David Fravor: UFOs, Aliens, Fighter Jets, and Aerospace Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #122
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David Fravor is a navy pilot of 18 years and a primary witness in one of the most credible UFO sightings in history. Please check out our sponsors to get a discount and to support this podcast:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
7:13 - Top Gun
12:06 - Navy pilot career
24:14 - AI is the third brain of a jetfighter 
40:37 - Sully
47:34 - Landing a jet fighter on a carrier
53:18 - What's it like to fly a jet fighter?
1:05:22 - Greatest plane ever made
1:11:04 - The Tic Tac UFO story
1:49:16 - Intelligent extraterrestrial life
1:53:30 - Why aren't UFOs investigated more seriously
1:59:52 - Tic Tac UFO details
2:07:55 - What do you think the Tic Tac was?
2:16:23 - SpaceX
2:30:01 - Response to Mick West Debunking
2:48:24 - Was the Tic Tac a secret military test?
3:00:07 - Is the government in possession of alien spacecraft?
3:25:28 - Interesting UFO sightings in history
3:39:55 - Advice for Young People
3:47:47 - Meaning of life

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 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. 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. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general, is foreign to me because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists to actual hard evidence. I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open-minded one, often looking and thinking outside the box. I'm often disheartened by the closed-mindedness of the scientific community, and in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor and basic scientific inquiry and study on the part of the conspiracy theorists. I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes that more inquisitive minds should walk. I think we humans know very little about our world, what's up there among the stars, and the nature of reality, and the nature of our very own minds. The path to understanding can only be walked humbly. The very idea that there is a possibility that David witnessed a piece of technology, whether human-made or alien-made, that moved in the way it did, should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this Earth. There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered that, once understood and mastered, will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings. Paradigm shifts in science and leaps 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 the Five Stars on Apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. More and more, I'm trying to make these ad reads unique and interesting and less adsy, more personal, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It is honestly the best way to support this podcast. This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens, the all-in-one daily drink to support health and performance. I drink it every day to make sure I'm not missing any of the nutrition I need. Now, let me take a hard left turn and talk about fasting. I fast often, sometimes intermittent fasting of 16 hours and then an eight-hour eating period of two meals, sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next. I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72-hour fast that some people I look up to have done. People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss and the different health benefits, it's a chance to meditate on the finiteness of life. Not eating somehow is a reminder that we're immortal, that every day is precious. I certainly experienced this with the 24-hour fast and I think it goes even deeper for the 48, 72, and even week-long fasts. Anyway, I always break my fast with Athletic Greens. It's delicious, refreshing, just makes me feel good. So go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex to claim a special offer, a free vitamin D for a year. Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Lex to get free stuff and to support this podcast. This show is also sponsored by ExpressVPN. Get it at expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get a discount. You probably know there's a show called The Office that I fell in love with, first with the British version with Ricky Gervais and then the American version with Steve Carell. ExpressVPN lets you pretend your location is somewhere else, choosing from nearly 100 different countries, and then watch one of the nine totally different other versions of The Office in other countries. Also, it protects you when you do shady things on the Internet that you shouldn't be doing, like checking the website of this very podcast that for some reason was not available in Russia for a long time. Not sure if it still is. But if it isn't, you can use ExpressVPN to access it. I think of ExpressVPN like a pirate ship and regular VPN free life as a boring cruise from one place to another with no excitement in between. Choose wisely, my friends. Again, get it on any device at expressvpn.com slash LexPod to get an extra three months free and to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P-Help, like you would try to spell if you were on a deserted island and trying to get an airplane to notice you. Check it out at betterhelp.com slash Lex. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. You can communicate by text anytime and schedule weekly audio and video sessions. Now, hard left turn, let me talk about desert islands. Whatever you think of it, I love the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks and the idea of spending time on an island alone with potentially no hope. The natural question is, if I could, what would I bring to this island? The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing. The first thing that popped into my crazy mind, which is the Introduction to Algorithms book, also called CLRS for the first letters of the last name of its four authors. I find algorithms beautiful, like a little toolbox for a simple world and psych computers when the real world outside is an impossible chaotic mess. I would love pondering the puzzles in that book for months, far away from human civilization. Anyway, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. 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 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, you know, I went through in 97, Class 497. There's actually a log of every single person that's went through, kind of like SEAL training. You know, there's a list. So people, because there's a lot of posers out there, I was a Navy SEAL. No, you weren't. Well, I went to Top Gun. You 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. There's 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, OK, here, and they'll sell them to you. If you are not on the list, you can get no patch. Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go to Top Gun. To go through. But it's 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 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 it was 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 and 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, 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 your SFTI when you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapon schools on the East or West coast and train the fleet squadrons. And then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that. So there's a, there's a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the course. It's it is literally one of the best things. And it's not, it's not a rank based thing because think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a, you know, like a, an 04 Lieutenant Commander. The lieutenants, the hierarchy, well, it used 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. 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 Lamar, 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 were 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, 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- They'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, 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, because 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, 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, not a chance. And then when I did, I actually had a, it's a funny story and I'll get to it and 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 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, he was my cousin, my cousin, the guy two doors down from my house, a paperboy in the neighborhood. So they all knew me. And I went to my cousin's wedding and he, and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor. I go, Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes, you fly jets, top gun and all that. I go, yes, sir. He goes, I figured he'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? And the easiest way is one, never take no. Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it. I mean, I knew what I was capable of inside. 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, but I'm really not that good at basketball. It's probably not ever going to happen no matter how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is. Or for me to be in the NFL, I'm not fast, 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 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 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 can't get to the nth degree, six decimal places. 80% solution is good enough. You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution. 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, if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really, really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this. And then I know that if I do a maneuver, if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do A. If he doesn't do A, he does some degree less, like B, C, D. And then I know how bad his error is. And then I capitalize. So I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees, nose high. If I just get above 40, then I'm good and I can watch how it reacts and then I can adjust for that. 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. Until eventually, if you're really fighting just guns only rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy, World War II dogfighting type stuff, then it's literally, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at 400 knots, 300 knots. 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. Well, part of it is family. My dad was, I used to call him a fire ready aim guy. He'd smack me and then ask me what I did wrong. Good parenting. Back then, I joke and people look, because at times it was kind of tough because he can be pretty demanding, but on the other side, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times. But then everyone else in my family, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid. My grandfather, who is a big part of it, my mom's dad, he taught me a lot. You have a question there that we'll talk about him, but huge, huge influence, very, very positive. A lot of the stuff that I do today and decisions are based on things that he taught me. I figured it was the first funeral I ever went to and it was about three miles long and church was overfilling and people were out. He was a beer delivery guy, dead serious. Then you go, someone asked who died, the Pope. So a lot of people loved him. So back to my career, to your first question, because I'm getting down a rabbit hole. No, when I was at the, I was going to stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man, I love the Corps. I think it's, of all services, it's that one, everything is in a ball and they're very, very professional. It was a great, great organization to join. But I went out to the Nimitz on my freshman cruise. After your freshman year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and 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? Yeah, so Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. It's four and a half acres of sovereign US territory. It floats around the US oceans. It's a giant thing. Does it have weapons on it? The air wing is really the weapons. It does have defensive weapons, but for the most part, it's a giant moving airport is what it is. So I was out there watching the airplanes land and take off. And I'm like, oh. And the squadrons that were out there, one of the squadrons was a VF-41 and a F-14 squadron, VF-84 and F-14 squadron, and then a couple of A6 squadrons. And we actually ended up pairing up and hanging out with some of the A6 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 go in the Navy, because there are Marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land based to support the Marines, because they're that unit, that whole unit. The Marine Corps is that one service that has it all. So when I graduated and I got to, I worked hard through primary and that's where I knew Missy. We actually went through together, Missy Cummings. We went through primary together and then I went to Kingsville. We all selected the same time. I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Wiedemeier, 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 selected out of primary together. We all ended up going jets. And that's how, besides from school, I knew her at school too. Long story, I got done, got winged. It took me two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings. And through some luck, I ended up getting A6s on the West Coast, which is a side by side bomber. So it's a pilot on the left seat and the bombardier navigators on the right seat. It was built in the sixties. It is all weather and it flies low at night. It's got a terrain mapping radar. How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for the public? Yeah, that's fine. How many fighter jets are side by side like that? In the Navy, that was the only one. The Air Force, the F-111 was a side by side, but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of that. Now those are all gone. The EA6B just went away a few years ago, and now the E18G Growler is the replacement for the EA6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew. It really became the F-18, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise by fuel. Then the Hornet. The Hornet is the F-18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually in front and behind? In the modern two-seaters, yes. But most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single seat. Single seat is just one person. One person. One person. With the exception of, probably someone will yell at me, but really with the exception of the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two-seater, and the G is also a two-seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say, full-up fighter bomber. So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18-year career, 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 F-18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and, let me think, 2001, to the end of 2001. And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets, and I flown both of those, the Es and the Es. 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 Strike Fighter Squadron 41. I love the name, the Black Aces. 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. And I got to serve with, I got pulled up because the guy, the people that are exos, because we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number one guy. So the exo becomes the CO, so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had worked with now soon to be Vice Admiral Weitzel, he was Commander Weitzel at the time, was the exo, and he really wanted because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets came into L'Amour. L'Amour had been a single-seat fighter community since forever. And now all of a sudden you've got the F-18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators in the back that are not pilots, they're weapon systems operators, and there's a difference. And Kenny is a weapon systems operator. And 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 equal more than one. And I would say that one plus one with two people is 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? Yeah. For me, from a human factors perspective and also an AI perspective, how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people, there's also a third person that's the AI part, there's some level of automation, like autopilot maybe even. 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 better in terms of the automation or perhaps not? Well, I can tell you, so let's start. Sorry, there's a bunch of questions. No, this is good. This is good. And I'm enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tic tac. So let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the 60s. 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. 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 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 fly in the mountains at night. You're going to be at 500 to a thousand feet above the ground ripping through fog layers because you don't need to see outside. You're literally flying a little TV screen and a radar. What are you looking at most of the time? So you just as a screen. It's this really primitive. If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy, but it was really fun. So it's similar to like the flare stuff. Is that, is no, are you, this thing is totally radar based. Now the airplane had a flare balls, 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 bombardier navigator had a radar and he was getting raw feed off of a pulse radar in front. Okay. So it's just basically mapping the mountain. So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be, it's going to give you a really bright return. And 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 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 sorry to interrupt. I'm going to just keep asking dumb questions. I apologize. But the pilot, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the bombardier? So you're actually just control. I'm flying the jet. I have the throttles, 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 bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking out about 12 and a half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scoped down because the radar can see a lot further. He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode, where we're dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is 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 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're just driving right at it. So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles, where the radar is going to see it on his scope, my 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. It's exactly right. And 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 ASICs cruise in our simulators. We called it the WIST, the Weapon Systems Trainer. And it was not even a motion. It just kind of sat there and you could fly these things and they had trained that they would inject into the system. But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first fleet bombardier navigator, I'll name him, his name is Chris Sato. He works at Apple, pretty high up, MIT grad. I think computer engineering. He's scary smart. So Chris could really work. And 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 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. 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. How do I avoid them? Or start a hard turn. 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. Which is how many miles an hour? Well, 420 is seven miles a minute. Okay. 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 IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low. They're all around the country. There's IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, 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. They're called the anti-collision lights because it was reflecting off the clouds and it starts to bother you. It 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, because you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's right next to you, but you're flying along. You're just like, you 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 F-18F. So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century and you're flying. So now the WISO 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 WISO does all the talking. He's got actually, he uses his feet. That's the weapon system operator in the back of an F-18F. So he's going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now, but we have a situational awareness display and it's linked to all the other airplanes. Just a 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 2s has about an 8 by 10 display for the WISOs that they can look at. The pilot's is smaller. It's down between us. It's a 6 by 6 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 is 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. Big picture sense 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. 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, you can sell the picture really quick. So 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 people use a 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 in 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 queuing 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 because it's a phased array radar now it doesn't really scan. There's all kinds of cool stuff that technology brings. Because if you'd have went back 30 years and said, hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey, we're going to have this helmet, you're going to be able to slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're just going to map magnetic resonance and go, oh, look, and I can literally slew my sensors this fast and then mash a button and transfer high quality coordinates from a system into a joint, 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, vise minutes or, hey, I got it. We're going to have to menstruate coordinates. And 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? What is the ceiling of current AI technology for controlling the plane? How much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated flight, for example? 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, basically you're taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing. So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are, there's a line. It 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, maybe, I'll try it. So humans can operate within that gray. So if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while, a Super Hornet, doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane. So if you know 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, depending on how you write the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight. 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. It'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I guess in a way you could probably program it, but I still think that when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an advantage, 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, first time they 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 how, for months? Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment. So because you want to get to know- These brain stews. You have to. Trust and all of those things. It increases the capability of 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, where 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. 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 is 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 fast enough, he did it fast enough, he did it fast enough, he did it fast enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was going to put 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 have 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? If you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions. Oh, man. 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 the engine's 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 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 and 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, and it's, 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 hydraulic, and 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 hydraulic, you know, because there's two hydraulic systems, one on each motor. Well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system, and my right motor is starting to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor down? Because that's going to kill my hydraulic system that's good. And now I'm flying on a good motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly. So they, it's a really, they're challenging problems that you have to think through in real time. And of course, the weather's never good. It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're going to break out at, I mean, it's just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you. And it's intended to increase the level of stress because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's going to stem power, you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are literally on instinct like an animal. Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction that you're going to have, when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down, you're, 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, um, I mean, one, one way we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, uh, as he's, uh, walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically in fear and, uh, yeah, worried about how things are going to go. I mean, it's purely to put it into words is fear, but as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could, uh, defeat me. So like that's, that's his experience of overcoming fear, but do you, uh, did you experience any kind of thing like that? Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution? I wouldn't say I was never afraid. I think that would be, I can't, I couldn't tell you that anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just, it's, it's usually, especially when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the weather sucks and the deck's moving, you know, the ship's going up and down because it will scare love or living shit out of you. Can I say that? You can definitely say that. So it's about landing a take off that that is if you even as they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know, guys would go flying missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and people were getting shot down a lot. Uh, the highest, the highest anxiety and heart rates were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier. How hard is it to land on that? It seems impossible. Like for, for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that. The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day. I mean, there's the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, 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. Cause you, what you'll do is you'll out drive your headlights. Cause it is so dark, you know, and you can get outside, you get outside of city and get up into New Hampshire. Uh, especially when the roads are curving, you know, and the lines probably aren't that good. It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a million because you have no depth perception. Uh, what you think is fixed, the runway is actually moving up and down and left to right. Yeah. Oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move. And, uh, we have two systems, uh, you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually, uh, it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship. And then there's the ILS now, civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth and glide slope. You know, you come down, you, it's like a plus, um, on the carrier, it's not, it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a non-precision approach. It's, it's not stabilized at all that. And I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the, and the, the tack hand needle will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving because the base that it's all sitting on is doing this and ships don't just go up and down. They, they, they do this. So the bow goes up and down and the tail, like you normally see a ship. And then there's, so that's pitch. And then it has roll. So it's doing this and then it has heave. So the whole boat is going up and down while it's pitching and rolling and you're gonna land on that. Um, so, and it's, I mean, I remember landing, I was with Chris, uh, Sado and, uh, Chris and I, we were off the USS Ranger, which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into razor blades. Um, we're flying the old A6 and we come in and it was off of San Diego and it was just the ugly night because San Diego always has a Marine layer that is about 1200 feet. It was lower than that that night. And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around. It was just the craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego. And I remember landing and your adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop. And we had spun around out of the landing area and we parked, we called the six pack. So it's right in front of the island. So if you've seen aircraft carrier of the island and the number of the ship on it, we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area. So it's like, you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this E A6B 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. It means you were not really high above the back of the ship when you landed. And it comes in and the exhaust on any A6 or an A6 actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see 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'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 shaking my hands like this. And I said, I'm not even, this is, I'm not faking this dude. I go, that's literally, I cannot stop shaking. I said, that scared the avalanche out of me. But it scares you afterwards. During it, you don't have time to think about that. You're doing it. You got to do. As we 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 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 time to, it's time to, you know, man up and 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 vape. I sit here on land and look up at you guys. It seems incredible that a human being can do that. You know, people ask, you know, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like, how was I said it's the greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's, it's an office with a view because 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. I go, no, take any rollercoaster, coolest rollercoaster you've ever been on and multiply it by a thousand. 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? I mean, it was a childhood 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. 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 squadron were brand new, like literally right out of the factory. I had 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, the whole of it is incredible. I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away, Yeah, do you miss it? I told myself I wouldn't. I promised myself that, you know, once you get through your O5 command, your flying really starts to tag, to come down. You know, even if you, and you're an 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, is a top, 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 had went there and I knew him, he would come down to my house. And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know, because the kids grew up in it. I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's colorblind. So it 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. 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 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, attritable 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 is- I had three female, actually four, one of them didn't fly anymore. She actually lives right around here. 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. Incredible. And then I had a Paige who ended up taking command. She got out of fighters and went into other platforms and she was a commanding officer. And then the other one is a, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all four of the women that were direct, I'm hoping I'm not forgetting. I don't think I'm forgetting someone. Incredibly, incredibly talented and a great addition to the ready room. So anyone who gets into the, oh, you know, women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. You know, we can talk about the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy. So women can fly as good as the guys. Yeah. You can't tell if you pass another airplane, you can't tell if there's a man or a woman in it. It really comes down to stick and throttle, the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be. If you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast. Anyone who has those characteristics can do it. And then I think most important besides that, there has to be a desire. Yeah. And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, because we used to track. So when I ran, we call it the rag, it's the replacement air group. So the Super Hornet Training Squadron, there's two of them. There's one on the East Coast, 106, and there's one on the West Coast, which is VFA 122. 122 is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations officer and training officer. Okay. So we track the last hundred students. Right? So everyone goes, ah, it's funny to hear students talk because, 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. 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 a Piper Warriors low wing to see, can you, are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation that goes through. And then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go. And then they put you into primary. It's kind of like a, it's like a pre-check, you know, like the preset, the pre-SAT to go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT? It's, it's, 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, we're, 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 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 going to 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. 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, new verse 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, 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 the 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? Like, do you start to actually be able to really experience the 3D nature? You do, because you have to project where you're going to be. So you have to know the performance of the airplane, knowing that, Hey, if I do this maneuver that I am going to go, it's, it's kind of like when I, when I talk about, when we were chasing the Tic Tac, so the Tic 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. Cause 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 them. But I also had to look at it to go, do I have enough altitude to do this? Cause 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 really important 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 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. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's your overall energy package. So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. It's overall energy package and that's that you 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? From pure speed, I would say SR-71. I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works, for what that was able to do. And then when you get into history of it, 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 X-15- By the way, the SR-71 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- That's how fast you're going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's your ground speed. So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the airspeed 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 we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had to do full maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200 and some odd knots, it's actually slow for the airplane. It's kind of like 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? And when you look at an SR-71 that's flying upwards of 70 plus thousand feet, the air is so thin, just like the X-15, 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 pitot-static 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 struck 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. It's like how fast, I could have got it going faster. It was literally still accelerating when I stopped, but 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. 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're 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 that, the system, which allows another human to control that system. So it's so beautiful. To me, I think it's a great experience. Was it sad to see the SR-71 go? I think it was during your career. I mean, do you guys romanticize the different planes? We would see it flying when I was flying hornets because West Coast flies in, 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 SR-71s, they had a loop because NASA was flying them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington state and Montana and they do a loop. And so you'd see them coming back down, they descend out of above 60,000. You'd see them, they 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 got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying around. It was the U2 and the SR-71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was needed, it was at the, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time. 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 and it does all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, the work with automation, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in my view, one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO literally, an identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it? Like chase it essentially? Chased it. Chased 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, has a helicopter pad on the back. Gotcha. And it has weapons on it. Okay. Gotcha. It shoots the missiles up, but it has a nice radar. Just that incredible spy one system phased array, four panels. So 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's 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. So, and they kept detecting these objects for just about a week. Then comes in like your part of the story, which is on November 14th from the, I guess it's from the USS Nimitz. 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 interviews 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, receiver has also the visible lights. You can switch. Yeah. It has a TV mode. It has a TV mode. So that gives you visible light and then it has an IR mode. And Chad Underwood recorded that video. So, and those are the videos that were released by the Pentagon later. One of the three videos, the two other videos, uh, go fast and gimbal were recorded in 2000 something 14 and 15, uh, on the East coast of the United States. They 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, in the degree of weirdness, but, uh, 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. Uh, but it's in some sense, this is a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery. And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions. There's division of opinions because, um, it's a mysterious, I mean, it's truly as a UFO in the sense that, um, you AP, uh, what is it? I unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you, uh, maybe correct me on any of the things that gotten wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general? So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out, uh, on our mission to go train, uh, and they canceled the mission and they 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 F18S. Okay. There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring at this thing. And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly, that's it. And, um, So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing. Yeah. So, so as we're flying out, we get, we get vectored. They come up and tell us, hey, we're going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is a Seige's cruiser. So we're talking to one controller, um, who is like, Hey sir, first you ask what ordinance we have on board. And I laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and 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 nine, which is really just a blue tube with the aim nine seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile. Uh, so there's only two ways to get it off. You can beat it off of the sledgehammer. You can take this thing and say, you put a wrench in it and 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, uh, my wingman, the other pilot, uh, the pilot, uh, the other pilot, uh, 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 Brock 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, uh, we had a mechanically scanned radars at them. APG 73 good piece of gear, APG 79 new ones, way better. But anyway, and I apologize if I interrupt the story, uh, hopefully it's useful, but they're telling you a location of a thing that you should look at. Yep. They're telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these things. And what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving. He says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks. That's we had been at sea for two weeks. He goes, this is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what these are. Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out. So we start driving out there and, uh, as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell of the radar. Cause radars don't see everything. They're so they have a range and they have an asthma 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? 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 wizzo's, the wizzo's 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, cause he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up. Now keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can't see the surface and you can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, Hey, it's the, the thing is 40 feet off the water of the panel. Can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time. So you go, is it, you know, where's it at? Yeah. So as we're looking around, we see, no, this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds and there's no white caps. It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day. If you 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 white water 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. That'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 probably, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out, it's pretty far off the coast. Perfect visibility. 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 white caps in the water if there is any. Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or, so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move where it's got a big weight, because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day, you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call it 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 GlideSol. So we're pretty conscious of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So we look, there's no waves, there's no wind, there's no white caps, and we look down and we see white water. So if you put 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 off the top. And that's where you get the white. 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 white water. You can go out when it's high tide in any one of the coasts, you can go out here off of Boston and go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered, but there will be white water around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something underneath the surface. Does that make sense? Yep. So that's what it was. We 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 white water. But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was across, I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15, 20 feet below the water, so the wave's breaking over the top and you're going to get white water 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 airplane, Jim, says, this is that talking in parcels again, he says, hey, Skipper, do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I go, what the hell is that? Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? So we see the white water and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we see this white water. 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 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's 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. At all. Of the things you've seen in the past. So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right? So you go, oh, what is it? Because when we see it, 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, the water comes up the sides because the downdraft, 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 rotor wash. What is that thing? So by this time we're driving around. So if we were at the six o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this thing. And it's still pointed north-south and it's going left, right. And it's kind of moving around the object. And if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half. So if you've got the east-west and then the north-south kind of across, it's hanging out on the southern thing that's hanging out. It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's crossing over it. It's going up. 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 a different perspective. So she's up here and I'm down here as I'm descending. She can watch, because right now all I'm watching is the Tic Tac. She can watch me and the Tic Tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on, which is really important. You can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me, which is perfect as the story goes on because it gives us two perspectives, a perspective that's about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. Because if it's just like, oh, I lost it. And they go, no, it's over to the right. We can still see it. We all lost it at the same time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm descending. It's an easy descent. I'm doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because I have everything available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 o'clock, as the Tic Tac's doing this, 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 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. I'm just watching it. Now you got to 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, watched this thing fly around. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the eight o'clock position and I'm a couple thousand feet above it and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15K, I think it is. I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating. So you can see it's just a really easy descent because- So what's 15K? 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000. No, the other airplane ends up about. So you're not going to that. Okay, gotcha, sir. So they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around the- Okay, and then you're slowly descending. 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 o'clock position, we're about the eight o'clock position and I'm like, oh, I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to do this. He's like, go for it, skip, because I was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming out co-altitude as this thing's coming out, I'm going to meet it. And I'm driving and I'm probably about a half mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation it's nothing. 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 because I'm going to the three o'clock position, it's at two o'clock and I'm going to meet it at three o'clock. So as I do this, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around, estimate in 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 as it crosses our nose, it just accelerates and literally in less than, probably less than a half second, it just goes and it's gone. And so we're like, and the first thing is, dude, did you guys see it? The other airplane's like, it's gone. We have no idea where it's at. So we kind of spin around real quick. I go, let's see what's down here. And I turn around, we're looking for the whitewater and we can't, the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember telling the guy in my back seat, I go, dude, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had at the time like 30 some hundred hours of flying. I'd been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like anything you've seen. No, no. So as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy to, you know, overseas. So we've got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially as a CEO, because I got it training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that. So, Hey, let's go back. And 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, because he's just like, because when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little Hornets, the legacy Hornets, F-18Cs, don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets. So he had launched first and they were going to do him. And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey, go to your 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 each, it's a football field. We're going to sit on one goal line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at each other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our reset points. So you're talking to him, he's listening to all of this. He's just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because they know that we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like, because 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, him and his wingman. So they're listening to all this go on. And then at this point you move on. Yeah, we come back up to train. We go back as we're flying back the controller, because we're talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OS's, they're 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, but that thing is at your cap. It showed back up. It just popped up. 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. We get out there. We never see it. We never see it again. 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, 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. And it's kind of that joking, you know, so the ship plays movies. We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat because there's a day check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night plays. 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 all 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. Cause that's how we have to do it. Cause we're so busy. Well, the movies became, it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day. Definitely going to catch some shit. Oh, we do. But let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions. So just taking it. Cause it's, 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 a 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. Now 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, 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 if 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 go, chased it. And they're like, well, I go, dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, so, and that's how he is. He's like, Oh, I'm going to go. And he was, 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 Fleer tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward looking infrared receiver. I'll probably overlay the video. 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 as L display. And this is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom of the square. It's really taken this, it's 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 score 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. 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 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. So 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. The radar smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed. So that's all it is, is you send the signal out something, it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever, and it sends it back and the radar was smart enough to go, that is not a return that I'm expecting. Something's messing with me. I'm being jammed. And it shows you and it puts strobes up, it gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff. So you can mean it. Well, it does, it goes full into it. 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- 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. 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 what their side stick controller 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, 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 is already looking there. And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out, he's just receiving IR energy from the Tic Tac and then the system itself will track the pixels and the contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in. So it says, oh, and that's what those little bars you see in the video where the bars come up left and right. He's doing some vision based tracking. That's exactly what it is. And that's the video. He goes through. Changes zooms, changes the mode. He goes through all the modes, so there's the 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. He's trying to figure out what the heck is this. Well, yeah, and he wants to get as much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going, what is that thing? Granted, so the video has been out. It actually was on YouTube for years before the government released it. It was leaked 2007. The guy that was in my back seat sent me an email and I had retired. So this is about, no, 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 the UFO. And they're like, get out. And I'm like, no, serious. So this is literally how it happened. So I was sitting with my friend, Matt. So Matt and I did our, 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 need to go to Apple, I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out and let's do it. Because they're like family. You do it. And most Navy guys, we don't send letters to each other weekly. I have friends that I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door, 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 this happens. 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. So I 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 can 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? 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 the 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 and 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 of 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, our 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. It's kind of being part of the club. So he's like, I got to write about this thing. I'm like, what are 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. You haven't really before then talked about it much. My wife didn't even really know the whole story. Just as a comment, is it just because you caught some- No, 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, 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. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us. Nobody looking like me came out on a- No, no one came out on a helicopter. No one came out on an airplane. 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, I think he just finished up. He was a captain of an aircraft carrier. 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. 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, the joke spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships, that it might have 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, C-V-I-C, which is Carrier Intel Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These guys are going to 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, you know, I'm a CO and they're not. And so I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he was a lieutenant or a 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 going to go well. I said, cause it's bullshit and I need those tapes. Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet and 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 no one came out. There's no flying going on when all this is happening. And I took the tapes back and then I copied the tapes. So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that I want. So there's a rumor too that, Oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long. And there's some, one of these petty officers are saying, I saw it. That's total crap. The original video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the release video is the entire video. So you have mentioned, uh, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me. But you, you have mentioned that, uh, like on Rogan, I think that you watched it on, you know, on a bigger screen, it felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the, the question, is there a higher definition version? Do you think of the FLIR video that would give us more pixels and more information presumably because of the high number of- I would doubt it. Cause 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 strange land and YouTube, you know, someone pulled off of a secret, it's, it looks like a rack, you know, there's tape machines in there and it gets converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they put it on YouTube. Um, no, it's, it's just like, you know, anytime, even a digital media, the more you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets, it degrades. So this, you don't know how many times this has been copied. So we were looking at the videos I've seen are right off the original. They're high eight tapes. It's basically pulled off the back of the display. So it's not filmed with cameras. It's literally a digital feed. It's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape. That's how the recorders work. Now it's actually digital to digital. It's not even on tapes anymore. They, it's a digital recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly up because originally we had little cameras here that shine. So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays. So this is, it's a pretty good feed. Um, when you put it on somewhere, instead of looking at it on your tiny little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on a, like a 19 inch, cause it was still normal TVs back there. We had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought so we could watch movies. So cause a nice huge 19 inch screen is maybe 20. It was a nice, wow. That's huge. It was gigantic. Um, I didn't get for like 50 bucks. You can get like 60 inches. This is 2005. So you look at it as big thing and, and you could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those. It was very clear. But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, was it, did you get much more information from the hired, from the clear little things out of the bottom, the bottom of the mission. So when you see it, cause he's coming almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like little, you know, like if you look at a session, there's a little antennas hanging out of the bottom, kind of like that. There was two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on a top. There was no plume, no IR, no, no visible propulsions, even heat signature, you know, it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar display, which that really raises the classification level, especially to see what the radar does when it's being jammed. You know, when I, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official investigation and about 2000 and let me think about 2009, I had gotten 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, okay, 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, okay, 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 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 you need to protect, because not everyone wants people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door. And there's rumors, you talk to everyone. I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes the newspapers and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much. I mean, if I turn down like, I turned down Russian TV. I can give you her name when we're done here. But 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 more people involved to go. Because I think there's, and when you talk to Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon, the group at TTSA, that whole thing was- What's TTSA? That's To The Stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLong group that got started. And you go, because I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him, he's very smart. And I ask 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 was reading books and he read one of them on UFOs. I'm trying to think the title. It's one of the big ones that's out there, real popular. He started asking more and through his fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more connected. If you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and he's part of the Mellon dynasty from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart. He definitely knows how the government works because he worked there. And so when I went down to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson about a month ago, month and a half ago, he texted me. I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, hey, because they were like, you got to do it. Because I had turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. Because those guys are like, you got to 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 the people who listen to this include fellow faculty at MIT and major universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from the scientific community. A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting. But you don't even know, 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, try to communicate, try to interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective. And 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, 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 go, well, that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday. Then you get into Project Blue Book. 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 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 if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it, then I win and you lose. And then more and more science is showing that there's habitable planets out there. Everything we've learned so far, and we know very little, but everything we've learned so far about the planets out there, exoplanets, Earth-like planets, it seems that it's very likely that there's life out there. Intelligent life is another topic, but life. Well, we as humans, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says, ha ha, we are it. And you go, not so much. Maybe we're not so intelligent. Because 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... Because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. 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 sometimes it's our ability to develop the technology to support the theory. We are just now proving 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. We have proven that. So you look at that way and you go, well, does that mean that 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 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... Because it's such an interesting topic from a career perspective, from a science perspective. You've been brave in 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, 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, 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 I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this 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 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... You'll follow as you APS. So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I just 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... Literally, I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was signed. So he was one. So that's why I call it the unofficial official report. It was never releasable because people go, well, I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go, well, just because you put in a FOIA request, I didn't get it. I go, because 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 a Navy call me about... Right before the article came out in the New York Times, this was starting to come back and she had called me because 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 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 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 of anything. I knew of the unofficial official report, which is that one. But if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because that's not my job and nor did I care. In that whole situation, you mentioned Lube. Did you think about your impact to your career? Just to get back to the question, do you think others, other pilots, other people like in Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing? Why aren't they talking about this? Why are people afraid to talk about this? Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust. I'll just tell you that right now. We typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, especially when I do even the TV shows, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, 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. So here's the thing. I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes from like physics and math. And I also have a deep curiosity about the world. I read a lot. That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to a person who 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. It 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 yeah, that's true for journalists. That's true for other scientists. It's just human nature. If we see something that we can't explain, then sometimes if you just, 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 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. And he's literally proving them, but he didn't have, 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 the hard work that people try to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made with his theories. It's fascinating. But yes, at the time it's kind of crazy. What are you 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, of the incident that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions of maybe just see if there's just to paint more and more of the picture. One, you kind of mentioned to take tact 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 tech tech? Like, is there any appendages? Is there, um, some texture to it that no smooth white tech tech, 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. Um, but remember we're looking at the original tape. So there's not, there's basically no degradation. But when you saw your eyes, there's no kind of appendages. No, 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. Uh, did you, I mean, you chased it. So we flew close to it. Relatively speaking, was there, did you feel any wake, like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically? No, nothing, nothing. So, uh, another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing. You've developed a feel for, for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival or did it, let me ask a few questions around it. So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised? Did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability? Did, uh, and did it, and did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, um, uh, an air fight against, 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. Uh, it's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side of the field, it'll actually go no threat and it'll start eating. You know, they don't put their tail up 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, um, you know, which I don't know, someone asked, what do you think? I go, maybe it was communicating with something. I joked on good morning America. Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of like Star Trek, you know, and I actually 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 it'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 something there, was there a seamount, we just didn't find it again. I don't know. But once we started to descend and it actually reorient its, its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up, then it was obviously where we were there and it was really coming up just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up and it ends up getting up to 12, uh, where I cut across the circle. I think it was very aware that we were there because it interacted. We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another airplane. Um, but, uh, you know, was it, was, were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me, it was more curious. Curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have. And I always felt to be honest, if I was inside the airplane, uh, especially as long as much 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 wizard in the back seat. He's running all the displays. We are a team. We're in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new. You feel pretty good. And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then accelerate like it did, like it was like no big deal. You know, for an airplane, if you just put me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight, just get me at 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, uh, it like it's something that you would love to fly almost. Uh, 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, there's another perspective on it is it was, uh, not that the thing under the water was the key thing. And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like, I don't think it was a projection. I think it was a real object. It was an op, a physical heart object that could be fly. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think all four of us will take the same thing. It wasn't, this was not, cause you go, okay, let's just go on a, it's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting next to each other, we were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that. And I go, okay, there's a, in theory you could have that, but with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying, you know, and they're, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of hanging out, watching this whole thing happen. You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two different altitudes over a clear blue, you know, if you've ever been at sea, and I don't mean like coastal, I mean, like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest. It's incredible. You know, you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean. You got pretty high contrast. And for this thing just to disappear, it's, 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, my mom's an Olympic swimmer. So like, I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss, anything could be under there. 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? It 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. And there's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was the triple seven that crashed. 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, 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 under water, 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? No, it's 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, is it move? Maybe not. I mean, I'm not the theoretical physicist and some, you know, I'm not at 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 taco. It flopped behind us and 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, because my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto became a wrestler because he beat me up every night. We joke, I talk 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. 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'll just keep going with that. 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, 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 because we didn't get it on radar. Um, because I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't, it wouldn't lock. The radar would lock. And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try, because you get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human created technology that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of, or is it not something not of this world? So you, if you'd have 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. Yep. For a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional propulsion system in it, cause I don't think it did. Uh, I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do, then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years, you know, and I understand, uh, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government, I never will speak for the United States government, but I understand how some of that stuff works for classification levels and why we classify stuff, you know, is it, is it detrimental to national defense? But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology like this that could literally change the way mankind travels, uh, 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, cause remember these things were coming down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space. So you know, above 80,000 feet, which is space and they would come down and they would come straight down. They'd hang out at like 20,000 feet. And then three or four hours later, they'd go back up. We don't have anything that can come down, hang out in once, you know, and I'm talking hold out in a spot. Well, we all know there's winds. They're not drifting like a balloon. They're just sitting there. And then they would go back up and they tracked up to the, when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10 of these things. There's other guys and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked a groups of these things coming down, hanging out and going up. So it's not just propulsion and the way it moves. It's also fuel. It's everything. So the whole, the whole of it indicates a kind of technology that's a highly advanced, but you don't think in your sense that you actually don't know, but you know more than a lot of people in your sense, the top secret military technology. If you think about skunk works, if you think about like that cannot be more than 15 years ahead. I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117. Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out, like it was developed at this time. It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government. What's the 117? That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B-2, but the stealth fighter. So if you look at that, yeah, 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. And the other one is, do we have the basis to do that? 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. 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 much power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to counter the giant orb that we live on? So by the way, you mentioned gravity-based. That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of what kind of propulsion would have to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussions 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. Yeah, which is very little. And someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all? Yeah. Okay, 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 had asked me, they said, what if there wasn't, maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from some place else. I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around. So I don't know. I'd like to say that, 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 the 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, we're going to be able to colonize, and I know Elon is big into that. 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. 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. 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. It's really driven by, there's the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing. Those are your big, you say Raytheon's kind of like a subset of that, but Raytheon's pretty big too. In US defense, those are the big guys. That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire, they go do stuff like that. When 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, 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 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, and then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing has 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 Thiacol, 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 you had to put them all back together. Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, I go, what do they do? Do they like overhaul? Because no, actually they clean them up and they can use them again. They're reusable systems. Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's a private company. So being able to put people on 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. 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 and two friends of mine, the one actually had a mission date, the one got one later. So it's cool when you're watching your friends doing a space walk 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 space walk. 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 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 we're going to, 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 a less than a compact computer in the sixties, 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 Wapakoneta, 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? One day? Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. I am not- Because that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight is that, people like, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in terms of, you're not a civilian, right? In a sense that you're just a normal person, you're not a fighter jet pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up there, it would be somebody like you in the next 20 years. I'd be, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things, I'd be all over it. I don't know what my wife would say, but 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 knows how I am. Most people that know me are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person you were in high school. I was a class clown, and I still am that way. So- Let me ask you this question about, so I'm talking to Elon again, and I'm curious to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to him about Tic Tac, about these weird out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously just like you said, if there's something to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to out the 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, 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. Just really in layman's terms, 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, 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, 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 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 does with Bezos and you've got Elon, there's some big money out there. I mean, you're talking 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? Because when you work outside of what the government would want to do. We're not working on this necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant. I am an American. You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union. I can't believe you agreed to this. You haven't killed me yet. Yeah, well, you're here. You've been here for a while. No, no, no. I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American through and through at this point. When you do that, let's just look at American universities. There's 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. 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 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. 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 realized that space was too expensive for one country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate. It's the one thing that the Russians and the US actually work together on. Think about it. That's it. We work together on space because we realized 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 exploring. 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 computing 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 it just sends data back. You can analyze it. 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 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 non-zero probability that it's alien technology. And in that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to, like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box. Like it's almost 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 of 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 and bounds. They can do whatever they want. So their money, oh, 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 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, I'm talking Stephen Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing something that's totally different. Yeah, 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 Tic Tac, thinking outside the box is not, 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 the, he was out of the box. He did not think that he not thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories. Where would we be? Okay, we're jumping around a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space, and Mars and space. But let's, let's, let me jump back to a few questions that folks had. I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual idea, not the actual facts of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other. But let me kind of bring it up. Mick West, I've just recently started 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, 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 with the Tic Tac, like with your own eyes. Like 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 fight that as, I mean, maybe you can comment on that. Let me do it right now. 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 because I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's, that's why I said 40 feet, 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, pure experience. There's, 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 the size of a hornet. From a human factors perspective, how often in your experience of those 16 years, do you find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things. So like, how often do you make mistakes with vision? You actually, you make vision issues a lot because you're, and the sad part is your brain believes what your eyes see. We are actually trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly, because your brain and eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instruments. Let's go back to landing at night. So your eyes, how do you do that? Yeah. Land at night. 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 MSD, the multi spatial disorientation device, or the spin and puke. It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules. And when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can, you can make yourself think that I'm descending or climbing, but you're actually only going around in circles at a very slow rate, as fast as a human can talk. But as they spin you around in the 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 cause 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. So 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, it's a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that, that adjusts your brain's interpretation of what you're saying. Yeah. You'd be amazed at how good. So here's, here's another example. So if we go out over the water, so there's no land in sight and we're 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 this short couple of 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 one nine five 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, oh, I pass land, I pass land. No, you don't. 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 three five five. And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns and use the sun relative. So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows. So you can come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened. And you get really, really good at that. So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six o'clock and you 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 read 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 cart and you go out with a stack of cards and you stick the new one on your knee board cart. So you're ready to go and here's the next setup. Um, it's kind of, it's in some way similar to what, uh, like at the, at the highest level chess players do. I mean, you're, I mean, they, they, they recap the games, but they, the richness of the representation that they use and remembering like how the games evolved. It's not like it's much richer than the actual moves. It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like, like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved. It's more like instinctual from years and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really can't. It's, it's just, 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. Cause the whole thing is the debrief. When we get back and we talk about that's really where their learning is. Um, and it's the same thing. If you want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off, you try and learn because you're remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place play with someone better than you. That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning anything. You're just learning that they're not good and you're better. When you, when you challenge yourself against someone that is going to is better than you, you learn. So I learned how to fight an airplane with, uh, he's actually one of my best friends. Uh, we'll call him Tom. I won't give his call sign cause I don't know. So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight, uh, because Tom had just left Top Gun. He was the, the, 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, cause I had come out of a six and we really don't fight because it was a bomber. And so I get in F-18s and I want to learn how to fight cause it's a whole other side of the mission. It's the F and F fighter attack. The F-18 is fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight. So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach me how to do it. And he did, and I would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never been. And then I would go, well, I'm 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, cause you don't, no one walks out into that world. I don't care how gifted of an aviator and go, I, 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 I mean, so what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac? Yeah. Low zero. Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So maybe even 90, I am 99.9%. So 0.1% my eyes deceive me, but remember if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. So the percentage is even lower. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't find that a particular debunking case that you saw, but I'm glad you put it, you, um, you said those words out loud. So for me, from our perspective, uh, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical. Uh, so your eye account, I think is the most fascinating story. And that, uh, I think, uh, that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there. On so many levels, just like we said, on the engineering level, that maybe there's propulsion systems where we can actually build it, 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, uh, 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 it's just where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me otherwise, but so to bring up make West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that one of the most amazing video, uh, parts of the Flir video for people who haven't seen it is at the end of it, uh, the, the, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left. Off the screen. Off the screen. And what make West says is, uh, that it, you know, make West probably others that the way to explain that is the tracking system. Like we said, it's vision-based tracking simply loses the, uh, like the object, the tracking loses it. And so it simply allows the object to, uh, float off screen because it's no longer tracking it. So I find that at least a plausible explanation of that video looking at your face. You do not. So can you maybe comment to that, uh, to that debunking, uh, uh, Sure. I will. So, um, it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system. No, for sure. And that's like me going, cause 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, he's four time, four or five time world champion. But, um, that would be pretty stupid to me to try and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car. Um, or as a matter of fact, anyone driving a formula one car. So I can't tell you how many times I've watched. You gotta remember when we looked at this thing, when it, when, when Chad came back with the video, we sat there and watched it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all right, right. All right, let's look at this. Um, you know, because you can look and see where the, you can see where the airplane'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, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up and the people at Raytheon could probably add to this because they built the pod. The tracking gate will start to open up and, and, but the thing, when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can't move fast enough. It has gimbal rates on how fast that thing can move around. Cause 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. Um, but there's a theory on one of them, oh, it's here and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking out in front. It stays like this. So 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 the he's on, he's on black hot. So the white object is actually colder than the ocean. That's flying. Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd be dead. So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the apparent rotation of the object. That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we know of. And make West suggests that a flare, like reflections or whatever can explain. No, cause what Mick West doesn't see is so when they take, cause I've talked to the, one of them actually I work with. So I know him. I know I talk to him all the time. So, uh, and it's his best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends. The gimbal video, the gimbal, both of them, the go fast and the gimbal were shot by the same person. Okay. So, uh, and they were in each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each other. Okay. So what you don't see is, so the airplanes, airplanes still super Hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new phased array radar that's made by Raytheon. Things incredible. Okay. It doesn't usually, if it's, if it's out there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started seeing stuff. And then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting pod, if 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 things. So what you see in the gimbal video of the thing and it rotates and you go, Holy shit, look at that thing. It's just sitting there and it's in the wind and it's going against the wind. Why it's doing this, you know, someone goes, Oh, it's an airplane. Now, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change aspect because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect. It just wrote, 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 as their number one priority or their launch and steering. So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pods 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, cause you go, Oh, it's just the video. Well, if you take the video with a radar going, no, there's actually other things out there because there's at least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the vacates. It was, it actually became, I called a buddy 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 note tam out, which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area. So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area. It's all the warning area tells you 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 don't stay. They had an airplane cause 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 I've heard it's almost hit one. It's almost hit, hit them. So that's another, that's one of the biggest, another biggest account is like almost hit a plane. Something that appeared to be a cube in a translucent sphere. What do you make of that? What I mean, that, that's the most dangerous. 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 like a hundred feet or something like that of the airplane that almost hit it. So they do is they come back and go, hey, I had a near midair. What'd you have a near midair with? This floating beach ball with this cube inside of it. And you go, huh? So they send out a notam again and they do what's called a hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there. We almost hit one. 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've picked them up like hovering on radar and then all of a sudden they're traveling at really high rates of speed. So, you know, what are you going to do? Well, let me ask this because this is what people kind of think about after you witnessed tic tac and after this, these incidents, as far as we know, uh, with the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not, did not react like what, like did not freak out. It almost like, was it 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 freak out? 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 no, cause, uh, you know, like, like tests almost. So let's talk about, so let's say you've got this cool new toy, let's 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 atoll in the Pacific, if it's going up above you, the worst case is going to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land? And it actually crashed next to the atoll and, and you know, Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy under the bus. So, um, that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen. So, 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, we can't control a lot of things. You're exactly right. So you go, you know, it's, you know, it's not the doctor evil scientist that's going to throw out there to get, there's control and there's reasons that we do it. Because a lot of stuff, especially when you get to, there's, there's, you build something in theory, you model it, you go, Hey, this is, it looks like it's going to work. You get funding, you build it, you test it some more, you bench test it, you know, you like an airplane with digital flight controls before it even leaves the ground. They've got things over the pedostatic system that are changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it. And it's probably up on jack. So the gear up, so it doesn't, it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know it's sitting on jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system. So they can actually make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, Hey, it looks like it's going to work. And then there's, when there's a bunch of stuff that they do. That's a control environment where 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, they're not doing that. And the other, the other side of that question is why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the U S government in general, not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen freak out in a positive way, freak out in the negative way, like what are the Russians up to again? Or, or more like, what is this like, so more turmoil. So if you 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 a, another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we saw and said, Oh, it belonged to them. Then it's a big deal. So here's what's going on. So we're literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup. Normally they, we go out for a month, go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month at sea period where we actually had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving. So we could run home up to the central Valley, have Thanksgiving with our family and then run back down and do this. Okay. So, you know, and I had just taken over, I had 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 oh five command in the Navy. Right? So you go, okay, so I'm out here. I got my squadron. I'm running it. I see this thing, you know, we catch shit for it. I have a squadron to run. I have the, the, the, the Tic Tac was over here. And although an extraordinary event, I have 17 air crew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for, right? Their 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, uh, snap and, and we're going through all this stuff. I don't have a lot of time to worry about the Tic Tac. Yeah. If people need to talk to me. So you gotta 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 CEO of the, the Princeton, who is a major command guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the squadrons, which are oh five command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is oh five 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, uh, and the admiral, right? And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends with. I talked to him. So you're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh yeah. This schedule, yeah. There's missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done. And there's no time for silly things. That's exactly right. So, and we're the, we're the integration, you know, when a, when a battle group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the key. It's we take our airport with us. We can park it anywhere we want and we can do what we need to do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me. The admiral never said anything to me. The people on his staff that I was friends with never said anything 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, cause 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 cause I'll talk for free. Cause you're not paying me. I said, I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because they, my wife and I got to go cause it was just looked like fun. Cause the whole town gets involved. Yeah. And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this because it was just, you know, it was fun and I got asked and Jeremy and George Nappin went the year before. So I went with, with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his wife and my wife. And you know, we all hung out kind of, you know, talking not about UFO stuff, but just getting to know each other as people because you know, Bob's like me, the stuff that he talks about is not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life. You know, he's just a really, really smart guy. That's just like the rest of us trying to get through life. Yeah. That's nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading, um, uh, Lula Lazando's resignation note from his, uh, uh, he was a program director at the, uh, ATIP program. Like, like, uh, yeah. One of the sad things is that he's mentioned that, you know, people in government just don't take this seriously as a threat, uh, like UFOs as a threat. Like you said, if it doesn't have a Russian label on it, it's a, it's a sad thing to think about that, that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that we don't want to deal with. And it kind of just fades into history. Like literally, it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up, like, and, uh, it just didn't, cause they're not like when aliens show up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the schedule. And if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up in some very, uh, uh, nonchalant peaceful way briefly. People would be like, that's, that's, uh, I don't have time for this. That's so sad. That's so sad. It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back, let's go back way back, way back in the time machine, you know, there were people kind of scattered around the globe, you know, in Europe's a perfect example. Why does France speak French? And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish, and then you'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, 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, cause the native Americans all spoke different languages. You know, it's that same type of thing. So, but anytime we have a Tennessee to show up, you're, you're actually, you think about it, you're an alien. If I go to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years, where, you know, or a thousand years where travel, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time. We were, well, we don't think we were, the Vikings probably were, um, cause 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, if you show up someplace, like when the conquistadors from Spain came over into South America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien, you know, and then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in, in a human alien world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other, we, we take what we want and that's what happened. I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because that's how we are. You know, humans are, we're an interesting group. So you go, now what, what if something is from someplace else? Just, let's just, let's just go off the grid and go, let's say there are little green men. What are their intents? Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo and he said, what do you think they were here for us? I don't know. He goes, what, I go, oh, 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, there, 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, the, the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't destroy themselves. Yeah. If I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention with the atom bomb. That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of, uh, what is it? UFO sightings since, since the nuclear since the nuclear. Yeah. That's you go. Hmm. Um, let me ask a little bit out there. Question maybe it's speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell. Do you think it's possible that there is out of this world aircraft or, uh, beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth, like the U S 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, go, 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 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 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. Globally. So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government or someone in the, in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something that is not from this world. And I'm not talking to meteor, but something that was manufactured in some way that allowed transport or observation. It could be a drone, could be a foreign drone, you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff. And we got stuff that just went past Pluto that's out in the Kuiper belt, you know, there's, there's stuff out there floating around. And what about ours? It's going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, because we've had stuff 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, uh, you know, people have issues with Bob. So if, you know, and I leave it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not, I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane, normal, super smart guy. Bob 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 U S government, should they make that publicly known? This is this note in question. This is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the nature of human civilization? Like the, the way we, the way we think about our place in the world, also the, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military conflict, should we release that information or not? If you were the government. So here, well, here's exactly how. So for, for classified information, the government is the people that classify it. So I can't go, I can't look at something and go, Oh my God, this Avion bottle is now a top secret. I can't, I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that. That's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24 years of my life. So, um, I understand that. Um, 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 like, well, I'm going to be a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, whatever your religious are, but you come over here. I kind of knew that from the last, but you come over here, you basically have made yourself. You're educated, you're working at a college, you're a lawyer, you're a lawyer. You're a lawyer. You're a lawyer. 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. I can do whatever the hell I can create. With a lot of hard work, I can do quite a lot. And no one gave it to you. So, I mean, and I have people- Well, I'm a believer that like, I mean, we are a community. So, there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American dream is a real thing. And this is, I joke about being Russian, but I'm an American. And this is, I do believe, the greatest country on earth. So, there's a reason the nationalist pride, 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 not so much a threat as 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, because 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. So, he did that. So, if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say, I'm just talking, this is Dave's theory. I have custody of this thing, 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. That's not important, but you get access to the technology to try and figure it out. And then you go, well, Bob comes out and says, 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, 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 wall. You go, I can't do it. So, sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So, you go find someone else who's in a propulsion, you bring him in, 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, project's over, end 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 remember, 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? And now they can leapfrog and they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution of technology and you shelf it again. Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because it's heartbreaking. Listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on. The alternative approach is to release this to the world and say there's a mystery here. And then the Elans 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 that's within a lot of us. And money aside, people in their garage just will- But you're thinking like a scientist. 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 that that got into the hands of the Nazis, that it would be the end. And that's a tough call to do that, knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the wrong hand. And that's kind of the fear when you look at this, you go, okay, so if we do this, if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it, kind of international space station like where we're all going to work on it together, like Antarctica is really supposed to be treaty free from any weapons or anything more. Suppose we got the international thing down there, we're all going to work together. If you did it in the confines of that and you could control the flow in and out, because what you don't want is someone stealing information and getting it back to where 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 the solution first. That's the problem because we have this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power. It would literally change the game of the way the world operates. And from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military aspect, it's got huge, huge- Yeah, yeah. So beautifully, beautifully presented. And 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 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. I agree with you. But 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. It's contradictory. It's not inspiring. It's suspicious. It's just not even the way they released the videos. The Tic Tac, if presented correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists. It's like us going to the moon. It's inspiring. I mean, it's incredible. And the way it was released was suspicious. It was like low resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents. And I mean, why, I don't know how to ask this question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in terms of communicating the things they do know to the public? Because I don't think they know how. Especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years. And I don't think, because I don't buy off on the conspiracy stuff. I just think that when it comes in, like I said, the government has the right to classify stuff, they classify everything because they don't know. You have something, you don't know what it is, you don't know. So we just go, well, it must be top secret and let's put it in a vault. It's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the arc and they put it in the, it's in the giant army warehouse. We don't even know what we have. So, but I also believe that, 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, I was joking with Joe when he was talking about the storm area 51 stuff. I'm like, yeah, that's probably the worst idea you could possibly have is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons, there are reasons that we have things that we don't just let out to the public because if we do, as soon as you do let someone know that you have something, they immediately try and encounter it. And perfect example, the U.S. in the sixties 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, 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. 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. We built three XB-70s and we scrapped the program. 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. 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, that person, 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 don't have the expertise, 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 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 or IEEE. It's so heartbreaking. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concorgs. And 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. Some of this new technology that you developed for an open source, and this goes back to the original conversation. 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 $100 billion. He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what, the Gates Foundation between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other money, because I think Bezos' ex-wife actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the Gates Foundation. So what's the Gates Foundation worth these days? And these are guys, brilliant, brilliant. Some of the greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing? Because they have the ability, 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 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, but they never stop them from free thought and developing that. It's just, we really don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that. I totally understand that. But if 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. And you go, is that... well, are they the greatest minds? I'd say, 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, the Elans of the world, the Jeff Bezos, are 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. They have an idea that this is what I want it to be. Where if you go to SpaceX, where 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. Money makes the world go round contrary to what everyone thinks. But 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'll guarantee that, what is it? Blue Origin, isn't that Amazon? 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 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 with, 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. And he would throw the money at it and make it happen. And I'm talking this fast. He has a great story about this. 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 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 him 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. And it's not just money. It's because I've seen, I 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. But like, because I've also worked for DARPA, like for research, in terms of a source of funding, there's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, like being funded by DARPA. And with Elon, I was literally in the presence of like, anything is possible. Cutting across all the bullshit of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy, the rules, the constraints, all of that stuff. Just, you can cut across immediately. So 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, 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 complete shift in mentality. And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost. Yeah. It's exciting, especially given putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky or it's limitless, the possibilities we could do with this kind of mech. I think it's exciting. I think we live in an exciting time right now, besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is a hopeful, there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the moment, is the 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 when 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 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, 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 Musk's face, the look on Jeff Bezos' face and all the brilliance. 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? Ramish on 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 you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven. They're actually explainable. You had sent me the question, the Phoenix lights. Phoenix lights, yeah. What's that? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these. I'm not either. You want a funny story on that. I was at a conference. Hopefully, he doesn't watch this and get offended. We had this, I call it speed dating. There was a table. There's about eight people at a table and we would go sit at the table and they could ask us questions and then after 10 minutes, we moved to the next table. I was speed dating all these people that are really into this. It was funny, but I'd sat down. It's always funny because some people will try and dominate it, but you have to push the dominators away so that if you're quiet and introverted, you can ask your question too. 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 looks at me and he goes, well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not, but I chase one, so I'm an expert. Have you? You could see him get deflated because I'm a smart ass like that. That 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. When we come out and say, because to me, it's just in it, it's five minutes of my life. I did a lot of really cool, really 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 if you talk to people that are really into it, who've never seen one, it kills them that they didn't see one. Here we are, because what's unique with ours, which adds that level is it wasn't, we just didn't see it. It wasn't like, oh, look, something in the sky and it was weird. We actually engaged with it. Yeah, that was- It was an engaged five minute thing. There's other stories from other countries. Like there's a story back when the Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these things and one of them shot at some, it shot at it because they said, shoot at it and it shot at it and then it got shot down. Then they said, don't ever shoot at them again and don't chase them. Just so 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, 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 a, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights. Somebody on, I think Reddit said, ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix light. 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. 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 A-10 drop and flares. I don't think so. Oh, 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 super power. 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 state separation. Then you see the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand it 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're launching at night, you'd watch. You 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 weird shapes in the sky. That's part. But when you go to Phoenix lights and you go, hey, when a thousand people see some, you're going to discredit all a thousand people or you're going to try and explain it away with something else. 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? I talked to them quite a bit. I am not a part of To The Stars Academy. I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this. So what's their mission? What's their hope? What's their- 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, physics-based knowledge to go, how would something like this operate? That's really their bottom line was to try and use and then couple that with, because they've got the series unidentified, couple that with television to get the word out. So you're actually putting something instead of, because everyone has a theory. Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories. 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. 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 and 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 doesn't, it'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- But 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 I, when they started and I talked to them, because I've talked to Tom and I've talked to Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid of the stigma that's tied to UFOs and let's look at it from a science base and then use TV to get the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool things. I mean, you know, they've, the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property of their government. They got a bunch from, it might've 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. Cause 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 government, the US government came out a month ago and said, we have, we have, 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. Yeah. The division is, I mean, nothing will unite us humans, descendants of chimps, like the idea that there's life out there. Oh, it would literally change. I said this a while ago, I forget, 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 okay. No, no, it's okay. We're not going to do, we're not going to stop. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay. And you got to think the only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia. If he'd have 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 them. 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 or 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 there's a balance between kindness and force. Well it is, 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, they're just good dudes. But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he was, he's a nationally ranked wrestler. 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, hey dude, you know, hey, how you doing? He's super nice. He would cross that ring on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally different person. And he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy, like put a hurt on. And he would get done and he's like super humble and they'd raise his hand and he would, he'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 have ripped 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. I mean, he wouldn't even tell you he's a wrestler. Yeah. That's kind of a symbol of the best of America. That's what America is, that wrestler. When you cross the line, you're, you can be hard, but once you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. I know you're super humble saying it's better to be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. That the entire trajectory of having a dream, of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career, what advice would you give to a young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and is inspired, that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice you could give them about life, about career, about anything? Yeah. Yeah. First, let me start with, and you had a question on it, inspirational people. So 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. And my grandfather's Sicilian. He was one of the first ones in his family born in the United States. So my great grandmother and I had aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat. Huge, huge guy. And just the nicest, friendliest would give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his funeral. And I'm talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. I mean, it was literally a mix of who's who. And he had told me once, because when you're little, you start looking. And I grew up basically, I was probably middle-class, lower middle-class. My dad was a fireman. You're not rich. He's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up. And I was talking 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. So it was a totally different than we are now. And he said, he goes, you know, David, he goes, they're no better than you. And you're no better than anyone else. He goes, you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's different. He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes, and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person. It just, that's who they chose to be. And you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on someone because, you know, there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should never ever do that. And I kept that close to me. He was a huge influence. It was my mom's dad, just a big, big influence in my life and the way I carried myself. And he was one that would say, you know, you can be anything you want to be. You know, he grew up dirt poor, you know, and the fact that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that, you know, to him, that was a success. And to me, it was always, you know, trying to better and move on. And he was the one, you know, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that, anything is possible. So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969, you know, and I'm watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military pilots. And, you know, we had an international guard that at the time was flying F-100. So I'm dating myself. And I was just fascinated with flight. And I just looked at that going, that's really what I want to do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always, I could do this or do that. And when I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into natural resources at Ohio State. And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger. Cause I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires. Cause that's just, I like that stuff. You know, it was that or being 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. And then, so you look and people go, what are you going to do with that? And I said, you know, I got an oceanography degree because I go, well, I'm going to sail on the ocean. So at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at. And that was a kind of a running joke. And then, and then there's, so there are these passions and underneath it is the, is the belief that you can be anything you want to be. You can, you know, I told my kids this, you know, when they were young, you know, it was tough, especially for my son. So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind. You know, my, my wife's brothers are both colorblind. It's really color deprived, color-deprived. 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. Cause he'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at? He goes right over there by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go this, I like he had a hat on one 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. Cause to him, it looked great. So he couldn't fly. He came. He said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate? You know, you're talking to your kids and you know, what do you want to do? He goes, I want to be a pilot. Now I got to tell him, cause he's looking at me, cause I'm a pilot, you can't be a pilot. He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you got eye issues. You know, so you got to redirect. And the other one was because I had to, I stopped flying. I was 42 years old and I was like, and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I know exactly what it feels like when, you know, Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it. Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever. So you do, when you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it. 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 residency in internal medicine right now. And my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors. And until I look at it is, you know, people go, oh, you got two 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 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, money. That's what makes the world go around. But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather who didn't have a lot of money, and he was probably one of the most happy people on life. And unfortunately he died at 65. He had a massive heart attack because he didn't tell that 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 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. And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, literally it was like three miles long. The Pope. It was crazy. Yeah. Who died the Pope? That was because he's a Catholic. He's Italian. He goes, 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 there was like 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 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. It's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you anything. I said, and get rid of the hate. And number two is follow your dreams because everyone is capable of everything. And there's a, there's a self realism. Like, you know, if you really have trouble with math, getting a PhD in applied math is probably not something you're going to be able to do, but understand yourself, what your own capabilities are. And you know, inside your heart, don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do. You have to determine that yourself and go for it. And, and, and you can do anything. It's just, it's, it's a great, the world's incredible. It really is. Let me ask the last big ridiculous question. Uh, so you've lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death. So, um, let me ask kind of, uh, 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've got going on here? The meaning of life, human life in this sense. So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often. Um, and I don't get into my religious beliefs or what I am, uh, 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, uh, him and I were sitting there talking and, uh, he was giving me the whole story and how he had really changed his look on life that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die. Well, unfortunately, after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location that fit there, you know, close to the water where they could do stuff. And I won't say where, um, and he was doing what he loved to do. And he got diagnosed with throat cancer. And I was talking to him, uh, it was probably about maybe two months before he died. Um, and he was talking to me, and I said, dude, 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 where 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's a Navy. And we were just talking and he looked at me and he said, and this is in my dream. He's like, Dave, it's all going to be okay. And this is, this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have. There's been people are going to think I'm weird about this, but, um, but, you know, I know what my dream was and you know, maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream, but in 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, in 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, 128 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, a Lamborghini or an S5 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. Cause 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 and eventually they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the 1700s in the Boston area and you're going to go, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact my life? He probably did. But eventually people forget. 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 always just joke, who are your true friends? It's the person while 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 o'clock in the morning. Who are you going to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come and get you. And that's life. Those that is life. The people you love. It's, it's, it's the people you truly care about. And contrary to, I have, you know, Oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends. You got about that many real friends that you can count on and that's it. Everything else doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you'd be nice. I mean, I've, there's acquaintance friends that I'll do anything for and then come to my house and stuff. But then there's the people that, you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment's notice, you know, when, when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right down the street from me and my cousin Chad, and I got two boys, there's, 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 Ray or Chad, ever needs me, if something happens, like when my uncle died, it wasn't, it wasn't an issue. If I'm coming home, it's, I'm booking the ticket and I don't give a shit what it costs because I will be there to 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 gotta, I gotta 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, it's probably sets the record for the longest one. So I, I mean, 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. And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening. Hope to see you next time.
 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.
 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.
 Please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount
 and to support this podcast.
 As a side note, let me say that the world of UFOs and UAPs,
 unidentified aerial phenomena, and aliens in general, is foreign to me
 because of the high ratio of outlandish conspiracy theorists
 to actual hard evidence.
 I'm a scientist first and foremost, but an open-minded one,
 often looking and thinking outside the box.
 I'm often disheartened by the closed-mindedness of the scientific community,
 and in equal part, I'm disheartened by the lack of rigor
 and basic scientific inquiry and study
 on the part of the conspiracy theorists.
 I believe there's a line somewhere between the two extremes
 that more inquisitive minds should walk.
 I think we humans know very little about our world,
 what's up there among the stars, and the nature of reality,
 and the nature of our very own minds.
 The path to understanding can only be walked humbly.
 The very idea that there is a possibility
 that David witnessed a piece of technology,
 whether human-made or alien-made, that moved in the way it did,
 should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this Earth.
 There may be propulsion and energy systems yet to be discovered
 that, once understood and mastered,
 will put distant galaxies within reach of us human beings.
 Paradigm shifts in science and leaps 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 the Five Stars on Apple podcast,
 follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
 or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman.
 As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle.
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 sometimes 24 hours, that's one dinner to the next.
 I've been even considering doing a 48 or 72-hour fast
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 People who have done it tell me that outside of weight loss
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 The answer is complicated, but let me pick one thing.
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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 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, you know, I went through in 97, Class 497.
 There's actually a log of every single person that's went through,
 kind of like SEAL training.
 You know, there's a list.
 So people, because there's a lot of posers out there,
 I was a Navy SEAL. No, you weren't.
 Well, I went to Top Gun. You 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.
 There's 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, OK, here, and they'll sell them to you.
 If you are not on the list, you can get no patch.
 Because it is, it's a pretty big deal to go to Top Gun.
 To go through. But it's 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 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 it was 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 and 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, 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 your SFTI when you come out of that, your job is to go usually to one of the weapon schools
 on the East or West coast and train the fleet squadrons.
 And then you visit the squadrons and train and do upgrade rides and all that.
 So there's a, there's a reason that they are extremely particular when you go through the
 course.
 It's it is literally one of the best things.
 And it's not, it's not a rank based thing because think, oh, Navy, you can come in as a,
 you know, like a, an 04 Lieutenant Commander.
 The lieutenants, the hierarchy, well, it used 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.
 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 Lamar, 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 were 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, 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- They'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, 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, because 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,
 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, not a chance. And then when I did, I actually had a, it's a funny story and I'll get to it and
 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 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, he was my cousin, my cousin,
 the guy two doors down from my house, a paperboy in the neighborhood. So they all knew me.
 And I went to my cousin's wedding and he, and Mr. Race looks at me and he says, David Fravor. I go,
 Mr. Race, how you doing? He goes, you fly jets, top gun and all that. I go, yes, sir. He goes,
 I figured he'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?
 And the easiest way is one, never take no. Don't let anyone put you down and say you can't do it.
 I mean, I knew what I was capable of inside. 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, but I'm really not that good at basketball. It's probably not
 ever going to happen no matter how hard I try and practice. It's just the way it is. Or for me to be
 in the NFL, I'm not fast, 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 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 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 can't get to the nth degree, six decimal places. 80% solution is good enough.
 You build up a really strong gut for the 80% solution.
 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,
 if you're fighting in BFM, the 80% solution is it's like a chess game, but it's a really,
 really fast chess game where you go, I'm doing this. And then I know that if I do a maneuver,
 if he's going to counter it correctly, he should do A. If he doesn't do A, he does some degree less,
 like B, C, D. And then I know how bad his error is. And then I capitalize. So I don't have to be
 perfect. I don't have to go, I need to go to 47 degrees, nose high. If I just get above 40,
 then I'm good and I can watch how it reacts and then I can adjust for that. 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. Until eventually, if you're really fighting just
 guns only rear quarter where you got to get behind the guy, World War II dogfighting type stuff,
 then it's literally, it's a very, very fast chess game that happens at 400 knots, 300 knots.
 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. Well, part of it is family. My dad was, I used to call him a
 fire ready aim guy. He'd smack me and then ask me what I did wrong. Good parenting. Back then,
 I joke and people look, because at times it was kind of tough because he can be pretty demanding,
 but on the other side, I probably needed to be reined in a little bit at times.
 But then everyone else in my family, my mom was really awesome when I was a kid.
 My grandfather, who is a big part of it, my mom's dad, he taught me a lot. You have a question there
 that we'll talk about him, but huge, huge influence, very, very positive. A lot of the stuff that I do
 today and decisions are based on things that he taught me. I figured it was the first funeral I
 ever went to and it was about three miles long and church was overfilling and people were out. He was
 a beer delivery guy, dead serious. Then you go, someone asked who died, the Pope.
 So a lot of people loved him. So back to my career,
 to your first question, because I'm getting down a rabbit hole. No, when I was at the, I was going
 to stay in the Marines. I really wanted to go, man, I love the Corps. I think it's, of all services,
 it's that one, everything is in a ball and they're very, very professional. It was a great,
 great organization to join. But I went out to the Nimitz on my freshman cruise. After your freshman
 year at the Naval Academy, you go out on a ship and 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? Yeah, so Nimitz is an aircraft carrier. It's four and a
 half acres of sovereign US territory. It floats around the US oceans. It's a giant thing. Does
 it have weapons on it? The air wing is really the weapons. It does have defensive weapons,
 but for the most part, it's a giant moving airport is what it is. So I was out there watching the
 airplanes land and take off. And I'm like, oh. And the squadrons that were out there, one of the
 squadrons was a VF-41 and a F-14 squadron, VF-84 and F-14 squadron, and then a couple of A6 squadrons.
 And we actually ended up pairing up and hanging out with some of the A6 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 go in the Navy,
 because there are Marine squadrons that go out to the aircraft carriers, but most of them are land
 based to support the Marines, because they're that unit, that whole unit. The Marine Corps is
 that one service that has it all. So when I graduated and I got to, I worked hard through
 primary and that's where I knew Missy. We actually went through together, Missy Cummings. We went
 through primary together and then I went to Kingsville. We all selected the same time.
 I went to Kingsville. There was another guy, Scott Wiedemeier, 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 selected out of primary together. We all ended up going jets. And that's how,
 besides from school, I knew her at school too. Long story, I got done, got winged. It took me
 two years to the day from the time I graduated the Naval Academy until I got my wings. And
 through some luck, I ended up getting A6s on the West Coast, which is a side by side bomber. So
 it's a pilot on the left seat and the bombardier navigators on the right seat. It was built in the
 sixties. It is all weather and it flies low at night. It's got a terrain mapping radar.
 How many, I guess, is that a good term to use fighter jets as a broad category for the public?
 Yeah, that's fine.
 How many fighter jets are side by side like that?
 In the Navy, that was the only one. The Air Force, the F-111 was a side by side,
 but the Navy, it was the A6. And then there's the EA6B, which is a derivative of that. Now
 those are all gone. The EA6B just went away a few years ago, and now the E18G Growler
 is the replacement for the EA6B. There was never a replacement for the A6 that I flew.
 It really became the F-18, which the A6 could go quite a bit further distance wise by fuel.
 Then the Hornet.
 The Hornet is the F-18. Is there usually two people in the plane, but they're usually in front and
 behind?
 In the modern two-seaters, yes. But most of the tactical airplanes in the world today are single
 seat.
 Single seat is just one person.
 One person.
 One person. With the exception of, probably someone will yell at me, but really with the
 exception of the F-15E Strike Eagle and the F-18F Super Hornet, which is the F is a two-seater,
 and the G is also a two-seater, but it's more of an electronic attack by say, full-up fighter
 bomber.
 So most of the time that you've flown in your, like I said, 18-year career, 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 F-18s, and I flew those all the way up until 2000 and, let me think, 2001, to the end of 2001.
 And then I shifted over and started flying the Super Hornets, and I flown both of those,
 the Es and the Es. 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 Strike Fighter Squadron 41.
 I love the name, the Black Aces. 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. And I got to serve with, I got pulled up because the guy,
 the people that are exos, because we fleet up, you go from the number two guy to the number one guy.
 So the exo becomes the CO, so the executive officer becomes the commanding officer. So I had
 worked with now soon to be Vice Admiral Weitzel, he was Commander Weitzel at the time, was the exo,
 and he really wanted because he knew there was a little bit of a problem when the Super Hornets
 came into L'Amour. L'Amour had been a single-seat fighter community since forever. And now all of
 a sudden you've got the F-18F coming in, which has the weapon systems operators in the back
 that are not pilots, they're weapon systems operators, and there's a difference.
 And Kenny is a weapon systems operator. And 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 equal more than one. And I would say that one plus one with two people is 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?
 Yeah. For me, from a human factors perspective and also an AI perspective,
 how difficult, so there's like, when there's two people, there's also a third person that's the
 AI part, there's some level of automation, like autopilot maybe even.
 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 better in terms of the
 automation or perhaps not? Well, I can tell you, so let's start.
 Sorry, there's a bunch of questions. No, this is good. This is good. And I'm
 enjoying this because now we actually get to talk about something other than a tic tac. So
 let's start with the A6. The A6 was really an analog airplane that was built in the 60s.
 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.
 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 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 fly in the mountains at night. You're
 going to be at 500 to a thousand feet above the ground ripping through fog layers because you
 don't need to see outside. You're literally flying a little TV screen and a radar.
 What are you looking at most of the time? So you just as a screen.
 It's this really primitive. If you look at it now, what we did, you'd think, wow, that was crazy,
 but it was really fun. So it's similar to like the flare stuff. Is that, is no, are you,
 this thing is totally radar based. Now the airplane had a flare balls,
 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 bombardier navigator had a radar and he was
 getting raw feed off of a pulse radar in front. Okay. So it's just basically mapping the mountain.
 So if you look at a mountain on a radar and you're coming up on it, the front side is going to be,
 it's going to give you a really bright return. And 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 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 sorry to interrupt. I'm going to just keep asking dumb questions. I apologize.
 But the pilot, can you at a high level say what the pilot does versus the bombardier?
 So you're actually just control.
 I'm flying the jet. I have the throttles, 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 bombardier navigator is looking at his radar and he's looking out about 12 and a
 half miles in front of the airplane. So he has the range really scoped down because the radar
 can see a lot further. He's looking at about 12 and a half miles when we're in the terrain mode,
 where we're dodging mountains and stuff. And what the pilot has is 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 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're just driving right at it.
 So when we get to the point where it hits 12 and a half miles, where the radar is going to see it
 on his scope, my 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.
 It's exactly right. And 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 ASICs cruise in our simulators. We called it the WIST, the Weapon Systems Trainer.
 And it was not even a motion. It just kind of sat there and you could fly these things and they had
 trained that they would inject into the system. But the crew coordination, so you get, so my first
 fleet bombardier navigator, I'll name him, his name is Chris Sato. He works at Apple, pretty high
 up, MIT grad. I think computer engineering. He's scary smart. So Chris could really work.
 And 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 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. 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. How do I avoid them? Or start a hard turn. 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. Which is how many miles an hour?
 Well, 420 is seven miles a minute. Okay.
 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 IR, it's called an IR route, an instrument route that's low. They're all around
 the country. There's IR 344 that we used to fly, which would coast in off of Oregon, 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. They're called the anti-collision lights because it was reflecting
 off the clouds and it starts to bother you. It 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, because you can kind of see the silhouette of this mountain that's
 right next to you, but you're flying along. You're just like, you 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 F-18F.
 So now we're into modern technology that was actually built in this century
 and you're flying. So now the WISO 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 WISO does all the talking. He's got actually, he uses his feet. That's the weapon system
 operator in the back of an F-18F. So he's going to run, well, the radar kind of runs itself now,
 but we have a situational awareness display and it's linked to all the other airplanes.
 Just a 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 2s has about an 8 by 10 display for the WISOs that they can look at. The pilot's
 is smaller. It's down between us. It's a 6 by 6 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 is 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.
 Big picture sense 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. 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, you can sell the picture really quick.
 So 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 people use a 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
 in 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 queuing 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 because it's a phased array radar now it doesn't really scan. There's
 all kinds of cool stuff that technology brings. Because if you'd have went back 30 years and said,
 hey, or 40 years ago and said, hey, we're going to have this helmet, you're going to be able to
 slew everything to your head. And I don't mean a mechanical setup, but I mean literally you're
 just going to map magnetic resonance and go, oh, look, and I can literally slew my sensors
 this fast and then mash a button and transfer high quality coordinates from a system into a joint,
 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, vise minutes or, hey,
 I got it. We're going to have to menstruate coordinates. And 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? What is the ceiling of current AI technology for
 controlling the plane? How much does the human contribute? Is it possible to have automated
 flight, for example? 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, basically you're
 taking thought and turning it into a giant math problem is really what you're doing.
 So you've got this logical math problem. Math problems are, there's a line. It 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, maybe, I'll try it. So humans can operate within that gray.
 So if you take an airplane and say, and I'll just take a Hornet for a while, a Super Hornet,
 doesn't matter, any airplane, and you go, here is the flight performance model of the airplane.
 So if you know 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, depending on how you write
 the AI, but typically AI, you don't want the airplane to leave controlled flight. 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. It'll flop ends, which defies most logic. And I guess in a way you could probably
 program it, but I still think that when you get to the edges that may or may not give you an
 advantage, 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, first time they 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 how, for months?
 Oh yeah, for like all of the deployment. So because you want to get to know-
 These brain stews.
 You have to.
 Trust and all of those things.
 It increases the capability of 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,
 where 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. 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 is 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 fast enough, he did it fast enough, he did it
 fast enough, he did it fast enough so that he could prepare everyone on the airplane that he was
 going to put 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 have 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?
 If you make bad decisions, and the list is long and distinguished of those who have died by making bad decisions.
 Oh, man.
 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 the engine's 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 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 and 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, and it's, 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 hydraulic, and 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 hydraulic, you know, because there's two hydraulic
 systems, one on each motor. Well, if I've got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system,
 and my right motor is starting to give me indications, do I want to shut the right motor
 down? Because that's going to kill my hydraulic system that's good. And now I'm flying on a good
 motor with a bad hydraulic system and without hydraulics, the airplane won't fly. So they,
 it's a really, they're challenging problems that you have to think through in real time. And of
 course, the weather's never good. It's always dark. It's always crappy. You're going to break out at,
 I mean, it's just all this stuff gets compiled on top of you. And it's intended to increase the
 level of stress because when things happen, like in Sully's case, we like to joke it's going to
 stem power, you know, where the functional part of your brain shuts down and you are literally on
 instinct like an animal. Well, if you've trained so much that that is the instinctive reaction
 that you're going to have, when the main part of your cognitive abilities start to shut down,
 you're, 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, um,
 I mean, one, one way we just offline mentioned Mike Tyson, I mean, he talked about like, uh,
 as he's, uh, walking up to the ring, he's like, he starts out basically in fear and, uh, yeah,
 worried about how things are going to go. I mean, it's purely to put it into words is fear,
 but as he gets closer and closer to the ring is the confidence grows and grows until the ego
 basically takes over to where you think there's no way anybody could, uh, defeat me. So like that's,
 that's his experience of overcoming fear, but do you, uh, did you experience any kind of thing
 like that? Or is that, or do you just go to the part of the brain that goes to the training
 and then you just go to the instinctual 80% solution? I wouldn't say I was never afraid.
 I think that would be, I can't, I couldn't tell you that anyone I know that wasn't afraid at one
 time. And for most of us, especially Navy carrier pilots, it's just, it's, it's usually, especially
 when you're new and you got to go out and it's nighttime and there's no moon and the weather
 sucks and the deck's moving, you know, the ship's going up and down because it will scare love or
 living shit out of you. Can I say that? You can definitely say that. So it's about landing a take
 off that that is if you even as they used to wire people up, they did it during Vietnam, you know,
 guys would go flying missions, you know, when they were flying low and crazy stuff was going on and
 people were getting shot down a lot. Uh, the highest, the highest anxiety and heart rates
 were coming back to land on board an aircraft carrier. How hard is it to land on that? It seems
 impossible. Like for, for a civilian, I guess, like me, it just seems crazy that a human can do that.
 The problem with night is, and there's different degrees of night, just like day. I mean, there's
 the clear full moon night, you know, where it's like, 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. Cause you, what you'll do is you'll
 out drive your headlights. Cause it is so dark, you know, and you can get outside, you get outside
 of city and get up into New Hampshire. Uh, especially when the roads are curving, you know,
 and the lines probably aren't that good. It's, you know, now take that and multiply it by like a
 million because you have no depth perception. Uh, what you think is fixed, the runway is actually
 moving up and down and left to right. Yeah. Oh, and when it's really bad, you can actually see it move.
 And, uh, we have two systems, uh, you know, there was a, there's an automatic system that's actually,
 uh, it stabilizes with the inertials on the ship. And then there's the ILS now,
 civilian pilots will tell you that ILS is a precision approach, which gives you azimuth
 and glide slope. You know, you come down, you, it's like a plus, um, on the carrier, it's not,
 it's really just a beam that goes out and it's considered a non-precision approach. It's, it's
 not stabilized at all that. And I've been where you can actually watch the needle and the, and the,
 the tack hand needle will move. There's all kinds of stuff moving because the base that it's all
 sitting on is doing this and ships don't just go up and down. They, they, they do this. So the bow
 goes up and down and the tail, like you normally see a ship. And then there's, so that's pitch.
 And then it has roll. So it's doing this and then it has heave. So the whole boat is going up and
 down while it's pitching and rolling and you're gonna land on that. Um, so, and it's, I mean,
 I remember landing, I was with Chris, uh, Sado and, uh, Chris and I, we were off the USS Ranger,
 which is now decommissioned. It's sitting, getting turned into razor blades. Um, we're flying the
 old A6 and we come in and it was off of San Diego and it was just the ugly night because
 San Diego always has a Marine layer that is about 1200 feet. It was lower than that that night.
 And it was pouring down rain. It was an El Nino year and there's thunderstorms all around. It
 was just the craziest night I've ever seen out of San Diego. And I remember landing and your
 adrenaline is so high that you're shaking. I mean, you literally can't stop. And we had spun around
 out of the landing area and we parked, we called the six pack. So it's right in front of the
 island. So if you've seen aircraft carrier of the island and the number of the ship on it,
 we're sitting right in front of that and we're looking at the landing area. So it's like,
 you get front row seats to the concert and, and this, this, this E A6B 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. It means you were not really high above the back of the ship when you landed. And it comes in
 and the exhaust on any A6 or an A6 actually points kind of down and it blows and it's blowing all the
 standing water on the aircraft. That's how hard it's raining. And you literally could not see
 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'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 shaking my hands like this. And I said, I'm not even, this is,
 I'm not faking this dude. I go, that's literally, I cannot stop shaking. I said, that scared the
 avalanche out of me. But it scares you afterwards. During it, you don't have time to think about that.
 You're doing it. You got to do. As we 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
 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 time to, it's time to, you know,
 man up and 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 vape. I sit here on land and look up at you guys. It seems incredible that a human being can
 do that. You know, people ask, you know, I'll be sitting around with my friends and they're like,
 how was I said it's the greatest job on the planet. I said, you know, it's, it's an office
 with a view because 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. I go, no, take any rollercoaster, coolest rollercoaster you've ever
 been on and multiply it by a thousand. 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? I mean, it was a childhood 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. 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 squadron were brand
 new, like literally right out of the factory. I had 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, the whole of it is
 incredible. I'll tell you what, when I left, when I decided to walk away,
 Yeah, do you miss it? I told myself I wouldn't. I promised myself that, you know, once you get
 through your O5 command, your flying really starts to tag, to come down. You know, even if you,
 and you're an 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,
 is a top, 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 had went there and I knew him, he would come down to my house.
 And now to see these kids that are, because typically military breeds military, you know,
 because the kids grew up in it. I mean, and I, the only reason that my son is not doing it is he's
 colorblind. So it 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. 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 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, attritable 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 is- I had three female, actually four, one of them didn't
 fly anymore. She actually lives right around here. 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. Incredible. And then I had a Paige who ended up taking command. She got
 out of fighters and went into other platforms and she was a commanding officer. And then the other
 one is a, teaches leadership and she is all three of them, actually all four of the women that were
 direct, I'm hoping I'm not forgetting. I don't think I'm forgetting someone.
 Incredibly, incredibly talented and a great addition to the ready room. So anyone who gets
 into the, oh, you know, women can't do it. That's all total horse crap. You know, we can talk about
 the original integration and stuff, which was not done well by the military nor the Navy.
 So women can fly as good as the guys. Yeah. You can't tell if you pass another airplane,
 you can't tell if there's a man or a woman in it. It really comes down to stick and throttle,
 the ability to extrapolate where the vehicle is going to be, where the airplane would be. If
 you're fighting another one, you have to be able to think fast. Anyone who has those characteristics
 can do it. And then I think most important besides that, there has to be a desire.
 Yeah. And I'm not saying that everyone, if you took, because we used to track. So when I ran,
 we call it the rag, it's the replacement air group. So the Super Hornet Training Squadron,
 there's two of them. There's one on the East Coast, 106, and there's one on the West Coast,
 which is VFA 122. 122 is the first one. So I ended up going there and I ended up being the operations
 officer and training officer. Okay. So we track the last hundred students. Right? So everyone goes,
 ah, it's funny to hear students talk because, 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. 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 a Piper Warriors low wing to see, can you, are you adaptable to this? And there's an evaluation
 that goes through. And then if you hit a certain mark, then you're good to go. And then they put
 you into primary. It's kind of like a, it's like a pre-check, you know, like the preset, the pre-SAT
 to go, Hey, how am I going to do on the SAT? It's, it's, 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, we're, 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 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 going to 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. 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, new verse 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, 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 the 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? Like, do you start to actually be able to
 really experience the 3D nature? You do, because you have to project where you're going to be.
 So you have to know the performance of the airplane, knowing that, Hey, if I do this maneuver
 that I am going to go, it's, it's kind of like when I, when I talk about, when we were chasing
 the Tic Tac, so the Tic 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. Cause 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 them. But I also had to look at it to go,
 do I have enough altitude to do this? Cause 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 really important 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 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. And you have to constantly evaluate where you're at and it's
 your overall energy package. So you can have a guy that's behind you that looks like he's going to
 kill you, but if this jet is at 400 knots and this jet is at 110 knots, this jet's just going
 to pull away, drive around and kill him in about 30 seconds. It's overall energy package and that's
 that you 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?
 From pure speed, I would say SR-71. I think it's an engineering marvel that was actually
 developed in the 50s by Kelly Johnson, Skunk Works, for what that was able to do. And then when you
 get into history of it, 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 X-15- By the way, the SR-71 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- That's how fast you're
 going. When you get up to altitude, there's an indicated airspeed and there's your ground speed.
 So your indicated airspeed is really how fast the air is going past your airplane. Well, the airspeed
 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 we would take the airplanes up to 50,000 feet when we had
 to do full maintenance check flights on them. So when you're doing 200 and some odd knots,
 it's actually slow for the airplane. It's kind of like 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? And when you look at an SR-71
 that's flying upwards of 70 plus thousand feet, the air is so thin, just like the X-15, 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 pitot-static 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 struck 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. It's like how fast, I could have got it going faster. It was
 literally still accelerating when I stopped, but 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.
 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're 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 that, the system,
 which allows another human to control that system.
 So it's so beautiful. To me, I think it's a great experience.
 Was it sad to see the SR-71 go? I think it was during your career. I mean,
 do you guys romanticize the different planes? We would see it flying when I was flying hornets
 because West Coast flies in, 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 SR-71s, they had a loop because NASA was flying
 them out of Palmdale and they would take off and they'd go up towards Washington state and Montana
 and they do a loop. And so you'd see them coming back down, they descend out of above 60,000.
 You'd see them, they 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 got to remember when those things started in the 50s, Sputnik wasn't flying
 around. It was the U2 and the SR-71 that were out there doing that work. So at the time it was needed,
 it was at the, if you think about it really, it was an incredible feat of aviation for that time.
 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 and it does all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, the work with automation, all that kind of stuff.
 Yeah. So one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is you happen to be one of, at least in my view,
 one of the most credible witnesses in history of somebody who's witnessed a UFO literally,
 an identified flying object. And not only witnessed, but got to, how do you put it? Like
 chase it essentially? Chased it. Chased 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,
 has a helicopter pad on the back. Gotcha. And it has weapons on it. Okay. Gotcha. It shoots the
 missiles up, but it has a nice radar. Just that incredible spy one system phased array, four panels.
 So 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's 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. So, and they kept
 detecting these objects for just about a week. Then comes in like your part of the story, which
 is on November 14th from the, I guess it's from the USS Nimitz. 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 interviews 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, receiver has also the visible lights. You can switch.
 Yeah. It has a TV mode. It has a TV mode. So that gives you visible light and then it has an IR mode.
 And Chad Underwood recorded that video. So, and those are the videos that were released by the
 Pentagon later. One of the three videos, the two other videos, uh, go fast and gimbal were recorded
 in 2000 something 14 and 15, uh, on the East coast of the United States. They 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, in the degree of weirdness, but, uh,
 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.
 Uh, but it's in some sense, this is a quite simple story without much resolution to the mystery.
 And it's fascinating. And there's a lot of opinions. There's division of opinions
 because, um, it's a mysterious, I mean, it's truly as a UFO in the sense that, um, you AP,
 uh, what is it? I unidentified aerial phenomena. So can you, uh, maybe correct me on any of the
 things that gotten wrong, elaborate on some key things and describe that experience in general?
 So here's what I know. So yeah, we went out, uh, on our mission to go train, uh, and they canceled
 the mission and they 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 F18S. Okay. There is no video from our event. It was all four sets of eyeballs staring
 at this thing. And then when we came back and told it when Chad and his pilot took off, that's when
 Chad got the video of it. And we're like, that's it. That's exactly, that's it. And, um,
 So when you say eyeballs, you mean literally your eyes are seeing a thing.
 Yeah. So, so as we're flying out, we get, we get vectored. They come up and tell us, hey, we're
 going to cancel training. This is a USS Princeton. So this is a Seige's cruiser. So we're talking to
 one controller, um, who is like, Hey sir, first you ask what ordinance we have on board. And I
 laugh because we don't carry live ordinance and 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 nine, which is really just a blue tube
 with the aim nine seeker on the front of it, which is an IR missile. Uh, so there's only two ways to
 get it off. You can beat it off of the sledgehammer. You can take this thing and say,
 you put a wrench in it and 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, uh, my wingman, the other pilot, uh, the pilot, uh,
 the other pilot, uh, 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 Brock 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, uh, we had a mechanically scanned radars at
 them. APG 73 good piece of gear, APG 79 new ones, way better. But anyway, and I apologize if I
 interrupt the story, uh, hopefully it's useful, but they're telling you a location of a thing
 that you should look at. Yep. They're telling us they have a contact on their radar. They don't
 know what it is. They just have a blip. They have a little blip. Well, they've been watching these
 things. And what he told me is they had been looking at these things as we're driving. He
 says, sir, we've been tracking these things for about two weeks. That's we had been at sea for
 two weeks. He goes, this is the first time we've had planes airborne. We want you to go see what
 these are. Gotcha. So they kind of interrupt the mission to say, check it out. So we start driving
 out there and, uh, as we get down to, he's going, you know, 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles. And then
 you get to a point where they call merge plot, which means we are inside of the resolution cell
 of the radar. Cause radars don't see everything. They're so they have a range and they have an
 asthma 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? 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
 wizzo's, the wizzo's 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, cause he could be anywhere from the surface all the way up.
 Now keep in mind, the ship is like probably 60 miles away, so it can't see the surface and you
 can do your standard radar horizon calculation and go, Hey, it's the, the thing is 40 feet off
 the water of the panel. Can he really see, you know, there are radars that can see around the
 curve, but let's just say that it can't at this time. So you go, is it, you know, where's it at?
 Yeah. So as we're looking around, we see, no, this is a, it's a clear day. There's no clouds
 and there's no white caps. It's just a calm, it's actually a perfect day. If you 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 white water 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.
 That'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 probably, I don't know, 80, 100, I don't know, but somewhere out,
 it's pretty far off the coast. Perfect visibility.
 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 white caps in the water if there is any.
 Oh yeah, they're easy. Yeah. For us, we look at it because we know if it's natural wind or,
 so if it's a really white cap windy day, then the ship's just kind of barely be moving when
 we land on it. It makes it actually easier. If the ship has to move where it's got a big weight,
 because it has to make its own wind when we land, which is the day that it was this day,
 you go, oh, okay. And it creates what's called, we call it 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 GlideSol. So we're pretty conscious
 of what's going on out there with the waves and the wind. So we look, there's no waves,
 there's no wind, there's no white caps, and we look down and we see white water.
 So if you put 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 off the top. And that's where you get the white. 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 white water.
 You can go out when it's high tide in any one of the coasts, you can go out here off of Boston and
 go, hey, at low tide, I can see those rocks and at high tide, I can't see the rocks are covered,
 but there will be white water around those rocks. You'll be able to tell there's something
 underneath the surface. Does that make sense? Yep. So that's what it was. We 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 white water. But the white water, and I like to shape it, you can say it was
 across, I say it's about the size of a 737. So it looks like if you took a 737, put it about 15,
 20 feet below the water, so the wave's breaking over the top and you're going to get white water
 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 airplane, Jim, says, this is that talking in
 parcels again, he says, hey, Skipper, do you? And that's about what he gets out of his mouth. And I
 go, what the hell is that? Do you see that essentially is what he's saying? So we see the
 white water and that's what draws our eyes down there. Otherwise, we'd have never seen it. So we
 see this white water. 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 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's 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.
 At all. Of the things you've seen in the past.
 So as a pilot, the first thing you think is it's a helicopter, right? So you go, oh, what is it?
 Because when we see it, 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, the water comes up the sides because the downdraft, 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
 rotor wash. What is that thing? So by this time we're driving around. So if we were at the six
 o'clock, we're driving around towards that nine o'clock position and we're just watching this
 thing. And it's still pointed north-south and it's going left, right. And it's kind of moving
 around the object. And if I had to say it biased itself, it was biased towards the bottom half.
 So if you've got the east-west and then the north-south kind of across, it's hanging out
 on the southern thing that's hanging out. It's just kind of moving around up, down, left, and it's
 crossing over it. It's going up. 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 a different perspective. So she's up here and I'm down here
 as I'm descending. She can watch, because right now all I'm watching is the Tic Tac.
 She can watch me and the Tic Tac. So she gets a God's eye view of everything that's going on,
 which is really important. You can hear people say it's high cover, whatever. She's watching me,
 which is perfect as the story goes on because it gives us two perspectives, a perspective that's
 about 8,000 feet above us when that thing disappears. Because if it's just like, oh,
 I lost it. And they go, no, it's over to the right. We can still see it. We all lost it at the same
 time. So as we come down, we get to about 12 o'clock and I'm descending. It's an easy descent. I'm
 doing about 300 knots, which is a really good airspeed for the airplane for maneuvering because
 I have everything available to me at that speed. So I'm coming down and as I get to 12 o'clock,
 as the Tic Tac's doing this, 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 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. I'm just watching it. Now you got to 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,
 watched this thing fly around. So we're like, okay. So I get over to the eight o'clock position
 and I'm a couple thousand feet above it and it's about, so I'm probably at about 15K, I think it is.
 I think that's my story is about 15. It's just estimating. So you can see it's just a really
 easy descent because- So what's 15K?
 15,000 feet. I thought it was 8,000.
 No, the other airplane ends up about. So you're not going to that.
 Okay, gotcha, sir.
 So they're still at about 20,000 feet. So they're driving around the-
 Okay, and then you're slowly descending.
 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 o'clock position,
 we're about the eight o'clock position and I'm like, oh, I've got enough altitudes. I'm going to
 cut across the circle. I tell the guy in my back seat, dude, I'm going to do this. He's like,
 go for it, skip, because I was a skipper. So I cut across the bottom. So I'm kind of almost coming
 out co-altitude as this thing's coming out, I'm going to meet it. And I'm driving and I'm probably
 about a half mile away, which you think, well, a half mile is pretty far. Half mile in aviation
 it's nothing. 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 because I'm going to the
 three o'clock position, it's at two o'clock and I'm going to meet it at three o'clock. So as I do
 this, it just accelerates and disappears. So this happens at around, estimate in 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 as it crosses our nose, it just accelerates and literally in less than, probably less than a
 half second, it just goes and it's gone. And so we're like, and the first thing is, dude,
 did you guys see it? The other airplane's like, it's gone. We have no idea where it's at.
 So we kind of spin around real quick. I go, let's see what's down here. And I turn around,
 we're looking for the whitewater and we can't, the whitewater's gone. There's nothing. It's
 literally all blue. So now you go. And I remember telling the guy in my back seat, I go, dude,
 I don't know about you, but I'm pretty weirded out because this is, I mean, you know, I had at the
 time like 30 some hundred hours of flying. I'd been doing it for 18 years. It's nothing like
 anything you've seen. No, no. So as we turn, we go, well, let's just go back, you know, because
 now I got to put on my real hat, which we have to train because we're getting ready to deploy
 to, you know, overseas. So we've got to get our training done. So that's my mindset, especially
 as a CEO, because I got it training out of the flight time because I'm responsible to do that.
 So, Hey, let's go back. And 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, because he's just like,
 because when he first went out, they were going to do him, but the little Hornets, the legacy
 Hornets, F-18Cs, don't have as much gas as the Super Hornets. So he had launched first and they
 were going to do him. And then when they knew we were off the deck, they just told him, hey,
 go to your 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 each, it's a football field. We're going to sit on one goal
 line. He's going to sit on the other goal line. And when they say go, we're going to run at each
 other and try and do something in the middle of the field and then go back to our reset points.
 So you're talking to him, he's listening to all of this.
 He's just listening. We don't talk to him at all. He's just listening. He just dials up because they
 know that we all know the frequencies. So he's listening to what's going on because he's like,
 because 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, him and his wingman. So they're listening to all this go on.
 And then at this point you move on.
 Yeah, we come back up to train. We go back as we're flying back the controller, because we're
 talking to the kid on the Princeton, they're called OS's, they're 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, but that thing is at your cap.
 It showed back up. It just popped up. 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. We get out there. We never see it. We
 never see it again. 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, 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. And it's kind of that joking, you know, so the ship plays movies.
 We have movies on the boat and they do 12 hours of movies. So they repeat because there's a day
 check and a night check. So the same movies in the morning and night plays. 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 all 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.
 Cause that's how we have to do it. Cause we're so busy. Well, the movies became,
 it was men in black, aliens, uh, uh, independence day. Definitely going to catch some shit.
 Oh, we do. But let, let, uh, let me just ask some dumb questions. So just taking it. Cause it's,
 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 a 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. Now 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,
 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 if 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 go, chased it. And they're like, well, I go,
 dude, and I go, and I told him, I said, dude, get video. And he goes, so, and that's how he is.
 He's like, Oh, I'm going to go. And he was, 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 Fleer tape. That's the targeting pod, the forward looking
 infrared receiver. I'll probably overlay the video. 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 as L display. And this
 is called, this is basically the PPI, which is the, you're at the bottom of it. You're at the bottom
 of the square. It's really taken this, it's 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 score 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. 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 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. So 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. The radar smart enough that when the signal comes back, if it's been messed
 with, it will tell you, it'll give you indications that I'm being jammed. So that's all it is, is you
 send the signal out something, it manipulates the signal either in range and velocity or whatever,
 and it sends it back and the radar was smart enough to go, that is not a return that I'm
 expecting. Something's messing with me. I'm being jammed. And it shows you and it puts strobes up,
 it gives these lines on the radar and it does some stuff. So you can mean it. Well, it does,
 it goes full into it. 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-
 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.
 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 what their side stick controller 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,
 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 is already looking there.
 And now he's on a passive track because he's not literally sending any energy out, he's just
 receiving IR energy from the Tic Tac and then the system itself will track the pixels and the
 contrast differences, it depends on what mode you're in. So it says, oh, and that's what those
 little bars you see in the video where the bars come up left and right. He's doing some vision
 based tracking. That's exactly what it is. And that's the video. He goes through. Changes zooms,
 changes the mode. He goes through all the modes, so there's the 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. He's trying to figure out what the heck is this. Well, yeah, and he wants to get as
 much data as he can on it based on the different modes instead of just staring at it going, what
 is that thing? Granted, so the video has been out. It actually was on YouTube for years before the
 government released it. It was leaked 2007. The guy that was in my back seat sent me an email and
 I had retired. So this is about, no, 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 the UFO. And they're
 like, get out. And I'm like, no, serious. So this is literally how it happened. So I was sitting
 with my friend, Matt. So Matt and I did our, 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 need to go to
 Apple, I'd be like, all right, let's figure this out and let's do it. Because they're like family.
 You do it. And most Navy guys, we don't send letters to each other weekly. I have friends that
 I haven't talked to in 10 years that they showed up on my door, 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 this happens. 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. So I 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 can 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?
 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 the
 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 and 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 of 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, our 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. It's kind of being part of the club. So he's like, I got to write about this
 thing. I'm like, what are 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. You haven't really before then talked about it
 much. My wife didn't even really know the whole story. Just as a comment, is it just because you
 caught some- No, 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, 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. No one ever came out in suits to talk to us.
 Nobody looking like me came out on a- No, no one came out on a helicopter. No one came out on
 an airplane. 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, I think he just finished up. He
 was a captain of an aircraft carrier. 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. 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, the joke
 spread faster than, or just rumors spread faster than anything on these ships, that it might have
 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, C-V-I-C, which is Carrier Intel
 Center, came down and said, hey, we need the tapes. These guys are going to 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, you know, I'm a CO and they're not. And so I went down to Civic and it was a, I think he
 was a lieutenant or a 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 going to go well. I said, cause it's bullshit and I need those tapes.
 Then he literally walked right over to a filing cabinet and 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
 no one came out. There's no flying going on when all this is happening. And I took the tapes back
 and then I copied the tapes. So I took two brand new eight mil tapes and I copied the sections that
 I want. So there's a rumor too that, Oh, the original FLIR video is 10 minutes long. And
 there's some, one of these petty officers are saying, I saw it. That's total crap. The original
 video is about a minute, 30 seconds long. What you see on the release video is the entire video.
 So you have mentioned, uh, I apologize if I say stupid things, please correct me. But you,
 you have mentioned that, uh, like on Rogan, I think that you watched it on, you know,
 on a bigger screen, it felt like it was higher definition. So let me ask the, the question,
 is there a higher definition version? Do you think of the FLIR video that would give us more pixels
 and more information presumably because of the high number of-
 I would doubt it. Cause 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 strange land and YouTube, you know, someone pulled
 off of a secret, it's, it looks like a rack, you know, there's tape machines in there and it gets
 converted to digital and stored on a hard drive and they pulled it off that hard drive and they
 put it on YouTube. Um, no, it's, it's just like, you know, anytime, even a digital media, the more
 you copy digital media, there's some quality that gets, it degrades. So this, you don't know how
 many times this has been copied. So we were looking at the videos I've seen are right off the original.
 They're high eight tapes. It's basically pulled off the back of the display. So it's not filmed
 with cameras. It's literally a digital feed. It's pulled off the back and put onto a high eight tape.
 That's how the recorders work. Now it's actually digital to digital. It's not even on tapes anymore.
 They, it's a digital recording system, but we were still in that process of slowly up because
 originally we had little cameras here that shine. So if the light hit, it would wash out the displays.
 So this is, it's a pretty good feed. Um, when you put it on somewhere, instead of looking at it on
 your tiny little computer monitor or whatever, I'm looking at it on a, like a 19 inch, cause it was
 still normal TVs back there. We had just put flat screens in the ready room that I had bought so we
 could watch movies. So cause a nice huge 19 inch screen is maybe 20. It was a nice, wow. That's huge.
 It was gigantic. Um, I didn't get for like 50 bucks. You can get like 60 inches. This is 2005.
 So you look at it as big thing and, and you could see, so when you get to the TV mode, when I say
 there's little things coming out of the bottom of it, you could see those. It was very clear.
 But in terms of the actual visual on the Tic Tac, was it, did you get much more information from the
 hired, from the clear little things out of the bottom, the bottom of the mission. So when you
 see it, cause he's coming almost co-altitude with it, you can see the bottom of it. It looks like
 little, you know, like if you look at a session, there's a little antennas hanging out of the
 bottom, kind of like that. There was two little things out of the bottom. There's nothing on a
 top. There was no plume, no IR, no, no visible propulsions, even heat signature, you know,
 it's all that stuff. And then the other thing that people didn't see is they didn't see the radar
 display, which that really raises the classification level, especially to see what the radar does when
 it's being jammed. You know, when I, matter of fact, when they did the unofficial official
 investigation and about 2000 and let me think about 2009, I had gotten 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, okay, 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, okay, 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 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 you need to protect, because not everyone wants
 people knocking. I don't want people knocking on my door. And there's rumors, you talk to everyone.
 I think you're about the 23rd person that I've talked to total. And that includes the newspapers
 and stuff. And I've been selective because there's so much. I mean, if I turn down like,
 I turned down Russian TV. I can give you her name when we're done here. But 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 more people involved to go. Because I think there's, and when you talk to
 Lou Elizondo or Chris Mellon, the group at TTSA, that whole thing was-
 What's TTSA?
 That's To The Stars Academy. That's the Tom DeLong group that got started. And you go,
 because I think Tom has caught a lot of crap for this, but he's actually, when you talk to him,
 he's very smart. And I ask 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 was reading books and he read one of them
 on UFOs. I'm trying to think the title. It's one of the big ones that's out there, real popular.
 He started asking more and through his fame with Blink 182 in the band, he got more and more
 connected. If you talk to Chris Mellon, who is an undersecretary of defense for intelligence,
 and he's part of the Mellon dynasty from Carnegie Mellon type, very, very smart.
 He definitely knows how the government works because he worked there. And so when I went down
 to DC to talk to people, he's one of the first people I'll go to. When I did Tucker Carlson about
 a month ago, month and a half ago, he texted me. I texted him, Tom, Lou to go, hey, because they
 were like, you got to do it. Because I had turned Tucker down a couple of times before and his
 producer had called me and I'm like, all right, I'll do it. Because those guys are like, you got
 to 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 the people who listen to this include fellow faculty at MIT and major
 universities. And it feels like there's some stigma to the subject from the scientific community.
 A lot of people, especially when they hear your story are like, wow, this is really interesting.
 But you don't even know, 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, try to communicate, try to
 interpret this in the best way possible from the scientific perspective. And 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, 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 go, well,
 that doesn't look like what they showed us yesterday. Then you get into Project Blue Book.
 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 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 if there only has to be one other planet that has life on it, then I win and you lose.
 And then more and more science is showing that there's habitable planets out there. Everything
 we've learned so far, and we know very little, but everything we've learned so far about the
 planets out there, exoplanets, Earth-like planets, it seems that it's very likely that there's life
 out there. Intelligent life is another topic, but life.
 Well, we as humans, and even more as Americans, we have this hubris about us that says,
 ha ha, we are it. And you go, not so much. Maybe we're not so intelligent.
 Because 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... Because electromagnetics are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.
 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 sometimes
 it's our ability to develop the technology to support the theory. We are just now proving
 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. We have proven that. So you look at
 that way and you go, well, does that mean that 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 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... Because it's such an interesting topic from a career
 perspective, from a science perspective. You've been brave in 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, 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, 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 I've talked to Lou Elizondo about this 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 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... You'll follow as you APS.
 So what's funny is the unofficial official report that I just 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... Literally, I watched the DOD memo that said it and it was
 signed. So he was one. So that's why I call it the unofficial official report. It was never
 releasable because people go, well, I put in a FOIA request and I didn't get that. I go, well,
 just because you put in a FOIA request, I didn't get it. I go, because 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 a Navy call me about... Right
 before the article came out in the New York Times, this was starting to come back and she had called
 me because 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 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 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 of anything. I knew of the unofficial official
 report, which is that one. But if you don't know about it, I'm not going to tell you because that's
 not my job and nor did I care. In that whole situation, you mentioned Lube.
 Did you think about your impact to your career? Just to get back to the question, do you think
 others, other pilots, other people like in Roosevelt are thinking about this kind of thing?
 Why aren't they talking about this? Why are people afraid to talk about this?
 Well, honestly, the military and the press, there's a distrust. I'll just tell you that right now.
 We typically don't like talking to the press because if I talk to you, especially when I do
 even the TV shows, because I've been on a couple of shows, when you look at it, 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. So here's the thing. I have a PhD and I've taken painfully too many classes
 from like physics and math. And I also have a deep curiosity about the world. I read a lot.
 That seems to be missing with journalism. So you're talking to a person who 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.
 It 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 yeah,
 that's true for journalists. That's true for other scientists.
 It's just human nature. If we see something that we can't explain, then sometimes if you just,
 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 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. And he's literally
 proving them, but he didn't have, 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 the hard work that people try
 to do years after to try to experimentally validate the predictions that Einstein made
 with his theories. It's fascinating. But yes, at the time it's kind of crazy. What are you 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,
 of the incident that you've experienced. So let me kind of dig in. Let me just ask some questions
 of maybe just see if there's just to paint more and more of the picture. One, you kind of mentioned
 to take tact 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 tech tech? Like, is there
 any appendages? Is there, um, some texture to it that no smooth white tech tech, 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. Um, but remember we're looking
 at the original tape. So there's not, there's basically no degradation. But when you saw your
 eyes, there's no kind of appendages. No, 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. Uh, did
 you, I mean, you chased it. So we flew close to it. Relatively speaking, was there, did you feel
 any wake, like any, did you feel it in any way in terms of your interaction, like aerodynamically?
 No, nothing, nothing. So, uh, another aspect of it, there's an interesting thing. You've developed
 a feel for, for objects in the air. Did you feel like it was surprised by your arrival or did it,
 let me ask a few questions around it. So did you, did it feel like the thing was surprised?
 Did it feel like it wanted to be seen almost to show off its capability? Did, uh, and did it,
 and did it, what did it feel like relative to if you were doing a, um, uh, an air fight against,
 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. Uh, it's kind of like an animal. If you've ever been around
 deer in a field, you know, the deer will look up and if it sees you and you're on the other side
 of the field, it'll actually go no threat and it'll start eating. You know, they don't put their
 tail up 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, um, you know,
 which I don't know, someone asked, what do you think? I go, maybe it was communicating
 with something. I joked on good morning America. Maybe it's like talking to the whales, kind of
 like Star Trek, you know, and I actually 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 it'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 something there, was there a seamount,
 we just didn't find it again. I don't know. But once we started to descend and it actually
 reorient its, its longitudinal axis and it started mirroring us coming up, then it was obviously where
 we were there and it was really coming up just, you know, you figure I'm at 20 and it's coming up
 and it ends up getting up to 12, uh, where I cut across the circle. I think it was very aware that
 we were there because it interacted. We call it a two circle fight when you're fighting another
 airplane. Um, but, uh, you know, was it, was, were we afraid? I don't think so. I mean, and to me,
 it was more curious. Curiosity overcomes any fear that you would have. And I always felt to be honest,
 if I was inside the airplane, uh, especially as long as much 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 wizard in the back seat. He's running all the
 displays. We are a team. We're in the state of the art airplane, you know, brand new. You feel
 pretty good. And then you get something that, you know, can climb from the surface up and then
 accelerate like it did, like it was like no big deal. You know, for an airplane, if you just put
 me from a standstill, let's just say slow flight, just get me at 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, uh, it like it's something
 that you would love to fly almost. Uh, 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, there's
 another perspective on it is it was, uh, not that the thing under the water was the key thing.
 And what you were seeing is some kind of projection or something that like,
 I don't think it was a projection. I think it was a real object.
 It was an op, a physical heart object that could be fly.
 Oh yeah. Yeah. I think all four of us will take the same thing. It wasn't, this was not,
 cause you go, okay, let's just go on a, it's a light projection. Well, if we were both sitting
 next to each other, we were looking at it from the exact same angle and all that. And I go,
 okay, there's a, in theory you could have that, but with an 8,000 foot altitude difference flying,
 you know, and they're, you know, she's probably not directly above me. She's kind of hanging out,
 watching this whole thing happen. You know, you're getting two different perspectives from two
 different altitudes over a clear blue, you know, if you've ever been at sea, and I don't mean like
 coastal, I mean, like when you get out at sea, the ocean is the bluest. It's incredible.
 You know, you got a bright white object over a deep blue ocean. You got pretty high contrast.
 And for this thing just to disappear, it's, 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, my mom's an Olympic
 swimmer. So like, I love that feeling, but I'm also terrified when I swim because the abyss,
 anything could be under there. 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? It 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.
 And there's literally, I mean, come on, the Malaysia airplane, the triple seven, it was
 the triple seven that crashed. 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, 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 under water, 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?
 No, it's 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, is it move? Maybe not. I mean, I'm not the theoretical physicist and some,
 you know, I'm not at 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 taco. It
 flopped behind us and 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, because my roommate in college was a collegiate wrestler. So I de facto
 became a wrestler because he beat me up every night. We joke, I talk 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. 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'll just keep going with that.
 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, 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 because we didn't get it on radar. Um, because
 I tried to lock it up because I can move the radar with my head, but I couldn't, it wouldn't lock.
 The radar would lock. And so, so then the question is, and this is unanswerable, but let's try,
 because you get some hints at it. Do you think it's human, like advanced human created technology
 that's simply top secret that we're just not aware of, or is it not something not of this world?
 So you, if you'd have 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. Yep.
 For a technology like that, you know, and let's assume that it didn't have a conventional
 propulsion system in it, cause I don't think it did. Uh, I would like to think that if we had a
 technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we normally do,
 then it would start coming out. But to hide something like that for 16 years,
 you know, and I understand, uh, you know, and I don't speak for the United States government,
 I never will speak for the United States government, but I understand how some of that
 stuff works for classification levels and why we classify stuff, you know, is it, is it detrimental
 to national defense? But there's a point where you have to look and go, if we had a technology
 like this that could literally change the way mankind travels, uh, 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, cause remember these things were coming
 down when the cruiser tractor from above 80,000 feet, which is space. So you know,
 above 80,000 feet, which is space and they would come down and they would come straight down.
 They'd hang out at like 20,000 feet. And then three or four hours later, they'd go back up.
 We don't have anything that can come down, hang out in once, you know, and I'm talking
 hold out in a spot. Well, we all know there's winds. They're not drifting like a balloon.
 They're just sitting there. And then they would go back up and they tracked up to the,
 when I talked to the controller, he's like, we've seen up to 10 of these things.
 There's other guys and it was raining and all this other, let's just say they tracked a groups
 of these things coming down, hanging out and going up. So it's not just propulsion and the
 way it moves. It's also fuel. It's everything. So the whole, the whole of it indicates a kind
 of technology that's a highly advanced, but you don't think in your sense that you actually don't
 know, but you know more than a lot of people in your sense, the top secret military technology.
 If you think about skunk works, if you think about like that cannot be more than 15 years ahead.
 I would say for a leap like that, and a perfect example in modern times is the 117.
 Because now a lot of the data on the 117 is out, like it was developed at this time.
 It flew for this long before it was actually acknowledged by the United States government.
 What's the 117?
 That's the stealth fighter, the original stealth fighter, not the B-2, but the stealth fighter.
 So if you look at that, yeah, 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. And the other one is,
 do we have the basis to do that? 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. 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 much
 power would it cost to create a gravity field of your own that could actually be strong enough to
 counter the giant orb that we live on? So by the way, you mentioned gravity-based.
 That's kind of like the hypothesizing that people do in terms of what kind of propulsion would have
 to be involved in order to result in that kind of movement. To me, all the gravity discussions
 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.
 Yeah, which is very little.
 And someone has to think out of the box to go, is this possible at all?
 Yeah. Okay, 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 had asked me, they said,
 what if there wasn't, maybe it was just a drone, maybe it was a UAV that got sent here from some
 place else. I mean, we've got stuff out there flying around. So I don't know. I'd like to say
 that, 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 the 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, we're going to be able to colonize, and I know Elon is big
 into that.
 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.
 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. 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. It's really driven by,
 there's the big three in defense, which is really Northrop, Lockheed, and Boeing. Those are your big,
 you say Raytheon's kind of like a subset of that, but Raytheon's pretty big too. In US defense,
 those are the big guys. That's actually where a lot of military guys go when they retire,
 they go do stuff like that. When 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,
 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 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,
 and then you've got Boeing. So Elon did what Boeing has 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 Thiacol, 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 you had to put
 them all back together. Where Elon gets them down, because I was joking with this guy, I go, what do
 they do? Do they like overhaul? Because no, actually they clean them up and they can use them again.
 They're reusable systems. Incredible leap in technology that no one thought of, but here's
 a private company. So being able to put people on 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. 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 and two friends
 of mine, the one actually had a mission date, the one got one later. So it's cool when you're
 watching your friends doing a space walk 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
 space walk. 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 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 we're
 going to, 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 a less
 than a compact computer in the sixties, 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 Wapakoneta, 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?
 One day? Me, if I had the opportunity, I'd go in a second. I am not-
 Because that's one of the hopes of the commercial space flight is that,
 people like, it would be tourism, but you certainly wouldn't want to, in terms of,
 you're not a civilian, right? In a sense that you're just a normal person, you're not a
 fighter jet pilot currently, but it seems like if we send a civilian up there, it would be somebody
 like you in the next 20 years. I'd be, if Elon wants to throw me on one of those things,
 I'd be all over it. I don't know what my wife would say, but 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 knows how I am. Most people that know me
 are like, yeah, you're pretty much the same person you were in high school. I was a class clown,
 and I still am that way. So- Let me ask you this question about, so I'm talking to Elon again,
 and I'm curious to get your perspective on it. If I wanted to talk to him about Tic Tac, about
 these weird out there propulsion ideas, which are obviously just like you said, if there's something
 to it, if it can be investigated somehow, it would be extremely useful for us to understand in the
 effort of developing propulsion systems that can get us cheaply to out the 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,
 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. Just really in layman's terms, 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, 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,
 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 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 does with Bezos and you've got Elon, there's some big money out
 there. I mean, you're talking 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? Because
 when you work outside of what the government would want to do. We're not working on this
 necessarily for the United States, although I am a huge giant. I am an American.
 You're talking to somebody born in the Soviet Union. I can't believe you agreed to this.
 You haven't killed me yet. Yeah, well, you're here. You've been here for a while.
 No, no, no. I'm joking. I'm an American citizen. I'm actually pretty much American through and
 through at this point. When you do that, let's just look at American universities. There's 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. 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 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. 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 realized that space was too expensive for one
 country to do alone. So we made the International Space Station and we have a conglomerate. It's
 the one thing that the Russians and the US actually work together on. Think about it. That's it. We
 work together on space because we realized 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 exploring. 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 computing 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 it just sends data back.
 You can analyze it. 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 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 non-zero probability
 that it's alien technology. And in that sense, it serves as a beacon of hope and a reason to,
 like you said, widen the aperture and to invest big amounts of money into thinking outside the box.
 Like it's almost 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 of 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 and bounds. They can do whatever they want. So their money, oh, 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 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, I'm talking Stephen Hawkins type brilliance that is going, I'm really doing
 something that's totally different. Yeah, 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 Tic Tac, thinking outside the box is not,
 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 the, he was out of the box. He did not think that he not
 thought out of the box and came up with some of his theories. Where would we be?
 Okay, we're jumping around a little bit. So we talked a little bit about Elon and Mars and space,
 and Mars and space. But let's, let's, let me jump back to a few questions that folks had.
 I have to kind of bring up some debunking stuff because I think not the actual idea, not the
 actual facts of the debunking, but the nature of the true believers versus the debunkers
 hurts my heart a little bit because people are just talking past each other. But let me kind of
 bring it up. Mick West, I've just recently started 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, 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
 with the Tic Tac, like with your own eyes. Like 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 fight that as,
 I mean, maybe you can comment on that. Let me do it right now. 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
 because I've done it for all those years. I mean, I got a good idea. So that's, that's why I said 40
 feet, 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, pure experience. There's, 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 the size of a hornet. From a human factors perspective, how often in your
 experience of those 16 years, do you find that eyes, what you see is the incorrect state of things.
 So like, how often do you make mistakes with vision? You actually, you make vision issues a
 lot because you're, and the sad part is your brain believes what your eyes see. We are actually
 trained to do the opposite of that, especially when you instrument fly, because your brain and
 eyes can tell you one thing, but you got to trust your instruments. Let's go back to landing at
 night. So your eyes, how do you do that? Yeah. Land at night. 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 MSD, the multi spatial disorientation device,
 or the spin and puke. It looks like a giant carousel and you're in these little modules.
 And when you get out, you think the thing goes really fast and they can, you can make yourself
 think that I'm descending or climbing, but you're actually only going around in circles at a very
 slow rate, as fast as a human can talk. But as they spin you around in the 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 cause 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. So 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, it's a loop that adjusts the perception system that like, that, that adjusts your brain's
 interpretation of what you're saying. Yeah. You'd be amazed at how good. So here's, here's another
 example. So if we go out over the water, so there's no land in sight and we're 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
 this short couple of 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
 one nine five 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, oh, I
 pass land, I pass land. No, you don't. 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 three five five. And then you recreate the turns and the amount of turns
 and use the sun relative. So you can create this entire battle that went on with arrows. So you can
 come back and debrief the guy that you were teaching on exactly what happened. And you get really,
 really good at that. So when you come up and go, well, Dave, how do you know you were at six o'clock
 and you 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 read 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 cart and you go out with a stack of cards and you stick the new one on your knee board
 cart. So you're ready to go and here's the next setup. Um, it's kind of, it's in some way similar
 to what, uh, like at the, at the highest level chess players do. I mean, you're, I mean, they,
 they, they recap the games, but they, the richness of the representation that they use
 and remembering like how the games evolved. It's not like it's much richer than the actual moves.
 It's like these, a bunch of patterns that are hard to put into words, like,
 like all the richness of thinking they have about the way the game evolved. It's more like
 instinctual from years and years of experience. So they try to put it into words, but they really
 can't. It's, it's just, 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. Cause the whole thing is the debrief. When we get back
 and we talk about that's really where their learning is. Um, and it's the same thing. If you
 want to go back to chess, you know, when you start off, you try and learn because you're
 remembering what you're doing. If you play against someone, I'm always a big place play with someone
 better than you. That's how you learn. If you're constantly beating people, you're not learning
 anything. You're just learning that they're not good and you're better. When you, when you
 challenge yourself against someone that is going to is better than you, you learn. So I learned how
 to fight an airplane with, uh, he's actually one of my best friends. Uh, we'll call him Tom. I won't
 give his call sign cause I don't know. So Tom took me out and taught me how to fight, uh, because Tom
 had just left Top Gun. He was the, the, 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, cause I had come out of a six and we really don't fight because it was a bomber.
 And so I get in F-18s and I want to learn how to fight cause it's a whole other side of the mission.
 It's the F and F fighter attack. The F-18 is fighter attack. So I had to learn how to fight.
 So now I got one of the best fighter pilots in the world who's going to teach me how to do it.
 And he did, and I would do something and then he would go, I'd get to a situation where I had never
 been. And then I would go, well, I'm 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, cause you don't, no one walks out into that
 world. I don't care how gifted of an aviator and go, I, 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 I mean,
 so what are the chances that your eyes betrays you when you saw the Tic Tac?
 Yeah. Low zero. Well, I mean, I'm not zero. So maybe even 90, I am 99.9%. So 0.1% my eyes deceive
 me, but remember if it deceived me, it had to deceive the other four people. So the percentage
 is even lower. Yeah. Okay. Well, I don't find that a particular debunking case that you saw,
 but I'm glad you put it, you, um, you said those words out loud. So for me, from our perspective,
 uh, coming into this world and looking at it, I'm a little bit more skeptical.
 Uh, so your eye account, I think is the most fascinating story. And that, uh,
 I think, uh, that's inspiring to me and should be inspiring to a lot of scientists out there.
 On so many levels, just like we said, on the engineering level,
 that maybe there's propulsion systems where we can actually build it, 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, uh, 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 it's just where I'm coming from. Maybe you can convince me
 otherwise, but so to bring up make West one more time, he looks at the Flir video and he says that
 one of the most amazing video, uh, parts of the Flir video for people who haven't seen it is at
 the end of it, uh, the, the, the Tic Tac flies or appears to fly very quickly to the left.
 Off the screen.
 Off the screen. And what make West says is, uh, that it, you know, make West probably others
 that the way to explain that is the tracking system. Like we said, it's vision-based tracking
 simply loses the, uh, like the object, the tracking loses it. And so it simply allows the object to,
 uh, float off screen because it's no longer tracking it. So I find that at least a plausible
 explanation of that video looking at your face. You do not. So can you maybe comment to that,
 uh, to that debunking, uh, uh,
 Sure. I will.
 So, um,
 it's funny how people can extrapolate stuff who've never operated the system.
 No, for sure.
 And that's like me going, cause 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,
 he's four time, four or five time world champion. But, um, that would be pretty stupid to me to try
 and tell Lewis Hamilton how to drive a car. Um, or as a matter of fact, anyone driving a formula one
 car. So I can't tell you how many times I've watched. You gotta remember when we looked at
 this thing, when it, when, when Chad came back with the video, we sat there and watched it.
 I mean, I can't tell you how many times I watched it off the original tapes going, all right, right.
 All right, let's look at this. Um, you know, because you can look and see where the, you can
 see where the airplane'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, the bars, the tracking gate starts to open up and the people at Raytheon could probably add
 to this because they built the pod. The tracking gate will start to open up and, and, but the thing,
 when it leaves so fast off the screen, the pod can't move fast enough. It has gimbal rates on how
 fast that thing can move around. Cause 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. Um, but there's
 a theory on one of them, oh, it's here and it flipped over. It doesn't do that when it's looking
 out in front. It stays like this. So 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 the he's on, he's on black hot. So the white object is actually colder than the ocean.
 That's flying. Well, birds aren't colder than the ocean. They'd be dead.
 So the gimbal video to comment on the amazing aspect of that video is the rotation, the
 apparent rotation of the object. That is something that is not possible to do with systems that we
 know of. And make West suggests that a flare, like reflections or whatever can explain.
 No, cause what Mick West doesn't see is so when they take, cause I've talked to the, one of them
 actually I work with. So I know him. I know I talk to him all the time. So, uh, and it's his
 best friend actually shot the video, one of his best friends. The gimbal video, the gimbal, both
 of them, the go fast and the gimbal were shot by the same person. Okay. So, uh, and they were in
 each other's wedding. So that's how well they know each other. Okay. So what you don't see is, so the
 airplanes, airplanes still super Hornets, but they have the APG 79, which is the new phased array
 radar that's made by Raytheon. Things incredible. Okay. It doesn't usually, if it's, if it's out
 there and it sees it, it's real. So at first they thought they were ghost tracks when they started
 seeing stuff. And then they actually threw one of the targeting pods out there. Well, the targeting
 pod, if 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 things. So what you see in the gimbal video of
 the thing and it rotates and you go, Holy shit, look at that thing. It's just sitting there and
 it's in the wind and it's going against the wind. Why it's doing this, you know, someone goes,
 Oh, it's an airplane. Now, if an airplane does this, it's eventually going to start to change
 aspect because it's in a turn. This thing doesn't change aspect. It just wrote, 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 as their number one priority or their launch and steering.
 So when they designate that, that's where the targeting pods 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, cause you go, Oh, it's just the video. Well, if
 you take the video with a radar going, no, there's actually other things out there because there's at
 least 60 people that have seen these things on radar off the vacates. It was, it actually became,
 I called a buddy 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 note tam out,
 which is a notice to airmen, which means there's these objects out there in the warning area.
 So anyone can, you can fly a Cessna through the warning area. It's all the warning area tells you
 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 don't stay. They had an airplane cause 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 I've heard it's almost hit one.
 It's almost hit, hit them. So that's another, that's one of the biggest,
 another biggest account is like almost hit a plane. Something that appeared to be a cube
 in a translucent sphere. What do you make of that? What I mean, that, that's the most dangerous.
 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 like a hundred feet or
 something like that of the airplane that almost hit it. So they do is they come back and go,
 hey, I had a near midair. What'd you have a near midair with? This floating beach ball with this
 cube inside of it. And you go, huh? So they send out a notam again and they do what's called a
 hazard report that says, hey, there's these objects out there. We almost hit one. 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've picked them up like hovering on radar and then all of a sudden they're traveling at really
 high rates of speed. So, you know, what are you going to do? Well, let me ask this because this
 is what people kind of think about after you witnessed tic tac and after this, these incidents,
 as far as we know, uh, with the gimbal and the go fast, it seems like people in the military did not,
 did not react like what, like did not freak out. It almost like, was it 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 freak out? 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
 no, cause, uh, you know, like, like tests almost. So let's talk about, so let's say you've got this
 cool new toy, let's 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 atoll in the Pacific, if it's going up above you,
 the worst case is going to land on you. So you're worried about where else is it going to land? And
 it actually crashed next to the atoll and, and you know, Elon wasn't happy and threw this guy
 under the bus. So, um, that's a test environment because you don't know what's going to happen.
 So, 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, we can't control a lot of things.
 You're exactly right. So you go, you know, it's, you know, it's not the doctor evil scientist that's
 going to throw out there to get, there's control and there's reasons that we do it. Because a lot
 of stuff, especially when you get to, there's, there's, you build something in theory, you model
 it, you go, Hey, this is, it looks like it's going to work. You get funding, you build it,
 you test it some more, you bench test it, you know, you like an airplane with digital flight
 controls before it even leaves the ground. They've got things over the pedostatic system that are
 changing the, what the airplane thinks is the airspeed talking to it. And it's probably up on
 jack. So the gear up, so it doesn't, it thinks it's flying. It doesn't know it's sitting on
 jack stands and they're just changing the pressure on the pedostatic system. So they can actually
 make the flight controls move and they can get all the data back to go, Hey, it looks like it's going
 to work. And then there's, when there's a bunch of stuff that they do. That's a control environment
 where 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, they're not doing that. And the other, the other
 side of that question is why do you think people on the Nimitz and in the U S government in general,
 not freak out more at the incredible thing that you've seen freak out in a positive way, freak
 out in the negative way, like what are the Russians up to again? Or, or more like, what is this like,
 so more turmoil. So if you 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 a, another country's emblem on the side of this thing that we
 saw and said, Oh, it belonged to them. Then it's a big deal. So here's what's going on. So we're
 literally in the middle of workups and it was a joint workup. Normally they, we go out for a month,
 go come back, do stuff, go out for a month. This was a two month at sea period where we actually
 had to beg for them to let us when the ship pulled in at Thanksgiving. So we could run home up to the
 central Valley, have Thanksgiving with our family and then run back down and do this. Okay. So,
 you know, and I had just taken over, I had 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 oh five command in the Navy. Right? So you go, okay, so I'm out here. I got my squadron.
 I'm running it. I see this thing, you know, we catch shit for it. I have a squadron to run.
 I have the, the, the, the Tic Tac was over here. And although an extraordinary event,
 I have 17 air crew and 300 sailors that I'm responsible for, right? Their 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, uh, snap and, and we're going through all this stuff.
 I don't have a lot of time to worry about the Tic Tac. Yeah. If people need to talk to me. So
 you gotta 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 CEO of the, the Princeton, who is a major command
 guy. And that's really your big major command. And then everything else is you got all the squadrons,
 which are oh five command, and you got the small boys that are out there, which is oh five 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, uh,
 and the admiral, right? And then he's got some post command guys on his staff that we were friends
 with. I talked to him. So you're responsible for a lot of things. Yes. Oh yeah. This schedule,
 yeah. There's missions. You have to do a lot, get the job done. And there's no time for silly things.
 That's exactly right. So, and we're the, we're the integration, you know, when a, when a battle
 group deploys, especially when you go to the Middle East for what we were doing, the air power is the
 key. It's we take our airport with us. We can park it anywhere we want and we can do what we need to
 do. So we're kind of key players. So when you get the theory that, oh, all these men in suits showed
 up. So the captain of the ship never said anything to me. The admiral never said anything to me. The
 people on his staff that I was friends with never said anything 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, cause 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 cause I'll talk for free. Cause
 you're not paying me. I said, I said, and then I got paid to go to the McMinnville Fest because
 they, my wife and I got to go cause it was just looked like fun. Cause the whole town gets involved.
 Yeah. And it's the only time I've ever spoken publicly in front of a large audience about this
 because it was just, you know, it was fun and I got asked and Jeremy and George Nappin went the
 year before. So I went with, with Bob Lazar. So I got to hang out with Bob and his wife and his
 wife and my wife. And you know, we all hung out kind of, you know, talking not about UFO stuff,
 but just getting to know each other as people because you know, Bob's like me, the stuff that
 he talks about is not the center of his life. If anything, it ruined his life. You know, he's just
 a really, really smart guy. That's just like the rest of us trying to get through life.
 Yeah. That's nevertheless, I mean, that was one of the sad things reading, um, uh, Lula Lazando's
 resignation note from his, uh, uh, he was a program director at the, uh, ATIP program. Like,
 like, uh, yeah. One of the sad things is that he's mentioned that, you know, people in government
 just don't take this seriously as a threat, uh, like UFOs as a threat. Like you said,
 if it doesn't have a Russian label on it, it's a, it's a sad thing to think about that,
 that we have such a busy schedule that the anomaly, it doesn't, is a distraction that
 we don't want to deal with. And it kind of just fades into history. Like literally,
 it's kind of sad to think that if aliens showed up, like, and, uh, it just didn't,
 cause they're not like when aliens show up, they're not going to be a thing that's on the
 schedule. And if they don't start killing people, they just kind of show up in some very, uh,
 uh, nonchalant peaceful way briefly. People would be like, that's, that's, uh, I don't have time
 for this. That's so sad. That's so sad. It's like anywhere in the world. So, you know, go back,
 let's go back way back, way back in the time machine, you know, there were people kind of
 scattered around the globe, you know, in Europe's a perfect example. Why does France speak French?
 And then right next to them, Spanish, you know, Spain speaks Spanish, and then you'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, 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, cause the native Americans all spoke different languages. You know, it's that same
 type of thing. So, but anytime we have a Tennessee to show up, you're, you're actually, you think
 about it, you're an alien. If I go to a different area, if I just, you know, go back 500 years,
 where, you know, or a thousand years where travel, we weren't traveling across oceans at the time.
 We were, well, we don't think we were, the Vikings probably were, um, cause 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, if you show up someplace, like when the conquistadors from
 Spain came over into South America and you've got, you know, the natives, you're actually an alien,
 you know, and then you look at what typically happens when aliens show up in, in a human alien
 world, you know, and when I say alien, I mean, you are not from that area. The other, we,
 we take what we want and that's what happened. I mean, we literally defuncted civilizations because
 that's how we are. You know, humans are, we're an interesting group. So you go, now what, what if
 something is from someplace else? Just, let's just, let's just go off the grid and go, let's say there
 are little green men. What are their intents? Lou asked me this when we were talking to Lou Elizondo
 and he said, what do you think they were here for us? I don't know. He goes, what, I go,
 oh, 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, there, 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, the, the crazy upright monkeys now have developed the atom bomb. Let's hope they don't
 destroy themselves. Yeah. If I was an alien civilization, I would start paying attention
 with the atom bomb. That's why the, I mean, there's certainly an uptick of, uh, what is it? UFO
 sightings since, since the nuclear since the nuclear. Yeah. That's you go. Hmm. Um,
 let me ask a little bit out there. Question maybe it's speculation, but maybe touching on Roswell.
 Do you think it's possible that there is out of this world aircraft
 or, uh, beings that are in the possession of one of the governments on this earth,
 like the U S 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, go, 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 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 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.
 Globally. So is there a chance that a foreign government actually possesses or our government
 or someone in the, in the world on the globe of the seven plus billion people has something
 that is not from this world. And I'm not talking to meteor, but something that was manufactured in
 some way that allowed transport or observation. It could be a drone, could be a foreign drone,
 you know, like Voyager flies around and does all that stuff. And we got stuff that just went past
 Pluto that's out in the Kuiper belt, you know, there's, there's stuff out there floating around.
 And what about ours? It's going to crash into Jupiter eventually or whatever, because we've had
 stuff 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, uh, you know, people have issues with Bob. So if, you know, and I leave
 it to you to determine if you believe Bob or not, I'll tell you, Bob is a straightforward, very sane,
 normal, super smart guy. Bob 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 U S government, should they make that publicly known? This is this note
 in question. This is the question of like, do we release stuff that can potentially change the
 nature of human civilization? Like the, the way we, the way we think about our place in the world,
 also the, if that technology is potentially useful for military applications, the nature of military
 conflict, should we release that information or not? If you were the government. So here, well,
 here's exactly how. So for, for classified information, the government is the people that
 classify it. So I can't go, I can't look at something and go, Oh my God, this Avion bottle
 is now a top secret. I can't, I don't have the authority, the ability or anyone to do that.
 That's up to the government. And I agree with that because I worked for the government for 24
 years of my life. So, um, I understand that. Um, 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 like, well, I'm going to
 be a
 white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, whatever your religious are, but you come over here. I kind of
 knew that from the last, but you come over here, you basically have made yourself. You're educated,
 you're working at a college, you're a lawyer, you're a lawyer. You're a lawyer. You're a lawyer.
 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. I can do whatever the hell I can
 create. With a lot of hard work, I can do quite a lot. And no one gave it to you.
 So, I mean, and I have people- Well, I'm a believer that like,
 I mean, we are a community. So, there is a social aspect to it, but the freedom and the American
 dream is a real thing. And this is, I joke about being Russian, but I'm an American. And this is,
 I do believe, the greatest country on earth. So, there's a reason the nationalist pride,
 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 not so much a threat as
 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, because 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. So, he did that. So,
 if you are trying to figure out a propulsion system, let's just say, I'm just talking,
 this is Dave's theory. I have custody of this thing, 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. That's not important, but you get access to the technology
 to try and figure it out. And then you go, well, Bob comes out and says, 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, 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 wall. You go, I can't do
 it. So, sometimes the best thing is to bring in a fresh mind. So, you go find someone else who's
 in a propulsion, you bring him in, 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, project's over, end 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 remember, 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? And now they can leapfrog and
 they get another two steps closer to the final answer. And then we get stuck by our evolution
 of technology and you shelf it again. Do you think that's the right way to do it? Because
 it's heartbreaking. Listen, I love government, but we just had this discussion about Elon and so on.
 The alternative approach is to release this to the world and say there's a mystery here.
 And then the Elans 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 that's within a lot of us. And money
 aside, people in their garage just will- But you're thinking like a scientist. 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 that that got into
 the hands of the Nazis, that it would be the end. And that's a tough call to do that,
 knowing that you have the answer and you can't solve the problem because it will go into the
 wrong hand. And that's kind of the fear when you look at this, you go, okay, so if we do this,
 if we put it out there, we've got this technology. If we don't work on it, kind of international
 space station like where we're all going to work on it together, like Antarctica is really supposed
 to be treaty free from any weapons or anything more. Suppose we got the international thing down
 there, we're all going to work together. If you did it in the confines of that and you could control
 the flow in and out, because what you don't want is someone stealing information and getting it back
 to where 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 the solution first. That's the problem because we have
 this inherent thing of power and technology like that is power. It would literally change the game
 of the way the world operates. And from not just a transportation or mankind, but from a military
 aspect, it's got huge, huge- Yeah, yeah. So beautifully, beautifully presented. And 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 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. I agree with you. But 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. It's contradictory. It's not inspiring. It's
 suspicious. It's just not even the way they released the videos. The Tic Tac, if presented
 correctly, could just inspire a generation of scientists. It's like us going to the moon. It's
 inspiring. I mean, it's incredible. And the way it was released was suspicious. It was like low
 resolution video on a crappy website, like with some crappy documents. And I mean, why, I don't
 know how to ask this question, but can government do better? Why are they doing it this way in
 terms of communicating the things they do know to the public? Because I don't think they know how.
 Especially in this topic, it's been hidden for so many years. And I don't think, because I don't
 buy off on the conspiracy stuff. I just think that when it comes in, like I said, the government has
 the right to classify stuff, they classify everything because they don't know. You have
 something, you don't know what it is, you don't know. So we just go, well, it must be top secret
 and let's put it in a vault. It's kind of like the Indiana Jones where they take the
 arc and they put it in the, it's in the giant army warehouse. We don't even know what we have.
 So, but I also believe that, 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, I was joking with Joe when he was talking
 about the storm area 51 stuff. I'm like, yeah, that's probably the worst idea you could possibly
 have is to just storm a military installation. It's just stupid. There are reasons, there are
 reasons that we have things that we don't just let out to the public because if we do, as soon as
 you do let someone know that you have something, they immediately try and encounter it. And perfect
 example, the U.S. in the sixties 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, 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. 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. We built three XB-70s and we scrapped the program.
 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. 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,
 that person, 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 don't have the
 expertise, 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 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 or IEEE.
 It's so heartbreaking. I talked to CTO of Lockheed, Keiko Jackson, and just Concorgs.
 And 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.
 Some of this new technology that you developed for an open source, and this goes back to the
 original conversation. 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 $100 billion. He has the ability to do stuff. I'll tell you what,
 the Gates Foundation between Bill Gates and his wife and Warren Buffett and some of the other
 money, because I think Bezos' ex-wife actually donated a huge chunk of her half into the Gates
 Foundation. So what's the Gates Foundation worth these days? And these are guys, brilliant,
 brilliant. Some of the greatest minds that we have to go, what are they doing? Because they have the
 ability, 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 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, but they never stop them from free thought and developing that. It's just,
 we really don't want this out there. Okay, so I understand that. I totally understand that.
 But if 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. And you go,
 is that... well, are they the greatest minds? I'd say, 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, the Elans of the world, the Jeff Bezos, are 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. They have an idea that this is what I want it to
 be. Where if you go to SpaceX, where 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. Money makes the world go round contrary to what everyone thinks. But 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'll guarantee that, what is it? Blue Origin, isn't that Amazon? 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 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 with, 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. And he would throw the money at it and make it happen. And
 I'm talking this fast. He has a great story about this. 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
 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 him 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. And it's not just money. It's because I've seen, I 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. But like, because I've also worked for DARPA, like for research, in terms of a source of funding,
 there's a weight of bureaucracy when I was working, like being funded by DARPA. And with Elon,
 I was literally in the presence of like, anything is possible. Cutting across all the bullshit
 of paperwork, of the way things were done in the past, of the bureaucracy, the rules,
 the constraints, all of that stuff. Just, you can cut across immediately.
 So 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, 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 complete shift in mentality.
 And for us as taxpayers, we can explore at half the cost. Yeah. It's exciting, especially given
 putting the Tic Tac in context, like then the sky or it's limitless, the possibilities we could do
 with this kind of mech. I think it's exciting. I think we live in an exciting time right now,
 besides everything that's messed up in the world right now. Well, this is a hopeful,
 there's so much conflict going on, so much tension. That's to me, space exploration at the moment,
 is the 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 when 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 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, 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 Musk's face, the look on Jeff Bezos' face and all the brilliance.
 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? Ramish on 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 you got to remember, there's a huge chunk of these sightings that get disproven.
 They're actually explainable. You had sent me the question, the Phoenix lights.
 Phoenix lights, yeah. What's that? I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with some of these.
 I'm not either. You want a funny story on that. I was at a conference. Hopefully,
 he doesn't watch this and get offended. We had this, I call it speed dating. There was a table.
 There's about eight people at a table and we would go sit at the table and they could ask us
 questions and then after 10 minutes, we moved to the next table. I was speed dating all these
 people that are really into this. It was funny, but I'd sat down. It's always funny because some
 people will try and dominate it, but you have to push the dominators away so that if you're quiet
 and introverted, you can ask your question too. 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 looks at me and he goes,
 well, you're not a UFO guy. I go, no, I'm not, but I chase one, so I'm an expert. Have you?
 You could see him get deflated because I'm a smart ass like that.
 That 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. When we come out and say, because to me, it's just in
 it, it's five minutes of my life. I did a lot of really cool, really 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 if you talk to people that are really into it,
 who've never seen one, it kills them that they didn't see one.
 Here we are, because what's unique with ours, which adds that level is it wasn't, we just didn't see
 it. It wasn't like, oh, look, something in the sky and it was weird. We actually engaged with it.
 Yeah, that was- It was an engaged five minute thing. There's other stories from other countries.
 Like there's a story back when the Soviet Union existed that they actually would chase these
 things and one of them shot at some, it shot at it because they said, shoot at it and it shot at
 it and then it got shot down. Then they said, don't ever shoot at them again and don't chase them.
 Just so 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, 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 a, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenix lights. Somebody on, I think Reddit said,
 ask him any thoughts on mass UFO sightings like the Phoenix light. 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.
 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 A-10 drop and flares.
 I don't think so. Oh, 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 super power.
 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
 state separation. Then you see the next one go off and then it's gone. And people don't understand
 it 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're launching at night,
 you'd watch. You 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 weird shapes in the sky.
 That's part. But when you go to Phoenix lights and you go, hey, when a thousand people see some,
 you're going to discredit all a thousand people or you're going to try and explain it away with
 something else. 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?
 I talked to them quite a bit. I am not a part of To The Stars Academy.
 I talked to Lou, I just was texting him before this.
 So what's their mission? What's their hope? What's their-
 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, physics-based
 knowledge to go, how would something like this operate? That's really their bottom line was to
 try and use and then couple that with, because they've got the series unidentified, couple that
 with television to get the word out. So you're actually putting something instead of, because
 everyone has a theory. Ancient Aliens covers all kinds of theories. 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.
 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 and 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 doesn't, it'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- But 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 I, when they started and I talked to them, because I've talked to Tom and I've talked to
 Lou and those are the two main players, it was to basically demystify the fact and get rid of the
 stigma that's tied to UFOs and let's look at it from a science base and then use TV to get
 the word out on the progress. And they've done some pretty cool things. I mean, you know, they've,
 the Italian government gave them all kinds of files that had been property of their government.
 They got a bunch from, it might've 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. Cause 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 government, the US government came out a month ago and said, we have, we have,
 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. Yeah. The division is, I mean, nothing will
 unite us humans, descendants of chimps, like the idea that there's life out there.
 Oh, it would literally change. I said this a while ago, I forget, 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 okay. No, no,
 it's okay. We're not going to do, we're not going to stop. No, no, it's okay. No, no, it's okay.
 And you got to think the only thing that stopped Hitler was his ego by going into Russia.
 If he'd have 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 them. 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 or 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 there's a balance between kindness
 and force. Well it is, 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, they're just good
 dudes. But you know, if you cross them, like I had a friend of mine, he was, he's a nationally ranked
 wrestler. 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, hey dude, you know, hey, how you doing? He's super nice.
 He would cross that ring on a wrestling mat. As soon as he crossed that ring, it was like a totally
 different person. And he would go out there and just destroy people. I mean, physically destroy,
 like put a hurt on. And he would get done and he's like super humble and they'd raise his hand
 and he would, he'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 have ripped 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. I mean,
 he wouldn't even tell you he's a wrestler. Yeah. That's kind of a symbol of the best of America.
 That's what America is, that wrestler. When you cross the line, you're, you can be hard, but once
 you're off the mat, you're just a kind human being. I know you're super humble saying it's better to
 be lucky than good, but your story is inspiring. That the entire trajectory of having a dream,
 of accomplishing that dream, of having one hell of a career, what advice would you give to a
 young person, to a young version of yourself today that listens to this and is inspired,
 that wants to fly or wants to go to space and wants to build the rocket? Is there advice
 you could give them about life, about career, about anything? Yeah. Yeah. First, let me start
 with, and you had a question on it, inspirational people. So 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. And my grandfather's Sicilian. He was
 one of the first ones in his family born in the United States. So my great grandmother and I had
 aunts and uncles that I knew growing up that actually came over on the boat. Huge, huge guy.
 And just the nicest, friendliest would give you the shirt off his back, obviously proven by his
 funeral. And I'm talking at his funeral, the head of the Black Panthers was at his funeral
 in Toledo, Ohio. The mafia guys were at his funeral in Toledo, Ohio. I mean, it was literally a mix
 of who's who. And he had told me once, because when you're little, you start looking. And I
 grew up basically, I was probably middle-class, lower middle-class. My dad was a fireman. You're
 not rich. He's working for the city. It was a paycheck to paycheck living is how I grew up.
 And I was talking 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. So it was a totally different than
 we are now. And he said, he goes, you know, David, he goes, they're no better than you.
 And you're no better than anyone else. He goes, you got to remember that. He goes, everyone's
 different. He goes, treat everyone with the respect and dignity that they deserve. He goes,
 and if they're poor, if they're homeless, he goes, it doesn't make them a bad person. It just,
 that's who they chose to be. And you make choices in your life, but never ever look down on someone
 because, you know, there will always be someone that will look down on you and you should never
 ever do that. And I kept that close to me. He was a huge influence. It was my mom's dad, just
 a big, big influence in my life and the way I carried myself. And he was one that would say,
 you know, you can be anything you want to be. You know, he grew up dirt poor, you know, and the fact
 that he had bought a house and took good care of my grandmother and did stuff like that, you know,
 to him, that was a success. And to me, it was always, you know, trying to better and move on.
 And he was the one, you know, my parents were a big part of this too, was instilling that,
 anything is possible. So when I'm four years and 11 months old in 1969, you know, and I'm watching
 Neil Armstrong walk on the moon and I'm asking my mom and she says, well, they were all military
 pilots. And, you know, we had an international guard that at the time was flying F-100. So I'm
 dating myself. And I was just fascinated with flight. And I just looked at that going, that's
 really what I want to do. And I never lost sight of that. There was always, I could do this or do
 that. And when I was going to go to college before I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I was accepted into
 natural resources at Ohio State. And I'm like, ah, if I can't fly, I'll go be a forest ranger.
 Cause I wanted to hang out in one of those towers in Colorado and look for fires. Cause that's just,
 I like that stuff. You know, it was that or being 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. And then, so you look and people go, what
 are you going to do with that? And I said, you know, I got an oceanography degree because I go,
 well, I'm going to sail on the ocean. So at least if the ship sinks, I'll know where I'm at.
 And that was a kind of a running joke. And then, and then there's, so there are these passions
 and underneath it is the, is the belief that you can be anything you want to be. You can,
 you know, I told my kids this, you know, when they were young, you know, it was tough, especially
 for my son. So when Nate was about five, six years, we knew Nate was colorblind. You know,
 my, my wife's brothers are both colorblind. It's really color deprived, color-deprived. 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. Cause he'll go, I'll go, what are you looking at? He goes right over there
 by the red thing. I'm like, what are you looking at? I go this, I like he had a hat on one 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. Cause to him, it looked
 great. So he couldn't fly. He came. He said, I go, what do you want to do, Nate? You know,
 you're talking to your kids and you know, what do you want to do? He goes, I want to be a pilot.
 Now I got to tell him, cause he's looking at me, cause I'm a pilot, you can't be a pilot. He's like, why can't I be a pilot? I said, because you got eye issues.
 You know, so you got to redirect. And the other one was because I had to, I stopped flying. I was 42
 years old and I was like, and it was my childhood dream. So it's like a pro athlete. I know exactly
 what it feels like when, you know, Brett Favre has to walk away from the NFL when you still can do it.
 Good choice of quarterback, by the way, the greatest of all time, but whatever.
 So you do, when you look at it and you go, I understand what those guys feel like when you
 have to walk away from something that you love and you think you can still do it.
 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 residency in internal medicine right now.
 And my son is in his third year and they're both going to be doctors. And until I look at it is,
 you know, people go, oh, you got two 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 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, money. That's what makes the world go around.
 But what you realize, and I'll go back to my grandfather who didn't have a lot of money,
 and he was probably one of the most happy people on life. And unfortunately he died at 65. He had a
 massive heart attack because he didn't tell that 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 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.
 And my grandfather, who's a beer delivery guy, literally it was like three miles long.
 The Pope.
 It was crazy. Yeah. Who died the Pope? That was because he's a Catholic. He's Italian. He goes,
 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 there was like 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 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. It's easy to be nice. It doesn't cost you
 anything. I said, and get rid of the hate. And number two is follow your dreams because everyone
 is capable of everything. And there's a, there's a self realism. Like, you know, if you really have
 trouble with math, getting a PhD in applied math is probably not something you're going to be able
 to do, but understand yourself, what your own capabilities are. And you know, inside your heart,
 don't let anyone ever tell you what you can and can't do. You have to determine that yourself
 and go for it. And, and, and you can do anything. It's just, it's, it's a great,
 the world's incredible. It really is. Let me ask the last big ridiculous question.
 Uh, so you've lived much of your life, your career is kind of at the edge of life and death.
 So, um, let me ask kind of, uh, 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've got going on here? The meaning of life, human life in this sense.
 So let me start with, have I pondered my own mortality? Yes, quite often. Um, and I don't get
 into my religious beliefs or what I am, uh, 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, uh, him and I were sitting there
 talking and, uh, he was giving me the whole story and how he had really changed his look on life
 that we're only here for a finite time and that we're all going to die. Well, unfortunately,
 after all that, when it was really going, him and his wife had moved to a location that fit there,
 you know, close to the water where they could do stuff. And I won't say where, um, and he was
 doing what he loved to do. And he got diagnosed with throat cancer. And I was talking to him,
 uh, it was probably about maybe two months before he died. Um, and he was talking to me,
 and I said, dude, 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
 where 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's a Navy. And we
 were just talking and he looked at me and he said, and this is in my dream. He's like, Dave, it's
 all going to be okay. And this is, this is like, and this is a vivid conversation I have. There's
 been people are going to think I'm weird about this, but, um, but, you know, I know what my
 dream was and you know, maybe it's my subconscious creating the dream, but in 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, in 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, 128 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, a Lamborghini or an S5 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.
 Cause 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
 and eventually they're going to die or eventually you're going to see a statue of a guy from the
 1700s in the Boston area and you're going to go, I don't even know who that guy was. Did he impact
 my life? He probably did. But eventually people forget. 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 always
 just joke, who are your true friends? It's the person while 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 o'clock
 in the morning. Who are you going to call is going to get in their car without complaining and come
 and get you. And that's life. Those that is life. The people you love. It's, it's, it's the people
 you truly care about. And contrary to, I have, you know, Oh my God, I got 6,000 Facebook friends.
 You got about that many real friends that you can count on and that's it. Everything else doesn't
 matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't mean you'd be nice. I mean, I've, there's acquaintance friends
 that I'll do anything for and then come to my house and stuff. But then there's the people that,
 you know, you know, like my cousins who are like my brothers that, you know, at a moment's notice,
 you know, when, when my uncle passed away at a young age, you know, who lived literally right
 down the street from me and my cousin Chad, and I got two boys, there's, 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 Ray or Chad,
 ever needs me, if something happens, like when my uncle died, it wasn't, it wasn't an issue. If I'm
 coming home, it's, I'm booking the ticket and I don't give a shit what it costs because I will be
 there to 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 gotta, I gotta 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, it's probably sets the record for the longest one.
 So I, I mean, 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.
 And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, ExpressVPN, and BetterHelp. Please check out the
 sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing,
 subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on
 Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now let me leave you with some words
 from Carl Sagan. Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening.
 Thank you for listening. Hope to see you next time.