98, 99% on the same sheet. So when I took over for Kenny, it wasn't like this drastic night and day where I just said, oh my God, everything he did, because everything he did, I agreed with. I actually loosened the reins on one thing of allowing a flight to go out without a senior without an 04 above, which was fine. And then Dell changed very little when I left. So the squadron for that time, and I'm pretty sure when he turned over to Chaser, it was pretty much almost a seamless move.
And the squadron maintained that reputation of, you know, because it's just, you know, you know, it is, you just want to be good. Everyone wants to perform. And those that don't, you just help them move on and get on with it.
But it's just, you know, the organization will take on the personality of the leader. And if you want to accept mediocrity, that's exactly what you're going to get. And we just didn't accept it. And I have no regrets.
And I mean, I had to build my squadron because we had a short time. We had a massive turnover right before cruise and the training squadron couldn't produce priors, which are top, you know, they have to have certain specs. So I had to literally get waivers to bring people into my command to deploy, but we made it work. We had a, to this day, I think we had a really good group.
We had a lot of fun, you know, so. You in touch with a lot of the people that served with you in that time period? Yeah, periodically. Well, obviously Alex, because she was in the flight with me that with the tic tacs. So, you know, obviously her and I talk, but no, several of my JOs, which is funny, because like my most junior guys in my squadron are now a lot more post command folks.
The guy that was in my back seat is still on active duty. He's a captain. My department head is a two star. You know, officially an old man in the Navy. Kenny's a three star. You know, it's when you get that point, like my peers that are still in that were CEOs are three stars, three and four stars.
So it's, you know, time goes, you know, and here in, you know, a few years, though, all of my folks will probably be out, you know, and I'll just be a relic, which is fine with me. But, you know, I always said, you know, what, what I got to do in the Navy and in the military was great. I loved every minute of it. I think being a pilot like that and carrier aviation is the greatest job on the planet.
And I'll hold to that. And you just because the experiences of being able to do what you do is amazing. But the people that you get to work with in that environment from the lowest E1 in the squadron all the way up, they all provide an incredible value. And I've yet to find that type of camaraderie anywhere else since I got out. But why I say that it doesn't define, it's not who I am, you know, I don't have to introduce myself as you know, hey, I'm Dave, I was a fighter pilot. If you don't know, you're probably not going to get it out of me unless someone says something.
Because to me, it's I don't I don't want to be defined by that. And my friends, you know, I worked with two folks, this is a good story. They were two flags from the same branch of service. And they both actually had had held the same job.
You know, so they had large organizations. They were very combat oriented. One of them would introduce himself as I am, you know, by rank.
The other one who actually probably did more, especially from a combat thing, because he had full up during the Iraqi freedom campaign, would never tell you. He would say hi, I'm so and so. And he would tell you, hey, I'm retired. But that's it.
He didn't he didn't he didn't have to tell you who he was. And it was one of those. If they don't know, they don't need to know.
If they know, that's fine. But he didn't he didn't define his life by that. He was one of the most humble individuals. I actually joked him because it was a different service.
I said, you know, man, I said, I'd have been in that service. I could work for you. And he said, thanks. Thanks. That's very humbling. And he was when you when you meet you've seen people like that, when you meet leaders like that, they don't have to walk in with their rank that just walk in, they have a presence.
And you know, and they're very humble about it. That's the one that people are really going to follow. To me, it was it was to meet people like that.
And I've worked for some amazing people across my career, which is probably you know, a lot of those guys are three and four stars right now. Then I made the choice to just leave. So it's it's all right. I'm very happy with my decisions. And why did that? So you know, you had you brought it up, you had an experience with the tic tac, as it's known now, and, you know, we don't have to go into great depth of particular experience, but I wouldn't mind getting a little meta around the conversation. So that happened while you were in the position of commanding officer of VFA 41.
Correct? Yeah, I've been in command for about a month. Okay, I took over from Kenny, and I think it was like October 16, somewhere around there, we just come back from s for weed. You know, and the kind of leader, you know, some people like when you're in command, you don't want your replacement coming in. So we were going to s for so it was, you know, Kenny was the boss, and then me, I was his exo.
And Dell was gonna be my exo. He was in the more and I said, Well, do we want to bring him on s for and Kenny said, by all means we do, which is a huge testament to him. You know, he doesn't have this insecurity, like I'm going out because you know, and he's done quite well for himself, obviously in the Navy.
So we all went and had a great time. And then we came back, we were all three there, we were all three ready to do the change command, we all worked on it. You know, because you usually know, on the outgoing, you want it to go really well. Because you know, it's when you when you do that, you know, I don't tell you when you do it. When you turn over a squadron, you feel like someone died, like someone has removed a piece of you. So when you walk off the dais after a change of command, and you're the outgoing, you literally feel like someone died.
And you know, like Kenny live like five doors down for me. I mean, we were pretty close. We were very close, we spent a lot of time together. But to have that and to for him to be secure enough to go Yeah, because some I've seen squadrons where they're like, no, he can come when I'm gone on the day of the change command.
So I had a we had a ship like that, where I got to know the CEO really well, because the outgoing CEO didn't want him riding the boat from California to Hawaii. Wow. So he wrote on Nimitz with us and both well. No, but the guy who came in, Bill was well, both of them were good guys. They were very good, very, very, very, very competent at what they did. But we got to know Bill really, really well.
And when we went on cruise, because he knew us really well, we were able to do a lot of things that would have never happened had we not had that friendship and that bonding. So so you were the commanding officer, you just got there. You have this experience, we go into a little quick details in a little bit, I think most of the listeners will probably be familiar. But when you came back at my understanding is that you got I would say probably par for the course, you know, harassment on this topic. Oh, yeah.
But what I'm more interested in is what about your kind of more senior colleagues that have known you for a while at this point, how did they engage in this topic with you if you engage them? No, they were. So I knew I knew the captain pretty well. Of the ship. At the time, we're not the same one that we deployed with.
But I didn't at that time, I ended up being got to know the next Admiral really well. But the Admiral that we had during that time, I didn't, I didn't, he didn't really, he didn't converse with us much. Where the next one was out more and we hung out with their staff a lot. Matter of fact, I'm getting ready to go to a retirement for the lawyer that was with us. But the senior folks know like the captain they would they just saw it said, Hey, what do you think? And I said, you know, when you look at him and go, I have no idea what it was. I mean, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life.
And I told my backseater that most of them are very accepting because you know how it is. There's a level of confidence. You know, a whack job not in that position. So once they figured out they're like, what do you think but you also got a in this I think this is what frustrates people that don't understand how it works is we're literally at our first at sea period, which was combined into a two month periods, we were doing the whole comp to a ref to a comp to all that all in one that two month at sea period, where we pulled in for Thanksgiving. And we actually had to convince them to let us go back up to LaMorse we could drive up spend Thanksgiving with our families, which they allowed us to do.
But we literally had like that five day gap where the ship pulled in, we got off, we went to Thanksgiving, we came back, we got back on and we're out. So from the beginning of November, when we left, except for that five day jump over Thanksgiving, we were out to like, like the 21st or 22nd of December. So where were you operating? Off the coast of San Diego, which is there's a bunch of called warning areas, which is basically just tells people who are flying airplanes. There's high military activity out here, you know, enter at your own risk. It's not a prohibited that you can't go into, like the airplane that just flew across DC and then ended up crashing because they were hypoxic.
That is that's P airspace, that's prohibited airspace, then there's restricted airspace, which is like the bombing ranges, which you don't want to go in there, which I've seen people do. And then the warning areas are just basically military operating areas over water. So we were out there playing around for that two months. So you know, we go on this flight, you know, obviously the cruiser had seen all that stuff never told us we didn't even know they were out there. And we go out on that training mission. And I'm not going to repeat the story.
But you know, we're the first time that they had actually seen the things and they had manned airplanes, you know, going out. So they said, Hey, kill the train, let's go figure out these things are because we've been seeing them. And that's exactly what happened. And then you get out there and then you see it and you're like, okay, and you get the standard process like, okay, low over water white helicopter, okay, then your brain goes into okay, identifying things of a helicopter, rotors, rotor wash, tail boom, doesn't have any of that. Okay. Not a helicopter.
Okay. Well, let's go down and get closer to it. And then it comes back up at us. And you're like, okay, we don't have anything to just kind of hang out over the water like that.
And then just come up and match me in a two circle flow uphill while I'm coming downhill. And then when we cut across and it goes as it's crossing my nose, it just rapidly accelerates and disappears. What does that mean tactically to you as a pilot when something matches you two circle? How do you explain it to a layman? Well, here's the easiest way is one, so I'm coming downhill and I'm probably doing around 300 knots.
There's a reason 300 knots is like a really good airspeed for the airplane if you need maneuverability. So as I'm coming down, then all of a sudden you got something hovering and it just turns and it's like almost instantaneous. It's doing the same speed as me, it goes around. So now you start questioning, you know, thrust away is pretty impressive. You can just instantaneously accelerate and start matching an airplane that's coming downhill when you're coming uphill.
Is he essentially on your lift vector? No, he's off my wing. Stabilized flight like he's very stabilized. So would you say it's like he's stabilized it so you're no longer closing on on it? Or you can only bring your nose around or is it just no, he's across the circle. So if you look at it, it's like, I don't know if kids still play it ring around the Rosie or duck duck goose where when you're a kid, everyone sat in a circle and then two people were at one on one side, one on the other, and he'd walk around and duck duck duck and he'd run. And, you know, eventually the cheapest, the easiest way to get someone is to cut across the circle or you're faster than them.
So in a two circle flow, the one who can get around the circle fastest is the one who's probably going to win because he's going to become more and more offensive. And eventually if he's fast enough, he's going to end up behind the other person. Do you think he was fast enough to get behind you? Oh yeah. You know, we didn't know that at the time, you know, I just saw it. Like, you know, I guess what I'm trying to ask is what's your tactical assessment of it making that maneuver? Was it to stabilize the situation? Was it trying to? Yeah, I think it's just to neutralize me coming down and to see, and maybe I don't know, because you don't know if it was, you know, like I said, it didn't, it didn't have windows or anything, but you don't know, you know, maybe it was virtual. It could turn.
I mean, we already saw how it moved. We already saw it abruptly just swap its axis from north south to basically, you know, west to east and start coming up at us. So you knew it had some maneuvering capabilities that you don't have. And then for it to just to match us as we're going around the circle, you know, it's pretty much at the same speed coming up at you.
And that's when I decided when we went all the way around once and it was, I was getting to that basically my vertical turn room. That's when I cut across the circle and it just, it didn't come at us. It was never, it was never threatened. I never felt threatened at all. And as it came up, you know, and you can see, because we have a glare shield, which is the canopy rail where the canopy closes, you know, between the windshield and the roof that comes down.
Once it got inside of that to my windscreen in that left quarter, you could kind of start to see it as it accelerated and in that short period of time, which if you put a ruler there is like what maybe a max of 12 inches. It just accelerates and goes away, you know, and like I've always said, the one regret is we didn't have the helmet cam on because no one really turns the helmet cam on because it's annoying. No one watches that video. Had we had the helmet cam on, we probably got some really cool video of this thing, but we didn't have the helmet cam on.
So it's a regret. But luckily Chad went out on the next flight. We landed, told him about it. And he just happened to, by luck, that thing was where we told it would be. And he caught that minute 30 second video.
So kind of cool. That he did because he came back and told us right away. And then we were all, because we had debriefed our flight and our flight was pretty much what was that? That's the strangest thing. And I was at the time, I don't know, I was probably around 3,600 hours.
So that's a lot of hours in a tackle jet. Yeah. And to see that you're like, whoa. And Nudes was in my back and he had done the O3 cruise.
He had done mostly O3 cruise and then Alex was new. She had been in the squadron for four months, five months. She got there in June, right before we did Northern Edge. She was June, July, August, five months she had been in the squadron. And then her back seater was an experience.
He was one of the department heads who had worked for me at the previous tour on this one and very, very competent gym. So he had basically two really experienced. One moderately experienced and one new. And by the way, and you know, it is not only is Alex new, but she's flying on the CO's wing, which is there's, there's a lot of pressure.
It's like, you know, you got to do a presentation. It's the first time you're doing it. Your boss is there. I remember that flight for me when I went out to the enterprise for the first time.
Fortunately, if one of the first time I flew off my skipper's wing, I ended up with a undetected bleed air break. And it was essentially like a little laser cutting through the control feedback lines on the stick. And so I basically limped the jet back, didn't do a good job of communicating how serious the situation was with the LSOs. And you know, I had, if I wanted to stick the aircraft to the right, I'd take two hands to push the stick over to get it to go.
And if I tapped it to the left, it would basically go 120 degrees right over. Oh, wow. It's very strange. And so I had to bring it back onto the ship and yeah, long story short, they ended up having to depot the jet because of the damage in there from the bleed lines.
Yeah, bleed air is nasty stuff. Yeah, but I digress. So you've told your story a lot, you know, 60 Minutes, Joe Rogan, all over the place. What do you want people to understand about that experience that doesn't come up a lot? Well, the biggest one for me is, and it's died down.
People shouldn't try and embellish the story. The story is what it is. And there's all kinds of stuff coming out. Like people watched it live, you know, like I was sitting and watching it while it was happening.
Well, that's funny because the jet didn't have the ability to send that video back at the time. And oh, by the way, we weren't taking any video. So you didn't watch it live.
Next one is the, oh, it was 10 minutes long. I watched it. It's 10 minutes long. It's not 10 minutes long. It's that minute 30 seconds.
That's what it is. What it is. Matter of fact, the pilot that was flying the airplane when Chad took the video. If you talk to them, it was uneventful. Like almost like, because I said, would you remember? And they're like, no, it's kind of like a no big deal.
You know, if you look, the jet's on autopilot doing 250 knots when he takes that video. So I mean, it was, you know, what it was because, you know, I've heard very intellectual PhDs say, well, it could have been this. It could have been a balloon. It's like, come on.
You know, I've got four people train. We watched it. And I like to think that I had decent experience. Matter of fact, a lot of people are saying stuff.
I had a lot more experience than them, even the military guys, although they may have more hours as far as tactical employment and what I was doing. I know I have way more experience than they did, than they're in unique positions right now. And one of them just said something. So it is what it is. You know, time will tell, especially in with everything coming out right now with, with Mr. Gorsh coming out, I have to say his name, about, uh-huh.
Gorsh, I think. Gorsh, Gorsh. Gorsh. He's pretty tricky. Coming out basically literally saying the same thing that Bob Lazar said in 1989.
And you know, Bob got chastised for it. And this guy's coming out now. It's like, because, because it's accepted. In 1989, if you just said UFO, UAP, whatever in Washington DC, you'd have been laughed out of your seat in Congress. Well, now you've got active Congressmen and women that are pushing policy, you know, and I think it was Senator Rubio and Senator Gillibrand who are literally diametrically opposed politically.
But on this thing, they're not diametrically opposed. And I've sat in rooms with both Republicans and Democrats who are diametrically opposed. And, uh, but on this, uh, topic, it's bipartisan. There is no Republican or Democrat. It's like, what are we trying to do? And all people want to do is, this is not about little green men and what it is.
If it leads to something like that, because we have stuff, so be it. To me, it's not important. What's important is from our incident onward is, um, how do we figure out what these are? How do they work? And we use that technology because if anything, our incident did, uh, it happened 13 years after the fact when the New York times article came out because the New York times, uh, article basically immediately removed the stigma because now you've got credible sources saying this stuff is real. Uh, and like ours, I even had people thought that we're in my squadron thought that we had signed non-disclosures. We never signed non-disclosures. We were never told to shut up the men in black never showed up.
Um, I've talked to other COs who are involved of, you know, other people are, Oh, we gave away all the, we had to give away all the black boxes. You know, as you know, in the, in the classified world, there's a custody trail you sign for. So you just don't here take this here, knock yourself out. Yeah, you must be good.
You're wearing a black suit. I'm going to give it to you now. It doesn't work that way. Um, so if anything of that did is it allowed us 13 years later to do the New York times article. And that was the, the not, I call it the unofficial official report that came out that ATIP or that, uh, yeah, ATIP did under Lou Elizondo that got wrote. It's about 20.
I mean, I know the guy Jay did it. Jay's Jay's out talking right now. He's Jay Stratton.
Jay Stratton. Jay's out of the, you know, the government, he's working in the private sector now. He actually is the one that called me on the phone back in 2009 to get that ball rolling. So there's a, there's a bunch of these pieces, you know, you think, wow, you think it would have been a nice, if it happened faster. You might had access to data, but then I'll turn around and say, I think there's a lot more data now.
You know, I said this to the senators like for the East coast stuff that was going on when, when you were on the flight with the gimbal video, um, you know, what do you guys call it? Giant killer is giant killer. But you know, why isn't someone going to giant killer, which is the coastal defense radar is going, where's the data? I mean, they probably have that, you know, they might not have it from 2015 because you know, over time things get archived and put away, but you know, there's other stuff going on. And you know, there's a lot of countries where you go, Hey, I just saw an object on the radar, go come down and go all the way to the right and then reverse and go to the left. And you know, we do track space, you know, NASA, you got to do it. They do it for the space station alone, just so objects, you know, so they can do avoidance maneuvers because there's so much stuff up there now.
You know, it wasn't, it's not, this isn't the sixties where it was the Russians and us. Now there's, I forget what they say, 60 different countries have got stuff in space. So you got to track all that junk that's up there flying around. Well, when you're tracking that junk, if there's stuff up there, you're going to see weird stuff. You know, our stuff all goes in the same direction. Once we get it in orbit, it goes like this.
It goes around. That's how it works. You know, if it's geo, it's out far enough to where it's velocity equals the rotational velocity of the earth. And it stays in the same spot roughly over the earth. It's not hard.
You can, you can pick up a high school physics book and figure that stuff out. But when you see stuff going the opposite direction and doing stuff that we don't have the technology to do right now, then you know, you ought to take the time to look at it. Personally, I'm like, it's a small budget.
The original eight tip budget was what, $22 million over four years or five years. You know, if it's five years, it's 4.4 million dollars, which in the big picture of thing is nothing in the government. It's not even in the rounding air. I mean, that's like lunch money for your kids.
Yeah. I've been seeing some interesting range file reports on some FOIA requests. Of course, FOIA is only so useful. It's for those that are not aware, they're essentially requests where if you have certain information theoretically by law, you're allowed to ask the government for that information since as a taxpayer, that is your information.
You have to have enough information about what you're looking for to allow that government employee to actually go find it. And of course that and therefore is going to be information that's communicated by the government. What's your opinion of foibles? So here's, here's, here's my opinion on FOIA. So a lot of times it works really well. You send in the request, you know exactly where it's at, you know who to send it to, you can get that information. So if you wanted information like from the Supreme Court, you know, people know where to go get stuff.
If you wanted information from, you know, whatever organization is that's releasable, you go to that. But the problem is, is people go, well, I know that this happened. So I got called about a FOIA request for our incident. And, and the, this is like, while you're in the, this was a 2000 about 20 2016 was before the New York Times article came out.
So I was living up in New England. So I got a phone call from a Navy commander. She was down at the Pentagon. She said is this ground or frame? I said it is. She said, Hey, we have a FOIA request about your incident in 2004.
Do you know of any official stuff? I said official. She said, yes. I said, I know of no official stuff because I didn't know of any official documentation on it. Now I knew there was an unofficial official report that was done by ATIP.
But that's not for me to release. And I don't know if it's official. And actually the irony in the whole thing is the people, the 20 people in the original ATIP organization at LuRAN were FOIA exempt. So their works were not releasable by FOIA. The other one is you send stuff randomly and you go, Hey, I need this.
And it ends up on the desk of some poor person at the Pentagon that's miserable sitting in a cubicle in the five sided concrete monstrosity. And then it's like, how much time am I going to put to answer this FOIA request? He's going to do his search. He's going to look or she, that person is going to look for whatever it is. And in a certain amount of time, when it's done, it's like, I didn't find anything.
There's nothing to find. If you know, there's the obvious, like, I know that this report exists, like the Durham report that just came out. I know that I want to read that report and you can request that report. That's fine. You know, it's there.
But if you're requesting something that you don't really know the existence of, and then you get nothing back, you go, Hmm, you know, the government's in a coverup. I don't think the government's in a coverup. I just think the poor person that had to go look for all that stuff for you and do your basic research papers so you can have this put enough time in it's if you know how car insurance works, when you crash your car, you know, and your estimator comes out and they look at your car. So let's say you had a red car. Remember, red cars are really hard to match paint because they fade.
Okay. Right. So it's not as bad now because we have the clear coats and stuff, but in like the seventies and eighties cars faded.
So red, you go, Hey, it was this red. It was guards red. I had a 911. It was guards red and it, but it's eight years old. And then you go try and match the guards red with the original paint.
It's just like open up an older car that doesn't have clear coat on it and look at the paint inside the door jams and look at the paint on the outside. They're usually two different colors because the sun and UV. So when you would go, when you're at your car, when they do the estimate, they go, it's going to take two hours to paint this car. That two hours is everything that includes matching your paint. So the guy's mixing, you know, add the whites and blacks into the red to get it to the right shade. He's doing the best he can.
And it's times up. I got to paint the car because time is money. It's kind of FOIA requests that way.
Look, I got so much time to get you what you want. If I don't get it done or it doesn't match, that's not my problem. You got what it is. It is what is move on, you know, put another FOIA request, send it to me again. I'll just, I'll know you by name and I'll make sure that I don't do my job because you're painful. So perhaps, you know, of limited value, but you can strike goals on occasion if you have enough information, perhaps.
Very much so. So when you, I was talking to government officials about, because they said, where would, where would this be? This is many people. I've got phone calls from, from Congressman. I said, well, you got nowhere to look. No one's going to volunteer.
No one's going to wave their flag and say, Hey, call me. They're not going to do it. They all have jobs. So you have to know exactly where to look. Like you need to go, Hey, I know that this specific organization inside of this specific entity, it, I know for a fact they have information.
It's been corroborated. You need to go to them. You know, by law, at least my understanding of the law, you know, the elected officials have a lot of power. It's the whole reason that our government succeeds is, you know, it's by the people for the people.
So if you have entities, i.e. some government, you know, I don't care if name the agency or, you know, DOD, CIA, NSA, you name it. If they're willful, if you go in and know exactly where to look and I like, you're that person and I go to you, I go, I know you have this show it to me and you play stupid.
Like you don't know where it's at and this and that. Then I think there's repercussions. I think there's repercussions that should be paid.
But I also think that the elected officials who go after this stuff need to handle it with the right level of sensitivity. Like you just can't go, oh, well, you know, this agency has this super secret, I'll just say they, a government agency puts a super secret satellite up that does all kinds of cool stuff. It's technology that no one else has and we track UFOs with it.
You're not going to give them the pictures and tell them where it came from because you don't want to compromise the technology that allowed you to get that. Right? So that stuff is the stuff that's protected. But if you go, hey, I know there's some East Coast guys that took pictures of a thing with their cell phones or they're flying off the vacay. That's a different story.
You know, for one, it's an iPhone. Number two, it's in US airspace. You know, the only thing that you could say is, well, it was a government entity. I go as a government entity out there doing training, but the training was not to go take the picture. The guy just looked out, saw something, pulled his, zoned his pocket, pulled his iPhone out, took a few pictures and then moved on. I go, you know, that's not by definition meets a classification level at all.
No, if I went to another country as an undercover spy and I took pictures of a, you know, maybe they had a, I don't know, a new airplane, you know, they had the, what's the X, the MiG 31 from Firefox with Clint Eastwood. You know, I went there and I took out my camera and I took pictures of it through the fence line. That's a different story.
That is protected because one, you don't want them to know where the picture came from because then they can usually smart enough to track who's in the area at the time and they'll figure out who it was. But it's just how we classify. And I think the problem with, especially the UFO stuff is it's been put behind this big vault doors for so long that there's a fear to talk about it.
You know, some services are better than other, organizations are better than others. Some, like, you know, I'll bash on them, but the whole Project Blue Book stuff was, you know, at first it was disprove, you know, that it was swamp gas. The other one was if you can't, you just discredit the individual and you make it go away.
Knowing deep down, you know, and Dr. Heineck said that, you know, later that, yeah, there was stuff that I just couldn't say and I made it up and I think he regretted it. I think it was the same thing with the Roswell guy on his deathbed came out and said all those pictures with the Weather Blo were staged. Let me ask you a question.
Moving the conversation forward, do you think, you know, I would classify the conversation we've been having for the past few minutes as understanding perhaps some of the disclosure process of existing data. I'd say that's, you know, one hand. On the other hand, you know, you could perhaps call it discovery, which is perhaps the open source or civilian research efforts to look into this.
Where do you see those two kind of efforts playing going forward? Do we think that, you know, disclosure through the government is perhaps the best methodology to get to the truth or do we think that open source efforts on the outside are perhaps the best or maybe both? It's both to an extent. Here's why I say that. We know because we have a very open society, contrary to what you may see on social media and people who want to bash the United States of America. And I'll say it, this is still the greatest country in the world. It provides the best opportunity.
And I can give you living examples of people who have immigrated here and literally made a life for themselves that they would have never had in their home country. It's really if you want to work and you want to put the effort into it, you can succeed. Because that and because of that open society that we have that we don't put people in a box and we afford that opportunity, it also can be a negative, i.e. our adversaries are really good at sending people into our academic institutions to get jobs over here that basically steal technology. I'm not talking military secrets, although that does happen.
I'm talking just, you know, you go work at Dell Computer or you work at Industrial Secrets that you take it over. I mean, if you look right now, you know, one of China's big headaches with what we're doing right now is, you know, we're not exporting a bunch of technology. Well, if we don't export the technology, it's harder for them to get.
Right. And, you know, there's like, I will say, I'm not creative at all. I can copy really well. It's the creative minds that you need to protect that those are the ones that invent the new stuff. Those are the ones that, you know, these high end universities that are doing the math that even the people that, you know, that I've worked with and work for me, their PhDs, very, very smart, but they're still not the ones coming up with most of them are not the ones creating new math.
You know, they're not Einstein who's living and going, you know, I'm gonna go completely off and come up with new theories. You know, that is something that, you know, I'm not saying they're all the best, but some of the best institutions to do that and the opportunities to do that based on funding everything else are here in the United States. We need to protect that. So that's really important. Remember when you go, hey, let's say, for example, we caught up, we found an alien spaceship lands in my front yard, right? But it gets covered up real quick and we grab the technology, it gets put on a flatbed truck and away it goes.
Don't come to my house and start looking for the footprints in the yard. It's not there. I'm making this up. But if that happens, now we know that the government has something. So now the government has to figure out, all right, this is technology that we don't understand.
So now we've got to reverse engineer. And I'm a big proponent of saying, hey, there's a lot of really smart people that aren't tied to the United States government that may be able to solve the problem. But now you're into that catch-22 of, do I pull some of these other people out that maybe can't qualify because they have so many contacts in other places that they would push that, they would let it out? They would, you know, because if you have a technology, it's like nuclear. You know, when we invented the bomb, you know, the Manhattan Project, we're the first ones to detonate the bomb and we're the only country to ever use it in wartime. And people have a fit about that. I said, yeah, but it saved a lot of lives, believe it or not.
And by the way, there was more destruction done by firebombing than the nukes. So we can take it to that. That's my political agenda. But we did it. But now you've got an incredible power, right? But hey, it was in the hands of the US and people say, yeah, we used it. We used it to end the war.
And it did. It ended the war like that. Now swap it and go Hitler got it first. Now you've got an incredible power in the hands of someone who doesn't want to do good and doesn't want to control it, who wants to use it for pure evil.
Now move on to something. Let's just on a whim, let's go. Hey, you got, you get a tic-tac.
You catch a tic-tac. And oh, by the way, the tic-tac is power very much on what how Bob Lazar describes the vehicles that he worked on. It's powered by element 115.
It creates a gravitational field and you can move things around really fast. Okay. You could use that for good.
Like why I can generate this incredible power. I can really change mankind and it'll be used for the good. But eventually that technology will end up in the wrong hands.
Now think about it where I've got this thing. And if it performs like what we saw, you know, it can, I could have it here in, you know, here in Portsmouth. I load it up with something bad, like a weapon.
I go go, it goes straight up into space. It goes to wherever it is. It comes straight back down and it does this in a matter of seconds.
It goes up, down, down, lands in the middle of a city, sets a fuse for three seconds, drops it out the door, closes up and it's gone. Two, one, boom. You don't even know it was there.
Now you've got a technology in the hands of someone who's going to use it for evil and use it to hold people hostage. That's the fear why you need to protect some of this stuff. And then you can go on and on and on, like how are these things traveling? How are they moving? If really there's no planet for them to come from that's, you know, not more than, you know, 15 light years away, how do they get here? You know, there's a bunch of stuff we don't understand, which is a little bit of a frustration with some of the folks that are physics minded that say, well, that's against the law of physics. No, it's against the laws of physics that we know. You know, Einstein came up with a lot of laws of physics and theories that went against what people believed at the time, but they've been proven to be true. So because we don't have it now, doesn't mean it's not possible.
It just means we haven't figured it out. And if you talk to, you know, because I've talked to Bob, he'll tell you, I said, how long till you think you, what you saw. He said, at least in another hundred years, because our material science, it's the same thing with anything else. You go, Oh, can we do this? We don't have the material science to do it.
But now we do. So I was talking to him one day and I said, I said, Hey, I'm going to do this. How would you describe it? He says in 1989, because he says he got to go inside the craft.
And this is obviously to the audience. If you're assuming that you believe Bob, I'll just say Bob's a very legitimate guy and he's very smart. He said, if you'd asked me, it was made out of wax and then you heat it up and then all the seams would melt because it didn't have any seams or rivets or anything like that. That was 1989. I said, what about now? This is a couple of years ago.
He said 3d printing. He goes, you would just 3d print it because if you look at anything 3d printed, you know, you can make things that move in 3d printing, but it's one solid piece. It's literally revolution. There, there's a guy that made a whole car out of 3d printing. So the break assembly is literally one unit.
It's made as one unit and the piston inside moves and it doesn't have, you can't break it. You can't it's, what we're, what we're probably imagining here is more of, you know, not 3d printing as we have it today, but you know, a technological progression that would make it probably visually seamless and very strong. Not what we have today. It's going to get bette
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