‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects

by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean                    May 26, 2019                (nytimes.com)

• In the summer of 2014, F/A-18 Super Hornet (pictured above) pilots Lieutenant Ryan Graves and Lieutenant Danny Accoin were part of the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” squadron out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia Beach, VA, a US Navy master jet base. They were training for deployment to the Persian Gulf using an upgraded cockpit radar system. As they would climb to 30,000 feet and then dive down to sea level, they noticed consistent UFOs that their older radar systems wouldn’t pick up. They ignored them, reasoning that these were false tracks. “It would be a pretty big deal to have something up there,” said Lt Graves.

• But the UFOs persisted, showing up at 30,000 feet, 20,000 feet, even sea level. They could accelerate, slow down and then hit hypersonic speeds. Lt Accoin interacted with the UFOs twice. The first time, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there. A few days later, Lt Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”

• In late 2014, Lt Graves was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.” The pilot told Lt Graves, “I almost hit one of those things.” The pilot and his wingman were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic Ocean east of Virginia Beach when something that looked like a sphere encasing a cube flew between them. An aviation flight safety report was filed. This was no secret drone. “It was going to be a matter of time before someone had a “midair collision,” said Lt Graves.

• The cockpit videos showed UFOs accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns -something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.“These things would be out there all day,” said F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot Lt Ryan Graves who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

• According to the Navy pilots, these UFOs appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. The pilots reported that the UFOs had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching. “Wow, what is that, man?” one pilot exclaims. “Look at it fly!” (see 1:38 minute “Go Fast” video below)

• No one in the Defense Department is saying that the UFOs are extraterrestrial. But they have the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena (UAPs), or unidentified flying objects (UFOs).

• Leon Golub, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the possibility of an extraterrestrial cause “is so unlikely that it competes with many other low-probability but more mundane explanations.” He added that “there are so many other possibilities — bugs in the code for the imaging and display systems, atmospheric effects and reflections, neurological overload from multiple inputs during high-speed flight.”

• The UFO sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which from 2007 to 2012 analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the USS Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents” and included the infamous “Tic Tac” UFO off of the coast of San Diego in 2004. The Navy recently admitted that it still investigates military reports of UFOs.

• Lt Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of the UFOs’ origin. Lieutenants Graves and Accoin, along with former American intelligence officials, appear in a six-part History Channel series, “Unidentified: Inside America’s U.F.O. Investigation,” beginning Friday (May 31st).

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”
In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance.

But the objects have gotten the attention of the Navy, which earlier this year sent out new classified guidance for how to report what the military calls unexplained aerial phenomena, or unidentified flying objects.

Joseph Gradisher, a Navy spokesman, said the new guidance was an update of instructions that went out to the fleet in 2015, after the Roosevelt incidents.

“There were a number of different reports,” he said. Some cases could have been commercial drones, he said, but in other cases “we don’t know who’s doing this, we don’t have enough data to track this. So the intent of the message to the fleet is to provide updated guidance on reporting procedures for suspected intrusions into our airspace.”

The sightings were reported to the Pentagon’s shadowy, little-known Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which analyzed the radar data, video footage and accounts provided by senior officers from the Roosevelt. Luis Elizondo, a military intelligence official who ran the program until he resigned in 2017, called the sightings “a striking series of incidents.”

1:38 minute “Go Fast” Navy cockpit video of UFO flying over the Atlantic
off of the coast of Virginia in 2015 (Global News YouTube channel)

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